LIBERATION THEOLOGY & RADICAL CHRISTIANITY WITH CHRISTOPHER ROWLAND

[Music] everyone taught us about radical Christianity was talking about the essence of Christianity itself I think the important thing to remember is that the primary Christian story is the story of a person who died as a blasphemer whose problem as far as his contemporaries was concerned whereas the that he taught with authority not as the scribes that the stories that were told about him were stories told about somebody who based his convictions about God and about the coming kingdom of God on the visionary experience and the same is true of Paul as well here's this person who whatever else one says about his teaching had pretty strong things to say about the law of Moses and he says these things in large part at least because the the person he believes he sees in a vision on the Damascus Road has called into a different sort of religious behavior as compared with his life as a Pharisee so radical Christianity is at the heart of Christianity itself and what has happened down the centuries is that various individuals have looked back and going back to the roots is what radicalism means and found in these New Testament stories and a way of understanding their Christian faith which is differed from the more institutional more traditional emphasis on accepting things which are handed down and the rest of it so that seems to me to be the heart of what it is I want to talk to you about if one looks at the Gospels for example what one finds is Jesus in conflict with his contemporaries on the basis of the fact that in a sense he's not one of them he is not part of that scribe lalit added to which he journeys to Jerusalem out of a sense of conviction and that sense of conviction leads him into conflict with a group of priests who manage the temple and who are in relationship with the Roman occupying colonial power whose major task was to make sure that peace and order was preserved and then there's the other gospel the Gospel of John different in so many ways from the other three Gospels but in that gospel what we've got is a picture of Jesus who all the time is appealing to what he has seen with his father and uses that claim to visionary experience what he's heard from God as a way of understanding what it is he should be doing even if that conflicts with what is handed down in the law of Moses and in the teaching of the authorities of his day the best example of radical Christianity that I can think of is a Lancashire man who found himself in London in 1649 which is the year that King Charles the first was executed and in that extraordinary period he like many others found themselves with a sense that something dramatic was happening in British society and he writes about his experience and his convictions and in so doing I think he offers for us exactly what it is that I'm talking about when I'm talking about radical Christianity he he is writing six months after the execution of Charles the first not a full year since being quiet at my work my heart was filled with sweet thoughts and many things were revealed to me which I never read in books nor heard from the mouth of any flesh and when I began to speak of them some people could not bear my words and amongst those revelations this was one that the earth shall be made a common treasury of livelihood to whole mankind without respect of persons and I had a voice within me bad me declare it all abroad which I did a bay for I declared it by word of mouth wheresoever I came then I was made to write a little book called the new law of righteousness and therein I declared it yet my mind was not at rest because nothing was acted and thoughts run in me that words and writings were all nothing and must die for action is the life of all and if thou does not act thou dust nothing within a little time I was made obedient to the word in that particular likewise fry took my Spade and went and broke the ground upon George Hill in Surrey I think you've got it all there you've got this sense of inner conviction which for when Stanley came by I this inner voice time and time again there is this appeal to dream division to the sense of God speaking directly whatever one might find in the words of scripture or in the traditions of the church and then most important of all this emphasis that when Stanley has that it's not just about writing theology in books it's about action and one can see again and again right the way through from what Jesus is doing when he goes up to Jerusalem to challenge those in power right the way through to the modern examples like liberation theology the emphasis is on action and life and then secondarily reflection so when Stanley writes his new law of righteousness he declares it but inwardly he's not convinced that that's enough and what he wants to do is to do something which actually marks the time in which he's living and go and dig the common ground and show that livelihood for everybody without respect of persons is something which can be enacted here and now and he and a group did exactly that on what is now incidentally one of their Pasha's parts of southeast England on Sir Georges Hill in Surrey sixteenth century the Reformation was a very turbulent period we think of Luther and Calvin and the great reformers but there were many others as well and a Baptist in particular who took a very different sort of line emphasizing the importance of ordinary people their understanding of Scripture the person that I would just want to concentrate on is thomas müntzer exact contemporary of Luther and Luther has some pretty strong things to say about him but they're coming out of the same general background in medieval mysticism that sense of inward communion with God the difference between months and Luther is that munsi didn't have powerful backers in the end among the princes of his day and ended up dying in a struggle with the peasants in 1525 outside Franklin's housing I think Munster is important because he reminds us that radical Christianity often down the centuries included resort to force of arms in order to prosecute the warfare of the saints to bring about the kingdom of God on earth it's not uniform in this sort of radicalism but it's a form of action which I think it would be wrong to ignore months sir all the time was looking for opportunities to work to bring about a new situation in the lives of ordinary people in the cities in which he lived and work and one of the things that he did was to preach a memorable sermon called a sermon to the princes in which he saw himself as a new Daniel a Daniel who like Daniel had with Nebuchadnezzar was advising the princes about what it is they should be doing and what Munzer says you need to be taking up your arms in order to bring about the kingdom of God on earth Muenster got involved in this and sympathized with and worked alongside peasants who's I think one could say legitimate demands for a better deal in their time had led them to rise in revolt against the Lords in their particular area and it was all brutally put down in 1525 month sir was captured and eventually executed what I think we need to remember is that what is behind this is this conviction that he was called to take up the sword and to bring about the kingdom of God on earth it's different from what we find in the writings of dragwon Stanley when Stanley as far as one can see was what we would now call a pacifist different also from what we shall see in 20th century examples like Liberation Theology where there is very little evidence of resort to force of arms and heed quite reverse and some are explicitly pacifist in the sort of line that they take now no 30 years ago since I first went to Brazil and I went there in my first leave of absence in Cambridge it was a very strange story in itself I was about to do what many others have done and gone to Germany and then to Israel for leave in order to do some writing and a friend of Mines who had just come back from Bolivia said what are you doing doubtful why not given your interest in political theology go and see what's happening Latin America and so I did I wrote to various people and had a remarkable time over two or three months in the summer of 1983 travelling around Brazil and to some extent Mexico right at the end of my stay what I discovered there was a different way of doing theology as compared with anything that I had been familiar with I've been in some parlo largest city in Brazil and the center the motor of liberation theology in the Brazilian Roman Catholic Church for a couple of days and my host took me to a an occasion where there was a a workshop on a Saturday which as it so happened was made a 1983 and and I went into this community room in a favela shantytown in on the fringes of San Paolo to see three people behind a desk a room full of chairs of men and women interacting with two of the people behind the desk I subsequently discovered the two people with whom they were interacting were professors of Old Testament and New Testament at the Pontifical University in San Paolo and the third person was a local bishop that he had nothing to say and just who was there in solidarity with everything that was going on my Portuguese wasn't quite good enough to follow everything that was going on but it was good enough to and stand that the topic of discussion for the day was the book of Revelation and it wasn't not being discussed about as a map of the end of the world but how it is those people who are living in the midst of a military dictatorship experienced there and then what was going on within the imagery of Revelation and they were talking in particular about the idea of witness and lots of people from around the room and talked about what it meant to be one of the witnesses in Revelation chapter 11 for example or to share the testimony of Jesus and so on and so on it was a remarkable occasion in which the experience and the life of those people was resonating with and interacting with the text of Revelation and I think on that day and those two hours I had an experience of what Liberation Theology was about it's not about people wonderful as they are like Gustavo Bertie areas load of its bath leonardo baths at our writing their books all of them would say that the motor for their own understanding about liberation theology about was doing exactly what those two exegesis were doing on that in that workshop on that Saturday so that their writing itself was being empowered and inspired by the experiences of ordinary people one of the great privileges of being chair of the last American Campaign Committee of Christian Aid was the opportunity to visit some of the projects that Christian Aid has supported over the years and in 1985 I went out to Brazil and saw some of the work which was being looked after and supported by one of Christian aides major partners in the Northeast of Brazil they're based in Salvador and from Salvador we went out one day to a fishing community about hundred kilometers away from Salvador it was one of those providential days when one finds something which made make such an impact on one's life we went to a local community and found there about half a dozen people putting together popular education material which is going to be used by local rural communities in the coming weeks and I was able to take some pictures of that educational material as they were producing it on the day and we can look at it here now the first of these emphasizes the primary importance of liberation theology which links back with so much of what is there within earlier radical traditions and indeed within the Bible itself and think of what Jesus is saying not everyone who says to me Lord Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven but the one who does the will of my father does the will of my father it's action in the life which is most important and this is what is stressed here the Portuguese word vida life and there you've got the globe and on it Latin America stressing the importance of that context being the motor for the inspiration of what it is that one thinks about and does in terms of one's understanding of God and I think once one gets that one gets something which is absolutely central not only liberation theology but understanding that radical tradition within Christianity the second slide has a railway track and that railway track has two tracks one track on which the coach goes down has life the other track the Bible and both going parallel one with another and both equally important in contributing to the understanding of what it is that's distinctive about this particular movement that compared with other parts of the popular movement working for social change here there is another ingredient coming in but that ingredient differs from the way in which often within mainstream Christianity we can see the Bible the Bible is the authority first and foremost which one looks up to because alongside it what they're saying is that life is the kind of almost the lens through which one looks at the Bible and once one does that then the Bible has found a kind of cast new light on the way in which one is looking at the world and one understanding oneself and one's responsibility before God and one's neighbor the third images so as the image implies is a triangle three angles and here you've got these three different elements what you've got is the Bible here they're calling it rather than life they're calling reality a word which is used again and again within liberation theology circles that the context in which we live and work as human beings and the third angle of the triangle is community so I think all these three things are needed in order to fall that the the whole kind of process of action and reflection to function alright if one just has two of them let's say for example if one just has Bible and community without reference to reality what ends up with a kind of otherworldly sort of spirituality if one just has community and reality without reference to the Bible then yeah you're easily to kind of end up with a politics which may well end up being indistinguishable from what is going on in wider political movements so all three unnecessary unimportant with the fourth image we've got another dimension here what we've seen in the first three images is the relationship between the individuals and the groups and their own particular context here and now what is going on in this fourth image is reminding people that the Bible in its origins belongs to another time and another place as well and here you've got this image at the center of which is the book of Exodus and there are four corners that's what modest means and those four corners are are related to issues which relate to the situation of the people of God back then what was it like for them how did the people live his number one number two with whom did people relate well the answer to that question is well the the Hebrew slaves were at the bottom of the pile here was a God who related to people who were at the bottom of the pile and of course that's a familiar theme within the whole liberation theology religion as also through radical Christianity down the centuries and that God is on the side of the poor and the marginalized and one can think of all sorts of biblical passages where and this kind of theme comes up the third corner who has power in society and and here you got Pharaoh at the top of the pile and the people of God powerless disenfranchised in no position at all and then the fourth point is what people thought and I think this is a very interesting issue the guards to the story of the emergence of Israel in the stories that we have in Exodus and Deuteronomy and elsewhere in the Pentateuch that what we've got is a people who are being led by Moses out of Egypt yes eventually into a promised land but they also had to have their minds and ways of thinking changed and there are several passages particularly Exodus where the people look back fondly to the fleshpots of Egypt oh god please give us the cucumber and the rest of it which we enjoyed there rather than this awful place that we we have been led out into and and there is I think a really important issue being kind of focused on here that Christian Radek radicalism is about raising people's awareness in in in Gerard when Stan is writing for example that's what he's trying to do all the time getting people to understand how it is the ways of thinking and behaving are as they are and that in a sense is what is going on in what Moses is trying to do within the stories of the Pentateuch actually to get people to see that there's an there's the possibility of another way of behaving and the book of Deuteronomy summarizes this as a kind of new manifesto for a different way of behaving which is much more egalitarian than the hierarchical way of behaving in Egypt it goes without saying that this is an extraordinary development within [Music] world Christianity and of course within the Roman Catholic Church and sooner or later there was a pretty radical reaction to it the pontificate of Pope John Paul the second aided by his prefect for the congregation absorption of the faith then Colin rotzinger and led a campaign against Liberation Theology and particularly what they Otakon deemed as his misunderstandings of Christian doctrine and some of the major figures within liberation theology found themselves being questioned and under threat so for example the inaudible because of a book he wrote on church carries manpower which was deemed to be too Protestant because of the emphasis on the way in which ordinary people could understand what was going on in terms of their theological responsibilities without always having needing a priest to do so and he was called to account and was silenced for a significant length of time Gustavo Gutierrez was also examined and he has I think managed to kind of maintain both his integrity his appeal to the sensuality of what he's doing within the whole fabric of the Catholic tradition and but there have been some difficult moments for him what are the issues that most concern the Roman Catholic Church centrally I think because of John Paul's seconds experience of Marxism in Poland I think the assumption that all Marxism must be tarred with the same brush I think led to his deep suspicions of what was going on in Latin America and particularly in Nicaragua and there's a an amazing image of when he he landed in Nicaragua to be greeted by the then sandanista government two of whose members were Roman Catholic priests and the Pope wagging his finger at an ester Cardinal for being involved in that way in in government is one of those images that has kind of stayed with me but I think I think that kind of indicates the kind of deep unease that there was at the center about what was going on in Latin America you

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Keywords: LIBERATION, THEOLOGY, RADICAL, CHRISTIANITY, WITH, CHRISTOPHER, ROWLAND

Id: 4enR1Xc4xng

Length: 24min 59sec (1499 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 28 2012