https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zGYjbLOimg&t=917s
Written by Paul S. Chung (Dr. Habil), Director and Editor-in-Chief, Public Theology in Forum
I had a great opportunity to interview Prof. Ulrich Duchrow at Heidelberg, Germany. He has given an account of several important issues in dealing with Palestine-Israel conflict, War in Ukraine, significance of religion, and international justice. He has offered a critical creative avenue to dialogue between liberation theology and public theology.
For Duchrow, liberation theology has begun by challenging military dictatorship in 1960s Latin America and continues to advocate preferential option for the poor. Of remarkable significance is that Duchrow takes into account prophetic ethics and critical attitude among axial religions.
This position is a constructive way of revitalizing the place of religion with the framework of liberation theology. As a rule, this approach is surprising, because liberation theology stands in tradition of Marxist critique of religion as an opium of people.
To be sure, Marx himself does not discard a prophetc horizon of religion in the sense of social protest to oppression and misery. Capitalist society is of religiously perverted character, because it is dominated by commodity fetishism. Where commodity becomes an object of fetishism or idol worship, this perverted society creates the society according to its image, controls human consciousness and reproduces its desire for more money.
In so doing, a critique of religion, as seen in terms of commodity fetishism, has an emancipatory character from the ritual of money-mamon. "You cannot serve both God and mamon"--it echoes Marx's critique of religion.
On the other hand, Marx problematizes the state religion at his time, in which religion serves only the crown. Altar and crown are so espoused that state religion discards an interest of those on margins. This is what public theology learns from liberation approach to religion.
Other than that, publc theology takes a step further to articulate religious construction of social cultural reality. In fact, religion is not private nor merely inward, but expresses itself in ritual or worship in the assembly of the faithful. Religious teaching and ethical attitide would influence adherents, penetrating their consciousness through religious collective representations.
God-Society-identity can be obviously seen in Judaism, Islam or American civil religion among others. This reality becomes crucial in religous conflicts in the world.
Given the identity thesis, religious idea or discourse can be bound up with material interests in wider spectrum among religious carriers, while their status (not class consciousness unlike Marxist position or liberation theology) is embedded with power relations in terms of status association, monopoly and social privilege.
Religious idea can be tainted with power mechanism at a level of status in social caste and runs counter to its original meaning in the course of history. For example, it is Max Weber that clarifies elective affinity between religious idea (Calvinist predestination) and innerworldly asceticism (its ecomonic ethics) rearding the spirit of capitalism.
In the course of capitalist history, such religious discourse and economic ethical practice have continued to drive and reinforce Capitalist accumulation and development. In the end, however, such running is caught in an iron cage of threatening freedom and losing meaning of life. How do we transcend such pathology in our century and its consequence of religious egotism and rugged individualism?
For this task, an immanent critique is required to cut through setback of religion or its disgrace effect by delving into the source of the religious idea. A longing for God the Wholly Other (Max Horkheimer) remains an undercurrent in characterizing position of public theology in comparison with liberation theology.
In a nutshell, public theology relocates critique of religion and commodity fetishism in wider spectrum of religious construction of social cultural reality toward immanent critique from within, creative interpretation of the religious texts, and solidarity effect against the disgrace effect. So, religion has more space in the framework of public theology based on social scienidic study and life-world.