Dreams of Peace and Freedom by Winter J. M

Author:Winter, J. M. [Winter, J. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300127515
Publisher: YaleUP
Published: 2006-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

Betrayal and Transcendence: The Road to 1968

There was another way in which the theology of liberation helped constitute utopian visions in the same period. In this context the name of Bonhoeffer is essential.43 Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words brought to Europe a different kind of liberation theology, but one with equally powerful political and social ramifications. “We have learned,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “to see the great events of the history of the world from beneath—from the viewpoint of the useless, the suspect, the abused, the powerless, the oppressed, the despised. In a word, from the viewpoint of the suffering.”44

And from the viewpoint of the Jews of Europe. The words of Bonhoeffer helped ignite a disturbing debate in Germany and elsewhere in Europe not about development or European achievements, but about European barbarism, and about the supine response of many Christians and their churches to the Nazi tyranny and to the extermination of the Jews. In the 1960s this debate produced accusations that crossed generational lines and provided much of the moral ammunition of the student revolt of 1968.

The influence of the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in liberation theologians both in Latin America and Europe raises an issue of central importance in our understanding of the upheavals of the 1960s.45 Bonhoeffer symbolized a radical critique of existing moralities, in particular those based on religious conservatism and nationalist beliefs. His life, and the echoes of his writing in the 1960s, help us to understand much about 1968 as a moral indictment of the generation of men and women in power in the post-1945 decades. From this angle 1968 appears as a moment when many people, especially young people, expressed a widespread sense of the betrayal of moral principles by ruling groups with a shady past to hide. But some of them went further and saw in protest or painting or play writing or in living experimentally the means of transcending these failures. This powerful mixture of anger and imagination is what is usually termed the spirit of ‘68. The remainder of this chapter will examine this moment in terms of the student revolt of 1968 and the Prague spring of the same year.

Let us pause for a moment to reconsider the meaning of the term utopia in light of these movements. In this context, a utopian vision arises out of a moral indictment of a set of institutions or beliefs which have been corrupted. But instead of leading to quietism or despair or nihilism, such a cri de coeur becomes utopian when it informs a vision of a different world, one with a moral order remote from that evident in the debased present. Thus 1960s utopians of different kinds and in different places found organized Christianity wanting, or state socialism a hollow shell, or liberal institutions a sham. What made them visionaries was the strength of their convictions that these ways of living could be reconstructed in authentic and radical ways.

We have had a brief look at liberation theology in Latin America in this context.

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