Fetishism and Justification

For Karl Marx, the capitalist system conceals not only the connection between social labour and the surplus value produced by labour but also the social character of commodity production.  In this way, capitalism alienates the labourers from their products, their self-representations, and it establishes the “fetishism of commodities” in which “the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves” (Capital, vol.1).

For Marx, commodities are products of social labour, of vital labourers who are interlinked.  Commodity fetishism occurs when the perception that commodities are extensively exchangeable, barely refers to the personalities and interrelations of the actual producers in a particular mode of production.  Instead, there arises the perception that commodities are exchangeable by nature, just as the law of supply and demand appears to be a natural law of trade.

Commodities and money are exchangeable because they seem to possess innately the capacity to substitute for one another in objective and calculable proportions.  Such a general belief is a fetishism that conceals and supports capitalist exploitation and the alienation of labour.

Using Marx’s protest against alienated labour and commodity fetishism, Jose Miguez Bonino reinterprets the Pauline-Lutheran principle of “justification not by works.”

For Marx, labour both expresses and transforms the following: the integral person of the labourer, his or her relations with fellow labourers, and their interaction with nature.  Alienated labour is objectified as money and commodities, which appear to be utterly exchangeable and to possess capabilities and values on their own.  The apparently self-exchangeable nature of commodities conceals, homogenizes and deforms the particular personalities and interrelations of the labourers who produce them.

In justification through works, the religious practices become valuable in themselves, and they conceal from their performers the real status of their relationships with God and neighbour.

Self-justifying works are like commodities, they become calculable and impersonal objects.  These works earn calculable merits that oblige God to render in return the equivalent grace or justification.  The interaction of the votary with God is depersonalized and deformed into an exchange relationship.

Those justified by objective “works of the law” boast of their own worth or of their grasp of God’s will (cf Romans 2:17-20; 3:27-28).  They are like buyers who boast of the bargains they are able to buy, or like moneyed and mighty exploiters who boast of their money and might.

A true work of faith is done apart from the care over calculation and reward.  It is a genuine good work, whose value is inalienable from the personality and fidelity of the doer.  And the true work of faith necessarily personalizes the doer into a divine work of love for the neighbour.

For Miguez, justification is not an inward but an integral reality, just as faith, as both gift and response, is not merely psychical or intellectual but integral, a unity of belief and practice.  Justification is God’s gift through the mediation of Christ.

Faith, Idealism and Ideology

To teach and preach Christian love, without taking into account the prevailing social structures, is to make this love blindly idealist and quite susceptible to ideological manipulation.  For Jose Miguez Bonino, idealist hermeneutics facilitate the formation of absolute ideas about God, and debase human corporeality and historicity.  In this way, the faithful God of the covenant could be turned into the immutable God whose heavenly cry beckons us away from radical political activity.  The faithful Son could be turned into the absolutely obedient victim and the substitute prey for a vengeful God.

The idealist tendency is strong in Christianity not only owing to the early infusion of Platonic concepts but also because of the belief in the irreducible power of the Godhead.  For Miguez, Platonic concepts can be expunged from Christianity, but divine omnipotence may not be denied.

A major challenge for pastors and theologians is to affirm divine omnipotence primarily in relation to the concrete empowerment of the oppressed and marginalized groups in these times.  An idealist perversion of the belief in divine omnipotence comes easily when this belief is proclaimed “in the abstract,” especially when the proclamation does not take into account the contemporary needs and struggles of the lower classes (“Christian Political Ethics”).

Abstract affirmations of divine omnipotence promote an idealist view of history, as the historical agency of the poor and the lowly get easily obscured.  One ends up viewing the passage of history as, e.g., the predestined long pull from an immutable God.  In such a scheme, one of the real partners in the divine-human covenant gets smothered, and history becomes only the action and will of God.  From here, it is but a small step toward fatalism and its noxious ideological forms.

It is a necessary task of pastors and theologians to de-ideologize church practices and teachings that have contributed to the dehumanization of people.  In the case of Juan Luis Segundo, he did not aim for the total elimination of ideology from theology and pastoral work, as he believed that faith without ideology is “dead.”  Faith that is not accompanied by ideology will have insignificant effect on a particular social context.  Faith will end up fruitless and lifeless if it only floats on the clouds of timeless principles and does not get incarnated or enacted in a social system.

 

To de-ideologize theology implies not only the elimination of noxious ideologies but also the assimilation of beneficial ones in order to make theology relevant and well-grounded.  Examples of harmful ideologies are fascism, Stalinism, and androcentrism.  Beneficial ones might be egalitarianism and feminism.

An ideology is any social theory with historic effects whether harmful or helpful, dehumanizing or humanizing, oppressive or liberating.  A social theory attempts to explain the reproduction and change of social practices across time and space.

Christ the Representative

Christ is the representative of God among us and our representative before God.  The nature of Christ’s work as Mediator is representation and not substitution.  Dorothee Soelle explained the distinction as follows:

“The ‘differentia specifica’ which distinguishes representation from substitution…[is] the perspective of time.  Representation regards man from the standpoint of time.  It gains time for man who is for the moment incapacitated…The chief thing which God does for us is to give us time, new and real time for living.” (“Christ the Representative”)

As our representative before God, Christ does not substitute for us: he does not take away our responsibility to fulfil the divine will to humanize humanity.  “The mediation of Christ…is the restitution of man as God’s free and active agent in God’s humanizing purpose” (Jose Miguez Bonino).

Through his life, ministry, death and resurrection, Christ gains time and historical space for people to participate fully in the completion of the divine purpose.  Christ inaugurates the new covenant, which does not abrogate but fulfils the divine-human partnership in the active care for the neighbour, society and history.  In the passion and death of Christ, the intimate participation of God in human death sealed the renewal of the divine-human partnership, and enabled the practice of altruistic self-denial to become fully humanizing.

 
Justification through Christ means forgiveness of sins.  The offer of forgiveness and the call to repentance, however, should be understood in close connection with the historical mission of Jesus to proclaim God’s Kingdom, preach good news to the poor, liberate the oppressed, and heal the infirm and the broken-hearted (Luke 4:18, 4:40-44, 5:17-26, 13:1-17).
 
In fulfilling his mission, Jesus opposed the dehumanizing legalism and greed of the religious and politico-economic authorities.  He showed that the forgiveness of sins calls for the comprehensive healing of persons and the courageous transformation of ruined lives and stark historical conditions.  Forgiveness is not only individual, and sin is not a private or one-person reality.  Sin can be public or interpersonal but never private.
 
The redemptive mission of Jesus to liberate those who are oppressed reveals the non-private reality of sin.  To sin is to dehumanize or, more concretely, to oppress the neighbour.  To sin is indeed to hurl an insult at God, but the insult does not immediately reach God.  The insult reaches God through the nearest and densest mediation of the divine presence.  This nearest and densest mediation is the Son-present-in-the-persons-of-the-lowliest-children-of-God (Matthew 25:34-45).

To sin, to insult God, is to oppress anybody of our fellow sons and daughters of God, especially the poor and the lowly outsiders.  The sinful condition is oppressive both to others and to oneself.  At the heart of sinful oppression is a mistrust of the other’s God-given capability to offer and receive love.  Through a deep mistrust of the God-given love-ability of the other(s), sinners mistrust God, and thus sin is unbelief.

The deep mistrust of both neighbour and God leads either to despair or to an excessive trust in one’s own capabilities or in the products of one’s capabilities.  Thus, the sinful condition, this deep mistrust, leads often to idolatry, either self-idolatry or the idolatry of man-made effects such as money, the free market, or the national security doctrine.  The forgiveness of sins through God’s Son involves the deep infusion of trust, liberation from oppression, and the downfall of idolatry.

 
To become God’s liberating representative among us, the Son was fully incarnated and humanized within history.  His life, death and resurrection is a perfect incarnation of divine Word and Power.  According to Miguez, this was not “a sort of abrupt departure from God’s ‘normal’ way of dealing with human life and reality.  On the contrary, the Incarnation becomes the clue for understanding all of God’s dealings with human history and with the whole of world reality.” (“Christian Political Ethics”)  The Incarnation definitively reaffirms the divine will to act through human means and to favour the meaningful autonomy of history.
 
This incarnational perspective challenges pastors and theologians to develop a down-to-earth sensitivity to actual human needs, struggles, and potentials.  It also deepens our understanding of divine omnipotence and transcendence.  According to Miguez:
 
“When we say that God is all-powerful, we do not mean that he substitutes for us, or prevents the existence of evil with a decree.  And while he reserves the freedom to definitively save his plan from failure, he still retains the capacity and patience to continue working and to complete his plan – that is our gift – throughout the frustrations and sufferings of history.” (“Room To Be People”)

Divine omnipotence empowers but does not overpower human activity and contextual freedom.  Furthermore, as in the crucifixion, divine power chooses not to magically or automatically overrule human injustice.  After every human tragedy, the living Word encourages us to begin anew, for divinity is a powerful persistence that aims not only to change things but more so to form full-fledged persons, who can be humanized and personalized only in concrete struggles and contextual freedom.

Covenant-Prophetic Faith

“The Old Testament work of scholars like Gerhard von Rad…(has) shown the deeply historical character of the biblical witness” (Jose Miguez Bonino).  Von Rad affirms that ancient Israel’s covenant-prophetic theology was dynamically historical: its world view was non-cyclical in contrast to that of the surrounding peoples of the Fertile Crescent.  It believed that the Israelite people was constituted by a series of canonical or definitive historical events and, particularly with the prophets, it was receptive and responsive to new historical movements, changes and chances.

The covenant-prophetic faith believes that divinity is actively involved in history.  YHWH is not primarily a god of the rich harvest or of fertility like Baal, who is susceptible to the death and renewal cycles of the natural environment.  Certainly, Yhwh is the creator of the physical world and the guarantor of the continuance of the natural cycles.  God favors these cycles not because he needs to but because he wants to.

In contrast to the gods of the Fertile Crescent, Yhwh’s will and power is revealed primarily in unrepeatable liberational events like the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan.  “What distinguishes the Holy Spirit from the magic ‘spirits’ is that it acts through historic mediations” (Miguez).

The biblical testimony to these liberational events is meant to help normatively believers in every age to obey the contemporary divine summons to help liberate and humanize people in their concrete situations.  The biblical message is meant to inspire a humanizing praxis rather than to express propositions about God’s being or essence.  Miguez writes:

“The Biblical message is a call, an announcement-proclamation (kerygma) which is given in order to put in motion certain actions and to produce certain situations…God is not the content of the message but the wherefrom and the whereto, the originator and the impulse of this course of action and these conditions…By defining an event as God’s action, the Bible is…pointing to the divinely wrought and revealed background and power of the human action demanded.” (“Marxist Critical Tools”).

Not even in the revelation of the divine name to Moses (Exodus 3:14) was an ontological statement intended; the divine name could be understood only in the light of liberational events that would still occur.  In this way, the holy name has done justice to divine freedom, which coincides with the gracious plan to save human beings through human intermediaries.  Miguez firmly believes in “the reality of a God who ever remains gratuitously ‘himself’ in the very process of being totally ‘for us’ and ‘in us’” (“Historical Praxis”).

Miguez’s biblical theology recognizes that the covenant-prophetic faith is not essentially an intellectual assent to revealed, supernatural and timeless truths.  Biblical faith is neither speculative knowledge nor a passive contemplation of abstract axioms.  Instead, “faith is always a concrete obedience” (Miguez), an obedient knowing, and an efficacious realization of the divine summons, which is actively involved in biblical and post-biblical history.

Authentic faith is an attentive knowledge of God’s historical summons, and requires a concrete engagement with history.  The biblical faith is a practising faith, a practical form of knowing the active Word.  “Faith is like the strength of a muscle: we are only aware of it when we use it.  The only faith is in the performance of the faith.” (Miguez)

Miguez’s understanding of faith affirms that it is both a divine gift and a human response.  God inaugurated history, and continues to be active in it.  God’s historical activity calls us to faithful practice, a concrete obedience to the living Word.  The pre-condition for every faithful practice is the reality of the prior divine commands and actions.

The Atheism of Marx

During the lifetime of Karl Marx (1818-83), most of the institutional churches and christian monarchs were opposing the labor movements. Because of his revolutionary humanism, Marx embraced atheism and denounced the religions that were condemning the struggle of the working class and which were extolling the status quo as divinely instituted.

Argentinean theologian Jose Míguez Bonino considers the atheism of Marx a functional critique of religion and not a denunciation of religion as such. The churches today should be open to this functional critique, for it parallels the biblical denunciation of idolatry.

Prophetic denunciation has been directed at such holy gifts as the temple (Jeremiah 7:1-15), the sabbath (Matthew 12:1-14), the law (Romans 3:19-31), faith (James 2:14-26), and the love of God (1 John 3:17-18). These are divine gifts, but God’s word condemns them whenever they are turned into mystifications of, and sacred veils for, injustice, inhumanity, legalism, and the amassing of things needed by roofless heads and unfed looks.

In the midst of dehumanizing mystifications, and in the midst of any god we ourselves have made whether it be capital, weaponry, the Leader, or the Party, “only an atheist can be a good Christian,” in the same way that “the early Christians were accused of being atheists and were judged and condemned as such for refusing to believe in the ruling gods of their society” (Míguez 1979).

These mystifications and gods represent a denial of the presence of the Holy Spirit either in our sensuous humanity or in the neighbor, who is a true temple of God (1 Corinthians 3:16-17, 6:19). “This is real atheism: God is denied in the neighbor and the neighbor in God” (Míguez 1976).

The basic ethic of the humanism of Marx can be summed up this way: “solidarity is better than egoism” (Míguez 1976). This basic ethic, however, is opposed by a deep-rooted element in Marx’s critique of religion which he most concisely expressed thus: “religion is precisely the recognition of man by detour through an intermediary” (On the Jewish Question).

In Marx was entrenched the yearning for absolute immediacy. He yearned for the removal of all mediations and intermediaries in social life, for he regarded even the best intermediary as partially alienating or subordinating. This is the heart of his rejection of both religion and the State. He envisaged the totally emancipated society to comprise of individuals who will be both co-operative and self-conscious. Social consciousness and self-consciousness will coincide completely.

For Marx, the genuinely free individual will know oneself fully, know one’s fellows fully, and be known by them fully. As he put it: “the religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to nature” (Capital, vol. 1). There will be no need for any Church or State to indoctrinate or to force people to be fit for social life.

Marx’s aspiration for absolute immediacy contradicts his ethic of solidarity, for solidarity can only be genuine when it is a unity among real others. Otherness would disappear if immediacy became absolute. “Solidarity is based on differentiation, on the existence of a real ‘other’ whom I do not absorb into myself or use instrumentally for my own self-realization” (Míguez 1976). Every real other has some aspect external to me, some capacity outside my control, and some degree of discretion, which I neither have given nor can take away.

Marx’s aspiration for absolute immediacy, more than his atheism, is a point of divergence between humanistic Marxism and Christian faith. Christians cannot disavow either the uplifting and humanizing mediation of Christ or the otherness of God. Christians believe that, if someday humanity became fully emancipated and united, it would be due to a great humanizing force that does not fully abide within either humanity or nature.

Sources Consulted:

Míguez Bonino, Jose. Christians and Marxists: The Mutual Challenge to Revolution. London, 1976.

Míguez Bonino, Jose. Room To Be People: An Interpretation of the Message of the Bible for Today’s World. Geneva, 1979.