faith, charity, and hope: Liberating the New Christian

faith, charity, and hope: Liberating the New Christian While Liberating Humanity

(Tina)Theresa Hannah-Munns
Liberation Theology
Peter Bisson
March 23rd, 2005

The one process of liberation produces individual New Christians whose faith, charity, and hope in Jesus strive to create a new Christian humanity. This motivates social praxis on a larger scale to liberate Latin America while still being orientated “towards the future” with the arrival of the salvific Kingdom of God. The New Christian knows communion with God occurs in her/his relationships within the Latin American struggle (faith) and this knowledge directs actions in the history of her/his everyday life (charity). Hope in Jesus as ‘The Liberator’ is the foundation of strength that allows for deep identification, commitment, and motivation to combine within social praxis in order to end the political struggle of Latin America. No longer concerned with “precritical consciousness” , s/he would follow a utopian ideal of society that comes from the “Christian hope (that) opens … in an attitude of spiritual childhood.

Hope transforms the present by orientating one towards the future, as seen within history having “quickened its pace”. Individual self awareness includes faith “that humanity is outgrowing its present condition and entering a new era”. The “New Political Theology” does not seek to escape history but to embrace it by reflecting on it alongside the hope in Jesus’ evangelical message that has political impact.
Reading these signs of the times gives the New Christian faith that is supported by a “scientific knowledge of reality” and leads to transformation anchored within current actions. Utopia creates an ideal that motivates social praxis towards the future in a framework for political action and charity.

Hope frees individuals to commit fully to social praxis while it also “demands and judges” each of the commitments within a postcritical reflection that moves to praxis in “a service to human liberation”. The New Christian follows Jesus’ example by creating true fellowship, committing fully to the needy, and delivering “head-on opposition to the rich and powerful”. Social problems dissolve “if every individual would become as radically converted as Jesus demands.”

Radical conversion is the unified process of liberation that currently challenges the social order through each individual’s conversion; “because of one’s hope in the resurrected Christ, one is liberated from the narrow limits of the present and can think and act completely in terms of what is to come.” Faith through scientific rationality, political action and charity, and hope in the utopian ideal of a just society is the liberation process that is complex in its “differentiated unity” of economics, politics, and social ideologies. These are tied together by the hope for freedom “from sin and entrance into communion with God and with all persons”. This hope, that backs charity and faith, propels the New Christian into achieving a new Christian humanity.