On Changing My Religion: Christian-Marxist Dialogue Under the Specter of Another World War Unwittingly Brought About by the United States’ and Israel’s Unjustifiable Attack on Iran

[Hugh Williams]

On Changing My Religion: Christian-Marxist Dialogue Under the Specter of Another World War Unwittingly Brought About by the United States’ and Israel’s Unjustifiable Attack on Iran

By

Hugh Williams

 

I’ve come to this part of my inquiry into Christian-Marxist dialogue where I can now see how what I’ve been calling metaphorically “changing my religion” accords very much with the experience of liberation theologians such as Juan Luis Segundo (see his Liberation of Theology (Orbis Books, 1976) pp.7-8).

Segundo learned from his own experience that Christian theology (and here we must speak of Catholic-Christian theology especially) tends to be taught in an isolated and almost autonomous way. The effects of this are not limited to the professional theologians and priestly class but extend to the ordinary people who might attempt to use theology to understand and cope with the real-life problems they are facing.

This is a long tradition where Christianity as a biblical religion, a religion of ‘the book’ (or books) requires interpretation, which requires going back to the ‘book’ and reinterpreting it. Thus, Segundo asserts that this theology is not, at least not in the first instance, an interpretation of humankind or of society. Now in returning to ‘the book’, theology, certainly after Vatican II, has been and is prepared to recognize its dependence upon human ‘science’ in order to understand its engagement with this past related to this book. This means the serious study of history, of languages, and of cultures. In all of this, theology is prepared to recognize its dependence upon human science.

However, when it comes to dealing with the present (and our future) this theology both implicitly and explicitly asserts an independence and autonomy. Segundo is bold enough to suggest that even among very sophisticated and scholarly theologians there is an almost naïve assumption that this revelation of God (the divine word) somehow applies to our present realities free of any involvement with the ideological tendencies and struggles of our own time and place.

Now Gregory Baum, who also very much came to challenge such an assumption, in boiling down a few of the essential presuppositions of liberation theology says that this theology clearly speaks of the divine ‘as a presence in history that empowers us to take responsibility for our future’. And it now occurs to me that this insight when fully appropriated is strikingly emancipatory especially when contrasted with this preoccupation with the past in what has been said above about the dominant theology of the Christian West. There is this new and vital attention and significance given to both our present and our future.

Segundo points out that this liberation theology, or the persons who have converted to this way of approaching theology, take on, and not without great difficulty, a very different methodology. There is a deep and abiding suspicion that our ways of thinking, including theological thinking, are intimately and almost necessarily bound up with our existing society and its social structures, and is so in often unconscious ways.

This then compels the person whose religion has been changed in this way to seek out and to combine the disciplines that aide us in opening up the past with those disciplines that can help us to understand, explain, and even change our present situation. This means engaging a method for interpreting this ‘divine word’ believed to be addressed to us in our own time and situation.

This intimate connecting and interrelating of past and present (and future) is essential for a theology of liberation. Segundo says that one might take up a theology that deals with ‘liberation’ and do so with a standard methodological naiveté, but that this will inevitably prove fatal for any authentic emancipation being inescapably consumed by the deep mechanisms of oppression, such as this tendency to incorporate the language of liberation into the prevailing and dominant discourse of the status quo. This is why so many people who have been or are being moved or touched by this theology of liberation and the liberation of theology have found themselves taking up serious dialogue (and dialectic) with Marxism and its vast and varied tradition …..