How My Theology Has Changed, Thank God!

 

Part XII: “Be Here Now”:**  There is No Past, No Future. 

Only the Present

 

“Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time — past and future — the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.” ― Eckhart Tolle

 

"Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift, which is why we call it the present" — Alice Morse Earle.

 

"Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment" — Buddha.

 

“Therefore, do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.” [Jesus, Mark 6:34]

 

The spiritual journey never lacks for surprises, both painful and joyful. Some of those surprises occur over decades. This has been the case for me, and one of the most profound insights planted its seed in me in college, popped up from time to time over the years, and has become especially meaningful for me in the last few years. And that is how we view time, and where we put our focus when it comes to time. 

 

Mark Twain once reportedly stated: "I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened," which was his reminder to focus on the present rather than wasting psychic worry on things that probably will never occur. 

 

Most of us do not know how to live in the present. Instead, we often feel remorse and guilt about the past. We feel depressed about a future we want but we think will never happen. We spend endless hours worried about all kinds of things that, in theory, could happen, but likely never will.

 

It was in college, as I studied the religions of the world, with a special focus on spirituality and mysticism, that I learned from both Christianity and other religions an approach and process which attempts to leave past and future behind and leads one to, in today’s parlance, “mindfulness,” which is a profound focus on what is “happening” in and around you in the present moment. Miriam Webster defines mindfulness as “the practice of purposely focusing attention on the present moment—thoughts, emotions, and sensations—with a non-judgmental, accepting attitude. It is a mental state that encourages awareness rather than automatic reactions to daily life, reducing stress and increasing emotional regulation.”

 

So, what is it I encountered long years ago when I was in college that has arisen in retirement to give me direction and hope? Normally the process of changing one’s way of thinking or perspective on a particular area of theology is a lengthy, slow-moving process. However, there are occasional times when we encounter something so new and unexpected that this process is accelerated. That happened to me in the early days of 1971, in the second semester of my junior year at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota.  

 

In college, I had decided to major in philosophy and in my freshman year we considered time from a philosophic point of view. Then, in my second year, 1969, Dr. Larry Alderink from the University of Chicago Divinity School joined the religion department at Concordia to teach World Religions. I jumped at this opportunity to learn about global religions that I knew very little about, such as Islam, Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism and Judaism. I quickly realized that so much of what I thought I knew about these religions was nothing but caricature. 

 

As I was learning about the teachings and practice of these various religions, I was, of course, at the same time, analyzing these new insights as they related to the Christian theology that I carried with me at the time. And that included comparing certain areas of Christian theology with the teachings and revelations of these various ancient religions I was now encountering. 

 

I found myself especially fascinated and intrigued by a particular area of spirituality known as “mysticism.”  Miriam Webster defines Mysticism as “the belief in, and practice of, achieving direct, personal communion or union with ultimate reality, divinity, or spiritual truth, often through contemplation, intuition, or altered states of consciousness. It emphasizes direct experience over dogma, focusing on inward transformation and ineffable knowledge.” Here the emphasis is not on past or future, but on the present. 

 

At that point my only experiences of such mysticism were certain inspiring moments in prayer or worship, but I was not at all familiar with the spiritual disciplines of meditation and contemplation. This changed quickly as Dr. Alderink began pointing me to certain books, all in early in 1971. First came the powerful work by German theologian Rudolf Otto, Mysticism East and West, in which he compares the Hindu philosopher Shankara and the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, arguing that despite different cultural frameworks, both represent a strikingly similar "speculative mysticism" focused on union with a transcendent, non-rational divine reality. I was fascinated by the way mysticism moved beyond doctrine and belief to the experienced presence of God and the wholeness of the entire universe. 

 

Next in 1971 came another book from Dr. Alderink, this one also by another German, a poet and novelist named Herman Hesse.  In his seminal novel, Siddhartha, Hesse shares the story of a young Hindu in India in his life-long search for enlightenment. His final revelations come as he lives with a ferryman on a river, where he meditates every day. Eventually he realizes a difference between the spirituality and culture of the West compared with the East. If western scientists want to study water, they take a bucket of water out of the river and begin to analyze it. The problem is, in a bucket it is no longer “river.” It ceases to move. Siddhartha then realizes from this a profound truth of life: If we look at life, and try to dissect piece by piece what life is, we are no longer actually living life. We are now in an abstraction about life. Just as you can only know the river by throwing oneself into it and floating with it downstream, so one can only know the truth and depths of life by throwing oneself into it with all of its joys and sorrows, ups and downs, truths and illusions. There is no way to “protect ourselves” from the pain and suffering of lived life. Part of our spiritual journey will be, as it was for St. John of the Cross, “the dark night of the soul” when we feel alone and all seems lost. 

 

As Siddhartha nears death as an old man, he reflects on what he has learned:

 

There is one thought I have had: that is, in every truth the opposite is equally true. For example, a truth can only be expressed and enveloped in words if it is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity. When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into . . . . illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. . . . . But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. . . . Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real. Time is not real. I have realized this repeatedly. And if time is not real, then the dividing line that seems to lie between the world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion. 

 

With this background explained, Siddhartha then shares his understanding of calling:

 

It seems to me that love is the most important thing in the world. It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.

 [Hesse, Siddhartha, pp. 115,119.]

 

Next came a scholar recommended by Dr. Alderink who significantly altered my understanding of life. This was Dr. Alan Watts, a British-born philosopher and theologian who taught in the US the last 20 years of his life. I read several of his books as he, like Otto and Hesse, worked to bridge the gap between western and eastern spirituality. The book that changed my perspective radically was The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety, written in 1951, the year after I was born.

 

Google summarizes this book succinctly: “The Wisdom of Insecurity is a classic book that argues the root of human anxiety is the futile pursuit of security in an inherently impermanent world, drawing on Eastern philosophy to suggest that true fulfillment comes from embracing the present moment and accepting uncertainty, by letting go of the need to control the future and instead living fully in the "now," so that one can find genuine peace and spiritual insight.”

 

Watts explains how all of this fits together:

 

This is why modern civilization is in almost every respect a vicious circle. It is insatiably hungry because its way of life condemns it to perpetual frustration. The root of the frustration is that we live for the future, and the future is an abstraction, a rational inference from experience, which exists only in the brain. The “primary consciousness,” the basic mind which knows reality rather than ideas about it, does not know the future. It lives completely in the present, and perceives nothing more than what is at this moment . . . . .

 

[Because] the future is still not here, and cannot become a part of our experienced reality until it is present . . . , it cannot be eaten, felt, smelled, heard, or otherwise enjoyed. To pursue it is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead. This is why all the affairs of civilization are rushed, why hardly anyone enjoys what they have, and are forever seeking more and more. Happiness, then, will consist not of solid and substantial realities, but of such abstract and superficial things as promises, hopes and assurances. [Watts, Insecurity, pp. 60-61]

 

Watts ends his book by explaining what happens when we are able to let the past and future go and focus on the present: “Free from clutching at themselves, the hands can handle; free form looking after themselves, the eyes can see; free from trying to understand itself, thought can think. In such feeling, seeing, and thinking life requires no future to complete itself nor explanation to justify itself. It is finished.” [Ibid. 152]

 

**The title of a book by Ram Dass.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How My Theology Has Changed, Thank God

 

Part XI: Biblical, Critical Methods

 

 

Do you get to believe what you want to believe? Yes, in a way. No one can tell you what you have to believe. As long as you keep it to yourself, yes, I suppose you could say, you get to believe whatever you want to believe. As long as you keep silent. 

 

However, once you open your mouth, or pick up a pen or hit the “send” button, that freedom no longer applies. You have now entered the public sphere which raises immediately the issue of ethics: what is right and what is wrong, which is, in turn, based on what is true or not true. After all, we certainly do not want to mislead someone else because our beliefs are based on falsehoods. 

 

Now a lot of people, including many of our present leaders, could care less about this issue. But if you consider yourself to be a spiritual or religious person, you no longer have a choice. Spiritual persons always take responsibility for their actions, because spiritual persons are attempting to reach beyond simple selfishness to an inclusive view of the world that includes the will of God and the safety and affirmation of all people and all creation. Yes, spiritual people do care about the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. They are all a part of our spiritual quest to live, as American poet Mary Oliver put it, the “one wild and precious life” into which God calls us. 

 

However, this quest runs head-first and head-long into the fact that from the moment of birth we are picking up all kinds of ideas and beliefs, many of which, if we are reflective, are neither true nor right. As religious people we may “believe” that whatever we believe must be true, or, we think, we wouldn’t believe it. I’m sorry to rain on your parade. Such “cozy religion” may sound wonderful, but it does not exist. Millions of people have gone to their graves confidently believing many things that are not true or healthy, and many of those things are destructive to others and to creation.

 

Because of this dynamic, in every parish I served (all ten of them) I stressed and offered what I term “serious Bible study.” I distinguish this kind of study from what I term “devotional” use of the Bible, whereby one reads for inspiration and hopefully direction and insight. However, that latter part often does not occur unless we move to this serious Bible study. 

 

Progressive Christians (including ELCA Lutherans, United Methodist, Presbyterians, United Church of Christ, and many others) do not believe that God “dictated” the Bible to scribes in such a way that whatever the Bible says can be taken literally as fact, as fundamentalists maintain.  Actually, that understanding is viewed as a heresy, as explained by German theologian Paul Tillich in what he coined the “Protestant Principle.”

 

Tillich begins with the dialectical nature of reality, comparing the unconditional to the conditional, the divine to the human, the infinite to the finite, the immortal to the mortal, faith to reason. Now, in traditional theology there is a strong emphasis on working to make sure that one does not profane the divine. Take the Ten Commandments for example. God’s name is holy, and we should not take it in vain. The sabbath day is holy, and we should not neglect nor misuse it. God’s truth is universal and absolute, and it should not be treated as if it were earthly and temporal and changeable.

     

What Tillich states in the Protestant Principle is that just as one should not profane the holy, one should also not elevate that which is finite and cultural to the realm of the sacred. This goes all the way back to the Protestant Reformation and theologians like Martin Luther, who rebelled against certain teachings of the popes of the time that they felt were not God’s eternal will. The one that bothered Luther the most was the admonition to church members to pay money for indulgences, which were pieces of paper from the church that said your sins were forgiven. What bothered him further was that the money from these indulgences was being used to build St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

 

Take the role of women. What if the treatment of women in the Bible is not God’s will, but is a reflection of the culture of the time, and it would be a mistake to elevate that view to be a part of God’s absolute truth?

 

How about slavery? The Bible clearly accepts that practice as a part of reality. Does that mean that God’s will for the world is that some people should be able to own other people? Or is slavery part of a misguided human culture that we should resist at all costs, including in the name of God? 

 

In order to develop a theology and spirituality  that is based on truth we begin with an understanding that the Bible cannot always be taken literally in the search for those truths.  We have to move into the area of what we call “hermeneutics” in theology, which is the process of “interpreting” the meaning of texts for today. 

 

Now, in an ideal world, when folks gather for the kind of serious Bible study I am talking about they would “wipe clean” the slate of their beliefs, and start building those beliefs from the ground up, based on the truths we find in Scripture. However, the modern world has taught us that none of us is as objective as we think we are because we carry all kinds of unconscious or pre-conscious ideas that do not shake out easily. 

 

So, in our search for truth, the first thing we need to try to do is to wipe the slate as clean as possible, while accepting that certain beliefs will always be coming to mind even though we try to put them on the back burner for now.  We call this the attempt to “suspend our present beliefs” as we search for deeper truths. 

 

This brings me to another way in which my theology has changed, beginning in college. At Concordia College in Moorhead, MN, all students had to take a required course  on how to interpret Scripture, in which we were taught Biblical critical methods, which are “scholarly, analytical tools—primarily historical and literary—used to investigate the origins, composition, and meaning of biblical texts, aiming to understand what authors intended rather than just subjective interpretation.” [Wikipedia] I took it the first fall of college. At the time, I had no idea how important what I was learning would be. But the skills learned and later honed were used every day both in parish ministry and my own personal view of life. This process of interpreting the scriptures, called Exegesis, would be central to every sermon I preached, every class I taught, every retreat I led, and the thousands of hours spent in clergy Bible study groups and in classes of parishioners as we studied the Scriptures together. 

 

So, what are these methods and what is their purpose? The first is Textual Criticism--based on having studied both Greek and Hebrew (the languages in which the Bible was written)--in which we try to determine what the text said in its original context. There are many events in the Bible which are written about by differing authors (especially in the Gospels) that have what we call “variants” in which the same story is told differently. The first task, then, is to try to determine as best we can the original text. 

 

Next comes Source Criticism. What are the sources the author used to write his text. For example, scholars believe Mark was the first Gospel written, and Luke and Matthew both had access to it in their Gospels. However, Luke and Matthew also each have their own material as well as a source called Q which contains many of the “sayings” of Jesus. 

 

Then there is Form Criticism which attempts to identify the genre of the text. Is it poetry, a parable, a prayer, prose, a song etc. Each of these types of literature are interpreted differently. 

 

One of my favorites is Redaction Criticism, which analyzes how the author organized and changed earlier material to get their message across. For example, scholars believe Matthew wrote primarily to try to convince the Jews that Jesus was indeed the Messiah, whereas Luke wrote to convince Gentiles that they, too, had a place in the Jesus Movement. 

 

These are just some of the tools of Biblical criticism, but the ones described point to the fact that you do not become an effective theologian or Biblical interpreter by taking one course or joining a church or by reading one of the thousands of theological books that contain shoddy Biblical interpretation and thereby bad theology.

The spiritual journey never ends. This creation is ever living and changing and those of us who believe in a living God will spend our entire lives in dialogue with this God and other spiritual people as we attempt to discern what God is doing now and what God is calling us to do next. This spiritual journey is demeaned when we try to take shortcuts to truth or when we assume the profound spiritual leaders of our time do not know what they are talking about. However, if we are willing to listen and learn, the kingdom of God opens before us. Simply pick up a book by Merton, Nouwen, Ghandi, Tutu, Pope Francis or Pope Leo, or, our new ELCA Presiding Bishop, Yehiel Curry,   who wrote in his Easter Message:

The journey to the empty tomb didn’t begin on the cross of Good Friday but in a manger decades earlier. Jesus was born with a purpose: to reveal God’s love, demonstrate grace, and call us into a life of justice, mercy and compassion. It was a long journey, a ministry that spread across the hills of Judea, well beyond his birthplace in Bethlehem and his home in Nazareth. And along the way, he showed us what it means to be children of God.

The Border, Immigration and Christian Spirituality

 

1 Praying at the wall for migrants and comprehensive immigration reform.

I have been bringing students and travel seminar participants to Mexico since 1985. Since 2003, my focus has been on bringing people to the US/Mexico borderlands of El Paso, Tx; Las Cruces, NM; and Juarez, Mexico. I just completed leading a group of a dozen members from the Rocky Mountain Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America which included our bishop, and two other synod staff members, to this area the first week of November.

The goal of these Border Immersions is to give participants the opportunity to go underneath all the rhetoric, posturing, and fake news and fake video to see what is really happening on the border. We do this by providing participants the opportunity to meet and talk with people who live and work on the border so that they have a chance to reassess their theology and moral and political views about immigration, walls, and how we are to respond to God’s call to welcome and love our neighbors. 

 

 This year we met and interviewed the Catholic Bishop of El Paso, (see the picture below), the director  for 40 years of shelters and immigration centers in El Paso, and another priest  in Juarez who has spent most of his life working with immigrants in the borderlands. We visited three shelters that house asylum seekers and talked with their staff (in Juarez, El Paso and Las Cruces). There was a stark difference in  these shelters compared to a similar trip I led last year, as the shelters now are essentially empty, as hardly anyone is now being allowed to apply for asylum. 

We also heard from an immigration attorney, who gave a presentation on our complicated immigration system, and from a former Border Patrol officer, who worked for 30 years in the El Paso sector and gave a PowerPoint on how things have changed over the years. [Normally we visit the Border Patrol, but they are no longer receiving groups.] We attended a Deportation Hearing at the courthouse in Las Cruces and were able to visit with and ask questions of the judge after the proceedings. 

Most importantly, we visited with migrants seeking asylum: this year we interviewed a woman left for dead in South America by her accuser because she filed a complaint against him for sexually abusing young women.  On a similar trip last year, we met a typical colonia (poor, rural communities often without water or sewer) family. The mother and father had come to El Paso  30 years ago with their infant son--and then had two American-born children. When the father went back to Mexico for his mother’s funeral, he was not allowed back into the US because the “work papers” in his wallet were no longer considered valid. Also last year, at a shelter in Juarez, I met a 19 year-old gay man from Central America who said he was threatened with death almost every day and a married father with 3 children who was shot 8 times in Mexico because he did not have the “protection money” demanded by a drug cartel.

 We also heard from folks who have tried to visit in local detention facilities. They have seen children sleeping on floors, lights on all night long, not allowed enough water or restroom visits.  Some are not allowed to bathe. One pastor said she met a youth who had been in detention 2 weeks and never allowed to shower. The stench was so bad she had to burn his clothes. 

 2We attended a march and worship service celebrating the Día de los Muertos, (Day of the Dead,) which includes the Mexican spiritual belief that the monarchs that return to Mexico Nov. 2 are the souls of the dead returning to comfort us.

As followers of Jesus, how are we to respond to what I have described above? Where does our spirituality lead us? The director of shelters mentioned above, at a time when his shelters were completely full, held a summit for  the churches in El Paso, asking them to begin to welcome immigrants into their church buildings for food, shelter, and assistance in how to apply for asylum. A few churches responded right away, but most did not. And so he called another meeting six months later, looked at the gathered clergy and church leaders, and simply said: “Jesus has been knocking on your doors for six months. Are you ever going to let him in?”

The spirituality of this moment in history is not complicated for me. Jesus put it about as clearly as one could: “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison, and you came to me.” [Matthew 25:35-36]

One of the failures of what we call mainline Christianity in America is that we never found a way to effectively challenge the theology of the Moral Majority that went public in 1979, based on Christian fundamentalism and Christian nationalism. We were seldom able to find effective ways of getting our theology into public discussion. We are now seeing the results of that failure. However, in just the last month both United States Lutheran and Catholic Bishops have come out with powerful statements on immigration, and they provide the theological and pastoral basis as to why we have throughout all these years welcomed refugees and immigrants into our families, communities, and religious communities. 

                                   3 Bishop Meghan Johnston Aelabouni of the Rocky Mountain Synod who attended the entire Immersion.

 

From the US Lutheran Bishops on October 8, 2025:

 

As bishops of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), we write to you in this moment of national and global tension with clarity and conviction. Our faith compels us to stand where Jesus stands—with and for those whom society often seeks to exclude, erase, or diminish.

Our shared confession that every person is created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27) grounds us in the conviction that all people possess inherent dignity. The incarnation of Jesus Christ reveals God’s profound solidarity with humanity—especially with those who are marginalized or oppressed. The gospel we proclaim insists that our neighbor’s need is the occasion for our love and that our public life is shaped by justice, mercy, and a commitment to the common good.

We are to respond to newcomers as we would to Christ—welcoming them, meeting their immediate needs, and advocating for justice in our laws and policies.

We are living through a time when vulnerable communities are being scapegoated and attacked. Immigrants and refugees are vilified, though Scripture commands us to welcome the stranger.

 In this time of division and fear, we, as people grounded in our faith, insist on love. This commitment flows from our faith in Christ crucified and risen—the One whose love breaks down barriers, confronts hatred, and transforms hearts.

 

Bishop. Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, Texas, speaking during the Nov. 11, 2025 session of the fall general assembly of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore. Credit: OSV News, photo/Bob Ro.

The US Catholic Bishops’ statement, which came out last week, begins with a profound pastoral orientation:

 

We are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement. We are saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants. We are concerned about the conditions in detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care. We lament that some immigrants in the United States have arbitrarily lost their legal status. We are troubled by threats against the sanctity of houses of worship and the special nature of hospitals and schools. We are grieved when we meet parents who fear being detained when taking their children to school and when we try to console family members who have already been separated from their loved ones. Despite obstacles and prejudices, generations of immigrants have made enormous contributions to the well-being of our nation.

 

The bishops then go on to proclaim their Christian convictions:

 

The Church’s teaching rests on the foundational concern for the human person, as created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:27). As pastors, we look to Sacred Scripture and the example of the Lord Himself, where we find the wisdom of God’s compassion. The priority of the Lord, as the Prophets remind us, is for those who are most vulnerable: the widow, the orphan, the poor, and the stranger (Zechariah 7:10). In the Lord Jesus, we see the One who became poor for our sake (2 Corinthians 8:9), we see the Good Samaritan who lifts us from the dust (Luke 10:30–37), and we see the One who is found in the least of these (Matthew 25). The Church’s concern for neighbor and our concern here for immigrants is a response to the Lord’s command to love as He has loved us (John 13:34).

4 Our group visiting long-time friends in Juarez.

How My Theology Has Changed, Thank God

 

Part X: Latin American Liberation Theology

My first eight posts in this series articulate the theological ways I searched to find meaning again, and a positive relationship with God, in response to the grief that consumed much of my life after the deaths of my parents when I was in high school, and my first wife, Pauline, after ten years of marriage.

 

In my last post, on Feminist Theology, I described another way in which our theology can change. It is not in response to our own painful experience, but to the painful experiences of others that is shared with us when we have an open mind and heart. The remainder of my posts in this series will be of this type, and most of them fall into the category of what we call “liberation” theologies,” which search to free us from old ways that no longer work, if they ever did. 

 

Traditional theology, which we often call Orthodoxy, begins “above” with traditional interpretations of theology and with the teachings of the church and then applies those understandings to our life in the world.  Liberation theologies always begin “below,” in our lived experiences, or as we learn of the lived experiences of others and then turn to the tradition for insight and guidance.

 

One of the primary ways in which this happened for me was on my first trip to the interior of Mexico in December 1983. The travel seminar began in Mexico City where two Catholic Sisters took us to a massive landfill on the outskirts of the city, the fourth largest city in the world with a population over 23 million people. Our van stopped at the top of the dump ground so we could get out and look down into the landfill. It was massive, with garbage piled high and deep as far as you could see, and an odor so strong it made your eyes water. 

 

Photo taken by me, December 1983

We drove down into the landfill where we found families living in lean-to homes, made from whatever materials they might find, and making their living by sorting through the garbage, for food to eat and for items they might sell. And right in the middle of this massive landfill was a soccer field for the kids to play on. We also saw large garbage bags that were turquoise in color. When we asked the Sisters why they were that color, they told us it was because that was how they got rid of hospital garbage, and the turquoise color was so that people would know not to go through it. 

However, driving a little further, we saw children going through the turquoise bags. We could not believe what we were witnessing! It was impossible to hold back the tears. The Sisters then explained that the poverty is so great that there is a waiting list of people who hope to live in the landfill one day. A child may be born in the landfill, grow up there and have children of their own, and then die there. It may be the only life some people ever know.

 

In the months to follow, that painful and bewildering experience haunted my dreams and my theological reflection. How can someone see, smell and feel such a painful reality and not respond in some way? Two years later, when we had moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico to live and teach, I began to find an answer. 

 

Dr. Mark W. Thomsen was the Director of the Division for World Mission, and he had an idea for a theological conference at our Lutheran seminary in Mexico City, which was scheduled for December of 1985. The American Lutheran Church invited 14 South American theologians and 14 North American theologians to gather to discuss the meaning of Lutheran theology for the contemporary era, especially as it pertained to the massive poverty throughout the southern hemisphere. The plan was to take 14 themes of Lutheran theology, with 7 major presentations made by Southern and 7 by Northern theologians, with another theologian from the opposite hemisphere responding to each lecture. 

 

Invitations were sent to 28 Lutheran theologians, 14 From North America and 14 from Central and South America. Every single one accepted the invitation, anxious to begin what we all knew would be a profound dialogue. 

 

Dr. Milton Schwantes

I remember vividly the beginning of the conference. It felt like being at the United Nations. Everyone had headsets, as all presentations and discussions would be translated into Spanish, Portuguese and English. As the conference was about to begin, a profound theologian from Brazil, Dr. Milton Schwantes, asked to speak. First, he thanked the planners for the invitation to come and he stated how pleased he and the other southern theologians were to be part of such a dialogue. Then he went on to say, “However, we have a problem with how this conference is set up. You are starting with doctrines of Lutheranism, and we are asking what these teachings mean for us today. However, that is not the way we do theology in the South. We begin with the pain and suffering of our people, and then ask what our theology and the church has to say to them.”

 

For a few moments, the conference fell into stunned silence. With those few words Dr. Schwantes had captured the challenge before us. He was advocating for  “theology from below,” the beginning of all liberation theologies. This was the answer to my intuition that the spiritual journey does not begin with doctrine, but with our quest to find meaning and hope in the midst of the suffering we ourselves experience, and the suffering we encounter all around us in the world. 

 

It was time for me to think through again the meaning of “salvation,” which, for me, growing up in the church, was our primary goal and included two elements: living in the forgiveness of sins in this life, and the hoped-for entrance into a life after death in the presence of God. However, that was not the primary understanding in the biblical world. The Greek soteria meant "deliverance from powers of harm, which included rescue from serious peril,  being saved from sin through forgiveness, and experiencing health and well-being. [See Shirley Paulson, The Bible and Beyond Blog]  

 

Focusing on the teachings of Jesus, one can readily see this understanding: he focused on freeing people from illness, racism, poverty, loneliness, and then invites his followers into a Movement built on equality, mercy, compassion, reconciliation, love and hope in the midst of the many calamities of life. For liberation theology, this means calling the church to include in its understanding of salvation the freeing of persons from the many ways in which they are oppressed, abused, marginalized and discounted in the earthly realm. As such, this approach searches for a true and whole freedom not only from spiritual sin, but from the many ways people are imprisoned by the conditions in their lives.

Last October Gustavo Gutiérrez of Peru, called the “father of liberation theology,” died at age 96. In 1971 he had published A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, which grew out of his concern for people experiencing economic poverty amid the collapse of political projects in the 1960s that tried to modernize the region, exacerbated by the political repression by military juntas in several South and Central American countries. The result was widespread violence and poverty—something that, for Gutiérrez and his colleagues, was not natural, but produced by severe social and economic inequality. 

Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian theologian, explains his understanding of this new theology: “That was the innovation introduced by Gustavo Gutiérrez and others—including myself—when we conceived theology starting from the suffering and oppression faced by the great majority of the Latin American people. The poor are oppressed, and all oppression cries for liberation,” [See Eduardo Campos Lima, The Christian Century, November 1, 2024.]

 

Liberation theology proposes to fight poverty by addressing its alleged source, the sin of greed. In so doing, it explores the relationship between Christian theology (especially Roman Catholic) and political activism, especially in relation to economic justice, poverty, and human rights. The principal methodological innovation is seeing theology from the perspective of the poor and the oppressed. For example, Jon Sobrino, of El Salvador, argues that the poor are a privileged channel of God's grace. According to Gutiérrez, God is revealed as the One with deep concern for those people who are "insignificant", "marginalized", "unimportant", "needy", "despised", and "defenseless". Moreover, he makes clear that the terminology of "the poor" in the Christian Bible has social and economic connotations that etymologically go back to the Greek word ptōchos, explaining: "Preference implies the universality of God's love, which excludes no one. It is only within the framework of this universality that we can understand the preference, that is, 'what comes first'." [Gutierrez,The God of Life, p. 112.] 

I was blessed living in Mexico to see liberation theology at work in the lives of the poor. I attended many Bible studies, called Base Christian Communities, where folks in poor neighborhoods gather to explore the relationship of God and the Bible to their poverty. I marveled at people’s generosity with each other, in spite of their great poverty, and their commitment to support each other and then work together to confront the ways both church and government often ignored them and even at times took advantage of them. 

These powerful experiences became the basis of my Doctor of Ministry thesis on Liberation Theology and the Base Christian Community Movement, and this new theological orientation would eventually change not only how I understood the world but also the ways in which I would do ministry. From preaching to confirmation to adult education I tried to begin with the pain and suffering and joys of the people with whom I worked as together we searched our rich and powerful Biblical and theological traditions for insight, guidance and inspiration. [For further study, see my recent book available from Amazon: Freed to Love and Live Again: My Journey through Grief to Wounded Healing, a Liberating Theology and Social Justice Ministry, especially Chapters 3-4.]

 

St. Paul talks about the power of faith, hope and love, and I saw in these Base Communities all three, including an unrelenting hope stronger than suffering and even death. As Rubem Alves of Brazil wrote in his book, Tomorrow’s Child:

 

What is hope?
It is the pre-sentiment that imagination
is more real and reality is less real than it looks.
It is the hunch that the overwhelming brutality
of facts that oppress and repress us
is not the last word.
It is the suspicion that reality is more complex
than the realists want us to believe.
That the frontiers of the possible are not
determined by the limits of the actual;
and in a miraculous and unexplained way
life is opening up creative events
which will open the way to freedom and resurrection –
but the two – suffering and hope
must live from each other.
Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair.
But, hope without suffering creates illusions, naïveté
and drunkenness.
So let us plant dates
even though we who plant them will never eat them.
We must live by the love of what we will never see.
That is the secret discipline.
It is the refusal to let our creative act
be dissolved away by our need for immediate sense experience
and is a struggled commitment to the future of our grandchildren.
Such disciplined hope is what has given prophets, revolutionaries and saints,
the courage to die for the future they envisage.
They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hopes.

This hope grows out of an unrelenting focus on the love of God for the whole world and a trust not only in God, but in the community of love that surrounds each of us. This deep spiritual understanding is expressed powerfully in the poetry of Julia Esquivel of Guatemala, who was an elementary school teacher who also studied theology:

Mary Erickson, Guatemala, 1986

I am no longer afraid of death

I know well

Its dark and cold corridors

Leading to life.

I am afraid rather of that life

Which does not come out of death,

Which cramps our hands

And slows our march.

I am afraid of my fear

And even more of the fear of others,

Who do not know where they are going,

Who continue clinging

To what they think is life

Which we know to be death!

I live each day to kill death;

I die each day to give birth to life,

And in this death of death,

I die a thousand times

And am reborn another thousand

Through that love

From my People

Which nourishes hope!

—From Threatened with Resurrection

Picture of Christ Figure: Hunger cloth from the Misereor humanitarian aid community in Wernberg Monastery, Villach Land district, Carinthia, Austria, EU. Via Wikimedia Commons