100 - From Conquest to Struggle: Jesus of Nazareth in Latin America

From Conquest to Struggle: Jesus of Nazareth in Latin America
By David Batstone
Albany, State University of New York Press, 1991. 224 pp. $44.50.

Dare one say-and how should one say it?-that the Christ is being reborn in Latin America? David Batstone here offers a fine presentation of how Jesus Christ is experienced and confessed today in Latin America and how Latin America's major liberation theologians reflect on that Christ. He achieves this while, at the same time, raising fundamental questions for christologists in other contexts. Batstone's excellent book arises from a matrix of reflection and practice. He is the founder of CAMP (Central American Mission Partners) and has served as its executive director since 1985. In addition, he teaches theology, most recently at the Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley; the University of Melbourne, and New College, Berkeley.

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The need for the Christ's rebirth in modern Latin America was powerfully put forth by one of the founders of THEOLOGY TODAY, John A. Mackay, in his 1933 book, The Other Spanish Christ (El Otro Cristo Espanol). In this book, still widely read throughout Latin America, Mackay did not deny that Christ had always been present, but he notes:

Journeying from Bethlehem and Calvary, [Christ] passed through Africa and Spain on his long westward journey to the pampas and cordilleras. And yet, was it really He who came, or another religious figure with His name and some of His marks? Methinks the Christ, as He journeyed westward, went to prison in Spain, while another who took his name, embarked with the Spanish crusaders for the New World, a Christ who was not born in Bethlehem but in North Africa. This Christ became naturalized in the Iberian colonies of America, while Mary's Son and Lord has been little else than a stranger and sojourner in these lands from Columbus' day to this.

Against the backdrop of the Spanish Conquistador's Christ, and perhaps also against the stream of Protestant Christs of North American Protestant missionaries, Latin American peoples are doing their own reflecting on the Christ that meets their needs and interests. The first chapter of the book sets the overall problem by demonstrating how every christology entails a set of interests, not only religious, but political as well. The second chapter introduces readers to the ways some key Latin American theologians (J. Severino Croatto, Segundo Galilea, Jon Sobrino, Juan Luis Segundo, Gustavo Gutierrez) treat Jesus of Nazareth. Chapter three focuses still more particularly on how many of these same theologians view the central events of Jesus' cross and resurrection. By this point, Batstone is well-positioned to introduce readers, in chapter four, to a number of difficult issues in christology. The concluding chapter five then aptly resituates these christological issues in the context of today's developing Christian base communities in Latin America.

Because of Batstone's style of deftly mixing concrete stories with careful reflection, and because of his presenting of diverse topics in this single text, I believe the book serves well not only the needs of theological students seeking an introduction to liberation theology, but also those of more advanced theological students seeking better focus of key issues in christology today.

If I were to risk a brief statement of Batstone's argument, something he himself does not quite do, it would be this: The special interests and needs (religious, political, social, personal, economic) of today's Latin American Christian communities are giving rise to significant, new visions of what it means to know Christ and to follow Christ. In arguing this, Batstone challenges his readers to face some very difficult christological problems. I note three of these, suggesting along the way how we might move through and beyond Batstone's formulations. First, Batstone does not shirk the question of truth in christology.

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Put the question this way: If our knowledge of Christ is, as Batstone shows, constituted by the special interests and needs of concrete communities, are we not simply left with a diversity of Christs hardly sufficient for a unified church? Or again: If Latin American Christians have their distinctive horizons, within which the Christ appears and is affirmed as Christ, what about the truth of that Christ for Christians working within other horizons?

Batstone perhaps celebrates this particularity more than he addresses its problems. He regularly invokes an emphasis on the Spirit at work in today's contexts and within our horizons, arguing that who Jesus was and who the Christ is, is shaped by the Spirit working in these particular horizons and contexts. Batstone's position is that it is Jesus' "'representation' within each new context which permits a profound understanding of the confession of him as Savior.... Thus, the task of explicating the current significance of Jesus is never completed once and for all." The truth of a statement about Jesus Christ, or of an experience of Christ, is "neither wholly in the past nor solely within the world of the interpreter; it is conceived as a product of that which is revealed in their interaction" (emphasis mine).

It is this interactive approach to christological truth that Batstone's work ably prompts readers to see. More than one philosopher (among them Hans-Georg Gadamer and Richard Bernstein) have set forth the philosophical case for this understanding of truth. I would suggest, however, that amidst the interaction (of present-day interpreters' horizons with Jesus' horizon) we need also to explore, more than Batstone does, the possible reasons for giving the primacy he does to the particular horizons of the marginalized and disempowered poor of Latin America. In other words, there is still a need to explore arguments for what has not unproblematically been termed "the hermeneutical privilege of the oppressed." What precisely is the relation between the particular horizons of oppressed groups and the truth of their christological claims? I believe that the horizons of the oppressed are not simply like the rest in the interactive process of interpretation; they are in some senses "privileged." Batstone would do well to say in what senses and how he would argue for the hermeneutical "privilege" he seems to assume.

Second, just as he insists on highlighting the particularity of Latin Americans' christological interests, so Batstone argues for a much more particularist approach to Jesus of Nazareth. Here he is critical of liberation theologians who, while indeed stressing the historical Jesus, often do so by highlighting this Jesus' universal significance. They often stop short of exploring the historical particularity of Jesus' life and ideological commitments. Batstone suggests that too many liberation theologians want an ideology-free Jesus of Nazareth to ground liberation theology. In contrast, Batstone insists that "the reason Jesus' life has universal import for the ... total scope of reality is because of the fact that he embodied his message and cause in a

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specific ideology(-ies) which gave it meaning." Batstone responds favorably, then, to Uruguayan liberation theologian Juan Luis Segundo, who claimed that "divine revelation has an impact on us because of the ideology that incarnates it, that puts limited, three-dimensional human flesh on it."

Surely Batstone is correct to reopen the issue of Jesus' particular relation to ideologies. Recent sociological and political analyses of the Jesus movement and early Christian movements suggest just how many of Jesus' political ideologies and practices have been frequently ignored in biblical and theological studies, which often present Jesus as an apolitical religious critic of every ideology, especially that of the zealots. This is challenged not only by studies like those of Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, which Batstone cites, but also by the important historical studies of Richard Horsely, Jesus and the Spiral of Violence: Popular Jewish Resistance in Roman Palestine (Harper & Row, 1987) and Sociology and the Jesus Movement (Crossroad, 1989). Such additional studies would enrich Batstone's position, giving a finer texture and thicker description to the ideological matrix within which Jesus forged his ministry. This would enable us to discern not simply that Jesus had ideology(-ies), but also how he manifested it and set into historical motion an uncompromisingly liberating and fully reconciling ideological practice.

As a final issue, I note Batstone's plea that liberation theologians attend more to the popular cultures of Latin American contexts. While appreciating liberationists' attempts to view theology as a "second step," coming after praxis, Batstone, nevertheless, notes that liberation theologians have "received their training and education in 'the culture of Enlightenment,' often losing touch with the popular culture and its historical experience." This may not be an entirely fair point, since a number of these liberation theologians keep strikingly close contact with communities of the poor, in spite of their education among academic elites. Witness especially Gustavo Gutierrez's connection to his parish in Lima, Peru, Clodovis Boff's ministries in the interior of Brazil, and Jon Sobrino's life and witness "under fire" for support of the church's daily witness in El Salvador. But it is true, and here Batstone follows Juan Carlos Scannone, that the subject matter of liberation theologians' texts tends to be structured largely by Enlightenment, North Atlantic problematics. In this sense, Batstone's challenge is well-taken, and I believe, as Gutierrez acknowledged in the introduction to the new edition of his A Theology of Liberation, that liberation theologies themselves see the need to be moving toward a more serious study of "popular culture."

Concerning this last point, I offer a comment that amounts to a return to our own North American context. The theologians on North American terrain would also do well to heed Batstone's admonition. Are we, as theologians, perhaps even more isolated from popular culture issues than are our colleagues to the south? Are we perhaps

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even more adrift in "the culture of the Enlightenment," of "modernity," and now of "postmodernity"? It is time that we theologians here apply both structural analysis and theological acumen to a North American context vibrant, and sometimes numb, with videos, MTV, and Nintendo wars. Batstone's queries on Latin American christology drive us to ask: Where are the North American theologians of popular culture and movements who are able to address the concrete fears, hopes, and promises of all our peoples, played out in a Queen Latifah, L.L. Cool J, Madonna, "Jungle Fever," labor union movements, PTA meetings, and organized protests? It may seem strange, perhaps, but the theological agenda unfolding in Latin American contexts challenges us North American theologians to reflect more deeply still on our own context's cultural movements and dynamics.

Mark K. Taylor
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey