We are facing difficult times for utopias and for hope. In fact, a lot of people - even many progressive militants - have lost them. To speak of utopias, social transformation, overall hope...seems to some to be unnecessary, idealistic, non-viable, or even ridiculous.
There is a whole "social imagery" which tries to deny us utopia and hope... In this study we propose a reflection on what the utopia and hope of Jesus can tell us in this context of history.
1. THE SITUATION WE START FROM.
For reasons of brevity and for the purpose of this article itself, we are not going to spend much time in an extensive description of this already well known situation of the world today. But we do need to call forth its most relevant characteristics, even though it be almost telegraphically, in order to have clear in our minds the situation that we are starting from and to which we are trying to respond. These seem to us to be the major characteristics as they are ordinarily described today0 :
-"Real" socialism has failed. Capitalism has shown itself to be the better socio-economic system. It has triumphed in its neo-liberal form.
II. ILLUMINATING THIS REALITY "WITH EYES PLACED ON THE UTOPIA OF JESUS" (Heb 12:2)
In order to theologically illuminate this harsh reality various lights can be utilized. In this study we want to address it only in the light of Christology.0
Jesus, fighter for a Cause
In focusing on Jesus, there is something important to point out from the outset: that Jesus was a "man with a Cause". He was not simply a "good person", not even a very good or very holy person. Jesus was a fighter for a Cause, an aware person, who knew what he wanted and is determined to get it despite the difficulties that he might find, a person who is even willing to lay down his life in the effort. A man of utopia and hope. A person with a Cause to live and fight for.
In more psycho-anthropological language we would call that Cause, perhaps, the "fundamental option" of Jesus. And it is known that the fundamental option in any person is not something on the periphery of who they are, ornamental or simply accidental. Nor can it be with Jesus.
In Jesus we are dealing with a fundamental characteristic of his life and his person.It is as such the most profound personal structure on which are mounted and articulated the rest of the characteristics of his person. It is without doubt an essential characteristic in him, and for that very reason, it is a "revealing" characteristic, that is to say, that it forms part of the revelation that is Jesus.0
We are used to saying that Jesus is at the same time the revelation of God and of the human being: he reveals to us how God is and he reveals to us what the human person can be. This "living with a Cause" which stood out so much in Jesus, is also "revelation" in that same double aspect: he reveals how God is and how the human person is (or should be).
He reveals to us on one hand that God has a utopia, a "dream"0 : we can call it - using more classical language - the arcane "design" of God, God's salvific plan, the will of God, God's very Reign. God is a dreamer, in any case, God makes projects, has a plan, and - said in a human way, if we understand the metaphor -God has hope and a utopia. Jesus reveals to us that this is how God is.
On the other hand, he also reveals to us that the New Human Person revealed in him is essentially utopian and hopeful, and that without this characteristic any human person is far from entering the fullness of the possibilities of their being "in the image and likeness" of their Creator.
Jesus' utopia that we speak about has a name. It is called Malkuta Yahve, Reign, "Reign of God" (RG). As is known, RG ends up being one of the "very words of Jesus", one of the highest frequencies of usage in the gospel0 , which constitutes with complete certainty the very center of the preaching of Jesus0 . It was in effect "the Cause about which Jesus spoke, what Jesus dreamed about, what he exposed and risked himself for, they persecuted him, captured him, condemned him and executed him..."0 Jesus is above all else a fervent servant of the RG, an impassioned fighter for the Cause. Without the perspective of the RG it is impossible to really know Jesus.
But what Reign?
Because it happens that the evidence of the centrality of the RG in the life and word of Jesus is so strong today, no one can avoid it. One can talk about the recovery of the centrality of the RG as one of the greater current contributions from the theology and spirituality of liberation to the christian churches. No one now dares to deny this centrality. All feel judged by it and attempt in one way or another to justify themselves by saying that they accept it.
But do they accept it? It is useless to say that we place the Reign at the center if under the same name we speak of different "Reigns". Many talk about the Reign of God, but understanding it to be something that Jesus never made reference to.
We cannot at this time do an essay on the prevailing forms of misappropriation and/or domestication of the Reign of God. But, to be concrete, we must make at least a quasi-telegraphic, denunciatory listing of the most gaudy of the current misappropriation1 or domestications of the concept of the "RG" among the christianities in use. We will point out these:
-An RG reduced to the "life of grace", the interior life, something like a second floor beyond daily reality and history.
-An RG centered in the Church, that remains in good part (consciously or unconsciously) identified with the Reign. We are dealing with "ecclesiocentrism" here, possibly the most subtle and the more surreptitiously widespread heresy.
-An RG reduced to Jesus (a Jesus without a Reign). Jesus ceases to be the announcer and fighter of the Reign to become himself the Reign, but a Reign that is reduced to his person. We are dealing here with a "personalist reduction" of the Reign.2
-An RG centered in a "God without Reign". These are the religions and the religiosity that lose their connection to history, and consequently to the perspective of the Reign that Jesus announced. They become "religion" in the worst sense of the word.3 It is really the same universal religion4 (common even to pagan forms), that uses the christian symbols but emptied of the Reign really preached by Jesus.
-An RG understood and lived as a biblical archeologism: groups that enter in the world of the bible and stay closed up within it. The Bible is enough for them, and they lay the newspaper aside5 .In this fundamentalist frame of mind, even with the bible in hand, there is no possibility of knowing the RG like Jesus understood it.
A christianity that places at its center, in fact -consciously or unconsciously- a Reign like these, that has so little to do with what Jesus announced, is christianity only nominally, not substantially. Its substance is not christian in the measure to which it removes itself from the Substance of the Cause, the Utopia, the Mission for which Jesus lived and fought.
The struggle of Jesus for the Reign did not make him into an "ecclesiastical", pious, religisist man, closed up in the narrow confines of what is conventionally religious. Just the opposite: the RG tore him away from domestic and family concerns, took him out of Nazareth, out of the very legalistic religious approaches of his time, the narrow religious concept of that age, the limited jewish perspectives...The RG lead him to life, to prophecy, to the plaza, to the masses, to human pain, to history, to public conflict, to confrontation with the Empire and the Temple....All those who today speak of the RG but who at the same time domesticate it, even confining it to the limits of what is narrowly ecclesiastic or religisist, should meditate on it.
In times of crisis for utopias and for hope like current times, it is normal that christianity feels the temptation to take refuge in one of the aforementioned substitutes for the RG, that would allow one (supposedly) to self-exempt oneself from utopia and hope. This temptation has always been present; but perhaps today it is the dominant temptation.
Your reign:"not another world, rather this same world, but completely different".
At no time did Jesus give a magisterial lesson about the RG. He never explained it systematically. But in the totality of the life of Jesus his preaching about the Reign is clear6 .
For now we only want to highlight this characteristic: for Jesus "the RG is not another world, rather this same world, but completely different". With this expression, two aspects are underlined clearly.
-the identity of the Reign hoped for in continuity with this world. Salvation is "homosalvation". In the RG there cannot be a world (a "heaven") entirely different, "another land".
- a radical novelty: the Reign, which will have to be this same world, will be so but in a completely renovated form. There will not be "another land", rather a "different land", new, completely renovated, returned to its pristine and transcended original newness.
One cannot advance toward such a RG but by the path of the transformation of history. "The earth is the only way that we have to reach heaven." We cannot build the Reign except within history. To leave or not worry about it in the name of a supposed transhistoric heaven that has nothing to do with history would only be an illusion. We cannot build a new heaven without making new the old earth. Transforming history we configure the future heaven. That is why we can be truly contemplative in the process of liberation7 , even in its low moments and dark nights.
What to think then of a christianity without hope, without a utopia, without an impassioned struggle for the construction of the Reign? It would no longer be the following of that impassioned fighter who maintained his hope in spite of all the difficulties, even when there appeared to be no outlet for hope.
A "historical reading of christianity"
Christianity, throughout history (diacronically), and even currently (synchronically) has taken on and takes on many of the different forms that religions adopt8 . It is to say, christianity is the object of many interpretations, of the most varied readings, namely:
-a doctrinal reading, in which what is most important was "to believe with the faith of the Church", orthodoxy, faith as adhesion to the revealed truth, adhesion to revelation as knowledge granted gratuitously by God...
-a moral reading: the essential part of christianity would be the test to which God submits us in this life so that, fulfilling in life God's commandments, we would receive after death the prize of salvation or the punishment of condemnation.
-a legal-institutional reading: to be a christian consists essentially in being a living and effective member of the body of the Church, which one enters through Baptism and in which one remains according to the established canonical rules.
-a mysterious-metaphysical reading: being a christian is played out principally in an invisible and impalpable dimension, in an interior world of souls, in the plane of grace, through sacramental acts, beyond the "real everyday world".
-and (so as not to overextend the list) a historical reading: It is God who has planted in the hearts of all humans the intuition of a new land, and has revealed to us explicitly that project of God's in Jesus with the name of the Reign of God. What God is asking of us is in synthesis transforming history within the lines of the construction of that utopia of God's.
There are two things to say about this partial list of the readings of christianity.
First, that no one of them is the only truth, nor is there one of them without some truth. Rather all reflect an aspect of the truth. It is to say: christianity is not a doctrine, but it has doctrinal aspects; it is not fundamentally ethics, but it has ethical implications; it is not simply an institution, but it cannot be made concrete in history without a minimum of institutionalization...
Secondly: the historical reading is not another interpretation, among many, rather it is the closest to what Jesus himself lived and proclaimed. And, in this sense, it is the "reading" that has the least "interpretation" or "reading". To live christianity historically, as "a believing praxis of historical transformation in the search for the utopia of the RG", is not one of the ways that christianity can be lived, but the way that Jesus lived it, and, in that sense, the only way that gives christian substance to religion and to any pretention of following Jesus.
Hope against all hope
Fortunately, we cannot say that Jesus could not be the model for us in these times because of the fact that he would not have experienced times of crises of hope as in our times. The struggle and hope of Jesus also passed through its crises.
In the beginning hope must have been easy for him, when it was obvious among the people that enthusiastic response which had them come in search of him in throngs or that wanted to proclaim him king. He must have felt worse when many began to leave him, complaining that that language was a little harsh, the later "crisis of Galilee" had to be a "dark night" for his hope:it seemed that there was no way out; that road was going nowhere. "Do I continue or not?"he must have asked himself. "Is this struggle worth the pain, or is it better to abandon it?" But he decided to continue and "went up to Jerusalem", to an open tomb. A little later he would sweat blood in the garden, trembling before the risk of death that was on the point of overcoming him. He continued forward, trusting maybe desperately that the Father was not going to abandon him, and that up until the last moment a way out could appear. But the moment of truth arrived, as naked as the kiss of death. With his back against the wall, on the cross and facing death, Jesus must have felt that there was no more time for fooling himself: the Father -incomprehensibly mute and silent- asked him to no longer hope for some way out, rather to trust in him without having any other support, with a hope against all hope. And Jesus did not fail: "in your hands I commend my Cause."
That was his best and greatest hope, much more valuable than that first enthusiastic optimism that took him down the paths of Galilee, easily impelled by the fervor of the multitudes. Hope in the dark night of the crisis of Galilee, of Gethsemani and of the cross was the consummation of his hope.
Extrapolating what the letter to the Hebrews asserts, we can say without a doubt that today in our times of the dark night of hope and utopias, we also must have "our eyes fixed on Jesus, initiator and comsumator of our...hope".
III. DRAWING CONCLUSIONS
Some conclusions have appeared already in our very reflection on Jesus. But in any case let us apply this light that comes to us from Jesus to the concrete historical moment we are experiencing.
Christianities without Reign?
The majority of us christians barely hear anything about the RG in our initial basic formation in parish catechism as well as in Sunday school or in schools of christian inspiration. And I do not say this so much as a useless rending of garments before a past that nothing can be done about, rather as a calling of attention of very urgent current relevance, because today, as we have said, although many speak about the Reign, many christianities customarily do not have the true presence of the Reign. This is reflected above all in their attitude toward hope and utopias.
Faced with these types of christians and christianities we say: "christianity without Reign is not true christianity". We do not say that they are defective christianities; we say that they are missing what is essentially christian. From the fact of whether the theme of the Reign be present9 or not in a concrete expression of christianity (be that on a national level or an existential level), one cannot derive simply a greater or lesser quality of the Reign, rather the affirmation or negation of its very christian essence.
Said in another way: many forms of christianity that have been lived in history or are actually in effect are not radically christianity. They are para-christian religious forms that certainly use christian symbols and concepts, but place them outside of any historical, utopian approach proper to the Reign. They are centered around a Jesus without Reign (and consequently a God without Reign). To the extent that they are missing what was essential in Christ (the historical-eschatological reading that the Reign implies), they are non-"christian" religions. They take the name of Jesus in vain.10 And falsely, because in his name they do and disseminate many times the opposite of what he did, even that to which he was most opposed in his time.11
Postmodern christianity?
But today we are told: we are in a postmodern world and culture, that no longer believes in utopias nor in megastories. Experience has already taught us that change is not possible. The utopias have failed. There is a need to be realistic and recognize that we are in a world that has reached its final phase with the triumph of the one historical form that has been capable of displacing all the rest. We have arrived at "the end of history". There will no longer be more than "more of the same". It is useless to continue to talk about utopias, the transformation of history, social praxis...If christianity says that it wants to incarnate in every culture, it must also become incarnate in this postmodern culture...
But the argument is a fallacy. The renunciation of great global visions, the giving up on the task of transforming the world, the refuge "in the fragment" renouncing all hope of change...are not a "cultural form", like any other, concretely that of the current post modernism. If they were a "cultural form", it would have to be respected and even incarnated. If they were a "cultural form", they would have to be respected and christianity even would have to incarnate and inculturate in that cultural form, in those "signs of the times".
But those postmodern elements are not really human nor humanizing, much less christian. The "postmodernization" of christianity (its postmodern inculturation) is not possible.
To renounce the overall vision, the pretention of transforming the world, the commitment to history, to prefer to remain in the partial, in easy pleasure and uncommitted, to live and enjoy the present having nothing to do with the future...is not compatible with christianity, as is clear from Jesus on whom we have fixed our eyes a moment ago. Jesus would never have accommodated postmodernism. Postmodernism is not a cultural form, rather the disillusionment of modernity, the tiredness of hope, a low hour for humanity, depressed because of the many disappointments experienced, perhaps. A follower of Jesus can not allow himself/herself to be discouraged by this hour of weariness; on the contrary, one has to discover in it a new call to plant hope.
"Light", decaffeinated Christianity?
For me another one of the great services that the theology and spirituality of liberation has rendered to the conscience of the Churches has been the powerful and prophetic attraction of attention they have drawn toward "what is essentially christian", and about the tremendous ease with which christianity, as any other religion, can imperceptibly slip into the worship of other gods, in spite of continuing to use christian names and categories.
The Bible itself bears witness over and over again of cases in which the prophets have cried out at the people of God and their leaders that the worship which they so fervently practiced did not find really the God they were invoking, rather it found other gods, the idols of death that are always in conflict with the God of Life. It would be interminable to quote the old and new testament. Today it is the theology and spirituality of liberation that have assumed this prophetic denouncement in large measure, and have had to put up with the same conflict that the biblical prophets and the prophets of every age faced before the civil powers as well as the holders of the institutional power of the respective established religion.
Well, the scandal is there, in plain view of everyone, but so deeply pushed into western subconsciousness that many do not perceive it. There is that 20% of the wealthiest part of the world population -the majority theoretically christian- , that according to the 1992 report of the UNDP splits up 82.7% of the wealth in the world and leaves the rest of the world, the four fifths part of humanity, with 17% of the resources.
The scandal is in all those "light" christianities, soft, "sensible", that run away from "radicalisms", that live with the system without major problems. They are "decaffeinated" christianities, that with the passing of time have lost the dangerous memory of Jesus and his Cause. They have forgotten already that originally they were a following of a radical prophet that died as the victim of a political execution because his preaching and his hope would subvert the system of the temple and the empire...
It doesn't matter that at times they can say to us that in the theology and spirituality of liberation we are a little insistent, and even monothematic perhaps, in speaking about the Reign and its demands. Even if we were obsessive, we would not be doing anything else but letting ourselves get carried away by what was Jesus' mania, his insistent obsession. What is important is centering ourselves and concentrating ourselves on the passion of the Reign, because that vein is the essential one, the "one necessary thing", before which all else "will be given us in addition."
Foolproof hope
In this hour of desperation, when many have abandoned the struggle and believe that there is no more place for anything other than survival or "fix things up for yourself as best as you can", the hour of hope seems renewed.
Many hopes have died because there were not true hopes with quality. They seemed to be, but they weren't. Many bet on hope because they already could "see" their imminent triumph12 . Others hoped for the triumph of the poor because it was a "scientific" truth that their victory would come inexorably because of the dialectical laws of history. At the heart of it all, not much effort needed to be made for such hopes. They were not "hoping against all hope", rather a hope based on supposed evidence.
Now that the imminent triumph that was already on its way disappeared without knowing how, and that the "scientific certainties" noisily have fallen, those who had those hopes are no longer capable of looking forward. They do not find any basis on which to rest their hope.
Enrique Dussel has said that in this new moment, only christians can raise the hope that sustained the marxists. But he refers to a hope of quality, based on the option for the poor and on faith.
-in the option for the poor, in the true option for the poor. Not that of those who opt for the poor because they appear to be the triumphant ones of tomorrow, rather because they were the losers today. Today they are even more so, and that is why those who maturely opted for the poor find even more reasons to opt for them.
-in faith: because now there are no "scientific certainties" on which to rest. On the contrary: it seems obvious that there is no way out. That is why hope today no longer can be self-deceptive: it has to be hope against all hope, against all the evidence. We do not find our support in any human certainty, but in pure faith.
We then are called to a purified hope, more from faith, more for the poor-poor, more like Jesus at the high point of his life. True hope is worth more the more gratuitous it is, the less evidence it has, the more it finds its reasons in the courage of continuing to bet on the Cause of Jesus.
This hope, made of faith and love, can be the guiding thread for the spirituality needed in this "dark night" for utopias and hopes. And the great role of christians can be, in this historic moment, the witness of nonconformity, the tenacity of hope, the unbending hope of Jesus.
A macroecumenical hope
A broad view could be the best antidote against the suffocation that can come upon us if we restrict ourselves to short term visions. The hope, the Cause, the struggle... exceeds the reach of any Church. God and the Reign of God are greater than our small minded perspectives. More still: the transformations are more profound; although on the surface everything seems to be frozen up and as if paralyzed, history does not stop. Only the superficial can speak of the "end of history".
If those who are dedicated to making us believe that the utopias have failed and that to attempt a transformation of the system no longer is possible are right, what will have failed would not be simply those utopias, rather God him/herself and God's project, Jesus and the Good News, and humanity itself. The proclamation of the triumph of neoliberalism is, at the same time, the unconscious proclamation of the failure of God, of Jesus, and of humanity.
We do not know how. Nor when. Perhaps it is our turn to walk, like Moses, foreseeing that we will not enter the Promised Land. Or perhaps at any moment a new light might appear on the horizon. Perhaps that arrogant solidity that the empire says it has will suddenly break. We in any case are not resigned to accept that history has ended. We rebel against the decree of desperation.
God is making God's project ferment farther out, farther below, more in the depths and farther within than we perceive. During the dark night the seed continues growing as well, although we do not see how. The Reign lives. The struggle continues.
0 I have gathered these aspects also in Que queda de la opcion por los pobres?, in "Alternativas" 1(1993)101-127. 0 I have developed other non-Christological aspects in the article cited above. 0 In traditional catechesis this characteristic does not appear. In addition in good part it has been absent in the theology of the "discipleship of Jesus" typical of religious life, specifically in terms of the aspect to which we are referring; the poverty, celibacy of Jesus or any other dimension of his life have been more present in that theology than the Cause/Central Utopia from which the different dimensions take their meaning. I ask myself how such an important and central element in the life of Jesus has been so passed over and even forgotten. Today, nevertheless, in the present circumstances it is a must to emphasize it. 0 This expression was used very beautifully in the final declaration of the christian participants in the Assembly of the People of God in Quito in September of 1992. 0 122 times it appears in the gospels, 90 of those times in the mouth of Jesus. Even after his death, the 40 days that Luke attributes to him in the midst of his disciples after having been raised, that Jesus makes use of to speak to his disciples...about the Reign! (Acts 1:3) 0 SCHILLEBEECKX, Gesu, storia di un vivente, Queriniana, Brescia, 1980. RAHNER - THUSING, Cristologia. Estudio teologico y exegético, Madrid 1975. J.I. GONZALEZ FAUS, La Humanidad Nueva, Eapsa, Barcelona 1981. L. BOFF, Jesucristo el liberador, Sal Terrae, Santander 1980, pág. 66, nota. I. SOBRINO, Cristología desde América Latina, CRT, México 1977. 0 L. BOFF, Testigos de Dios en el corazón del mundo, ITVR, Madrid 1977, pág.281.
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