Category Archives: Liberation Theology

Jesus and the Politicians

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In the previous instalment I argued that Jesus and Paul did not address their moral teachings to institutions, such as the state, corporations, professions, or clubs. Only individuals can obey Jesus’s moral commands. On what grounds, then, do advocates invoke Jesus’s moral teachings to justify their public policy proposals? And what are their motivations for wanting Jesus’s support?

I think these strategies fall into three categories.

Thoughtless Clichés

Some politicians, social media junkies, and political pundits quote the teachings of Jesus, the apostles or the prophets without any attempt to justify using them in contexts and for purposes alien to their original settings. Examples are abundant: one often hears Jesus’s words “Do not judge, or you will be judged” (Matthew 7:1) quoted to deflect criticism of immoral acts. Or, it is argued that we should support a universal right to government funded healthcare because Jesus said that God “has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free” (Luke 4:18; quoting Isaiah 61:1-2). Again, should not government act as a counterweight to the rich and powerful and take the side of the poor, because, in the language of liberation theology, “God is always on the side of the poor”?  Jesus’s words are often quoted as proof of this liberationist thesis:

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God…But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort (Luke 6:20-24).

And James says,

Listen, my dear brothers and sisters: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who are exploiting you? Are they not the ones who are dragging you into court? (James 2:5-6).

Misapplication of the Old Testament

Another group, composed of Christian socialists and Black “prophetic” preachers on the left and so-called “Christian nationalists” on the right apply the Old Testament’s moral and social teachings to the United States of America and other Western democracies to very different ends. But neither left nor right take into account that the Old Testament law was given to the ancient people of Israel, which was a theocratic state governed by a specific covenant with God. The covenant laws—religious as well as moral—were binding on all the people within the realm. In contrast, the New Covenant announced by Jesus (Luke 22:20 and 1 Corinthians 11:25) is based on faith and obedience to Jesus, not on national or ethnic identity. This community is the new covenant people of God; it is not a political entity with sovereignty over all people within its borders—Christians, atheists, moral and immoral. To apply the OT laws given to ancient Israel or the moral instruction given in the NT to the disciples of Jesus to the United States (or other modern states) without due consideration for the differences is a misuse of Scripture and a case of flawed ethical reasoning. The United States of America is neither the Old Covenant nor the New Covenant people of God.

Academic Abstraction and Transposition

In my experience, most academic Christian ethicists understand that the moral teaching of the Bible should not be applied to modern societies uncritically. They are well aware that OT moral teaching was addressed to the ancient covenant people and the NT moral teaching speaks directly to Christians only. Moreover, they understand the point I made in the previous essay in this series, that is, that Jesus’s and the apostles’ moral teaching asserts a strict unity between the inner condition of the soul and external behavior. Good works without love are worthless (1 Corinthians 13). And one who claims to love but does nothing to help others is a liar (1 John 4:20).

The United States of America and other modern states concern themselves for the most part with external behaviors that significantly affect the peace, security and general welfare of society. They do not make policy based on the moral teaching of First Corinthians 13. Jesus said the greatest command is to love God with all your being and the second is to love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:34-40). No state has ever enshrined these teachings in law—not even in Calvin’s Geneva, Cromwell’s England or John Knox’s Scotland—nor could they be policed if they were. Additionally, modern states find it prudent to allow some external behaviors to be practiced that are clearly taught to be immoral by Jesus and the apostles. How, then, do Christian ethicists develop a Christian political/social ethics for a society that is religiously diverse and contains significant numbers of atheists, agnostics, nihilists, libertines, Marxists, anarchists, and others?

Admittedly, there are a variety of ways Christian thinkers go about developing “Christian” social ethics. But all of them have one strategy in common. They all abstract principles or rules they judge to underlie the moral teaching of the Bible, remove them from their original setting in ancient Israel or the early Christian community and transpose them into a modern secular setting. As one example, as a graduate student in a course in theological ethics I studied the ethics of Reinhold Niebuhr. In his book An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (1935), Niebuhr argues that the Christian ideal of agape love (First Corinthians 13!) cannot be realized even in the life of an individual, much less in political society. But accepting universal love as a moral ideal can inspire us to work toward the closest approximation possible in this world, that is justice. Hence Niebuhr’s theory of ethics is called “Christian Realism.” But is “Christian Realism” Christian in any meaningful sense? The abstract concept of justice as “giving to everyone their due” (Aristotle) is common coinage in all the great ethical systems. What do we gain by calling it an “approximation” of Christian love? How can you have Christian ethics without faith, hope and love, that is, without Christ? Something else is going on, but I won’t take the time here to pursue that issue. I will just say this: Niebuhr’s Christian ethics resembles Roosevelt’s New Deal socialism more than it does Jesus’s radical discipleship ethics.

Liberation theologies—Latin American, Black, Feminist—are also examples of this third type of distortion of Jesus’s and the Apostles’ moral teaching. Liberation theologies latch on to the biblical theme of liberation exemplified most dramatically by God’s liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery in the Exodus and taken up in the NT as liberation from sin, death and the devil. Political liberation becomes the total focus of this theology. Liberation theologians adopt the persona of Moses when he said to Pharoah, “Let my people go.” But of course, modern states are neither ancient Egypt nor unfaithful Israel. And liberation theologians are neither Moses nor Amos. Something else is going on here also. I will just say this: Just as Niebuhr channeled Roosevelt’s New Deal socialism, liberation theologians have more in common with Karl Marx’s utopian communism than with Jesus and Paul.

Next: You may be left with some questions: Do Jesus’s moral teachings have nothing to say to political society? May Christians not bring their faith and moral convictions into public policy discussions? Are there ways to bring our faith to bear on the great issues of the day while avoiding the three mistakes I just outlined? In future essays I hope to address these questions.

Christian Ethics is for Christians!

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In this essay we continue our study of Christian ethics in which we attempt to reclaim Christian moral teaching from political opportunists. In the previous essay I listed five ethical principles that do double duty as conclusions and guiding principles of this series. Today we will address the first two:

  • Jesus and the apostles address their moral teaching to individual persons; not a single line is addressed to an institution.
  • The only entity capable of moral dispositions and actions is the individual human person.

I assume that most of my readers are familiar with the full range of the New Testament. Given this assumption, I will not take the space to document every instance of moral teaching in the NT. Nevertheless, in preparation for this essay I reread the four gospels and the letters of Paul just to make sure that my memory served me correctly.

Jesus

Jesus teaches his disciples about many things: the character of God and providence, the coming kingdom of God, and sincere religious practice. Included in his teaching are what I am calling moral teachings, that is, how we ought to act. The Sermon on the Mount serves as a convenient summary of Jesus’s moral teaching. Among the moral imperatives in that section of Matthew are:

  • Don’t get angry or insult your neighbor.
  • Don’t harbor lust.
  • Don’t divorce.
  • Don’t swear an oath.
  • Don’t take revenge.
  • Love your enemies.
  • Don’t worry. Trust God.
  • Don’t love money.
  • Don’t judge others.

Elsewhere in the gospels Jesus teaches his disciples to:

  • Forgive others.
  • Love their neighbors.
  • Purify their hearts from all hypocrisy.
  • Be humble and serve others.
  • Don’t seek honor from others.

Perhaps no other statement expresses the heart of Jesus’s moral teaching better than Matthew 5:48: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” This command comes at the end of the section wherein Jesus insists, against the universal human inclination, that we ought to love our enemies. The moral actions Jesus commands can arise only out of a character assimilated to the character of God.

Paul

Paul’s writings deal centrally with the necessity in the first decades of the church of clarifying how trust in Jesus as the crucified and risen Messiah and Lord relate to the Law and how Jewish and Gentile believers can be united in one body. But Paul unmistakably continues to teach his converts—especially gentile converts—the moral vision embodied in the Law and the prophets as interpreted by Jesus. We can see this fusion clearly in Romans 13-15, Galatians 5, Ephesians 4 and 5, Philippians 2, and Colossians 3. But I am especially struck, however, by 1 Corinthians 13 where Paul, like Jesus, connects outward actions to the most intimate depths of the heart. God wants our souls! If we fail here, we “gain nothing” (v. 3).

4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

This description reminds me of Jesus’s statement in Matthew 5:48 “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” In 13:10, Paul even uses the same word “perfect” or teleios to describe the state in which everything is as it should be.

The Individual Christian

In my rereading of the NT, I could not find a single moral imperative addressed to the state as it existed in that day (the Roman Empire) or any hypothetical state. There are no moral instructions about justice or love or mercy directed to public or private institutions composed of nonbelievers or a mixture of believers and nonbelievers. The NT does not read like Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Politics or Grotius or Hobbes or Locke or Rousseau or Hegel or Rawls. Nothing resembling public policy advocacy can be found. When the NT speaks to the world, it says “Repent and believe the gospel.” And even then, it speaks only to individuals, for only individuals can repent or believe. Moral instruction follows conversion.

Indeed, the NT speaks about the church as an institution but only in descriptive terms. When Jesus or Paul or John presents moral instruction to the church it is always addressed to the community not as an abstract institution but as individuals of one mind and heart.

When you consider Jesus’s and Paul’s inextricable linkage of moral action with the depths of the inner person, it becomes clear why the NT addresses its moral teaching to individual persons only. Institutions don’t have hearts. They can’t believe. They can’t love.

Why, then, do so many clergy, politicians, intellectuals, and others, quote Jesus and the apostles as if their moral teaching could be applied directly to the political order or organizations composed of atheists, adherents of other religions, and nominal Christians? Can this practice be justified?

Next Time we will examine three ways people apply Jesus’s and the apostles’ teaching to public institutions and attempt to justify particular public policies.

Is Liberation Theology Christian?

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I am taking a break from my essays on higher education to ask, “Is Liberation Theology Christian?” A few years ago, I would have answered this question, “It depends.” Perhaps that was because I knew it only from books. But now my first impulse is to say “No!” because I find myself surrounded by “liberation” theologians, and I know firsthand where they are coming from. It does not matter what they focused on in graduate school—biblical studies, church history, systematic theology or practical theology—everything is about liberating the oppressed. They’ve multiplied like rabbits. It seems that within the past 10 years, every theology graduate program in America decided that the only subject worth studying is oppression and liberation. Everybody is a social ethicist and a political activist. And you advance your academic career by discovering new classes of oppressed people and ever more subtle ways oppressors oppress their victims.

Before I go further into my complaint, I should probably define liberation theology. Liberation theology is a general term for any system of theological thought that privileges “liberation” as the lens through which it views all the topics usually studied in Christian theology. It evaluates every theological utterance by its tendency to oppress or liberate some group of people. There are no neutral theological statements! Everything is political, and everyone has an agenda. The purpose of liberation theology is to critique theologies that justify oppression and construct theologies that justify the efforts of designated oppressed groups to liberate themselves. It is not to listen to the word of God, repeat it to the church, and obey it.

What kind of oppression does liberation theology have in mind? Not sin, death, and the Devil! These three are the classic oppressors of humankind from which traditional Christianity sought liberation through the gracious saving action of the Father, Son, and Spirit. In liberation theology, the oppressors are human beings and the social structures they create. Liberation theologians work to expose and critique the capitalism, patriarchy, white racism, homophobia, colonialism, transphobia, etc., that they see permeating American society. Liberation theology focuses on political liberation. And it draws on the socio-political analysis of Karl Marx and his contemporary followers often called neo-Marxists. They divide the world into the oppressor classes and the oppressed classes. It’s a very simple analysis of a very complicated world. And from this simple analysis liberation theologians derive a simple theology that divides people into good and bad, guilty and innocent based on group identity. The oppressors can make no defense and the oppressed can give no offense.

What gives these liberation theologies the appearance of being Christian? The simple answer to this question is that they argue that the God of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus Christ always took the side of the oppressed. Liberation theologians select such prooftexts as the Exodus story, some of Jesus’s statements, some of his interactions with the poor and rich, and a few other isolated statements in the Old and New Testaments. They sprinkle these quotes within an already complete system of social and political thought derived from Karl Marx and lead the reader to leap to the conclusion that the whole system springs from the essence of Christianity. But Christianity is completely superfluous to the doctrine. It is added to tickle Christian ears and, frankly, to deceive them.

Why do I say that liberation theology is not Christian? (1) Read any liberation theology you please—feminist, Black, womanist, gay, queer, and Latin American—and you will always find that the subjective experience of these groups is considered a divine revelation as authoritative, if not more so, than Scripture. No reading of Scripture, no matter how obvious to the ordinary reader, will be allow to subvert the “truth” of the subjective experience of oppression. But in any theology worthy of the designation “Christian,” Scripture must be acknowledged as the norm of all theological doctrine and ethics, and to reject this norm is to cease to be Christian. To continue posing as Christian is to lie and deceive. (2) Liberation theology selects one theme within Scripture—liberation—and subordinates everything else to it. Liberation theology does not therefore present the fulness of the gospel or the apostolic teaching; and this distortion through omission is a textbook definition of heresy.

In Search of the Social-Justice Jesus

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I heard a fine sermon Sunday (9/22/24) about the subtle dangers of hypocrisy and the temptation to judge others by standards we cannot meet (Matthew 7:1-5). With our x-ray moral vision, we can detect microscopic faults in others but are blind to the huge train of sins we drag behind us! Ouch! It was a time for self-examination! I was struck with how comprehensive Jesus’s demand for individual conversion is; each of us must change from head to toe, inside and out, body and soul, act, being, and affections!

My Search for the Progressive Jesus

Now, don’t tell the preacher, but after reading Matthew 7:1-5, I turned back to Matthew 5 & 6 and forward all the way to the end of the Gospel of Matthew, looking for the social-justice Jesus progressive and liberal Christians keep talking about. I kept thinking: could it be that looking for systemic injustices perpetrated by “society” instead of examining our own lives is another way of evading Jesus’s demand for personal repentance? Is our obsession with systemic sins a modern form of the hypocrisy against which Jesus warned?

When I got home after church, I looked through the Gospels of Mark and Luke also. Still, no sign of a first-century Che Guevara, Angela Davis, or Ibram Kendi. Nor did I find a Democrat or Republican or Libertarian Jesus. He’s not American or Brazilian or Chinese or Indian. He’s not even Jewish in the political sense.

The Politics of Heaven

In the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, Jesus’s first public words were, “Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matt 4:17; cf. Mark 1:15). There is not a single place where Jesus addresses impersonal “systems of privilege and oppression.” Not even one! Impersonal systems cannot repent or believe. In every case in which Jesus addresses the “poor,” “rich,” “self-righteous, “powerful,” “outcasts,” or the “oppressed” he speaks directly to individuals. Jesus proclaimed something much more radical, much more comprehensive than political reform or revolution. He proclaimed that the Kingdom of God is just around the corner. His requirements for entry to the Kingdom and his demands for life within the Kingdom are completely unrealistic for any worldly political order. His is a heavenly politics, and in that sense stands in judgment on every earthly kingdom. Read the Sermon on the Mount! Very few people in any nation would even try to live up to it. And even fewer would come close to success.

The Mustard Seed Kingdom

What, then, was Jesus up to? In reading the Gospel of Matthew it becomes clear that Jesus never expected the entire nation to respond favorably to the gospel of the Kingdom:

 Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it (7:13-14).

Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the Kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven (7:21).

Think about the parables of the Kingdom in Matthew 13: The Sower, The Weeds, The Hidden Treasure, and The Net. Each of these parables assumes that the Kingdom will be much smaller than the whole people. The Kingdom message will sort (13:1-58) and divide people, even families (10:34-39).

The Church and the Kingdom

Again, what is Jesus up to? In response to Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Messiah, Jesus said,

Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven (Matt 16:17-18).

Jesus plans to set up his own community within the world, and this community will be made up of serious disciples of Jesus. In their way of life as individuals and together in community they will be “salt” and “light” in the world (Matt 5:13-16). They will shine into the world a ray of light that anticipates the bright dawn of God’s comprehensive reign over his creation. They will honor God in humility, faith and obedience and love each other from the heart. They will do justice to all people and even love their enemies. As need arises, just as Jesus did, they will do good to everyone. They will feed the hungry, visit the sick and those in prison, befriend the abandoned, and they will speak up for those suffering injustice. They will establish hospitals and educational institutions. The Spirit of Jesus will drive them to do all sorts of good works…in his name!

But will they do all these things without abandoning the message Jesus preached, “Repent for the Kingdom of heaven is near.” For they know that reforming systems apart from reforming hearts will simply substitute one system of injustice, greed and envy for another! They know that “man shall not live by bread alone,” that loaves and fishes will not by themselves satisfy but merely anesthetize the soul.

My search failed!

There is no social-justice Jesus in the New Testament. He is a figment of progressive and liberal Christians’ imaginations, a composite character constructed of elements drawn from Amos, Spartacus, and Che Guevara. Back to Matthew 7:1-5. It is much easier for the modern social justice Christian to curse the injustices of the world than to do justice in their own families and to their neighbors and enemies. As long as we focus on the sins of others or systems of privilege, we do not have to repent and prepare ourselves for the Kingdom of heaven.

Next Time: We will examine this progressive assertion. “In the Bible, God is always on the side of the oppressed.”