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

There are a number of scriptural texts which could be explicated through a materialist lens. For the sake of succinctness, this analysis will continue to develop this approach vis-à-vis the reoccurring New Testament theme of "the kingdom of God" on which Gutierrez has also built. When Paul says, "for the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit," he is—on the basis of a Christological reframing of religion— making a critique of religion consonant with Marx's critique of religion.³⁴ First, Paul is criticizing a (so-called) Christian interlocutor who sets ideological premises as necessary and sufficient causes for what is the "righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit."³⁵ Second, Paul's emphasis on the Holy Spirit, and the arguments he makes throughout his theology, point to an ontological basis for material consideration of self, others, and the world.³⁶

Throughout his letter to the Romans, Paul is engaging with a variety of religious interlocutors. Here, he is responding to an interlocutor who does not grasp, what Paul perceives, as the most basic claim of Christian freedom in Christ consequent to the empowering of the Holy Spirit. In the context, he is arguing against the belief that an action in and of itself (in this instance, the consumption of sacrificial meat) must be subservient to a higher ideological principle which presupposes soteriological (and/or eschatological) outcomes such as "righteousness, peace and joy." Paul agrees then, with the premise that Marx lays out in The German Ideology: The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. [...] Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence.³⁷ If Paul's appeal to religious conscientiousness rather than ideological subservience forms the basis for right action (i.e. behavior in society or world) can we also say that Paul's prescription supports a dynamic inclusion of the historical circumstances of the Christian? The emphasis on material provisions within the early Church, and throughout the scriptural witness provides a resounding affirmative answer to this question.³⁸

It is worthy of further consideration how and why Paul approves the "service of Christ in this way" as "acceptable to God and approved by men." In attempting to show how this passage may be consonant with Marx's ontological critique of religion, it would seem obvious prima facie that for anything to be denoted as "acceptable to God" undermines the essential premise that this is not ideological inversion and subject-formation. Now, however, on a second reading, we can penetrate deeper as to why it would have been insufficient for Paul to say simply that this is "acceptable to God" in this passage. In identifying an individual's conscience as a vivifying premise, Paul can divorce "right action" neither from the proper consideration of ones own material premises nor the outcomes of consequent intercourse in society and world. In so doing, Paul, preceding Marx, is himself attempting to undermine the inverting power of ideology and tying up a person's right action intrinsically with the circumstances of themselves and others—that is, the material circumstances and outcomes of action and life-process. It is in this spirit, that the sacrificially communal ethic which undergirds all of the New Testament is echoed thusly in the subsequent verses: "Each of us is to please his neighbor for his good, to his edification." Although it is not necessarily developed into the economic or productive sense, Paul's depiction of the Christian community is based fundamentally on the axiomatic equivalence of the particular interest and the communal interest.³⁹ Paul's sacrificial Christology and consideration of the role of the Holy Spirit ethically binds man to man, and frees him from the dominance of ideological imperatives.⁴⁰ We will see how this can be developed, not on ideological religious basis that Paul himself has tried to upturn, but rather, on the ontological basis of material reality (and humankind's) inclusion into the divine life of God.

Paul continues, "For he who in this way serves Christ is acceptable to God and approved by men. So then we pursue the things which make for peace and the building up of one another." Paul, not dissimilar from Marx, turns the question on its head by setting the conscious ideological imagination in dialogue with the material circumstances and outcomes of an individual's action in society and world. For Paul, in this context, the "righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit" that designates the "kingdom of God," can be reduced to neither the utility of "right action" or the correspondence between "right action" and a governing ideological principle (e.g. religious or Mosaic law). Rather, this "righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit" is a social and material consequence of freedom from dominating ideologies and a freedom unto proper treatment of peoples unique and dynamic phantasmagoric "sublimates of their material life-process." That is, if there is a divine ontological bases for existence which is shared, we are indebted as individuals, to each other. In this sense, the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, and the presence of God in the individual lays the groundwork for a "real community" by serving as an ontological basis for the individual's freedom from dominant ideologies and ideals. That is, as Marx describes it, the gift of the Holy Spirit forms the basis for a community where "individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association."⁴¹

In order to identify the basis of this ontological reading of the role of the Holy Spirit we have to jump back in Paul's letter to the Romans. Paul has, up to chapter eight accounted for the plight of man in the world, and the insufficiency of the law to change people or the world—in other words, to liberate them. Paul, a Hebrew, pivots on the bondage of the law as it has created in him an irreconcilable dualism of nature under the law: "[...][O]n the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin." It is a dualism in which religion as law has placed on Paul an inversion of reality—namely, that it is because the law exists that man is made sinful.⁴² It is worth noting here, that this fundamental dualism set up by Paul explicates the insufficiency of religion in nearly the precise spirit, with which Marx critiques it. We have already seen in later passages in the letter to the Romans how Paul himself identifies the way "the law" and "religion" (in the traditional sense) can serve to establish alienating and dominating ideologies. Observing both of these interpretations in tandem, we see how Paul can additionally setup the same essential ontological critique of religion as Marx: it reverses reality and sets man in subjection to what is a predicate of his own life-process. How then, does Paul overcome this insufficient dualism? By unpacking the totalizing depth to which the ontological nature of the Holy Spirit and the incarnating work of Christ accomplishes.

At this point, Paul pivots, fundamentally, on the essence of the Christian revelation (that is the Gospel message) that God has taken up residence in humankind and therefore humankind can be ontologically located as participating in the immanent life of God: "Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death."⁴³ The penetration of the Spirit into the material world, for Paul, has freed humanity from the nature of the bondage that is evident under the power of the law. Now humankind appears as balanced on the precipice before God and the world, as beings which are neither entombed by our own ascent toward God, nor subject to the sublimates of our own material circumstances. We are "the children of God," and as "the children of God," we occupy a comparable divine position to the Son of God himself. Paul sees material reality itself as part and parcel to the divine life. Our position in reality, is caught up with all of material reality: "[...][T]he creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God." What is this freedom? It is the very same freedom from the domination of religion which Marx seeks in his critique: the freedom to exist in reality—in history, in materiality—as we really are, working only toward what we already can be, and not what exists outside of us, waiting to be realized. "It is the task of history," Marx writes, "therefore, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world."⁴⁴ The Spirit, for Paul, establishes ontologically what Marx's has in mind when he asserts "the truth of this world;" that is, its grounding in ultimate realness. For Paul, this is grounding in the divine being.

Paul says later, "[...][W]e know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons."⁴⁵ Notably, this is not, the alienating "eschatological dimension" which we have explored earlier. And neither is it, as he continues, a "hope" which is premised on a reality which is inaccessible to us because it exists in the future. Both the the "future" and the "hope" are, as we are, premised on the immanent nature of the God and the pregnancy of divine life that exists within our own material reality.