Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 27:1 (NA 1976)
Article: The Man Of War And The Suffering Servant The Old Testament And The Theology Of Liberation
Author: John Goldingay

TynBul 27:1 (1976) p. 79

The Man Of War And The Suffering Servant The Old Testament And The Theology Of Liberation1

John Goldingay

The theology of revolution in the west, the theology of liberation in the third world and among groups such as blacks in America who can identify with the third world,2 are responses to what are seen as the facts of human life as it has to be lived today by peoples for whom oppression, injustice, deprivation, the absence of fundamental human rights, are basic facts of experience. For these victims of the constitutional violence of their leaders or of the west, such are the realities which make life (such as it is) what it is. If their situation is to alter this will require political changes of a revolutionary kind.

The question is, if this is how life is in the world for my neighbour, what does Christianity, what does being a Christian mean? What perspective does the Bible bring to this situation? How are we to go about ‘Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation’?3

In this paper I want to look at how some Latin American theologians, in particular, have used the exodus story (Exodus 1–15) to throw light on their peoples’ need of

TynBul 27:1 (1976) p. 80

liberation’.4 The main works I shall be referring to are A Theology of Liberation by the Peruvian Gustavo Gutiérrez5 , the first of these Latin American works to be published in England; the Mexican José Porfirio Miranda’s Marx and the Bible6 ; the Argentinian José Severino Croatto’s Liberación y Libertad7 ; a survey by another Argentinian, José Miguez Bonino, whose English edition is called Revolutionary Theology Comes of Age8 ; the documentation of a dialogue on liberation in the Latin American Bishops’ Council, Liberación: Dialogos en el CELAM (Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano)9 and articles in the Argentinian journal Revista Biblica and elsewhere.

My thesis is as follows

(i) There are real parallels between the Israelites’ situation in Egypt and that of oppressed peoples today, and the assertion that God also wills the latter’s liberation is prima facie<...