Christian Realism and Liberation Theology

...For Niebuhr history was ultimately the realm of man's paradoxical encounter with a Hidden God, not the realm of struggling to build God's kingdom...

...Richard Wightman Fox IN THE SEVENTIES Reinhold Niebuhr's reputation took a beating...

...He almost apologizes for taking a tand...

...It was the transcendent ideal that must be constantly invoked to criticize the necessarily imperfect actions of those Christians who, like himself, immersed themselves in politics...

...Christian Realism and Liberation Theology never reaches its announced goal of "re-examining Christian realism in the light of liberation theology...

...We are still waiting for a Niebuhrian on the left to take up where Michael Novak left off years ago in his Theology for Radical Politics.adical Politics...

...McCann believes that liberation theology is essentially flawed because it "possesses no theoretical resources for distinguishing religious, transcendence from political enthusiasm, a distinction that . . . Christian social activists must make if they are to remain recognizably Christian...

...Salvation is historicized for Gutierrez, identified to a large degree with wordly deliverance History itself is the arena of the fulfillment of God's will...

...But precisely in order to remain a radical in politics Niebuhr undertook a systematic critique of the "illusions"-about both human nature and human history-to which he felt his radical associates habitually succumbed...

...From the beginning...

...Perhaps it's one more sign of the times that Dennis McCann's scholarly treatise (published by the Maryknollers) on the whole defends the Niebuhrian tradition and rejects the central thrust of liberation theology...

...For Christian realism," McCann writes, "history is an interim in which the conflict of grace and pride confirms the paradoxical logic of the Cross . . . , a fulfillment of history that lies beyond history itself...

...Jesus's ethic of non-violence, for example, becomes for Segundo a dispensable feature of Jesus's "ideology," one that is in no sense normative for contemporary Christians...

...It must either abandon its distinctive method of con-scientization to salvage a specifically Christian content (as in Sobrino's "conservative" Christology at the Crossroads) or follow conscientization to its logical, quasi-secular end point (as in Segundo's "radical" Liberation of Theology...

...Interestingly, as McCann points out, Niebuhr's position in the 1930s bore a strong resemblance to Segundo's yet there was a pivotal difference...

...They "begin with a religious vision not of a Hidden God, but of One who emphatically stands revealed in the struggles of oppressed peoples...

...Christian ethics for Niebuhr is grounded on the tension between the normative "impossible ideal" and the believer's concrete actions...

...One vital contribution that such a conclusion might have made would be to show how Christian realism might address the realities of contemporary Latin America...

...in Segundo's ethics that tension is lost...

...His 1963 volume A Democratic Experience, co-authored with Paul Sigmund, is in fact all Sigmund and no Niebuhr when it addresses Latin America...

...Christian realism had become so respectable that self-styled Niebuhrians like McGeorge Bundy and Hubert Humphrey had invoked it to defend the hard-nosed, "realistic" use of power in Southeast Asia...

...At times that approach threatens to reduce each of them to a set of abstractions...

...Twice a candidate for office in New York on the Socialist ticket, and a leading speaker at major Socialist rallies and on New York street-corners, Niebuhr was so militant that many of his friends, and even his brother H. Richard, began to doubt his Christian orthodoxy...

...Niebuhr was not abandoning radicalism...

...The question remains whether Niebuhr's tragic Christian vision is compatible with commitment to a disciplined struggle for political liberation in a setting of structural oppression...

...The major problem with the book is that it stops just at the point where we are ready to consider McCann's claim that an updated Christian realism - one characterized by a more sophisticated sense of social theory - is the path of the future in Christian ethics...

...As far as it goes, McCann's discussion of these two conflicting practical theologies is very insightful, although his use of academic jargon will needlessly limit the accessibility of the text...

...To know how much ground he has broken we need to see the other third of the book...

...For Segundo, thoroughgoing conscientization requires that an elite of Christian leaders-who in his view must manage the masses much more overtly than Gutierrez ever proposed-must be willing to dispense with (in McCann's phrase) "the figure of Jesus as represented in the New Testament...

...For liberation theologians like Gustavo Gutierrez, whom McCann treats at greatest length, the starting point is utterly different...

...But McCann is sensitive enough to the historical context of each tradition that he helps us understand not only their theological adequacy, but also their practical implications...

...Niebuhr agreed that Jesus's ethic of non-resistance was not immediately "relevant" to the social struggle, but he insisted that as an "impossible possibility'' it was still normative for Christians...

...Without such an ultimate principle, from the standpoint of which all human endeavor was relativized, politics led first to fanaticism and then to defeatism...

...The Exodus is the paradigmatic Biblical story for liberation theology, as the "myths" of Creation, the Fall, and the Atonement are for Christian realism...

...The recent development of liberation theology in the work of Jon Sobrino and Juan Luis Segundo further persuades McCann that liberation theology is inherently unstable...

...McCann in effect gives us the first two-thirds of a ground-breaking volume...

...But McCann has taken pains to stay away from ideological squabbling...

...he remained a democratic socialist for the rest of the decade...

...no means are ruled out a priori in the struggle for liberation...

...But between 1933 and 1935, in what amounted to a period of protracted self-criticism, Niebuhr concluded that his political commitment had been insufficiently informed and tempered by his faith in a transcendent God...

...Liberation theologians and other Christians on the left decried his "Christian realism" - the "ideology of the Establishment" Ruben Alves called it...

...No matter that Christian realism itself had a radical heritage and, as Robert McAfee Brown and a few others pointed out, a continuing radical potential...

...Always the preacher of paradox, Niebuhr insisted that Christians master a delicate balancing act: they must be in politics but not of it, committed to establishing justice in social relations, but reconciled to the futility of striving to per-, feet the world...

...As an academic monograph Christian Realism and Liberation Theology strives to distill the essential assumptions of two alternative practical theologies and lay them objectively side by side...

...Ironic too, since Niebuhr himself was appalled by American policy in Vietnam-and publicly appalled by it at an earlier date than some of his voluble radical critics...

...Christian ethics for Segundo is the evaluation of ends, not the proscription of any particular means...

...Christian realism grew out of Reinhold Niebuhr's reflections upon the political radicalism of the early 1930s, in which he played an even more central role than McCann indicates...

...Niebuhr himself had very little to say about the non-European world...

...therefore, the central focus of Christian realism-as McCann astutely shows- was the "disposition" of the individual Christian struggling on the one hand to engage in politics but on the other to refrain from absolutizing his cause...

...Christian realism developed a profound understanding of human nature in society, while on the whole it neglected the theory of society itself...

...It was natural for opponents of the war to overreact by consigning Niebuhr and all his works to the dustbin...