A THEOLOGY FOR ARTISANS OF A NEW CHRISTENDOM:
Neuhaus, Richard John
The five volumes of Juan Luis Se-gundo's "A Theology for Artisans of a New Humanity" offer us the most comprehensive exposition of Latin American liberation theology to date. While not as coherent...
...Its emergence in presumably radical form only demonstrates that the lust for Christendom dies very hard indeed...
...Such a society requires a break from capitalism, indeed this break is necessary if we are to "know God" (111,36...
...A popular book in France these days is entitled Toward a Partisan Church...
...And, because the absolute has been completely "integrated" into the work of liberation, we must of course answer our own prayer...
...And Christendom can assume many forms-revolutionary and establishmentarian, left and right, spiritual and, yes, secular...
...Although a small minority, their influence is great in a large part of the Christian community...
...Go, and come to more...
...God's plan for the universe" is essentially an evolution of interpretations...
...What appears to be the confusion (others say dialectic) in Segundo's thought at this point is illuminated by Gutierrez's more candid discussion of the "two planes" notion in A Theology of Liberation...
...for "mass man is sin" (V.38...
...Taking them seriously means to respect and encounter them-and to disagree with them-as the theologians they claim to be and indeed are...
...This is most striking in his treatment of the history of the Church and of Christian thought...
...The future is that of evolving interpretations, not the breaking in of new events of divine initiative (111,42...
...The fellowship which is the true body of Christ (11,105) is seen to include all who are committed to the struggle of liberation, for faith depends not upon a person's "religious situation"-whether or not he calls himself a Christian, for example- but upon "service to man" (11,112...
...All history is redemptive history...
...Ecumenism must therefore reach beyond ecclesial boundaries to all who are engaged in that task...
...And so also says Segundo...
...The doctrine of the Trinity means that "God is society" (III, 66...
...The hoped-for impingement of events "from the outside" or divine action in history is dismissed as magic (IV.63...
...He buys into the left wing of Reformation thought in his emphasis upon the Church as an "aristocracy" of true believers (here belief is of course "ortho-praxis") against the notion of a Church encompassing the masses (I,90f...
...Segundo's notion of grace, reiterated at many points, is that grace means that we now have everything...
...Like some in the 16th century and many since, there is for Segundo no salvation apart from the establishment of the earthly city...
...Yearning for Christendom is the ever present temptation for Christian existence...
...In its secularized version, Christendom is described as Humanumdom...
...V,l 11...
...Only at one point (IV,117) does he acknowledge the existence of conflict in statements of the magisterium...
...Or, as it was stated in an older ideology of Christendom, error has no rights...
...It remains unclear why, or even if, the life and teachings of the Church should have any claim on public attention...
...John the Evangelist, Brooklyn and senior editor of World-view...
...He has gone that far and much further...
...Segundo affirms with Paul Lehmann, "Salvation is maturity...
...Weary of the pilgrimage, we want to "get it all together" now...
...Since the sacraments are legitimated by being instruments of "consciousness-raising" (IV,-111), it remains unclear why other techniques of group dynamics might not serve better than these quaint rites of bread and wine and water and words from a distant past...
...This is the "new type of human being" in service to whom Christian faith must be justified...
...The future is not a matter of eschatological arrival but of evolutionary unfolding...
...It is an intriguing exercise in the doing of theology...
...Such reconciliation is made the easier by the fact that the whole tradition must, at least for Latin Americans, be interpreted in the light of Medellin (111,15...
...The "two planes" idea, separating the spiritual from the political, was important to lib-erationists, writes Gutierrez, when the Church's political intervention was almost always on the side of the op-pressers...
...At one point (111,48) Segundo challenges the notion that "the modern mind" has no place for the transcendent...
...For both the desire is to get it all together before God himself has gotten it all together...
...It is a kind of weakness which other liberation fighters have either outgrown or never needed...
...He went to the door, opened it and said to Him: 'Go, and come no more . . . Come not at all, never, never!'" Thus Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor dismisses Our Lord after that long night in prison...
...If some sort of secret 'magic' did exist at some point, then Jesus Christ was the last and ultimate 'magician.' He turned us back again to human tasks and human efficacies because he not only offered but really gave us everything we need from God...
...Segundo asserts again and again that history is essentially an evolution of interpretations rather than a succession of events...
...Christendom ideology, whether in sacred or secular terminology, is always the same...
...Segundo's hope is to help Christians "justify" their faith in view of the questions being asked by the world (I.viii and throughout...
...That conflict has to do with Vatican II and will, it is assumed, soon be reconciled...
...Christendom is an act of closure, a desperate and finally futile bid for invulnerability against the judgment of the future, against the judgment of the Absolute Future who is God...
...Indeed that which hinders the work of liberation is by definition false (IV.54...
...In a typically Protestant fashion, Segundo views the New Testament Church as normative for our day and, leapfrogging with great alacrity back and forth across the centuries, discovers, not surprisingly, that the Bible anticipates precisely his understanding of the Church's mission in 20th century Latin America...
...Yet the yearning for Christendom dies slowly...
...There is no other epiphany of God (II,-163...
...In short, the culmination of Segundo's history-less history is the relentless exclusion of hope for the coming of the Kingdom of God as the eschatological fulfillment of history...
...Any notion of the sacraments that is not justified within this functionalist framework is, quite simply and devastatingly, "magic" (IV,60,61...
...Facts that conflict with the higher interpretation are dismissed not simply because they are inconvenient but because they are false...
...The five volumes emerge from as many years of dialogical (some might say dialectical) process at the Peter Faber Center in Montevideo...
...The only truth is the truth that is efficacious for man's liberation" (IV.54...
...That is, history is not dichotomized between "salvation history" and "ordinary history," between redemptive history and secular change...
...That Segundo seems less ready than Gutierrez to abandon the two planes concept thus inviting confusion in his readers, is curious in view of his less sophisticated and less critical understanding of revolutionary potential in Latin America...
...We are told (1,96) that the Church in its present form should eschew political power and should generally remove itself from institutional forms of social influence for the sake of "pluralism...
...The evolution that is "God's plan for the universe" calls for liberation from every bondage of the masses, RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS IS pastor Of the Lutheran Church of St...
...On the contrary, their fundamental conviction was that the world is the testing-ground of religion...
...III,16f...
...To Segundo's credit, he acknowledges, at least in a brief aside (111,132), that there may be problems once the revolution is successful...
...Segundo himself begins by distinguishing his "new type of theology" from a theology that treats "the avatars of a doctrine laden with the accumulations of twenty centuries...
...And this plan is strictly social...
...No longer need the Church pray, "Maranatha...
...At another (111,91-92) he movingly affirms, contra John "Honest to God" Robinson, his need for an I-Thou relationship with a Christ that is more than the depth of his own being...
...But it is more than a matter of convenience...
...The notion that the world's agenda should be challenged by Christian faith is not entertained...
...Although he may add little to the development of these themes, his is a useful demonstration of how malleable are the pronouncements of the magis-terium, especially those issuing from Vatican II...
...Not just society in general but the society we struggle to become...
...Our prayer, if indeed we need pray, is simply for the higher interpretation which is in fact Jesus in our time...
...A Note: It may be protested that I have made too systematic Segundo's sprawling and often ambiguous work...
...Mere facts," writes Segundo, must be enlisted in the service of higher interpretations (111,89...
...Maranatha...
...Yet sin is essential as the dialectical negative that gives birth to new interpretations (V.84...
...What has been revealed is "God's plan for the universe...
...The Church will have made friends of Mammon while there was still time and will therefore, presumably, not be cast aside when its role is no longer convenient to the new rulers...
...This "creative use" of the tradition- others might say exploitation of the tradition-offers infinite possibilities in support of the liberationist tasks at hand...
...History-less history is of course exceedingly convenient...
...While there is no evidence the group challenges the basic directions posited by the leader, he is forced to address problems he might not have anticipated in his solitude...
...Since this dialectic is so often appealed to by Segundo, it is disappointing but not atypical, that near the end of his project he notes that the concept of dialectic "is very much in fashion but also extremely vague...
...One of the strongest points of most theologies of liberation is the insistence upon the unity of history...
...There is room neither for outside intervention nor for truth independent of the liberation struggle...
...One would not know from Segundo that the truth claims of Christianity throw the world's questions into question/Admittedly, for Segundo the world is always selectively defined as the elite that has through consciousness-raising broken with the illusions of the masses...
...Even so, come Lord Jesus...
...If this happens, writes Segundo, "then Church and social change will have taken a considerable step forward...
...The universality of the gospel means not a proclamation to be shared but simply that the grace which the gospel declares is already present in all efforts toward humanization (V.96...
...Between these winsome statements of modesty at the start and at the end, Segundo exhibits few inhibitions in assaulting most of the problems that have preoccupied Christian thought for near two thousand years...
...Clearly evident in the five volumes is either a development in Segundo's thought on this question or a changing estimate of what is tactically appropriate to say...
...By the third (111,78,79) we are informed it is foolish to try to hold the Church together, as though it were possible to keep in the body of Christ those who oppose what God is doing in the world...
...In the light of this characteristic insistence, Segundo's treatment of history is curious in the extreme...
...Clearly enough the Church is not an army or a political party," but just as clearly it is not possible to maintain "communion" among people who "think and do things that are completely different or even opposed to each other...
...It is way of "settling in" to a history for which we dare not settle...
...From the Bible through the early fathers and councils through Medellin 1968, obvious contradictions in Christian thought are glossed over and the "deep continuity" fervently stressed (I,23f...
...His touching hope is that "the revolution and its leaders will manage to maintain sufficient breadth of...
...The Magician has paid his last visit...
...instead he places himself at the disposal of every man, and each man becomes absolute in turn" (111,27, emphasis added...
...The whole of the life of the Christian community can be "justified" only in terms of its being instrumental to this liberation struggle (IV,7,20...
...In his great book on the investiture controversy of the 11th century, Gerd Tellenbach writes, "There was, in the eyes of the Gregorians [Gregory VII], no antinomy between the religious and the secular life...
...In writing a theology for "the new type of human being" now emerging, Segundo has, says John C. Bennett, gone far "in transcending the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism...
...Segundo himself cites the Grand Inquisitor as representing the idea of the Church that must be repudiated...
...Thus it is not a question of the theology of the Church but of revolutionary tactics as to how the Church should relate to the political order (I recognize that my assertion of the distinction between theology and tactics is the nub of the difference between myself and some liberation theologies...
...His most recent book is Time Toward Home: The American Experiment as Revelation (Seabury...
...In any case, it is hard to square with the insistence that "the absolute" has been completely "integrated into the active work of liberation...
...Segundo affirms, with a sense of fresh discovery, the battle-wearied Protestant dichotomies between the priestly and prophetic, the cultic and the ethical, the institutional and the functional, the called and the elect...
...Even Augustine, whose dismal prognosis for the city of man makes him an unlikely recruit to liberation theology, is regularly invoked, and even the most other-worldly papal pronouncements are readily rehabilitated under the sponsorship of Segundo's thorough historical revisionism...
...The revealed goal is "a society in which each individual person directs his creative potentialities toward the common good...
...A major part of Christian faith is presented by'Segundo, then revised in light of several days extensive exchange with lay people and clerics, and finally expanded with documentation and "clarifications" that attempt to respond to questions raised...
...The tempo increases in the fourth (IV.10...
...Christendom is a substitute for the search for the Kingdom of God...
...That goal of liberation theology appears also in Segundo, although not without some hesitation...
...That at least may serve as our excuse...
...The sacraments are meaningful "solely" (emphasis his) in terms of contributing to community building (IV.38...
...outlook to appreciate and preserve" the critical role of the Church...
...Or backward, as the case may be, toward the re-establishment of Christendom on a quite new basis...
...ibid) Salvation is the maturity that no longer needs, can no longer tolerate, interference "from outside...
...Come, Lord Jesus...
...But this seems to be a personal and even private need rather than social and programmatic...
...His is not, he says, a conventional theology so much as it is a statement of "faith-in-crisis...
...Lest that seem too general, Segundo makes clear that the society he, and presumably God, have in mind was defined by the Medellin conference of 1968 (III,15f...
...What is salvation...
...There is continuing revelation, but it is contained, at least implicitly, in the liberation worldview now espoused (1,19...
...Taking them seriously means that we should not condescendingly indulge them because they are "the voice of the poor," nor celebrate them as revolutionaries with whom we may sympathize...
...Similarly, the theological tradition of the Church is useful, at least for people who happen to be Christians, in shoring up commitment to the struggle (I,xi...
...The answer would seem to be that, while effective grace is available to all and manifest in the liberation struggle, Christians still have a particular need for the ritual signs to which they have grown accustomed (IV 79,101...
...To paraphrase the Easter Vigil: "O felix culpa, that has given birth to such a mighty Revolution...
...He says he does not use dialectic in the conventional Hegelian or Marxist sense, but to define it more clearly "is not part of our purpose here...
...Since liberation theology is often seen as the more politicized version of the "theology of hope," one of the most stunning absences in Segundo's work is that of any sense of eschatological change still to be expected...
...Christendom in whatever form is the premature synthesis by which we resolve the scandal of a horrifying and still incomplete history, and premature synthesis is another name for idolatry...
...If the Church's task is to debunk all stereotypes of the establishment, there may come a time "when this course comes into conflict with the direct effectiveness of the revolutionary movement...
...Go, and come no more...
...the Church, its teaching and its life, must be justified solely by its contribution to building a new social order, a new social order of rather specific definition...
...However, now that the Church can be more often enlisted on the side of the liberation struggle, the two planes concept must be discredited and the Church's political intervention encouraged...
...The Latin American liberation theologians must be taken seriously...
...While always invoking statements of the Roman Catholic magis-terium, Segundo substantively aligns himself with themes characteristic of Protestantism far to the left of Calvinism, not to mention Lutheranism...
...While not as coherent as Gustavo Gutierrez's A Theology of Liberation and some other works, Segundo's enterprise is more ambitious in both its reach and methodology...
...Nine hundred pages later (893 to be precise) he expresses the hope that what has been said might contribute to the whole Church and indeed "to the positive evolution of humanity...
...The Absolute enters the world of man in such a way that he does not take over possession of it...
...In the first volume (1,78-88) we are told the doctrine of the Church should not be so devised as to exclude from the Christian community those who are not part of the liberation struggle...
...But a comparison of all the differences between Segundo, Gutierrez and other liberation theologians in Latin America would take us too far afield...
...He seems to embrace a notion of history without history, that is, history without real historical change...
...The meaning of the sacrifice of the mass, for example, is discovered in sacrificial commitment to the cause, as exemplified by Karl Marx and others (IV.36...
...At other points he is emphatically Barthian in opposing "religion" to "Christian faith...
...It is a way of putting the world together so that Christian existence is coordinated with existing social, political and economic realities, whether those realities be established in power or exist only in revolutionary intent...
...Any orthodoxy that does not essentially point toward orthopraxy is magical" (IV64...
...Finally all wraps are removed and Segundo urges the Church in Latin America to throw its declining resources unequivocally on the side of the revolution while there is still time and not to worry about false and distracting notions of Christian unity (IV, 132f...
...V, 130) Such an admission after he himself has used the term hundreds of times leads to the perhaps uncharitable suspicion that "dialectical interpretation" is but a rhetorical flourish to cover the evasion of problematic conflicts in historical fact...
...Christendom is the refusal to live tentatively in the courage of our uncertainties, vulnerable to a future revelation which can alone vindicate what we are and do...
...Segundo affirms a more or less inexorable process of secularization, citing Harvey Cox and others in support of an analysis that seems increasingly untenable with regard to the developed countries and almost totally implausible in the Third World (I,94f...
...But the ideological structure is the same, since Christ, the absolute, is in fact humanum...
...In trying to give his argument greater coherence, I have tried to be fair to his stated themes and have drawn the conclusions I believe to be necessary, even though they be unwelcome...
...Although the latter volumes were written considerably after Medellin, Segundo nowhere comes to terms with the eupthoric and mistaken assumptions of 1968 that Latin America was in a pre-revolutionary situation-assumptions brutally discredited by subsequent events...
...For some, embracing liberation theology is yet another way of identifying with the Third World, as they say...
...We in our poverty, and precisely because we are poor, may have something new and worthwhile to say...
...In any case, many North Americans, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, have welcomed liberation theology in general and Segundo in particular as a desperately needed transfusion for our anemic religious thought...
...The argument comes close to suggesting that the best the Christian hopes for is acceptance as a comrade by those who are advancing "God's plan for the universe...
...There can, by definition, be no transcendent referent by which the struggle for liberation, however envisioned, can be criticized...
...Such communion in the sacramental realm is an illusion that causes the Church "to lose any and all specific import or signification...
...Conflicts are explained away in terms of what fathers or popes or councils "really meant...
...This raises difficult, and largely neglected, questions about why it is important to be part of the community that explicitly celebrates the gospel, unless of course one is Christian by accident of life circumstance...
...For Gregory VII that struggle was absolutely embodied in the Church led by die papacy, for another it is absolutely embodied in the liberation movement led by the revolutionary aristocracy...
...In the absence of institutionalized countervailing forces, however, experience tells us that state power quickly precludes the possibility of genuine pluralism...
...Some find the result engagingly complex and nuanced, others find it simply confused...
...Segundo's understanding of the modern state seems naively indifferent to the state's self-aggrandizing dynamics...
...IV.23...
...Sin is, quite simply, everything that gets in the way of that evolution (V,27...
Vol. 102 • July 1975 • No. 8
