Jesus as Liberation Theologist

[marmar]

from Consortium News:


Jesus as Liberation Theologist
April 22, 2013

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration decried “liberation theology” as Marxist and quietly approved when right-wing regimes murdered priests and nuns. But new scholarship reveals that “liberation theology” was carrying forward the real-life demands of Jesus for social justice, as Rev. Howard Bess explains.

By the Rev. Howard Bess


Christian churches have created a theological understanding of Jesus that has made him the unique son of God, born of a virgin, died as a sacrifice for sin, and raised from the dead, the second person of the Trinitarian God. The volumes that have been written about this theological Jesus are almost endless.

However, in the past two centuries, scholars have been asking very different questions about the flesh-and-blood Jesus of history. At first those conducting the search were a trickle. Today they are a flood.

The first attempts could not find a Jesus of history in the narratives of the four gospels of the New Testament. Then, about 40 years ago, a new generation of scholars took a different approach. They looked at the history, culture, economics and religion of Galilee in the first century C.E. In that context, the teachings of Jesus took on new life and the Jesus of history emerged in a new way.

Sometimes called “the third quest for the historical Jesus,” this new surge of scholarship was different because it was interdisciplinary. It was led not by theologians but by historians, sociologists, economists and political scientists. Their work placed Jesus in the setting of an advanced agrarian society, an aristocratic empire and a peasant backwater. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2013/04/22/jesus-as-liberation-theologist/