Recherche – Detailansicht
Ausgabe: | März/2020 |
Spalte: | 215–217 |
Kategorie: | Dogmen- und Theologiegeschichte |
Autor/Hrsg.: | Pittl, Sebastian |
Titel/Untertitel: | Geschichtliche Realität und Kreuz. Der fundamentale Ort der Theologie bei Ignacio Ellacuría. |
Verlag: | Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet 2018. 431 S. = ratio fidei, 67. Kart. EUR 44,00. ISBN 978-3-7917-3006-6. |
Rezensent: | Anselm K. Min |
Sebastian Pittl, wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Institut für Weltkirche und Mission, Frankfurt am Main, has written a substantive analysis of historical reality and the cross as the fundamental place of theology in the thought of Ignacio Ellacuria (1930–1989), the Jesuit liberation theologian originally from Spain who died a martyr in El Salvador in 1989.
Central to Ellacuria’s thought are the concepts of »history« and the »cross,« which P. analyzes philosophically in the first part of the book and theologically in the second. The philosophical discussions begin with Ellacuria’s critical concept of philosophy as protest, present Zubiri’s concept of »reality« in relation to intellection, truth, transcendence, and structure, to which Ellacuria owes much, and systematically develop Ellacuria’s own dialectical concept of »historical reality,« the central category of his thought, which involves liberating praxis as its own internal dynamic as a process open to the future. For Ellacuria, the highest form of the openness of his-torical reality is the expansion of human freedom, and it is libera-t-ing praxis that opens up the possibilities of human freedom by re-moving the oppressive and restraining blockages of history and thus also reveals both the »real« truth of historical reality and the »theoretical« truth of human knowledge, which is always embedded in the structures of power and interest and colored by dominant ideologies. The privileged place for critical reflection is the liberating praxis on behalf of those oppressed and excluded by the dominant order where freedom is most threatened and one ac-quires the necessary hermeneutic sensibility to the »negativity of history in its highest form.« It is most appropriate that Ellacuria regards the »cross« – the symbol of negativity – as the place of a »Christian« philosophy.
The theological part of the book is divided into two parts, theology of history and the cross. Ellacuria’s theology of history is analyzed in the context of contemporary European discussions (Rahner and Pannenberg) focusing on the relation of the history of salva-tion and the salvation of history. P. highlights Ellacuria’s critique of static identity thinking in current theologies of history, the Chris-tological matrix and the trinitarian foundation of his thought, the unity of the history of salvation and the salvation of history, the historical mediation of salvation, historical soteriology as a possible secular theology relevant to the contemporary European situation, and the relation of Christianity to power. Ellacuria’s theology of the cross is built upon two central insights, the historical necessity of the death of Jesus, and the symbol of the »suffering servant of God« in Isaiah, culminating in the idea that »the crucified people« is the historical continuation of Jesus the suffering servant.
The book closes with a meditation on the crucified people as the place of a »heterotopian utopia« (Foucault) especially relevant to the contemporary world with all its diversity and pluralism and with a plea to recognize a contemporary example of the crucified people in the migrants and refugees crossing the Mediterranean to escape from poverty and oppression in Africa.
Originally a dissertation at the University of Vienna, this is one of the most systematic, meticulous, and insightful analyses of Ellacuria’s theology. Ellacuria belongs to the first generation of liberation theologians such as Gustavo Gutierrez, Juan Luis Segundo, Leonardo Boff, and Jon Sobrino, yet his work came to be known to the non-Spanish world only in the 1990s, and by then rather overshadowed by others. As this commentary makes clear, however, his theology contains substantive insights of considerable originality, especially in the matter of the concept of »historical reality,« the historicization of the cross, and the identity of the crucified one and the crucified people, to which Jon Sobrino’s later Christology owes much.
P.’s work raises at least three major issues for the contemporary theologian. The first issue is how theology can avoid idealism, moralism, spiritualism, individualism, and ideology in its neces-sary response to the global problem of human suffering. It is safe to say that much of the theological tradition has been guilty in this regard, and liberation theology has been a wake-up call for the last half-century. In this regard Ellacuria’s analysis of the concept of »historical reality« as a locus of materially based conflict and negativity and of the need to methodologically »historicize« a theological issue by situating it in the whirlpool of the struggles for domination and exposing it to the test of negativity still remains a salu-tary warning against the spiritualistic and moralistic tendencies of much contemporary Western theology. (Ellacuria’s concept of »historical reality« owes far more to Hegel and Marx than to Zu-biri, and this has not been fully noted by P.) The identification of the crucified Jesus with a crucified people should also provide a powerful spiritual impetus for Christians in the global North to overcome their complacency and individualism and to meditate on their own lord and savior still bearing the cross in many of the poor, starving, and oppressed peoples of the world, especially in the glob-al South. We are living at a time when it has become compelling for Christians to take the thoroughly traditional doctrine of »the Body of Christ« in all its theological depth and historical realism and develop the spirituality of finding the crucified Christ in the suffer-ing members of different groups who suffer not as isolated indi-viduals but as members of groups.
The second issue prompted by P.’s work is whether »historical reality« interpreted in the dialectical terms of economic and poli-tical power should still remain the paradigm of historical interpretation for today and thus the locus of contemporary theology. We are living in an age of globalization which today has taken a cultural turn. The dominant form of domination is still economic and political, but its effect is most concretely felt in the realm of cul-ture. Contemporary capitalism no longer produces only material things like cars and airplanes that remain external to us and which we can dispose of without putting our own interiority or subjec-tivity at risk. The capitalist logic of consumption is increasingly given to the production of information, knowledge, ideas, images, appearances, impressions, values, symbols, dreams, hopes, illusions, and anxieties, things that are internal to the human subject and constitutive of the very content of subjectivity. That is, capitalism produces not only objects but also our very subjectivity, denaturing the subject to a purely instinctive, passive, unthinking, objectified subject. The logic of consumption does not rest until it rests in the death of the subject: the ideal consumer is the dead subject. A radical degradation of the human is spreading all over the world wher-ever global capitalism reigns, not only in the global North but also in the global South. It would seem that this is surely the kairos for a new theological paradigm or at least a serious revision of the existing historical paradigm with its concern for economic and poli-tical domination where the dominated know they are being dominated because they feel the pain in the most concrete way. In the postmodern cultural turn the dominated do not even know they are being dominated because there is no pain to feel, but are in fact happy to be dominated because there is only the illusion of self-satisfaction.
The third issue Ellacuria raises is whether the historical paradigm as such should still remain the paradigm of theology today, however revised it might be, or whether we should search for an alternative. The Hegelian-Marxian tradition is the culmination of the modern Western turn to the subject along with its anthropocentrism and its nihilistic consequences. That historicist tradition, however, seems exhausted today. Liberation theology is the Hegelian-Marxian moment of Christian theology, and Ellacuria’s seems to be the most elaborate development of that historicist tradition, raising the radical question: Is historicism still compelling as a theological paradigm? Many questions have been raised in recent years in both theological and secular circles about whether anthro pocentrism and its subordination of nature to history are acceptable in an age of the environmental crisis. Ellacuria’s theology clearly belongs to the historicist tradition: Human freedom is the highest manifestation of the truth of history, and nature only remains the material basis of history. In fact, history is »the totality of all actuality.« Ellacuria’s historicism cannot be clearer. It is also clear that no alternative that remains deaf to the cry of the poor and margina-lized could be Christian in a world where that cry continues to make the front page news. How, then, is it possible to accept many of the trade marks of liberation theology such as critical sensibility to the negativities of history, the preferential option for the poor, the importance of praxis, and even the need to »historicize« great issues, and also to »sublate« [Aufheben] the historicism inherent in its horizon?
I suggest that this sublation is possible by searching for a deeper and broader horizon. History is indeed an essential condition of human existence, but nature is larger than history, and God is larger than both history and nature. What is ultimate about history is not that it is history but that it is the realm of ontological contingency, of entities whose essence does not contain its own exis-tence, the realm of the creature. To look at reality »sub ratione Dei« is not only properly theological but also provides the ultimate hori-zon for judging history itself and its negativities. To restore the horizon of God the creator is not only to take history most seriously by virtue of the Incarnation but also to be freed from its nar-rowing historicism by virtue of the Resurrection that opens the es-chatological horizon of the infinitely incomprehensible God. It means preserving the historical urgencies of liberating praxis with-in the larger horizon of God that includes the salvation of creation in its totality, depth, and ultimacy and as a moment of contemplation in the classical sense, the radical critique of the place of human-ity, history, and nature in the ultimate divine scheme of things, a horizon rather missing yet not missed in contemporary theology.