Liberation through Reconciliation

Jon Sobrino's Christological Spirituality

O. Ernesto Valiente

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780823268535
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Denominaciones cristianas

In the past one hundred years alone, more than 200 million people have been killed as a consequence of systematic repression, political revolutions, or ethnic or religious war. The legacy of such violence lingers long after the immediate conflict. Drawing on the author's experiences of his native El Salvador, Liberation through Reconciliation builds on Jon Sobrino's thought to construct a Christian spirituality and theology of reconciliation that overcomes conflict by attending to the demands of truth, justice, and forgiveness.

1 Liberation and Reconciliation

The good news that the gospel proclaims and that Christians are called to embody rests in the promise that in Christ God has reconciled the world. Yet an honest look at our personal lives and relationships, and at the world around us, will readily confront us with realities that contradict this vision of a reconciled world. The millions of victims of war, discrimination, and economic oppression attest to an empirical reality that is at excruciating odds with the good news of the gospel. This apprehension of negativity reveals that all is not well—that something is seriously wrong with the world in spite of God’s promised commitment to it.

The gap between the world as promised and the world as it appears to us is even starker when one considers the ambiguous role played by Christians in events such as the Holocaust and the recent massacres in Rwanda. Some have acted with self-sacrificial love and courage, making efforts to address the consequences and roots of such conflicts. But many others have been passively or actively implicated in the violence. As the Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf notes, in some of these conflicts genuinely committed Christians not only failed to protect innocent victims but were willing participants in unspeakable genocides.1

The authority of such a history subverts any uncritical insistence upon God’s or our own goodness. Rather, it calls for an articulation of the Christian message that is faithful to its sources and capable of empowering a Christian praxis that provides a hopeful and credible response to our social brokenness. Christianity thus must inform a new way of being and relating that has a transforming, reconciling effect on the world. This book contends that Latin America liberation theology’s articulation of the Christian message offers indispensable resources to help mend our conflicted world. It approaches the pursuit of social reconciliation from this perspective and in dialogue with the theological work of Jon Sobrino.

Because “reconciliation” is a polyvalent term that is used in innumerable ways, I begin by outlining how this book understands reconciliation in three steps: by drawing the roots of its scriptural meaning; by determining the scope, agents, and context that it envisions for such reconciliation; and by identifying, at least at the theoretical level, the necessary conditions for its realization. In the second part of the chapter, I begin to examine reconciliation from a liberationist perspective in order to outline the distinctiveness of this approach and address some of the main criticisms leveled against it. This chapter establishes a theoretical framework for engaging reconciliation and helps us identify the most provocative arguments and questions of a complex subject that is studied from the intersection of different academic fields.

Sketching the Contours of Reconciliation

At its core, reconciliation involves the attempt to mend and renew broken or fragmented relationships, and to overcome enmity by transforming the parties involved. In the last thirty years, this basic concept has been studied from different fields, including psychology, the social sciences, law, politics, and theology. On the practical side, numerous international tribunals, truth and reconciliation commissions, and local civic and religious organizations have worked to achieve social and political reconciliation.2

The multiple efforts to confront the challenges posed by the pursuit of reconciliation have led to rapid growth and evolution in this area of study and have yielded many, often contradictory, approaches to reconciliation.3 In turn, the rich output generated by this fecund subject has led to some imprecision surrounding its definition.4 Authors enlist terms such as “peacebuilding,” “restorative justice,” “conflict transformation,” and “transitional justice” to stress different aspects in the practice of reconciliation. While it is encouraging and fitting that reconciliation is an area of study that continues to attract a diversity of scholars, the unintended consequence is that “reconciliation—enjoys no tight consensual usage.”5 Indeed, the meaning of reconciliation continues to be somewhat elusive and remains to some extent an area of contention in current scholarship today.6

More serious than this lack of consensus, however, is how the meaning of reconciliation can be manipulated and distorted by social and political processes. Theologian Robert Schreiter, for instance, has detected three understandings of reconciliation that falsify its true sense: reconciliation as a shortcut to peace, as in the case of political amnesties that trivialize the demands of victims; reconciliation as an alternative to liberation that preserves the status quo; and reconciliation as a managerial and bargaining process of conflict mediation that demands no change in the perpetrator’s practices.7 Although it might not be possible to dispel all of the ambiguity in the use of the term, identifying such false understandings of reconciliation is crucial because, as Schreiter notes, violence and oppression seek to impose “the narrative of the lie” that threatens to destroy the narratives that sustain people’s true purpose and identity.8

Thus, before interrogating Sobrino’s work in search of a viable and credible account of how the Christian faith can be articulated and lived as a force for reconciliation, this study examines reconciliation’s meaning within the development of the Christian tradition. Mindful of the inherent difficulties that ensue from the historical nature of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures and from the fact that they are written from a perspective that privileges a chosen people over “unchosen” ones, this project relies on contemporary biblical scholarship to address these limitations. By taking an examination of the scriptures as its point of departure, it recognizes the normative role of these writings in expressing the faith experience of the Christian community and its understanding of reconciliation.

The Scriptural Roots of Reconciliation

Central to the biblical narrative of redemption and reconciliation is the realization that something is profoundly wrong with human existence—that human beings live in a state of alienation from God, in enmity with one another, and in disharmony with their natural world. In the face of this reality, the Bible maintains that God is committed to healing humanity, mending our relationships, and living in communion with us. The book of Genesis traces this state of alienation back to the entrance of human beings into sin (Gen 3:1–21), which results in the rupture of the relationships between the first humans (Adam and Eve) and their immediate descendants (Cain and Abel), and a rupture in humans’ relationship to the natural world.9 Right after their act of disobedience, God confronts Adam and Eve and reveals the divine punishment for their actions, but not without simultaneously extending an offer of reconciliation, promising that the offspring of the woman will crush the head of the tempter (Gen 3:15) and thus eliminate the enmity it introduced. Although the Bible makes it clear that human beings are singularly responsible for their state of estrangement from God, it presents God as the one who takes the initiative to restore the relationship. The scriptures thus attest that God’s grace and persistent desire to reconcile sinful humanity set the context for interpreting human history and the possibility of salvation offered therein.

The scriptures consistently convey that despite God’s reconciling will, all relationships—God-to-human, human-to-human, and human-to-the-rest-of-creation—remain threatened and affected by the legacy of sin and humans’ repeated rejection of God’s way. God’s desire to reconcile all aspects of human life is expressed biblically in terms of a covenant that provides a means for re-establishing and sustaining the relationship among human beings and between God and God’s people.10

The compilers of the Pentateuch saw the foundation for the covenant emerge from both the promises God made to the patriarchs (Gen 12; 15; 17; 22; and so on), and the events of the Exodus.11 In the Exodus account, God responds to Israel’s sufferings and oppressive enslavement under the Egyptian pharaoh by leading the Israelites out of Egypt and subsequently entering into a covenant with them. Implicit in the description of the event is the insight that reconciliation demands the people’s just liberation from oppression. As Gustavo Gutiérrez notes, “The covenant and the liberation from Egypt were different aspects of the same movement, a movement which led to encounter with God.”12 The covenant completes the liberation of the Exodus event by placing a seal on the reconciliation of the people with God: They are now constituted as the people of God.

From the earliest times, Israel’s religion included the conviction not only that the people of Israel were a chosen people, but also that “as the covenant people of Yahweh, Israel was subject to [God’s] comprehensive demands. They would encounter Yahweh’s blessings or curse as they obeyed or disobeyed the law.”13 Indeed, the Torah dictates the prescribed way of life through which the Israelites expressed their fidelity to God and makes it clear that God perceives the people’s manner of relating to each other and to outsiders as a direct reflection of their reverence (or irreverence) toward God.14 This again reflects the biblical perception that reconciliation cannot be achieved without justice, and that the restoration of the relationship between God and humanity is always accompanied by the restoration of relationships among human beings. As Jason Ripley observes, “At the core, righteousness in the Hebrew Bible is inherently relational, involving the fulfillment of the demands of a relationship, both those among humans and those between humans and God.”15

Even as it establishes the terms for living as God’s people, the law anticipates the reality that the people will fail and thus includes provisions for reestablishing relationship when it is ruptured. Through ritual sacrifices performed by priests, the Israelites could seek to overcome their acts of infidelity and disobedience to God.16 The purpose of these atoning rituals was to heal the breach in the covenant relationship with God that resulted from their sins.17

While the sacrificial system provided the Israelites with a means of reconciling themselves to God, this same system was opposed by the prophets when its rituals amounted to no more than empty signs that were not accompanied by sincere repentance and conversion. The biblical prophets decry the people’s unfaithfulness toward God that is evident in their mistreatment of each other, especially the most vulnerable. As Hans Walter Wolff summarizes, such indictments are rooted ultimately in the fact that “the God of the history of salvation [has been] forgotten and rejected.”18

Even as the prophets perceived God’s punishing judgment in the destruction of Jerusalem (587 BCE) and the exile of the Israelites, they also saw God’s purifying hand at play (Isa 1:21–26; Jer 27:6).19 For them, these events were necessary to catalyze a turning point that would ultimately lead the Israelites to repentance.20 As in the Genesis account of the expulsion from the garden, God’s judgment is not the last word, but rather is administered with the goal of precipitating repentance and return, and the formation of a newly forgiven and reconciled community. This promise of a restored Israel is succinctly expressed in Jeremiah’s prophecy of a renewed covenant:

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their inequity, and remember their sin no more. (Jer 31:31–34)

Three elements in the renewal of Jeremiah’s covenant are particularly important for our purpose. First is the centrality of divine forgiveness: While this forgiveness is preceded by God’s judgment, it nevertheless anticipates the repentance of the people. Second, this covenant’s novelty resides not in the promulgation of a new law, but in God’s gratuitous transformation of human nature and the creation of a sinless and just community that will be eternally faithful to the covenant: God’s will shall be written in the hearts of God’s people, and all its members—from the least to the greatest—will live in covenant relationship.21 Third, while the promise proclaimed through the renewed covenant points to an eschatological future, its hope and content directly impinge upon the concrete historical reality of the present.22 The prophets were rarely concerned with God’s abstract and otherworldly future, but rather with the tangible realities that confronted God’s people. Indeed, the just and peaceful world that they announce as an eschatological promise also anticipates a new action of God in history that continues to be a source of inspiration and transformation for the people of God.

THE NEW TESTAMENT

New Testament commentators often use terms such as “reconciliation,” “redemption,” and “liberation” interchangeably. The problem associated with this practice is that the rich meaning that each one of these images conveys tends to be lost when we collapse them into concepts with analogous meanings. In fact, each term draws from different biblical traditions and metaphors and each stresses different aspects of the salvific work effected by God through Jesus Christ.23 The words “reconcile” and “reconciliation,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Half Title
• Introduction
• 1. Liberation and Reconciliation
• 2. Confronting a Conflicted Reality
• 3. Theology as a Task Guided by the Spirit
• 4. Life and Spirit of the True Human Being
• 5. Reconciling Reality
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index