4. Life in the Wasteland: The
Just Society vs. Baal Worship
Fertile ground for the emergence of liberation theology was provided by the clash
of views over the role of politics in the Latin American Church in the first
half of this century. One problem encountered was how to acknowledge God's
sovereignty in history when the everyday world was structured in ways that seemed
to deny it.
- Where could one find a divine presence in a civilization that, in so
many ways, seemed so uncivilized?
- And was it up to individuals or governments to establish a reign of righteousness?
Leonardo Boff points to three models of the Church that have impacted on the
liberation dialogue in Latin America.
- First, "the Church as City of God" holds
that politics and government are essentially outside the realm of religion,
which is for individual salvation.
- Second, "The Church as Mater et Magistra" sees the Church as educating and persuading
political leaders to work for social betterment.
- Third, "The Church as Sacrament of Salvation" has
the religious community opening itself to the world and actively collaborating
with the state in uplifting the members of society.
Finding all three historical models of the Church wanting, Boff suggests a fourth,
drawn from his experiences in the Brazilian basic ecclesial communities. This
model, which can be called "The Church of People-hood and Justice for
All," would be much more participatory, avoiding centralization
and domination. Being democratic, it would emphasize the community more than
the
individual. Behind Boff's model is liberation theology's concern for the
loss of "people-hood" in Latin America and in much of
the world.
The new wave of Latin American theologians couple their critique of "individual
Christianity" with an affirmation of the broader concept of
being a "people of God." In the Bible, we are reminded, God has a chosen people.
He loves the poor, oppressed, and landless — as a group. He hates the oppressors — as
a group. It is the people who leave the Wasteland and enter the Promised Land.
And although the generations had passed away, their children and grandchildren
repeated the history of Egyptian oppression and God's salvation in the first
person: "And the Egyptians treated us harshly, and afflicted us, and laid upon
us hard bondage. Then we cried to the Lord... and the Lord brought us out of
Egypt with a mighty hand." (Deut. 26:5-10)
The Judeo-Christian meaning of liberation is clarified by some
attention to Baal, the most
active "foreign god" of the Canaanite pantheon. To the Canaanites, fertility
depended upon sexual union between Baal and his sister and consort, Anath.
Baal worship consisted in reenacting the mating of the gods in orgiastic
rites with
temple prostitutes. Beyond maintaining natural fertility and harmony,
Baal religion was used by the aristocracy to uphold the social order. Canaanite
tenants worked as dispossessed farmers on estates owned by magnates, the temple,
and the king. They worshiped the landowners, the baals, who held dominion over
both the land and the
peasants themselves. Old Testament exhortations against Baalism
emphasize the proper way to worship
Yahweh: by acting with mercy and justice towards one's fellow
humans.
Because justice does not prevail when some,
like the baals, claim the land and its bounty while others are excluded from
these privileges, Hosea denounces Israel for betraying
its covenant to recognize God as the true owner of the earth. And Amos,
referring to the greed for possessing the land and its fruits, said God is
angered by those "who trample upon the needy, and bring the poor of
the land to an end" (Amos 8:4). Amos' indictment of
Israel mentions oppression of the poor and cultic prostitution as if they were
one (Amos 2:6-8). This seems strange until one recognizes that the link between
these two sins is a wrongful
concept of land ownership. Recall that Baal-worship and its sexual rites
glorified inequitable land possession and control. In the Prophets, the role
of land is crucial in the divine providential scheme, and the flouting of just
principles of land possession has grave consequences. Human beings are caretakers,
not the owners, of
God's creation.
Amos and Hosea underscored that being a caretaker
of the earth, while defining people's relationship to the land, also defined
people's relationship to one another. Being a caretaker meant loving justice
and doing mercy, letting go of selfish possession and the desire for power over
others by usurping their means of livelihood, and instead becoming, like God,
compassionate. Consider what a revolutionary break this represents from Baal
worship, which
idolized control of the soil and deified the landowners!
5. Poverty in the Wasteland: The Preferential
Option for the Poor
Jesus expressed
the contrast between ownership and stewardship in the pithy
saying: "You cannot serve God and mammon" (Matt. 6:24; Luke 16:13). Again
we see the real sting of Baal worship. Possessions, understood apart from their
Creator and their usefulness to man, become "master." They become idols that
dehumanize and kill. Stewardship never entails the passive acceptance of social
mores that allow possessions
to become masters (Luke 16:1-13). Thus, being
a caretaker of God's land means having a different view of reality than is prevalent
in a world ruled by possessions.
Jesus opens his ministry by claiming as real
what Isaiah had hoped for: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has
anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release
of captives and... to set at liberty those who
are oppressed" (Luke 4:18).
Society turned upside down is the topic of Jesus's keynote address in Luke: the
poor and hungry can be happy because they will no longer be poor and hungry.
But Jesus does not stop at this announcement, he goes on to call people to stewardship.
He asks men and women to love their enemies and to be merciful as God is merciful
(Luke 6:27-49). He urges them to do no less than act as a community where God,
not mammon,
rules. These are radical demands.
Latin American liberation theologians point out that, according to the Exodus
story and to Luke's gospel in particular, God's chosen people are the refuse
of society. The reversal — the reordering of those who are on top — is
good news to the poor! The recipients of God's grace, however, are not always
poor, oppressed, or helpless. The patriarchs, the judges, the Roman centurions,
and many others blessed by God certainly were not. Why did God act on their behalf
as well? God is faithful, and acts favorably for those who respond to him with
faith,
as Paul points out (Rom. 1:16).
The church's "preferential option for
the poor" must be seen as an application of the injunction to do justice and
love mercy. As Gustavo Gutierrez has always
insisted, we must maintain "both the universality of God's love and God's predilection
for those on the lowest rung of the ladder of history. To focus exclusively on
the one or the other is to mutilate
the Christian message."
Liberation theologians and other social reformers often fall into the trap of
romanticizing the poor, as did Nicolas Berdyaev in his early demi-Marxist days:
I then thought that the proletariat, as a working and class-conscious group,
exploited but at the same time free from the sin of exploitation, possessed the
psychological structure that is
favorable to the revelation of the truth...
The temptation here is to think of God's bias
for the poor in terms of a higher spirituality brought about by poverty. Yet
involuntary poverty is scarcely any guarantee of faith. If it were, its promotion
ought to be a primary mission of evangelism, and the exploitation of the disadvantaged
a cause to make the Church rejoice. The biblical bias is rather to be traced
back to the nature of
God himself.
God, finally, is the one who rejects power and takes upon himself, in the person
of his son, the ultimate sacrifice in solidarity with all who are crucified by
the power structures of this world. God not only has compassion for the poor,
he becomes, like them, weak. God not only reverses society, he appears on the
cross as a manifestation of this reversal. He appears, Paul wrote so vividly,
as foolishness, a
stumbling block, weakness, and uses "what is low and despised in the world...
to bring to nothing things that are" (Cor. 1:18-31). God becomes weak in order
to become one with his people. He wishes to be worshipped genuinely for the sake
of his loving essence, not falsely for the sake of attributes which compel, out
of fear, a counterfeit of worship. Thus Christ, in Dostoyevsky's powerful symbolism,
spurns the Devil's temptation to make use of miracle, mystery, and authority,
inviting instead a faith that finds in Truth and Goodness their own intrinsic
validation. It is in this sense that Jesus said, "My kingdom
is not of this world" (John 18:36), for in this world predatory power assails
the innocent and must be contained and curbed by power
harnessed to their defense.
"I have overcome the world" (John 16:33) may be interpreted to mean that Truth
and Goodness are triumphant simply because of what they are and that nothing
external can affect them. But human life and freedom cannot be made to depend
entirely upon the spiritual condition of other men, society and its rulers. The
rights of the individual must be safeguarded in case that spiritual condition
proves to be a low one or not sufficiently enlightened by grace. As Nicholas
Berdyaev put it, "A society that chose to be based solely upon grace and declined
to have any law would be a despotic society.... It is impossible to wait for
a
gracious regeneration of society to make human life bearable."
As a citizen of the spiritual order, the Christian lives under grace — and
is not restrained by power or authority. But in this life he or she is also,
inescapably, a citizen of the secular order, where power must be checked by power
and political means employed to serve the ends of grace, moving the world closer
to a likeness
of the Promised Land.
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