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June 26, 2024
SHOULD PROCESS THEOLOGY BE THE BASIS FOR “LIBERATION THEOLOGIES”?
Schubert M. Ogden (B. 1928) is an American Protestant theologian who taught at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, and at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. He has written many books, such as The Reality of God and Other Essays; To Preach the Truth: Selected Sermons and Homilies; On Theology; The Understanding of Christian Faith; Christ Without Myth: A Study Based on the Theology of Rudolf Bultmann. etc.
He wrote in the Preface of this 1978 book, “First, there is the issue of God, which I formulated in these terms: ‘Can Christian faith in God be so understood that it positively includes the concern for human liberation in this world?’ Then, second, there is the issue of the Christian mission, which I formulated as the question: ‘Can we understand our special calling as Christians as a new responsibility that we bear for the sake of the world, instead of as a new privilege that only Christians can enjoy?’ … the origin of this book was in the reflections to which I was led in responding to this question… The purpose of this book, accordingly, is to try to address the first issue in a way that I hope will prove helpful to anyone already struggling with it.”
He suggests, “it would be mistaken, in my opinion, to see the theologies of liberation as nothing more than a contemporary re-expression of the social gospel… the social gospel, after all, was typically a movement within the relatively advantaged human group to take advantage of the different historical situations and needs of persons belonging to disadvantaged groups, the theologies of liberation are typically movements within the disadvantaged groups themselves to provide a theological self-interpretation of their own situations and needs.” (Pg. 23-24)
He states, “the challenge presented by the various liberation theologies is that of working out a still more adequate theology of liberation than any of them has yet achieved… I want to identify four points where… the theologies of liberation typically fail to carry out the theological project to which they are committed in an adequate way… in the first place… these theologies typically are not so much theology as witness… they tend rather to be the rationalization of positions already taken than the process or the product of critical reflection on those positions… in the second place… they typically focus on the existential meaning of God for us without dealing at all adequately with the metaphysical being of God in himself… in the third place… the liberation theologies typically tend to confuse---or do not adequately distinguish---two essentially different, though closely related, forms of liberation… processes that can and must be distinguished respectively as redemption and emancipation… in the fourth place... they typically have too restricted or provincial an understanding of the various forms of bondage from which men and women, as well as their fellow creatures, need to be emancipated.” (Pg. 32-37)
He says, “Not only the Christian religion but any religion has by its very nature a metaphysical as well as an existential aspect. Consequently, if religious assertions are always about our own possibilities of existing and acting, and are to that extent existential, they are never about nothing other than our own possibilities, because they are also always about the ultimate reality apart from which we could neither exist not act at all, and so are also metaphysical.” (Pg. 47)
He points out, “persons both within the church and without it commonly understand the faith … as primarily, if not only, a matter of believing certain things about God… As long as this common understanding of faith prevails, my assertion that faith in God is existence in freedom is not likely to seem true. For that matter, it will hardly even be understood. Nevertheless, there are few things a theologian can say more confidently than that the understanding of faith as primarily belief about god has no warrant whatever either in Scripture, or… in the apostolic witness that is the norm even of the claims of Scripture… Christian faith in God, in its primary sense, is an existential matter of believing IN God, as distinct from an intellectual matter of believing certain things ABOUT God.” (Pg. 52)
He asserts, “I am confident that it is precisely the metaphysics that has been worked out by certain of the process philosophers---notably, Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne---that… provides the very resources that are required if the project of a theology of liberation is to be carried out to completion…. process metaphysics … is the metaphysics that takes ‘freedom’ as its key concept… one may go so far as to say that process metaphysics is precisely THE metaphysics of freedom, which insists on the applicability of its key concept to literally everything that can be actual at all.” (Pg.73-75)
He suggests, “the theological talk about God as the Redeemer, and hence about his love as redeeming, or the process of redemption, is rightly understood metaphysically when it is taken to refer to the ever-new event of God’s own self-creation in response to the free self-creations of all his creatures. In other words, I understand redemption to be the unique process of God’s self-actualization, whereby he creatively synthesizes all other things into his own actual being as God.” (Pg. 83) Later, he adds, “But just as essential is to recognize that it is ONE God who alone is both Redeemer and Emancipator and who, therefore, is the one ultimate ground of our freedom and of the freedom of everyone else… to separate emancipation and redemption … is to deny that both are the work of one and the same divine love, and that it is always in both… that each of us is given and called to share.” (Pg. 95)
In the last chapter, he concludes, “far from absurd is the idea of a theology that would take the positions it takes only on the basis of a critical reflection governed by the two criteria of appropriateness and understandability. In fact, I am quite convinced that this is the only idea of theology as itself radically free, in the twofold sense of being free FOR all positions precisely because it is free FROM all positions. The clear implication of this idea, however, is that the only way in which theology as such can be of service to any emancipating praxis is by critically reflecting on its positions in terms of these criteria… It is because theology as such exists… to respond to this deep human need for truth that its service to the praxis of emancipation can be only the INDIRECT service of critically reflecting on the positions that such praxis implies. The whole point… is that this is the only service that a truly free theology is in a position to perform… not the least important step we have to take… is to emancipate theology from its historical bondage as mere rationalization to its proper freedom as critical reflection.” (Pg. 123-124)
This critical, yet also somewhat supportive book will be of great interest to those seriously studying Liberation Theology, Black Theology, Feminist Theology, and of course Process Theology.
Schubert M. Ogden (B. 1928) is an American Protestant theologian who taught at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, and at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. He has written many books, such as The Reality of God and Other Essays; To Preach the Truth: Selected Sermons and Homilies; On Theology; The Understanding of Christian Faith; Christ Without Myth: A Study Based on the Theology of Rudolf Bultmann. etc.
He wrote in the Preface of this 1978 book, “First, there is the issue of God, which I formulated in these terms: ‘Can Christian faith in God be so understood that it positively includes the concern for human liberation in this world?’ Then, second, there is the issue of the Christian mission, which I formulated as the question: ‘Can we understand our special calling as Christians as a new responsibility that we bear for the sake of the world, instead of as a new privilege that only Christians can enjoy?’ … the origin of this book was in the reflections to which I was led in responding to this question… The purpose of this book, accordingly, is to try to address the first issue in a way that I hope will prove helpful to anyone already struggling with it.”
He suggests, “it would be mistaken, in my opinion, to see the theologies of liberation as nothing more than a contemporary re-expression of the social gospel… the social gospel, after all, was typically a movement within the relatively advantaged human group to take advantage of the different historical situations and needs of persons belonging to disadvantaged groups, the theologies of liberation are typically movements within the disadvantaged groups themselves to provide a theological self-interpretation of their own situations and needs.” (Pg. 23-24)
He states, “the challenge presented by the various liberation theologies is that of working out a still more adequate theology of liberation than any of them has yet achieved… I want to identify four points where… the theologies of liberation typically fail to carry out the theological project to which they are committed in an adequate way… in the first place… these theologies typically are not so much theology as witness… they tend rather to be the rationalization of positions already taken than the process or the product of critical reflection on those positions… in the second place… they typically focus on the existential meaning of God for us without dealing at all adequately with the metaphysical being of God in himself… in the third place… the liberation theologies typically tend to confuse---or do not adequately distinguish---two essentially different, though closely related, forms of liberation… processes that can and must be distinguished respectively as redemption and emancipation… in the fourth place... they typically have too restricted or provincial an understanding of the various forms of bondage from which men and women, as well as their fellow creatures, need to be emancipated.” (Pg. 32-37)
He says, “Not only the Christian religion but any religion has by its very nature a metaphysical as well as an existential aspect. Consequently, if religious assertions are always about our own possibilities of existing and acting, and are to that extent existential, they are never about nothing other than our own possibilities, because they are also always about the ultimate reality apart from which we could neither exist not act at all, and so are also metaphysical.” (Pg. 47)
He points out, “persons both within the church and without it commonly understand the faith … as primarily, if not only, a matter of believing certain things about God… As long as this common understanding of faith prevails, my assertion that faith in God is existence in freedom is not likely to seem true. For that matter, it will hardly even be understood. Nevertheless, there are few things a theologian can say more confidently than that the understanding of faith as primarily belief about god has no warrant whatever either in Scripture, or… in the apostolic witness that is the norm even of the claims of Scripture… Christian faith in God, in its primary sense, is an existential matter of believing IN God, as distinct from an intellectual matter of believing certain things ABOUT God.” (Pg. 52)
He asserts, “I am confident that it is precisely the metaphysics that has been worked out by certain of the process philosophers---notably, Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne---that… provides the very resources that are required if the project of a theology of liberation is to be carried out to completion…. process metaphysics … is the metaphysics that takes ‘freedom’ as its key concept… one may go so far as to say that process metaphysics is precisely THE metaphysics of freedom, which insists on the applicability of its key concept to literally everything that can be actual at all.” (Pg.73-75)
He suggests, “the theological talk about God as the Redeemer, and hence about his love as redeeming, or the process of redemption, is rightly understood metaphysically when it is taken to refer to the ever-new event of God’s own self-creation in response to the free self-creations of all his creatures. In other words, I understand redemption to be the unique process of God’s self-actualization, whereby he creatively synthesizes all other things into his own actual being as God.” (Pg. 83) Later, he adds, “But just as essential is to recognize that it is ONE God who alone is both Redeemer and Emancipator and who, therefore, is the one ultimate ground of our freedom and of the freedom of everyone else… to separate emancipation and redemption … is to deny that both are the work of one and the same divine love, and that it is always in both… that each of us is given and called to share.” (Pg. 95)
In the last chapter, he concludes, “far from absurd is the idea of a theology that would take the positions it takes only on the basis of a critical reflection governed by the two criteria of appropriateness and understandability. In fact, I am quite convinced that this is the only idea of theology as itself radically free, in the twofold sense of being free FOR all positions precisely because it is free FROM all positions. The clear implication of this idea, however, is that the only way in which theology as such can be of service to any emancipating praxis is by critically reflecting on its positions in terms of these criteria… It is because theology as such exists… to respond to this deep human need for truth that its service to the praxis of emancipation can be only the INDIRECT service of critically reflecting on the positions that such praxis implies. The whole point… is that this is the only service that a truly free theology is in a position to perform… not the least important step we have to take… is to emancipate theology from its historical bondage as mere rationalization to its proper freedom as critical reflection.” (Pg. 123-124)
This critical, yet also somewhat supportive book will be of great interest to those seriously studying Liberation Theology, Black Theology, Feminist Theology, and of course Process Theology.
September 12, 2022
I came across this title listening to a podcast on process theology and I glad that I decided to read it. Deep wisdom in this little gem of a book.
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