The Future of Faith

by Harvey Cox

  In 1970 Pope Paul VI named Romero auxiliary bishop to Monsignor Luis Chávez y Gonzales, archbishop of San Salvador. This was a sure indication of the confidence Rome had in him and that it was only a matter of time until he became a full bishop. This happened in 1977, when the same pope appointed him archbishop of San Salvador, succeeding Monsignor Chávez. Traditionalist circles within the Salvadorian and wider Latin American church, already alarmed by the spread of liberation theology, welcomed Romero’s appointment with applause and a sigh of relief. Here was a solid conventional priest of the old school, one who would not rock the boat and who would show little sympathy for Catholics—lay or clerical—who were involving themselves in social movements and protests. At least this is what they thought, and the evidence of Romero’s life up to that point gave them every reason to think that way.2

  But things began to change quickly and—contrary to almost everyone’s expectations—Romero became in his own person a living sign of the fundamental transformation Christianity was undergoing in the late twentieth century. In his case the conversion came by way of what was beginning to be called “liberation theology.” Romero did not learn about it in seminary or at the Gregorian. It was not being taught there. He learned it through grueling experience. No sooner had he become archbishop of San Salvador, than a young priest and friend of his, Father Rutulio Grande, who had been serving among the poorest people in the country, was murdered by a death squad.

  Romero was personally shaken. Then, when he officiated at the funeral Mass in the village where Grande had lived, the people who had been devoted to the dead priest asked him, “Will you stand with us as Father Rutulio did?” That began Romero’s conversion. Ever since his return to his country, every day he had heard about more murders, jailings, beatings, and kidnappings. And now, this. But the authorities feigned ignorance, and the press was silent. Consequently, Romero took a daring step. Every week he announced the names of the dead and the “disappeared” from the pulpit of the cathedral. Then he warned members of the police and the military that God forbade them to kill innocent peasants who were demanding their God-given rights. He became a voice of hope for his suffering people and a growing menace to those who were clinging to their shaky hold on power. He began to sense that he was a marked man, and once in a sermon he promised, “If they kill me, I will live on in the life of the people.” Then, on that March day in 1980, the members of the death squad loaded their guns and drove to the Hospital of Divine Providence.

  Romero’s violent death also made him the saint and martyr of liberation theology, the most innovative and influential theological movement of the twentieth century, and also probably the most widely misunderstood. Liberation theology is not, as its critics charge, a political movement that deploys religious language. Rather, it is a profoundly religious movement with important political implications. Nor is it a theological trend or school of thought like other twentieth-century ones such as the Catholic “Neo-Thomism” associated with Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) or the Protestant “Neo-Orthodoxy” of Karl Barth (1886–1968). Rather than new ideas or theories, liberation theology represents a whole new way of engaging in theology.

  It begins by rethinking the Christian message from the point of view of the poor and the outcast. It did not come to birth in the lecture halls of Tübingen or the libraries of the Gregorian University in Rome. It is not a “trickle down” theology, but one that has “percolated up” from thousands of grassroots groups and movements. Originating in Latin America during the 1960s, it quickly mushroomed throughout the global South, where Christianity is now growing most rapidly, in Korea, Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and India. Bishop Tutu of South Africa as well as the “Minjung” theologians of Korea, the “Dalit” (formerly “untouchable”) theologians of India, and leaders of the underground church in China acknowledge their debt to it. There are also Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist variants.

  Like Romero, I did not learn about liberation theology at Harvard or Yale. But unlike him, I did not learn it by living in the midst of squalor and oppression. My first contact with the movement came when I spent the summer of 1968 at the Center for Inter-Cultural Studies in Cuernavaca, Mexico. I had gone there at the invitation of the center’s founder, Monsignor Ivan Illich, when—after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in the spring of that year—I felt so deeply disheartened about the prospects of my country that I wanted to go somewhere else for a while. I had met Dr. King in 1956, during the Montgomery bus boycott. We stayed in touch, and then I marched and demonstrated, and spent a few days in jail, while working with his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I had made speeches for Robert Kennedy in Oregon and California during his attempt to gain the Democratic nomination for president in 1968. I flew back from Los Angeles the day his campaign ended, confident that “we had won,” only to learn of his assassination when I got home.

  Angry and confused, I was so eager to get away that I arrived in Mexico, accompanied by my wife and three young children, with no place to stay. Illich helped us find a small house, hemmed in on one side by a tile factory, which clattered noisily during the day, and on the other by a waterfall, which gurgled and roared day and night. We soon grew to appreciate the sloshing of the falls, like a hundred bathtub faucets all turned on full. But we never quite adjusted to the clanking of the factory and were grateful that the workers took a long siesta every afternoon and never worked at night.

  It was a noteworthy summer for me, and little by little I became less dispirited. I learned Spanish at the center’s excellent language school and taught a course on contemporary social theology in lieu of tuition. We visited beaches and Aztec pyramids. I learned to savor cheese enchiladas and Dos Equis beer. It was a propitious time to be south of the Rio Grande. The spirit of change was in the air. The Catholics in Latin America were already caught up in new theological and social currents, and many priests had been forced to leave their homes by either church authorities or their governments, but the bishop of Cuernavaca, Don Sergio Méndez Arceo, who sympathized with what they were doing, always seemed to find a place for them in his diocese. Their presence transformed Cuernavaca, a cool summer retreat for the Mexican elite, into a cauldron seething with spirited discussions over cups of coffee and glasses of beer around the centro.

  When I got back to Harvard, I immediately began teaching courses in liberation theology, among the first offered in North America. Only in retrospect have I realized that if I had known about the ruthless massacre of over one hundred student demonstrators in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico City, which took place just before I returned, I might not have felt so hopeful. But the Mexican authorities quickly hid that awful news from the public, which only learned about it weeks later. In fact, it took years for the full horrendous truth to come out.

  One of the people who breezed through Cuernavaca that summer was Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Peruvian priest, often thought of as the “father of liberation theology.” He divided his time between teaching at the Pontifical Catholic University in Lima, serving an impoverished parish there, and traveling to various places on the continent to teach and speak. We met at Illich’s center, and the following year Father Gutiérrez invited me to give a lecture in Lima at his university, the Pontificia Universidad Catolica, which the faculty and students there simply call the Catolica. I accepted, and in Lima I stayed with the Maryknoll priests, ate with Father Gutiérrez at an unfussy restaurant in a crowded working-class district, and visited his parish in Rimac a drab and dingy quarter of Lima. He was about to publish his epochal book, Theology of Liberation, which appeared in English in 1971, and we talked about it at length.3

  Father Gutiérrez, like Bishop Romero, is a living example of both the steep decline of a Christianity based on hierarchically imposed beliefs and its current rebirth as faith in the promise of the era of justice exemplified in the life of Jesus. Gutiérrez is a stocky, somewhat rotund man whose brown skin reveals his Que
chua lineage. He walks with a slight limp, the result of a childhood illness. His owlish face is softened by a wide grin, which he frequently flashes. He dresses in simple civilian clothes, and when he talks, he looks at his listener over large glasses in plastic frames. I have never seen him in a clerical collar.

  “Gustavo,” as all his friends call him, started out to study medicine. He wanted to be as helpful as possible to the poor people he knew so well. He soon changed his direction, however, and entered the seminary in Lima to study for the priesthood. As in Romero’s case, his teachers recognized his intellectual gifts, but—perhaps not seeing Romero’s submissiveness—they dispatched him to Louvain and Lyons instead of Rome. There Gustavo delved into Jacques Maritain’s “integral humanism” and Emmanuel Mounier’s Catholic personalism and also read some of the books of Pierre Teilhard des Chardin, whose writings had been condemned by the Vatican. He was also drawn to Yves Congar’s thinking on the theology of the laity. He wrote his own thesis on the religious significance of Sigmund Freud. When he returned to Peru, Gutiérrez had accomplished something few before him ever had. He had fused his indigenous roots and his passionate love for the poor with the best theological scholarship available. He was entirely ready for the next step.

  Although he is widely thought of as the father of liberation theology, Gutiérrez always tries to minimize his own role. When, during my visit with him in Lima, I once asked him why liberation theology had first appeared in Latin America, he told me the answer was simple. It was because of the potent mixture of faith and poverty there. “The poor people of our continent,” he said, “began to understand their poverty from the perspective of their faith, and their faith from the perspective of their poverty.” This meant that the first question they asked was not about the “existence” of God, an issue that had preoccupied educated middle-class Westerners, whose concerns were shaped by science, skepticism, and rationalism. The question poor people posed was the much older one of how to justify a God of love and justice with the suffering and deprivation they felt and saw around them. They drew their response directly from their understanding of who Jesus was and what faith in him involved. They found in Jesus not a rationalization of why things are as they are, but rather an unflinching confidence that things need not be this way and that they can and will change. They saw in Jesus a challenge to the fatalism that had often dogged them and an assurance that not even defeat and death can prevent the coming of God’s reign of justice.

  It is not difficult to see how liberation theology connects the vitality of early Christianity with the emerging profile of Christianity. The centrality of faith-as-confidence in Jesus and the Kingdom of God, which is inseparable from him, provides the link. As Gutiérrez writes: “Reflection on the mystery of God (that is theology) can only be done by following Jesus. It is only possible in this way and in this spirit to think about and announce the Father’s gratuitous love for every human person.”4

  Liberation theology is more than just a regionally specific “Latin American theology” or a passing fad. It embodies a momentous leap out of the many centuries in which Christianity was defined as a system of beliefs imposed by a hierarchy. It symbolizes the resurrection of faith-as-trust and represents the retrieval of the core of the gospel message as it was understood and lived in the earliest centuries of Christianity. It is an unmistakable sign of the coming of an Age of the Spirit.

  Liberation theology dramatizes the link between the origins of Christianity and the recent shift of its center of gravity from the West to the global South, which has generated a significant change in what it means to be a “Christian.” Many more destitute and formerly excluded people are now full-scale participants in the worldwide Christian community. The result of this upheaval is that the Christianity of the twenty-first-century has begun to look more like that of the first two centuries, when streams of women, slaves, and impoverished city dwellers joined the new congregations. The original idea of Christianity as a faithful way of life has begun to displace the enforced system of creeds that defined it during much of the intervening time.

  There are many reasons why Latin Americans began to see Jesus this way. First, they read the gospels in small groups, often led by laypeople, in which they discussed ways to respond to the appalling conditions they lived in. Priests and nuns had originally organized these groups, called “ecclesial base communities” (comunidades eclesiales de base, CEBs), to complement regular parish worship, especially in areas where clergy were in short supply. But they soon outgrew clerical oversight and took on lives of their own. They met in villages, small towns, and in the shabbier sections of the big cities.5

  Whenever I visited one the CEBs, I felt a strange sense of déjà vu. They seemed amazingly similar to the descriptions I had read of the tiny congregations of Christians that dotted the Mediterranean basin in the first centuries of our era. The men and women who gathered in the CEBs were usually from the less privileged strata of the society. Their clothes were clean, but worn. Some could barely read. The atmosphere was relaxed and informal. They sang, strummed guitars, prayed, welcomed visitors, shared food, read a biblical passage (usually from the gospels), and energetically discussed the problems their communities were facing in light of the passage they had read. They often made shrewd connections between the biblical stories and their present circumstances. They had clearly not been distracted by either of the two approaches to the Bible that hampered its availability in the West. First, they knew little about historical-critical methods, but listened to the texts as if they were good stories. Second, they were unspoiled by fundamentalism, which has only since then made any impact in South America. They did not view Jesus as a “personal savior” whose mission was to rescue them from a sinful world, but as the one who announced and demonstrated the nearness of the Kingdom of God that was to come to their world.

  Christianity understood as a system of beliefs guarded and transmitted through a privileged religious institution by a clerical class is dying. Instead, today Christianity as a way of life shared in a vast variety of ways by a diverse global network of fellowships is arising. The initial fruits of this resurrection are already obvious. In those countries where the clerical leadership clings to the older model, the churches are empty. Any visitor to Europe can witness these vacant pews at first hand. But in those areas of the world where creeds and hierarchies have been set aside to make way for the Spirit, like the stone rolled away from Christ’s grave in the Easter story, one senses life and energy. There is no question that some of this energy spills into directions that might once have been called heresy or schism (and still are by some quibblers). Still, the fact that the most fruitful and exciting movements in Christianity today are taking place on the margins of existing ecclesial structures should not surprise anyone. Historically speaking, “schism” and “heresy” have often heralded the deepening and extension of the faith. Pioneers always step outside of established boundaries. Sometimes they are condemned, sometimes honored, and sometimes both, starting with the first and only later ending up with the second.

  The Catholic culture of Latin America is not the only sphere in which new life is blossoming. It is also appearing in what some might consider an unlikely place, in the tsunami of Pentecostalism that is sweeping across the non-Western world. It is to that blustery wind of the Spirit that we now turn.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Last Vomit of Satan and the Persistent List Makers

  Pentecostals and the Age of the Spirit

  The tidal shift of the world’s Christian population from the “north” to the global South is one of the reasons for the present decline in creed-bound Christianity, the revival of faith, and the birth of an Age of the Spirit. But it is an ambiguous development. Some American and European scholars are afraid that this post-Western “new Christendom” is causing more of a reactionary tilt and may end up strengthening fundamentalism.

  But the evidence is mixed and is not all in.

  Although outs
iders often confuse the two, it is Pentecostalism, not fundamentalism, that accounts for 90 percent of this spectacular growth. The two are not the same. In Latin America Pentecostals are often grouped with evangelical Protestants, and in Brazil the two are given the common label crente. The word literally means “believer,” but that can be misleading. The crentes of that continent are precisely those “people of the Way” for whom creeds are less and less significant. Two or three Latin American countries already have crente majorities, and others are headed in that direction. When I visited the religious census office in Rio de Janeiro in 2002, I was told that in the previous year, in metropolitan Rio de Janeiro alone, 327 new crente congregations had been established. In the same year, only one new Roman Catholic church and two Umbanda (Afro-Brazilian) temples were built.

  The situation in Brazil is one of the clearest indications of an Age of the Spirit. But it also mirrors the extraordinary growth of Pentecostals everywhere. The majority of Christian congregations in sub-Saharan Africa and on the Asian rim are Pentecostal. The largest Christian congregation in the world, the Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, Korea, which claims eight hundred thousand members, is Pentecostal. Reports from mainland China suggest a grassroots Pentecostal/charismatic Christian movement is taking place there as well. In the United States, large numbers of Latin American immigrants are leaving the Catholic Church and joining Pentecostal congregations. Like a forest fire that continues to smolder just below the surface, ecstatic worship has simmered in Christianity from its earliest years and constantly breaks through the barriers that have sought to dampen it. It will undoubtedly continue to do so.1