Sister Elizabeth Johnson’s chapter on Liberation Theology has a number of fine passages, and disturbing asides. On page 72 she quotes the Puebla Document and its use of the image of the human face, the faces of the poor, as a way of demonstrating what is at stake in political theology. Vagrant children, sexually exploited minors, marginalised indigenous peoples, ill-paid labourers, women trafficked and enslaved, old people cast off as unproductive….and the list goes on, of human beings whose faces tell a story, and it is a story of those who hunger for liberation.
What Liberation Theology seeks to articulate is the outraged cry that rises to heaven, as it did when the Israelites were in bondage in Egypt. The liberation theologian believes in a God for whom bondage is a scandal, oppression a contradiction of God’s intention for humanity, and poverty that leaches life of joy, meaning and fruitfulness a condition at odds with the benevolence and generosity of the Creator.
Johnson’s critique of money as a divinised source of oppression, a universally sought after means to power, faces head on the capacity of finance to dominate and enslave, to dehumanise and oppress. So in common with liberation theologians she wants the focus of the Gospel to be fixed, not on the nonbeliever struggling for faith, but on the nonperson struggling for life. Life, liberation, fruitfulness, human fulfilment:
"Liberation is the signature deed of the saving action of God in history. To liberate is to give life, life in its totality. Consequently it becomes clear that God does not want humankind to suffer degradation. Far from happening according to divine decree, the sufferings of the poor, oppressed and marginal people are contrary to divine intent. The dehumanising and death-dealing structures that create and maintain such degradation are instances of social sin. they transgress against the God of life….. (p. 79)
Speaking of the Americas, but incorporating in the same argument the impact of unrestrained economic globalisation she reflects:
Starting with the conquistadores and continuing for five centuries through successive ruling systems up to multinational corporations today, greed has divinised money and its trappings, that is, turned them into an absolute. Core transgressions against the first commandment have set up a belief system so compelling that it might be called money-theism, in contrast to monotheism. (p.80)
Bishop Irenaeus gifted to the church a four word motto I think I’d like to get put on a T-shirt in both Latin and translation:
Gloria Dei,
vivens humanitas –
"The glory of God is the human being fully alive"
Liberation theology has taught us to give important weight to freedom from oppression and establishing justice for the poor and dispossessed as definitive of the Kingdom of God and of the God whose Kingdom will come. as Holy Week approaches, and we begin to have a sense of our own individual unworthiness, it may be that God’s greater requirement of us is to look on a money-theistic world, and repent of our idolatry. Structural sin is much harder to confess, and to turn from.
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