Liberating Eschatology: Reevaluating Early Liberation Theology and Marx’s Critique of Religion

That is, the Gospel can be recast as the message that humankind, is in fact participating in the divine being of God, rather than ascending or progressing unto the divine being of God: in this way, we are confronted with both the dignity of all humankind and the immanence of God in the present; rather than, being both alienated from our essence as human by imperative ascent to God, and alienated by the notion of a future divine state which is inaccessible in the present.24 In other words, humanity and world are no longer profane, but sacred and divine.25 It is unclear whether or not Gutierrez considers the ontological premises expressed in this way as necessary to his theology. As we have shown, Gutierrez does seem to lean on the first premise (i.e. the dignity of all men) without explicitly asserting that humankind participates in the being of God.26 It is, however, implied by the idea that Christ has given the dignity of God to humankind, and the Holy Spirit has taken up its presence in church, people, and the creation.27 It should be apparent, as the perennial conflict in theology would attest, that this does not square with traditional consideration of "sin." This conflict still remains in Gutierrez theology itself: the world cannot be "free universally from its profanity," and still be subject to the traditional ontological category of a "fallen state." In this way, Gutierrez also reifies a traditionally religious category of alienation. Notably, sin must then be further developed, beyond this analysis, but in light of the ontological premises here as they appear as the fundamental testimony of early Church and Gospel message. Doing it in the other direction—from sin to ontology—lead's ultimately back to the dualistic alienating categories of religion, and subjects Christian theology ultimately to Marx's critique of religion.

This second premise we have explored in Gutierrez soteriology/eschatology, (i.e. the immanence of God in the present), however, is a further way we see Gutierrez utilize an eschatological framework which fights back against the fecundity of the ontological premises suggested here. First, we will account (to conclude this section) for how Gutierrez obfuscates the significance of the immanence of God in his development of the future orientation of the individual. Then, in the following sections, we will return to the ontological premises expressed above, developing them through Paul's letter to the Romans, and in dialogue with Marx's critique of religion. In this way we can offer some conclusions about the implications of these ontological premises for both Marxist critique and Christian eschatology

Gutierrez interfaces specifically with Ernst Bloch and Jürgen Moltmann to flesh out the principle of "hope" and its relationship to eschatology. Both Bloch and Moltmann, themselves are concerned with similar problems addressed here in this analysis. That is, how does one interpret the import of eschatology—or any other Christian principle which is future oriented such "promise," or "hope"—in the present. Gutierrez cautions against Moltmann's interpretation as it may "replace a Christianity of the Beyond with a Christianity of the Future."28 In light his warnings against this type of alienation, he plays with a vision for political theology (the church as an "institution of social criticism") which is based fundamentally in historical praxis and utilizes the role of the utopian vision.29 Gutierrez concludes: Christian hope opens us, in an attitude of spiritual childhood, to the gift of the future promised by God. It keeps us from any confusion of the Kingdom with any one historical stage, from any idolatry toward unavoidably ambiguous human achievement, from any absolutizing of revolution. In this way hope makes us radically free to commit ourselves to a social praxis, motivated by a liberating utopia and with the means which the scientific analysis of reality provides for us. [...] To hope in Christ is at the same time to believe in the adventure of history, which opens infinite vistas to the love and action of the Christian.30 The poignant affect of Gutierrez's sentiment aside, it does appear, likewise, that the conclusions at which he arrives are consonant with the direction of this analysis. However, because Gutierrez is unable to throughly develop the ontological bases for the standpoint of the individual in reality, his use of hope, future—and consequently—eschatology and Kingdom are unclear. He spends a good deal of time attempting to overcome the alienating nature of eschatological thought as it appears in thought similar to that of Moltmann, but in the end does not locate humankind in a position which is not fundamentally oriented toward, or acting in pursuit of, a future world.31 It is in this way that even if a theology of liberation, or Christian theology in general, can identify ontological premises which help to reconcile it with a Marxist critique of religion, the practice of eschatology remains a roadblock because of its fundamentally alienating implications. That is, if God is immanent in the present (via the Incarnation, the Holy Spirit, etc) what does it means to say that God will be "more immanent" in a future state? Theology that utilizes eschatology, requires some "profanity" of the present state as it is defined by the "divinity" of a future one.32 In this way, eschatology in its traditional sense, in part because of its ontological implications, prevents theology from overcoming the Marxist critique of religion: it will always serve as a reversal of reality which alienates man from himself, and projects a dominating ideology back from the future. While this is no small task to undertake, it is essential for the progress of Christian theology (and possibly, as well, for the progress of Marxism itself).33 It is with then, that we continue into one scriptural example, and the witness of the early Church, to further explicate theology's potential interface with Marx's critique, develop the ontological premises put forward earlier, and ultimately to apply these premises to the realm of eschatology.

footnotes

  1. Cf. Tucker, 144; Marx employs his designation of species-life, and species-being following but also re-contextualizing Feuerbach. A large part of this, is because of his ontological critique of religion: "Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a religious, imaginary world and a real one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. He overlooks the fact that after completing this work, the chief thing still remains to be done." Part of this critique of Feuerbach is rooted in his use of species-being as an alienating premise and essentially still a reversal of reality; Cf. Tucker 33f, esp. n. 1: In On the Jewish Question, he does it in the context of his critique of the state: "In the state, on the contrary, where he is regarded as a species-being, man is the imaginary member or an imaginary sovereignty, divested of his real, individual life, and infused with an unreal universality." The of the goals of this paper is to suggest that a deeper understanding of Christian ontology can potentially contribute to a Marxist valuation of material reality. One suggested instance is in the fruitful parallel between Marx's species-being and implications of these ontological premises suggested here which require further consideration but are outside the scope of this analysis. ↩

  2. This emphasis on ontology (the christological and pneumatological dimension) and the question of the divine nature of the material world itself is not unprecedented in contemporary theology outside of theologies of liberation (including black, feminist and queer examples which follow the same lines) vis-à-vis ecology, psychology, the modern sciences, and relational ontology (for example) Surely these premises must be further developed. These studies here, help to compensate for what is a lack of basic ontological and pneumatological development of the most fundamental Christian premises of faith; the premises are obfuscated historically in part, by various co-optings of traditional philosophical (read: monotheistic, Neoplatonic, etc.) categories of divinity which fail to represent the basic mindset and experience of the early church. It has found its most throughly developed source in Karl Rahner's reconsideration of the categories of theologia and oikonomia (immanent and economic Trinity): cf. Karl Rahner, The Trinity, (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), esp. 15-21, and Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God For Us, (New York: Harper Collins, 1973); LaCugna has developed Rahner's axiomatic equation of the theologia and oikonomia to great lengths. For the ecological ramifications of these governing ontological principles: cf. Denis Edwards, Jesus the Wisdom of God: An Ecological Theology (New York: Maryknoll, 1995); Denis Edwards, Ecology at the Heart of Faith, (New York: Maryknoll, 2006); Denis Edwards, Partaking of God: Trinity, Evolution and Ecology, (Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2014); Denis Edwards, "'Everything is Interconnected': The Trinity and the Natural World in Laudato Si'," The Australasian Catholic Review (2016); Denis Edwards, "The Attractor and the Energy of Love: Trinity in Evolutionary and Ecological Context," The Ecumenical Review 65, no. 1 (2013), 134: "The Holy Spirit can be understood as the dynamic life-giving presence of God to the whole process of the emergence of a universe, uniting it, and every part of it, to the Word in the relationship of continuous creation. It is this relationship that enables the existence of entities and their becoming. Without this relationship there is no existence and no emergence. The relationship with the Spirit enables both;" For the scientific, psychological and psycho-social import of this pneumatological thought: cf. Amos Yong, The Spirit of Creation: Modern Science and Divine Action in the Pentecostal-Charismatic Imagination, (Michigan: Eerdmans, 2011); other works engaging Modern Science along these lines refer to process theologian Joseph Bracken, S. J.: Joseph Bracken, The World in the Trinity: Open-Ended Systems in Science and Religion, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014); Joseph Bracken, Christianity and Process Thought: Spirituality for a Changing World (Conshohocken: Templeton Press, 2006); Joseph Bracken, "Intersubjectivity and the Coming of God" The Journal of Religion (2003): Here, Bracken puts forward his essential hypothesis in process-systems terms: "For, if one concedes that the three divine persons by their dynamic interrelation coconstitute a conjoint field of activity for the workings of the divine life, and if one further concedes that this divine matrix likewise serves as the ontological ground of being for the world of creation, then one has at hand the ontological basis for asserting that the divine persons and their creatures can coexist in their separate subjectivities and yet share the same divine life, albeit in different degrees." For our purposes here, it is enough to say that the ontological grounds of material reality, and what has traditionally be conceived of as a transcendent or immateriality are in fact one in the same. There is, in this sense, no need for matter-spirit dualism in religious thought, and likewise an ontological basis for the real (in the sense which Marx uses it in The German Ideology) consideration of Christian theology. ↩

  3. José Míguez Bonino, Christians and Marxists, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), 105f: Bonino reaches the ontological premises which we are trying to single, but fails to properly develop them and cannot assert grounds for his argument that are not subject to religious critique: "Love is ontologically ultimate [...] There is no undifferentiated 'ground of being', no universally discoverable 'reason', no unnamed 'energy' to which we can appeal or from which we can derive or to which we could trace the concrete will and purpose which has been manifested in the history of God's self-revelation. He is as he has acted—in creation, in Jesus Christ, in the power of his Spirit. The concrete threeness and unity of an active love is the ultimate reality." ↩

  4. Cf. Romans 8:18-25; (see below). ↩

  5. Gutierrez, 218. ↩

  6. Cf. Ibid, 220: This criticism of alienation is compared to Marx criticism of Feuerbach: "Marx's idea of praxis is different; it is based on a dialectical conception of history—necessarily advancing, with eyes fixed on the future and with real action in the present, towards a classless society based on new relationships of production;" 220ff: Gutierrez recounts (but acknowledges in the insufficiencies of) the work of Johann Baptist Metz, in defining the practice of "political theology;" 232ff: Gutierrez also builds off the work of Karl Mannheim in co-opting his distinction between utopia and ideology. Cf. Johann Baptist Metz, "The Church and the World in the Light of a 'Political Theology,'" in Theology of the World, (Scribner, 1968), 107-140; Cf. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1936) trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils; esp. 192-204; ↩

  7. Gutierrez, 238f. ↩

  8. Cf. Joseph Bracken, "Intersubjectivity and the Coming of God" The Journal of Religion (2003), 386f: Bracken here is critical of Moltmann's echatological vision: "[...][I]n both [Moltmann's] Theology of Hope and in The Coming of God, what appears to be missing from Moltmann's presentation is a deeper philosophical understanding of the relationship between time eternity whereby God can 'come' to human beings out of the future and offer them hope for something new and different in their lives." He goes on to put forth an ontological argument within the confines of his unique neo-Whiteheadian process thought that attempts to account for continuity of change through divine inter-subjectivity without recapitulating the alienating aspect of eschatological thought. ↩

  9. John Polkinghorne, The God of Hope and the End of the World (New Haven: Yale UP, 2002), 149: "In so far as present human imagination can articulate eschatological expectation, it has to do so within the tension between continuity and discontinuity. There must be sufficient continuity to ensure that individuals truly share in the life to come as their resurrected selves and not as new beings simply given the old names. There must be sufficient discontinuity to ensure that the life to come is free from the suffering and mortality of the old creation." Polkinghorne's point is well taken and it is along the same lines by which we criticize eschatology. But ultimately it exposes the insufficiency with Christian religious thought that Marx sought to uncover, and we are trying to reconcile here: as long as we think of "new creation" as something that is inaccessible to us either because it is "new," "spiritual," future, divine, we will remain subject to whatever predicatory ideology we construct outside of us, awaiting our arrival. ↩

  10. Cf. Walter Benjamin, "Parolipolemena to 'On the Concept of History,'" Selected Writings: 1938-1940 (Harvard UP: 2003), ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 4, 402: In this compilation of Benjamin's fragmented essays on the concept of history, it he refers to this fundamental present-future tension of the humanistic outlook. "The historical materialist who investigates the structure of history performs, in his way, a sort of spectrum analysis. Just as a physicist determines the presence of ultraviolet light in the solar spectrum, so the historical materialist determines the presence of a messianic force in history. Whoever wishes to know what the situation of a 'redeemed humanity' might actually be, what conditions are required for the development of such a situation, and when this development can be expected to occur, poses questions to which there are no answers. He might just as well seek to know the color of ultraviolet rays. Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake. " (emphasis own). It is not that we must to delimit the future state in order to bring it about, but rather, it is consideration of the future, in and of itself, that restricts our ability to realize the situation which we desire. Cf. Edgar Bauer, "Critique's Quarrel with Church and State," in The Young Hegelians: An Anthology (New York: Humanity Books, 1999) ed. Lawrence S. Stepelvich; 271: E. Bauer, on a similar foundation, builds a more anarchist vision of the free community: "Therefore you ask me what 'the free community' is, what it looks like, how it is possible. To that I can give you no answer, for who is permitted to think beyond his own time? Our time, though is critical and destructive;" (emphasis own). Cf. Mark 13:31 (Matt. 24:36); And as it pertains to this analysis, not even Jesus—God in human form—knew the time of his "second coming:" "But of that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone." Jesus, himself, would not have disagreed with Benjamin or Bauer on this valuation of history and eschatology. ↩