Foreword: Theology in the footsteps of the martyrs

The legacy of the martyrs commits us

In the immediate vicinity of my office and the lecture halls of the Department of Theology of my university is the Rose Garden, the place where our companions were killed. This place makes it truly clear to me what it means to do theology. For me it is holy ground, and like all of El Salvador it is sanctified by the blood of its martyrs, among them Óscar Romero and Rutilio Grande. In them and through them the drama of Jesus became present, current historical reality, as Ignacio Ellacuría would say. The martyrs of El Salvador, like Jesus, placed themselves unconditionally at the side of the victims, unmasking those who have the power to kill. In doing so, they provoked the fury of the perpetrators and were finally destroyed by those to whom they pointed. Salvadoran martyrs are the real presence of the mystery of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, the central mystery of our faith.

This mystery, which they have consistently lived and sealed with their blood, is matched by the theological language that they wielded with extraordinary power. Rutilio Grande, Óscar Romero and Ignacio Ellacuría marked a new way of proclaiming the Good News and denouncing sin in a way that the Salvadoran Church had not known before. This new way of speaking firmly rejects theological and pastoral ‘docetism’, empty words to which the ‘flesh’ of historical reality does not correspond. In this new language, ‘the living and effective Word of God incarnates, sharper than any two-edged sword’ (Heb 4:12). It creates reality: it is ‘liberating and redeeming like Jesus’s language’ (Bonhoeffer 2010, 390), to put it in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

The central concept of this way of doing theology is the notion of the ‘crucified people’. In it, the suffering of people who were exposed to every kind of cruelty during the civil war is boldly identified with the redemptive suffering of Jesus on the cross. The people thus addressed understood and ‘canonized’ this way of speaking spontaneously and immediately: ‘They speak of us’. The language of Rutilio, Romero and Ellacuría reached the hearts of the most vulnerable, the victims, without hesitation, giving them ultimate theological dignity and making them subjects of their own history.

The risk of squandering this legacy

This legacy is precious because it has cost the lives of so many good people. But there are many ways to squander it. As great as the joy of the beatification and canonisation of Óscar Romero may be, it has also brought with it the danger of squandering this legacy through its inflationary exploitation and its instrumentalisation for ecclesiastical and political interests. It is scandalous when the Salvadoran president acts in his official residence in front of a huge painting of Óscar Romero, thereby concealing the government’s murderous ‘security policy’. The ‘extraordinary measures’ proposed by the president and approved by the country’s legislature legalise the repression of the marginalised sections of the population and open the door to all kinds of aberrations such as torture, disappearances and ‘extrajudicial executions’, the lynching of marginalised young people suspected of being gang members.

To do theology from the perspective of the victims is to continue the theology of the martyrs and to be committed to the principles that guided them. The fundamental of these principles is ‘honesty with what is real’. This kind of theology denies ignorance and indifference to that part of reality which harms the victims; and secondly, recognises as the most important theological task the proclamation of the ‘God of life’ – in resistance against all ‘idols of death’. Such a theology proclaims with all available human and spiritual energies the glory of God in the struggle for the lives of the weakest and the victims.

To do this, real intellectual rigour is needed, but the task is never just an intellectual one. To do theology in the footsteps of the martyrs requires that we become followers of their practice, which is neither more nor less than the practice of Jesus. Anyone who wants to do theology in the tradition of an Óscar Romero and an Ignacio Ellacuría is committed to do what they have done. Using the metaphor of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great martyr of the German Lutheran Church in the Nazi era, we are called to block the spokes of the wheel with our whole existence: the barbaric instrument of medieval torture and execution symbolizes the contemporary machinery from lethal mechanisms that constantly smashes its victims.

Ignacio Ellacuría gives us the decisive clue as to what it means to actualize this theology: ‘Actualise does not mean primarily updating it, at least in the sense that this expression means that it corresponds to the fashion of the times. Actualise means, rather, giving it actual reality’ (Actualizarlo no significa primariamente ponerlo al día, al menos en el sentido que esta expresión puede tener de estar a la moda de los tiempos. Actualizarlo significa, más bien, dar realidad actual) (1990, 398). The theoretical-scientific effort to know the philosophical-theological concepts of the generation of martyrs also requires that we ‘give actual reality’ to their practice here and now. The decisive hermeneutic key that opens the access to the thinking of the martyrs is to attune ourselves with their action. Intellectual effort becomes blind if it is not illuminated by the martyr practice, and that means the practice of Jesus. Theological fruitfulness can only come from this way of acting.

Ellacuría gives us a second indication of what is essential for this kind of theology. When the Second Vatican Council urges us to explore the signs of the times, Ellacuría insists that, among the ‘signs of the times’ to be scrutinised, there is a principal one: ‘This sign is always the historically crucified people, who associate with their permanent presence the always different historical form of their crucifixion’ (este signo es siempre el pueblo históricamente crucificado, que une a su permanencia la siempre distinta forma histórica de su crucifixión) (1981, 58. My emphasis). It is a sad paradox: the most current and urgent challenge of all time is always the crucified people. That ‘always’ has nothing to do with an eternal metaphysical truth but confronts us with the ongoing scandalous reality of the crucified people in history. Any possibility of getting used to this scandal, of adapting to the inevitable, is cynicism. And the ‘always the same’ is in sharp contrast to the variety of the always new forms of crucifixion of human beings: the sin of the world is highly creative!

Consequently, it is not enough to notice the permanent existence of the crucified people, but it is always necessary to mobilise all available intellectual energies to analyse in detail the dynamics and vicious circles of structural sin. It takes courage and sharpness of mind to get to the bottom of this, to investigate thoroughly what the powers and mechanisms are that bring death to so many people.

The method of doing theology in the footsteps of the martyrs

Every serious theology begins with an act of contemplation, with the mysticism of open eyes. It begins with the courage to look carefully, not to close one’s eyes to these realities that provoke the natural instinct to look in the other direction as quickly as possible. It begins with resisting the temptation of ‘not seeing’ the reality of the victims of current violence, which seems to be the fierce denial of a good and merciful God. This ‘seeing’, this act of contemplation, is an act in which we allow ourselves to be penetrated by the pain of the victims. As Johann Baptist Metz would put it: ‘People who use “God” in the way Jesus does accept the violation of their own personal preconceived certainties by the misfortune of others’ (1999, 230).

The fact that the language of Óscar Romero and Ignacio Ellacuría was so powerful that it immediately reached the hearts of the victims is mainly due to their ability to ‘see’. Without this act of contemplation as the beginning of every theological task, the language of theology easily degenerates into a bigoted word. We can also corrupt the most sacred words of this tradition as a ‘crucified people’ through inflationist abuse or through verbosity. Theological language only has value and significance if, again and again, it is born of pain, of feeling with the victims down to the marrow of our bones. In Simone Weil’s words, to do theology begins with an ‘act of attention’ that allows the ‘affliction of others to enter into our flesh and soul’ (1973, 20).

To ‘see’ is the first step. However, if one follows the classical triple step ‘see – judge – act’ as the theological method, a fatal misunderstanding of the next step, ‘judge’, is possible. It can never be understood in the following way: first you see and then you subject what you see to the judgement of the theologian. Rather, the second step, in the words of Ignacio Ellacuría, is to ‘carry reality’; that is, to assume the weight of that reality.

You might ask yourself: why is it so hard, so difficult, to listen to the victims, to let them talk, to give them real attention and not steal it to address issues that seem more important to us academically? Obviously, it is hard to bear, to bear and not to escape. It requires great courage to act counterculturally, even against what seems appropriate for academic work, so that the weight of the victims’ reality falls on us. The scheme of ‘see – judge’, ‘hear – interpret’ must be transformed into ‘see – take the weight’, ‘hear – and give space in our hearts to what we hear’.

A theology born in this way does not pretend to be the spokesperson for the victims, the ‘voice of the voiceless’, but it listens to the voice of victims. No one wants to hear it, not even the governments, because that would give the impression that everything is going well in the country. But often, the victims are not heard either by the churches or by other institutions in society. An elementary demand and a first step in stopping violence is to create spaces where victims find the place to be heard, where they can transform themselves from objects of cynical interest into sons and daughters of God and can begin their costly journey towards healing and reconciliation. Without salvation for the victims there is no salvation for anyone.

In Ignacio Ellacuría’s triple step of ‘taking charge’ of reality, ‘carrying’ reality, and ‘being responsible’ for reality (‘hacerse cargo’ de la realidad, ‘cargar’ con la realidad y ‘encargarse’ de la realidad) (2000, 208), Jon Sobrino adds a fourth: ‘letting ourselves be carried by reality’ (2008, 2). This means that listening to the victims is not an altruistic act by the people who do it. People who really open themselves to the victims, receive life through them. The paradox applies, where life is threatened, where death seems omnipresent, in the same place life vibrates in a density as in few other spaces. Grace seems to burst in with preference into these places of death. There blossoms the ‘primordial holiness’ of which Jon Sobrino speaks, the goodness and generosity of the human heart in an immediacy and purity as is sought in vain elsewhere. Only by kneeling before this mystery of life is there hope for us too.

To conclude

Liberation theology seems to be an anachronism, a relic from a vanished, utopia-pregnant time. Too much tied to socialist projects, which have long since been refuted by history and have betrayed the hopes of the poor; it seems questionable if it can be a productive offer in the dramatic crises of our times.

What I certainly do not want to tempt with these considerations is to remain nostalgically attached to a glorified past, or to want to make liberation theology a ‘school’ that stereotypically reproduces the concepts of the 1960s and 1970s. That would be a mockery of this tradition. To repeat its language monotonously contradicts its very own claim. Rather, we are called upon to understand and decipher our time with all our intellectual strength and creativity. To really get involved with it will throw many of our supposed certainties overboard. The theological word that our time demands is never already given but is only reborn from this struggle.

For what stands at the origin of liberation theology is precisely the definitive farewell to any kind of timeless doctrine, to any kind of speaking that pretends to stand above the respective concrete historical moment and to apply unchanged beyond it. The breakthrough of liberation theology marks the radical turn from a theology as metaphysical doctrine to the temporalisation of the speech about God – to the God who becomes an instruction for action in the concrete historical situation. And most deeply connected with it is the dangerous memory of the historical Jesus, of his concrete life, in his socio-political context.

It is worthwhile reminding us for a moment that what this Jesus of Nazareth did in concrete terms has hardly played a role in the 2,000 years of the history of theology: that he took care that people got enough to eat; that he took care of their illnesses; that he offered closeness and community to those who were outcasts for decent society. All that hardly occurs in the ‘Christian teaching’ up to the Second Vatican Council, and in no way does it become structure-forming for theology or even find its way into the Christian Credo. It seems to be insignificant: Jesus, the Christ, was conceived, born, suffered, died and rose from the dead. But what constitutes his life, and his concrete practice, does not seem to be relevant for the ‘orthodox doctrine’.

Latin American liberation theology has made a radical conversion to the concrete Jesus of Nazareth. It really thinks the incarnation to its end: God is present in what this Jesus concretely does and lives. And to be a Christian means in consequence to do what he has done. The practice of Jesus becomes the instruction for all church activities. To ‘de-spiritualise’ the Gospel and to let it become concrete and bodily experienceable, a ‘joyful message’ to the people threatened by the powers of death. This is the lasting imperative that starts from liberation theology.

Notes

1. 1. This foreword is adapted from Martha Zechmeister’s keynote address, titled ‘The Productive Asynchronicity of Liberation Theology: Theology in the Footsteps of the Martyrs’, at the November 2020 conference ‘As It Was in the Beginning? Liberation Theology and Praxis in Contemporary Latin America’, Institute of Latin American Studies, School of Advanced Studies, University of London.

References

• Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. ‘Thoughts on the Day of Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge, May 1944’. In Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 8: Letters and Papers from Prison, edited by John W. Gruchy, 383–90. Minneapolis: National Book Network, 2010.
• Ellacuría, Ignacio. ‘Discernir el signo de los tiempos’, Diakonía 17 (1981): 57–9.
• Ellacuría, Ignacio. ‘Utopía y profetismo’. In Mysterium liberationis. Conceptos fundamentales de la teología de la liberación I, edited by Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino, 393–442. Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 1990.
• Ellacuría, Ignacio. ‘Hacia una fundamentación del método teológico latinoamericano’. In Escritos teológicos I, 187–218. San Salvador: UCA Editores, 2000.
• Metz, Johann Baptist. ‘In the Pluralism of Religious and Cultural Worlds: Notes Toward a Theological and Political Program’, translated by John Downey and Heiko Wiggers, CrossCurrents 49, no. 2 (1999): 227–36.
• Sobrino, Jon. No Salvation Outside the Poor: Prophetic-Utopian Essays. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2008.
• Weil, Simone. Waiting on God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.