I.

What resources are there within Christianity to reattune us to the liberating meaning of Christian symbols? How might we be honest about the brutal legacy of Christianity’s complicity with oppression? And how do we do this while affirming the liberating center at the heart of the stories of Israel’s God, the same God the New Testament writers identify in the life, ministry, and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth?

These podcast episodes on symbolic devastation are rooted in my own confrontation with the violent legacy of Christianity and how individuals and communities who identify themselves as Christian invoke the symbols of the biblical texts to justify their actions of indifference and violence.[1]

My name is Colton Bernasol, a friend and essay contributor for World Outspoken. Last episode I began in the early moments of the colonial era. But today, we turn back to the twentieth century and to a specific movement in theology and church history: Latin American liberation theology.

It is 1968. As church members in Chicagoland planned and began organizing the Pentecostal church in the Chicago suburbs, 130 bishops of the Roman Catholic Church from across Latin America met in Medellín, Columbia, to discuss the ramifications that the Gospel had to Latin America's economic situation.[2] It was a powerful meeting. The bishops condemned structural poverty, colonialism, and neocolonialism on theological grounds, decrying these realities as injustices contrary to the will of God.[3] But beyond this important ecclesial injunction, Medellín helped to inaugurate and give birth to Latin American liberation theology. As the Sociologist Christian Smith writes, "What Medellín introduced, liberation theology cultivated, elaborated, and systematized.”[4]

Today, many know of Latin American liberation theology because of its calls for the “preferential option for the poor.”[5] In evangelical and fundamentalist circles, many accuse the movement of being reductively political. For example, Russell Moore, the editor-in-chief for Christianity Today, called the theology of white nationalism "a liberation theology for white people." His point was to condemn white nationalism as politically reductive. But in making his point, he condemned liberation theology too. For Moore, liberation theology and white nationalism are two sides of the same coin. Moore’s naive reading prevents many from looking toward the rich insights at the heart of Latin American liberation theology.

For our purposes I want to focus on two theologians from this movement: Juan Luis Segundo, a theologian from Uruguay, and Jon Sobrino, a theologian writing from El Salvador. Both theologians are responding to contexts where much of the theology that is developing is indifferent to oppressed peoples. They are trying to do theology in a context of religious corruption. It is their critical and material approach to theology that will be helpful as we try to interpret Christian symbols in a way that is honest about history yet hopeful about the possibility that we can, in a spirit of humility, apprehend their liberating meaning.

II.

Juan Luis Segundo understood that theology could be either oppressive or liberating in its use of religious symbols. It is for that reason that Segundo felt the urge to develop a theology that was at once critical of itself without rejecting entirely the sources, like the Bible and tradition, from which it tried to speak of God. His book Liberation of Theology, based on a set of lectures from a short time he spent at Harvard University, is his attempt at this critical yet constructive theology.

Segundo holds that a liberating theology is one that takes seriously experience and its capacity to trouble long-cemented habits of interpreting the biblical symbols. The trouble of interpretation begins in experience – our everyday lives marked by history, culture, and society but also class, gender, race, and sexuality. Because experience is unstable and ever-changing, new experiences can arise that render previous interpretations of biblical symbols insufficient. This can be described as the “crises" of interpretation.[6]

As we said in the last episode, one cause of this interpretative crises is the result of unjust historical conditions which arise alongside and are given justification by Christian symbols. Marx and Fanon are onto this when they accuse religion of being bourgeois and colonial. When we experience the cross as a symbolic component of an unjust social order, our frame of meaning is upended. Columbus, Cabeza de Vaca, Cortez, the Klu Klux Klan, White Christian Nationalism, Megachurch Capitalism and indifference, all of which I talked about last episode, only seem to prove their point.

But this is where Segundo goes beyond both Marx and Fanon. For Segundo, the experience of religious corruption does not spell out the total death of religion, instead it provokes the need for what he calls “ideological suspicion,” so that we might be able to diagnose how religious language, symbols, and stories are being used. It is not religious symbols in themselves that are corrupted, it is the ideological uses of them that are corrupted, that is, how they are used to justify and sanction the societies in which we live.[7]

Now why does this matter to symbolic devastation? Symbolic devastation names the silence of Christian symbols that results from the inability to apprehend the Good News to which they point. From the vantage point of symbolic devastation, the symbols appear to do existential and material harm, and part of the terrifying nature of the devastation is that you can internalize this harm as the only way to look at these symbols. When one way of interpreting a Christian symbol becomes established through history, venerated in the form of an unbreakable tradition, it becomes easy to assume that the symbol can mean nothing other than its dubious ideological use. There is no other way to interpret. Feeling the danger, we abandon the harmful symbol altogether.

You may see now that, in some sense, I have already begun naming the ideological problem at the heart of my own and many others’ devastation of Christian symbols like the cross. Christianity has a long history in which its central leaders and institutions have used the ambiguous language and meaning of Christian religious symbols for the accumulation of power, fame, greed, and control. We need suspicion – of ourselves, of our communities, and of power – if only to be very honest about the nature of religion itself: its a powerfully evocative force that, when its symbols are invoked, can muster cosmic and theological meaning to build worlds that depend on death, destruction, and violence.

But Segundo does not end with suspicion. Instead, suspicion exposes our idolatry, our capacity to fashion religious language to justify our violent fantasies. A “hermeneutics of suspicion” can serve as a theological clearing; it clears the ground for us to return to the symbol and ask if it can speak again, making a distinction between a symbol and its unjust use.

What is the new starting point? For Segundo, a liberating theology depends on our capacity to enter a relationship with these symbols with the trust that they can, after separating them from ideological chaff, speak anew.[8] The way forward is to interpret symbols from the vantage point of critical suspicion and the openness to trust that the God to whom these symbols points wants genuine liberation and freedom. This is what Segundo calls the inevitable “political option” to theology.[9] Theology is political because God’s revelation through scripture, history, culture, and experience, is a revelation that stakes a moral and ethical imperative that is social in its character. It is God’s concrete commitment to situations of both individual and collective injustice that allows us to distinguish between liberating and violent invocations of Christian symbols.

III.

Like Segundo, Jon Sobrino’s theology has a critical starting point. But he is concerned with the social context of El Salvador, where poor farmers were being exploited by elite Christian landowners and many members in the church refused to speak out against these injustices. Those who did were assassinated. Óscar Romero, the archbishop, had been assassinated in 1980. And in 1989, while Sobrino was away in Thailand, Jesuit Colleagues of his were killed by members of the Salvadoran military. Sobrino was targeted as well, but narrowly escaped death as a matter of happen stance.[10]

Sobrino wrote an essay in 1998 titled Theology in the Suffering World: Theology as Intellectus Amoris, the Latin translating to “the understanding of love.” It is an important essay because Sobrino lays down what he takes to be an effective way to do theology in rather succinct terms.

Sobrino argues that theology must be done from the messiness of the material world: a world of suffering, poverty, exploitation, racism, sexism, and violence. Theology, Sobrino tells us, must root itself in this place, and it must begin there, in the concreteness of life that is a life of struggle. Sobrino is like Segundo in this regard: there is no “neutral” starting point to theology. Theology must “take responsibility,” says Sobrino. So in the most holistic sense of the term, theology is political — even while remaining spiritual and existential.[11]

But for Sobrino, it is not simply a matter of doing theology in the suffering world. Rather, he thinks that the suffering world is the place of God’s revelation. As he writes, “God has revealed God’s self not only for but through the sufferings of God’s peoples.”[12] Liberation theologians often speak of the preferential option for the poor, that in order for theology to be truly Good News, it must center those who are poor, those whom society makes outcasts, marginalized, forgotten, decentered, and wounded. Perhaps most provocatively, the implication is that the God of Jesus is not going to be found in those institutions and places that damage and wound those whom God loves; even the most central institutions and symbols of Christian faith can be absent of God, because they can sustain and ignore the injustice they create.

There is good scriptural ground for this way of thinking: Moses speaks of the God who came down from Sinai to free oppressed Israel; the prophets, like Amos, speak of a God who could care less about temple sacrifice when the poor are ignored; and Jesus of Nazareth is born of Mary, a woman of insignificant standing, from a small town outside of Jerusalem, who trusts in the God who cares for orphans and widows. Even Jesus tells us that we know him in and through the “least of these,” suggesting that God’s Divine Presence will not stay bounded within the temple walls. Revelation itself becomes the inditement of the powerful in a violent social order.

At the heart of Sobrino’s theology is a commitment to love and hope. Hence, he describes theology as intellectus amoris and intellectus spei, that is, theology as an understanding of love and understanding of hope.[13] We might think of these as ethical and temporal dispositions, activities that shape how we approach interpretation. Love is a commitment to the flourishing of another. Hope is an orientation of trust toward the present in light of a future secured by God’s identification with and victory in the suffering world.

Finally, Sobrino calls theology mystagogy, a way of walking into the deep mystery of God.[14] Here Sobrino reminds us that there is a distance between our speech about God and God in Godself. The paradox of faithfulness is its willingness to accept its own fragility, to be open to the inexhaustible depths of God’s character. What follows is that no interpretation can fully comprehend Divine Mystery. We tread the path to understand who God is with humility, knowing that even the most sedimented of traditions – like the traditions of colonial Christianity and their lingering ways of understanding God – fall short of beholding God. Perhaps this is why in the Old Testament traditions there is a sense of reverence to God’s name. It is not to be spoken. Its meaning is “I will be who I will be.”[15] God is always ahead of human fantasy and language, always its divine subversion, and this is especially so for those who have power. To assert finality in any interpretation is to capture God, it is to participate in that very spirit which captures peoples and land, and to bring them under the reign of human mastery, the logic at the heart of colonialism.

Now what does this mean for symbolic devastation? Much like Segundo, Sobrino offers a critical starting point to Christian symbols. In the suffering world, a world created and sustained by the religious system of Christianity, one cannot proceed except by engaging in an internal critique of Christianity, the goal of which is to gain clarity into the religious causes, not only the material causes, to the unjust worlds we build. To recover the symbol’s meaning, we must give up the innocence of Christianity in the colonial world. This is what I mean when I say there is no going back after symbolic devastation. The way forward is through the honest accounting of Christianity’s own ethical compromise.

But a symbol’s meaning is not entirely lost. Instead, the critical starting point begins in a commitment to seek out God’s revelation in the poor. The basis for this is in Jesus’s own teachings and life. His commitment to the poor, sick, marginalized, and outcast reminds us that God is found in those who enact God’s preferential love. It is on the basis of this commitment that love and hope become dispositions for a truly liberating theology. We must look for love in any interpretation of the Christian symbols, and we must have anticipatory trust – in other words, hope – that they can speak again, even as they are used as tools to justify colonial dominance, white nationalist superiority, and middle-class indifference.

Finally, Sobrino’s invitation for us to treat theology as a form of mystagogy reminds us that language will inevitably fall short before God. Mystagogy puts a stop to all interpretation and therefore to those interpretations that make use of Christian symbols as a form of religious justification of domination. By recognizing the limited nature of all attempts at inquiring into God, we become free to dismiss colonial interpretations of the symbol as just that – interpretations that cannot exhaust the symbol’s meaning since it is a symbol that points to the inexhaustibly Divine.

IV.

But what does this look like concretely? What might it look like to interpret the cross beyond the colonial history that devastates it as a symbol? We wrestle with these questions in the final episode. I believe that when we interpret the cross within the materiality of Jesus’s own life and look to how marginalized peoples have made use of the symbol, we will discover a tradition of Christianity that points to the truly liberating dimensions of the Gospel. The silence of the cross as it gets used by oppressive ideologies need not lead us to reject Christianity as a whole, instead, it is an invitation into the scandal of Divine mystery of a God who takes His Place not with Columbus, Cabeza de Vaca, the Klan, among Christian Nationalists, or even in those suburban megachurches. If the God of liberation is to be found, he is to be found where he has chosen to take up residency – in Jesus, yes – but also among those whom Jesus identifies with throughout history and in the present, today.

We explore what this entails next episode.

Blessings until next time.

Episode Credits:

Writer and Host: Colton Bernasol

Music by Lucas Manning

Producer: Lucas Manning

Executive Producer: Emanuel Padilla

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About Colton Bernasol

Colton Bernasol is an editor and writer from Plainfield, Illinois, a Southwest suburb in the Chicagoland area. He graduated from Wheaton College with a BA in Philosophy and Biblical/Theological Studies and from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary with an MA in Theology and Ethics. He writes at the intersection of religion, society, and culture. Currently, he lives in Chicagoland with his wife Anna. Sign up for his newsletter, Provisional.

Footnotes

[1] Colton R. Bernasol, "Theology After Symbolic Devastation: Method in the Liberation Theologies of Juan Luis Segundo, Jon Sobrino, and M. Shawn Copeland." Order No. 29162635, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, 2022. http://turing.library.northwestern.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/theology-after-symbolic-devastation-method/docview/2675665905/se-2. These podcast episodes draws on research and writing I’ve done for my master’s thesis.

[2] Christian Smith, The Emergence of Liberation Theology: Radical Religion and Social Movement Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1991), 21.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Russel Moore, “Christian Nationalism Cannot Save the World,” for Christianity Today, September 2022. https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2022/september-web-only/christian-nationalism-cannot-save-world-politics-elections.html.

[6] Juan Luis Segundo, Liberation of Theology, 9. A correction: In the audio version of the podcast, I say that Segundo uses the language of “crises of interpretation.” This is not the case. He actually describes the need for interpretation as arising out of experience that instigates “profound and enriching questions and suspicions about our real situation.” The language of crises emphasizes the existential upheaval one can feel when these profound and enriching questions arise from these experiences.

[7] Ibid.,. 19, 39.

[8] Ibid., 31-33.

[9] Ibid., 69.

[10] Jon Sobrino, Principle of Mercy: Taking the Crucified People from the Cross, (Orbis Books, 1994), 173. See also Anderson, Gary L., and Kathryn G. Herr. "Sobrino, Jon (1938–)." In Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice, edited by Anderson, Gary L., and Kathryn G. Herr, 1296-1296. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2007. https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412956215.n800. Robert Anthony Lassalle-Klein, Blood and Ink: Ignacio Ellacuría, Jon Sobrino, and the Jesuit Martyrs of the University of Central America (Orbis Books, 2014), xvii-xxi.

[11] Sobrino, Principle of Mercy, 38.

[12] Ibid., 12.

[13] Ibid., 41.

[14] Ibid., 43.

[15] Terrence Fretheim, Exodus, in Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, (Westminster John Knox Press, 1991), 63. I follow Terrance Fretheim’s argument here that places emphasis on the promise and divine future embedded in the name. Hence: “I will be what I will be” over “I am who I am.”