Chapter Four - Domination and Political Theology - Section Ten

The Community of Faith and Action in Liberation Theology

The idea of Christian community links theology with practice. A central component in much practical liberation theology is the Base Christian Community or communidade eclesiales de base, occasionally centred on the local church, but more often almost spontaneously forming in pockets of society infiltrated by believers who gather together for worship and practical action for justice. As with other elements in liberation theology, Base Christian Communities had their antecedents in Western movements, such as some monastic orders, worker­priest groups, the Catholic Worker movement and the like, formed by religious and laity seeking to live their faith more authentically among the ordinary people in society by sharing their sufferings and joining their struggles. the evangelical component in these earlier movements, concern that the Church was neglecting factory workers, the urban and rural poor, and society's outcasts, nevertheless there was a current of popular empowerment necessarily running through movements like the Young Christian Workers, who lived and worked alongside the people and, where they felt it necessary, helping them struggle for human and labour rights. The influence of European Christian movements began to be felt in South America during the latter 1950s, and steadily grew during the 1960s. There is no single form or model for these communities, some simply being house churches in which believers gather for worship and Bible study, others taking on communal characteristics in which believers live and work closely together, sharing their lives in ways similar to monks or nuns in religious communities, and engaging in a wide range of community activities such as providing medical services, food, or running local schools. In many parts of the so­called Third World, especially in Latin America and the Philippines, Base Christian Communities have played central roles as mobilising centres for local and regional agitation for greater justice and popular empowerment (Berryman, 1987: 63 ­ 68). It should not be surprising, then, to find Base Christian Communities becoming targets for especial repression in many so­called Third World countries, precisely because oppressive power structures cannot tolerate living alternatives to themselves containing the potential to develop challenges to their domination. The idea of Christians as a Îpeople of God1, contrasting the idea of Îa people1 as drawn together through fraternity, attempted equality, and a communicative ethic (after Habermas) over against a state undergirded by domination in Weber's sense, immediately lends itself to a view of practical political theology as a direct, practical challenge to the power and domination of the secular state, and to the institutional Church allied with the state. José Comblin draws a political theological view of the state as a servant of the people under God, which incidentally is a Biblical view of the state as indicated by an accurate exegesis of Romans 12 and 13, together with a view of the reality of the Christian community as an actualisation of the Parousia: ... the state has never accepted the role of servant without being compelled to it by the active resistance of a responsible people. Such an active, antipower people is the people of God. Nor is there any real people of God if Christians are not in the process of becoming a people, an assembly of free persons struggling against the state and its powers. The church as an institution is Christian only if it supports and defends such a people (Comblin, 1979: 195).