Freedom as a Heuristic for Understanding the Meaning of the Kingdom of God

In the context of Roman Empire, the gospels narrate how the hope and struggle for the kingdom of God catalyzes a multi-tiered movement. In reference to this movement, Richard A. Horsley describes the gospels as “intracommunity articulations of a no-longer-so-hidden mobilization of Galilean and other peasants into a village-based movement.”Footnote ¹⁴ The renewal of Israel occurs within this mobilization that draws on Israelite culture and covenantal tradition to condemn imperial relations and restore autonomy. In the context of this mobilization and pushing it further, Jesus announces and acts out a politics centered around what he called the kingdom of God: a family- and village-based movement organized around Jesus to counteract social disintegration and “reinforce family and social solidarity” in line with covenantal tradition.Footnote ¹⁵ In this “concrete political situation,” the people of Israel discover God.Footnote ¹⁶

Although the fact of political struggle in Israel's history, and specifically Jesus’ life and death, isn't controversial, explaining the specific nature of Jesus’ political claims and their relation to the transcendent reality of the kingdom of God carries far more ambiguity. The concept of freedom offers one possible heuristic to specify the meaning of the village-based movement that organized around Jesus’ claim of the nearness of the kingdom of God—and, as such, a way for theologians to discern the claim of the kingdom of God as another possible world. Sobrino describes the freedom entailed in the kingdom of God as standing “in combative relation to the anti-Kingdom. They are not merely mutually exclusive, but fight against one another.”Footnote ¹⁷ Jesus’ announcement of the kingdom of God and the freedom that characterizes this project takes on meaning precisely as an alternative to the Roman Empire. As is well attested, at the starting point of his ministry in Luke's gospel, Jesus offers a sort of “mission statement” that summarizes his praxis in relation to the kingdom of God when he reads a message from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor” (4:18-19).Footnote ¹⁸ This raises the question of the meaning of the “freedom” to which Jesus refers as shaping his praxis. Sobrino describes this freedom as a historically specific praxis of love.Footnote ¹⁹ Freedom refers to that which binds a person and community to history—the thinking, politics, activity, and work that emerge in community. And, more concretely within a Christian theological perspective, freedom is a praxis of love motivated by hope in the promise of the resurrection that there will be justice for victims.Footnote ²⁰ To love—and thus to live in freedom—is to live “now like risen beings,” or in a praxis that resembles faith in this promise.Footnote ²¹ Living as “risen beings” has a specific content: to take on the hope of the crucified, the hope of the victims, and to put this hope in the center of historical praxis against structures that victimize.Footnote ²² Using an abstract notion of “love” or “freedom” to express this hope distorts Jesus’ actual struggle in relation to the kingdom and avoids the conflict embedded in this struggle.Footnote ²³

Ignacio Ellacuría, whose thought motivates much of Sobrino's subsequent work, particularly focuses on this conflict embedded in Jesus’ praxis:

The meaning of freedom that emerges in relation to the kingdom does not include freedom from conflict; it is precisely a freedom to be in “incessant combat” with all that opposes the specific and partial kingdom that Jesus proclaimed. Abstracting the concrete meaning of freedom within the gospels ends up obscuring how gospel writers use the idea of freedom to express a conflict and struggle.

The specifically Christian contribution to the meaning of freedom exists in relation to “sin,” a general concept to describe a break from God that can only be expressed historically: “Sin appears … as the fundamental alienation, the root of a situation of injustice and exploitation. It cannot be encountered in itself, but only in concrete instances, in particular alienations…. Sin demands a radical liberation, which in turn necessarily implies a political liberation.”Footnote ²⁵ The struggle for liberation for which Gustavo Gutiérrez calls and that he connects to salvation is a transformation of “a human, social, and historical reality which originates in a socially and historically situated freedom.”Footnote ²⁶ Historical or political liberation includes the growth of the kingdom but does not eclipse all that the kingdom is: “The growth of the Kingdom is a process which occurs historically in liberation, insofar as liberation means a greater human fulfillment. Liberation is a precondition for the new society, but this is not all it is.”Footnote ²⁷ Gutiérrez, Ellacuría, and Sobrino emphasize that theologians cannot abandon the specificity of the village-based movements around Jesus for abstractions. Humans encounter divinity in history, and freedom can be a heuristic to understand the content of the kingdom Jesus announced when theologians understand sin and freedom with respect to Jesus of Nazareth and our concrete present-day context.

Freedom as a Heuristic to Understand Contemporary Struggle

Drawing on the work of the Zapatistas can push theologians toward a concrete understanding of freedom in the present-day context of neoliberal capitalism in ways that can shed light on the “good news” of the freedom that grounds the kingdom of God. In their respective contexts of Roman Empire and global neoliberal capitalism, the Jesus movement and the Zapatistas announce that another world is possible and that this world has irrupted in the struggle for that other possible world. These announcements locate hope in struggles against fetishization. That is, announcing and actualizing another possible world contests the separation of concepts, definitions, and structures from the activity and thinking that constructs those concepts, definitions, and structures. This contest grounds the hope for freedom.

The Jesus movement and the Zapatistas articulate historically particular struggles for freedom that carry meaning beyond their respective contexts, yet meaning that fades away when we disconnect their claims about the meaning of freedom from their particular historical struggles. When theologians abstract concrete historical expressions such as freedom or the kingdom of God, we rip how communities have made sense of reality apart from their function within particular historical situations. Detached from their use-value, ideas developed within historical struggle become exchange-values within the academic marketplace—that is, they become fetishized. For example, Marcella Althaus-Reid argues that discourses of liberation come from concrete, rebellious people. Yet the textualization of this liberative force that becomes “valuable in a theological market” often loses this materialist force.Footnote ²⁸ Disconnected from struggle, an idea such as freedom appears as a formal and abstract concept, valuable in itself and capable of being easily and uncritically transferred across contexts until it carries little meaning. Struggling against fetishization would require relinking the meaning of freedom to the political praxes of early communities gathered around the memory of Jesus that sought local autonomy from the state.Footnote ²⁹ The work of the Zapatistas can help theologians to better understand the content and praxis of these early commitments to freedom.

Drawing on the theoretical work of the Zapatistas to make sense of the meaning of freedom isn't merely interesting and an opportunity for novelty; rather, it is essential to more faithfully understanding what Christian solidarity organized around the hope for freedom entails and what it means to critically reflect on society and church in light of a faith shaped by Jesus’ orientation toward the kingdom of God. The abstracted freedom of the “free market” and individual rights has become the main mode of freedom operative in the present world-system, and academic theology never exists apart from this world-system. Dissociation from the struggles of communities actively implementing another possible world, however nascent these projects of counter-fetishization may be, even seeps into liberation theology.Footnote ³⁰ Turning to and learning from communities of struggle who have articulated their own understanding of freedom, distanced—again, however inchoately—from the fetishization endemic to neoliberalism, is a methodological necessity.

The Zapatistas articulate freedom as resistance to the capitalism of Western modernity: this contest specifies the meaning of freedom in a non-abstract way. In the “Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona,” the Zapatistas liken capitalism to war: “a war of conquest of the entire world, a world war.”Footnote ³¹ The Zapatistas are not only suspicious of how Western modernity has been elevated to a set of ideals that have to be defended at all costs; they have named this constellation of ideas, policies, and tactics “war.” From a decolonial theoretical perspective, Nelson Maldonado-Torres locates this “war” within the history of European modernity and its underside of colonialism and slavery. Maldonado-Torres refers to “a paradigm of war” that is an “episteme and social order” that has its origin in 1492.Footnote ³² The year 1492 is a significant point in the history of the paradigm of war insofar as the European encounter with and concept of the Americas established and legitimized a method of violent force in the formation of ways of being and knowing within what came to be called “modernity.”Footnote ³³ The origins of modernity in colonialism and slave-trading establish the modern understanding of freedom: “In modernity, the racialized others take the place of enemies in a perpetual war out of which modern ideals of freedom and autonomy get their proper sense. This is the foundation of modernity as a paradigm of war and the source of many of its pathologies, crises, and evils.”Footnote ³⁴ Western modernity sustains what Maldonado-Torres calls the “sub-ontological difference,” or signifying what is below being, and uses race to legitimize this claim alongside abstract claims of freedom and rights.Footnote ³⁵ The context of the war capitalism wages within Western modernity catalyzes the political project of dismantling Western modernity, which has “naturalized” a situation of war and “a peculiar death ethic that renders massacre and different forms of genocide as natural.”Footnote ³⁶ The Zapatista struggle for an alternative within or to Western modernity contributes toward a possibility of freedom outside the naturalization of war.

This freedom outside the naturalization of war resides in struggle. The premise that no sphere of struggle against this war has priority, but rather the breadth of struggle forges another possible world, grounds the Sixth Declaration. In response to the legacy of the Sixth Declaration, Marcos describes an attachment to life shaped by tradition that forces struggle: “What had made [indigenous communities] resist—our compañeros and compañeras initially, and today our bosses—had been an attachment to life that had a lot to do with a cultural burden. Language, dialect, the way of relating to nature presented an alternative not only for life, but for struggle.”Footnote ³⁷ Five hundred years of struggle by communities that begin to call themselves Zapatistas and that articulate the meaning of this struggle in public forums establishes a way to understand the meaning of freedom. Marcos locates this struggle within the “neo-zapatismo” of the Sixth Declaration. Under the leadership of indigenous communities, the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) has struggled for change in a way that “meant not organizing ourselves, not organizing other people to go vote, nor to go to a march, nor to shout, but to survive and turn resistance into a school.”Footnote ³⁸ Resistance, as a way of living and thinking, is itself freedom.

The Zapatistas’ First International Gathering of Politics, Art, Sport, and Culture for Women in Struggle in 2018 reinforced this commitment to survive and to resist, as well as the understanding of the world that struggle creates. At the closing ceremony, Zapatista women put an agreement, emblematic of the Sixth Declaration, in the following terms: “We propose an agreement to stay alive and continue struggling, each of us according to our ways, our times and our worlds.”Footnote ³⁹ A group sent by the El Kilombo collective from Durham, North Carolina, reported on the gathering by noting a basic difference between workshops led by non-Zapatista attendees. Whereas non-Zapatista workshops focused on freedom as a matter of self-care, delinking individuals from structures, and “self-expression and the body,” Zapatista-led workshops focused on structural transformation:

A sense of orientation on the path of struggle opposes initiatives for identification and inclusion. Cultivating a collective praxis of resistance evokes freedom to be a part of a collective that lacks recognition and promotion within neoliberal capitalism.Footnote ⁴¹ Herein lies the possibility of another world.

The Zapatista struggle for another possible world turns on the struggle against fetishization within the modern world-system. Inspired by the Zapatistas, John Holloway describes struggle in the modern world-system as a response to methods of enforcing capitalist relations. Thinking from the perspective of struggle unsettles the reification of relationships and forms of identification that shape bourgeois thought. This perspective contests fetishization by keeping concepts connected to the struggles that produced them.Footnote ⁴² Holloway describes two understandings of fetishism, each of which has different theoretical and political implications. One way to understand fetishism is as an established part of capitalist society. In this understanding, fetishism is a historical point of origin that has already taken place.Footnote ⁴³ This perspective obscures sites from which possibilities of anti-fetishism might come. Such possibilities would, seemingly, emerge only outside of the ordinary: for example, from academics in privileged positions or particular revolutionary forms.Footnote ⁴⁴ A second perspective understands fetishism as an ongoing process of fetishization. In this perspective, conceptual categories are perpetually open: rather than expressions of “objectified social relations,” conceptual categories express the struggle to objectify social relations.Footnote ⁴⁵ In 2015, Marcos described a commitment to struggle that suggests this second perspective of fetishization as a historical process: “Our destiny is not happiness. Our destiny is to fight always, at all times, in all places. It does not matter that the wind is not favorable.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The perpetual and everyday struggle to establish social relations outside forms of identification enforced by capitalism grounds engagement with the world. This struggle to become “nobody,” as the Kilombo collective noticed in the Zapatista method of struggle, is the struggle against the separation of concepts, institutions, and definitions and the struggle to create.

The struggle against reified identities most immediately appears in the Zapatistas’ act of covering their faces, and their written documents also explain this commitment. Marcos articulates a process by which the Zapatistas, in becoming a collective “nobody,” embody a collective antipower. Their identity emerges in everyday struggles to dissolve relations of power over others. Those without identification—the “nobody” that makes up the majority of the planet and that emerges as a collective within struggle—create another possible world.Footnote ⁴⁷ Marcos pushes this further:

When employing the “fetishization-as-process” perspective, individuals and communities cannot opt out of struggle, as the content of each category, each attempt at identification, is itself struggle. Identity emerges, as Subcommander Moisés put it, in collective work.Footnote ⁴⁹ The conflict between, on the one hand, definition, identification, or the imposition of limits, and on the other hand, creation or the transcendence of limits, unifies historically specific conflicts in the modern world-system.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Zapatistas bring this general struggle against fetishization to bear on the historically particular situation of Mexico amid neoliberal capitalism that continuously works to reify market relations. In taking up this struggle against fetishization, the Zapatistas concretize freedom as a reality encountered in particular forms of struggle.

The Zapatistas clarify in the “Second Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle” that they “aren't proposing a new world, but something preceding a new world.” The “antechamber” they seek to create forces space for political struggle.Footnote ⁵¹ Ongoing struggle against fetishization and settled meanings in identifications and abstractions, taken up in the act of negation—of as Marcos says, “recording past pains and rage”—establishes the possibility of another world. Negation allows for the possibility of “drawing in the notebook the maps, calendars, and geographies that have been forgotten above.”Footnote ⁵² In contesting the conceptions of history and the delegations of meaning within the modern world-system, the Zapatistas inform a practice of living in relation to and participating in another possible world. They demonstrate the practice of “widening” the “crack” in the “wall” of history that presents itself as the only possible world: “the Zapatistas have learned that if you stop clawing at the crack, it closes.”Footnote ⁵³ The hope of the other side of the wall, or faith, grounds this praxis of negation, or the political strategy of enlarging the crack. If the Zapatista would be asked what is on the other side of the wall, Marcos writes, “They would respond, ‘nothing,’ but they would smile as if they had said ‘everything.’”Footnote ⁵⁴ The possibility of another world—“a world in which many worlds fit”Footnote ⁵⁵—lies in struggle itself. The simultaneous claim of “nothing” and “everything” to describe that which exists beyond the wall describes a meaning of another possible world: it already exists in the struggle to live in and create other worlds that always remains more than, but never detached from, our creative action. Another possible world lies in “a struggle against that which encloses us.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The struggle to transform the modern world-system from our various positions within it is both the conflict with the process of fetishization and the participation in a reality beyond the process of fetishization. This struggle against fetishization, which is simultaneous with a struggle for freedom, can inform the notion of freedom—itself often fetishized—that underlies the kingdom of God by reattaching it to struggle.

The Meaning of Freedom within the Zapatista Movement as a Theological Mediation

While the theoretical and political praxis of the Zapatistas can inform a meaning of freedom to guide theological reflection, it can also shape a particular orientation of theology. Understanding the work of the Zapatistas as a mediation for theology counters apologetic versions of theology that perceive Christian ideas or identity as themselves worthy of defense. Similarly, using the work of the Zapatistas as a mediation for theology resists simply translating ways of thinking, being, and hoping outside Christian dogmatic formulas into Christian rhetoric. The commitment to opposing fetishization precludes what Dianne Stewart has called the “hermeneutical gymnastics” that theologians go through to convince themselves and others of the real or true liberating aspect of Christian claims.Footnote ⁵⁷ Avoiding such theological approaches is not a new insight; what is new about an orientation of theology shaped by the Zapatistas is the overlap between struggle and freedom, which becomes clear when we read the Zapatistas’ resistance within larger political struggles contesting the process of fetishization.

The understanding of freedom developed within the Zapatista movement can clarify the meaning of freedom that underlies the kingdom of God and can also clarify how some theologians have taken on an understanding of freedom against fetishization. Gutiérrez describes Job's friends as talking about God in a way that endlessly repeats established claims about the God in which they believe. This repetition that assumes a formal procedure to be correct and true in itself substitutes for a struggle to encounter and bear witness to that God in history. Gutiérrez describes such arguments that are committed to an idea of God articulated out of a limited framework as “like a wheel spinning in air: they do not go anywhere.” The theology of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar resembles “the wasted energy of intellectuals who get excited but do not actually do anything; they are incapable of taking a forward step, because the impulse that makes them string arguments together is purely verbal.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Drawing on the work of the Zapatistas as a theological mediation confirms the “wasted energy” of theological reflections that continue in the style of Job's friends, who “believe in their theology rather than in the God of their theology.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Although admittedly difficult to see a claim about method as radical, the work of the Zapatistas forces precisely such a method to the fore: the primacy of conflict, and specifically of conflict with fetishization, itself opens a substantial meaning of freedom underneath its fetishized versions.

Various theologians clarify that, because Christian faith posits the incarnation of divinity in Jesus of Nazareth, God-talk has to come forth from history. Taking the work of the Zapatistas as a theological mediation both affirms this orientation of Christology and suggests a stronger claim: a critical theology—in its academic form but also in its lived and everyday formFootnote ⁶⁰—is a site of freedom. The basic Christian claim of how humans encounter divinity privileges history over nature.Footnote ⁶¹ As the book of Job suggests, we encounter divinity outside what Subcommander Marcos describes as the “antireality hygiene” of theoretical work in a “sterile laboratory.”Footnote ⁶² Reality grounds discourse about God; texts and traditions are a part of the discourse insofar as they are part of the human attempt to respond to and express reality, but they can never eclipse reality as the center. The “sterile laboratory” approach to theology retreats into Eurocentric thought patterns in order to preserve its coherence. But it is not just that—the “sterile laboratory” approach also retreats from the human encounter with divinity in history.

When describing who he would like to be, Sobrino says he “would like to be a person who is ‘honest about reality.’… I would like to be a human being and a believer who is affected by reality, and, professionally, one who theologizes about realities.”Footnote ⁶³ Thinking theologically requires a substantial connection to reality and an intellectual approach that can adequately make sense of reality. A break with reality doesn't merely result in bad theology; it is not theology at all. Theological discourse irresponsive to reality is only idolatry. It lives in reference to fetishizations rather than to a deeper structure of meaning that prompts conflict with fetishization. The Zapatistas indicate that the social, political, and intellectual activity of conflict coincides with this deeper structure of meaning. If theology begins with spirituality, with the human encounter with and response to divinity, then reality has to be the ground. Precisely because of the character of historical reality as dynamic and open and as the site of the encounter with divine mystery,Footnote ⁶⁴ theology is not possible in what Marcos calls the sterile laboratory.

In light of the theological importance of getting out of the sterile laboratory—an importance rooted in responsiveness to divinity—Sobrino claims that the most important task for Catholic theology in the present context is overcoming Docetism. He prioritizes a struggle to live, think, and act in relation to fetishizations of reality rather than in reference to reality itself.Footnote ⁶⁵ Sobrino offers an apt metaphor: when theology decides “in advance what comprises its sphere of reality,” it manifests as “a subtle form of gentrification.”Footnote ⁶⁶ A theology like that of Job's friends, or a theology that commits to a rhetoric or a tradition of thought rather than to divinity, pushes out theological reflection born from a historical encounter with divinity. The danger of a gentrified discipline of theology that relies on fetishized concepts—such as versions of love, freedom, development, liberation, or particular identities—is not the danger of an impoverished theology; it entails the danger of no theology at all or of “theology” referring to something other than a critical reflection spurred by a community's historical encounter with divinity.

A gentrified theological field conceals and distorts God. Sobrino describes the precedence reality has over texts in his theological reflection:

Concealing reality subverts the theological task. This concealment of reality “does not allow God to be seen in reality.”Footnote ⁶⁸ This carries implications. Delinking Christian theology from its traditional mediation in European philosophy is essential for the very basis of the theological task, namely, asking how we encounter God in history, because this delinking allows for the interrogation of widely accepted meanings of concepts within European traditions that are not natural but rather the result of often violent historical processes. Freedom is but one example. Resisting the gentrification of theology also implies working to hold ideas in relation to struggle. In this respect, Ivan Petrella is right to argue that liberation theology ought to return to a commitment to a “historical project” that motivated its early generation of thinkers.Footnote ⁶⁹ But we can be more specific: such a historical project ought to be critical—it should confront fetishization in order to serve as an “antechamber” that precedes a new world—and it ought to motivate all thinking that calls itself theology. The practical and theoretical work of the Zapatistas is one mediation that can help theologians to critically appraise the fetishization integral to the present world-system in light of hope and faith in an alternative.