Theo‐Drama as Liberative Praxis

Abstract

Theo‐Drama as Liberative Praxis Roberto S. Goizueta In Latin American liberation theology, the God of the poor is a Dios Compañero, a God who accompanies us in our everyday struggles. The religiosity of the poor, or “popular religion,” is a privileged locus for experiencing this divine nearness; the rituals and symbols of the people's lived faith are places of divine–human encounter. Yet such an encounter presupposes that God is indeed revealed and made present in the rituals and symbols of popular religion, that is, that these are not merely human constructs that express human needs and longings but are, in fact, revelations of a divine reality that is given to us in and through symbol and ritual. For the poor, God is not a concept that persons and groups conjure in order to express human needs and ideals; God is a self‐communicating reality made present in the world around us and thus received by us as pure gift. If this is not true, then neither is the possibility of hope and liberation. Consequently, I will submit, the lived faith of the poor gives rise to a theological aesthetics of liberation that subverts modern and post‐modern notions of the symbol as an arbitrary, interchangeable sign with no intrinsic connection to its referent. While some European theologians such as the Swiss scholar Hans Urs von Balthasar have effected a retrieval of a premodern understanding of symbol in order to articulate a Christian theological aesthetics, they have not paid due attention to the sociopolitical, liberative import of such a retrieval. Balthasar, for instance, fails to appreciate how the lived faith of the poor gives expression to a theological aesthetics of liberation which resists both the reduction of liberation to sociopolitical praxis and the reduction of theological aesthetics to an apolitical, merely affective experience of the Beautiful. As the retrieval of a premodern symbolic realism which posits that God is really made present and available to us in the cosmos and in history, Balthasar's intellectual project represents an attempt to retrieve both the embodied and the receptive character of Christian faith; God is “the Beautiful” and, as such, can be known only insofar as we surrender ourselves to its intrinsic power, a power utterly gratuitous and beyond our control. “What is here called an ‘aesthetic’,” writes Balthasar, “is therefore characterized as something properly theological, namely, as the reception, perceived with the eyes of faith, of the self‐interpreting glory of the sovereignly free love of God.” Yet Balthasar's aesthetics remains socially and politically ambiguous. In this essay, I will argue for the importance of Balthasar's project. At the same time, I will suggest that only when undertaken in the context of a preferential option for the poor can a methodological attentiveness to the aesthetic character of Christian faith make possible a retrieval of both the normative character of religious faith, as a response to “the True,” and the liberative character of faith, as response to “the Good.” To make this argument, I will draw not only on Balthasar's work, therefore, but also on the insights of Latin American liberation theology, as represented especially by the Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez (the so‐called father of liberation theology). More specifically, I will contend that, while theological aesthetics represents a necessary corrective to modern and postmodern theologies, liberation theology represents an equally necessary safeguard against the opposite danger, a reduction of aesthetics to an apolitical religious experience wherein the Beautiful does not irrupt in the world, transforming it, but is simply a legitimating reflection of that world. For an authentically Christian theological aesthetics, the fundamental criterion of beauty will be the body of a tortured, scarred criminal hanging from a cross—and, therefore, the bodies of those whom Jon Sobrino calls the crucified people of history. Such an expression of the Beautiful can only subvert all merely human preconceptions of beauty, pre‐conceptions that legitimate the exclusion and exploitation of those persons whom the dominant culture considers “ugly.” Christian faith as lived faith For Christians, the act of faith is a lived response of the whole person to a God who, as Love, freely gives Godself...