Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Enrique Dussel on "the poor" and "the kingdom"...

(The complete article from which these quotes are taken can be found here)

"[R]eligion is not some ideological superstructure which justifies the prevailing system; religion is rather the infrastructural undermining of the sinful status quo and the construction of a new order in history as an offering or sacrifice to God, a sharing in that building of his Kingdom which is God's own gift.

The revolutionary who is a believer will not see his religious position as a matter of accident or of little importance. His religion is a radical openness, an enabling condition of greater political and economic creativity in his work, his service of the poor. This service, 'already' in the Kingdom since it is outside the system, is worship of God. Thus the poor are a necessary mediation of the act of worship of the Infinite...

All actual, material, and thus religious service of the poor is in itself worship of God and the building of his Kingdom. To deny poverty is to deny the absence of the Kingdom in the present system. It is to affirm the existing system as the kingdom of this world. To affirm the poor, on the other hand, and to serve their eventual liberation, in the structures and in history, is to witness to the presence of the Kingdom in the satisfying of the poor and to the absence of the Kingdom in the imperfection of society...

The Church, God's remnant among the peoples of earth, has evangelism for its calling. To evangelize is to bring good news to the poor, to turn the many into a people and to make that people aware of the destiny that God has prepared for them: the Kingdom. Not just aware, but active, now that there is a real possibility of conquering sin, of restoring their wealth to the poor and of building a new order in which there will be neither rich nor poor, neither oppressors nor oppressed, neither nations of the centre nor nations of the periphery, neither ruling classes nor those that suffer the rule of others."

No comments: