Theology As Fear

From M.I. Aguilar, The History and Politics of Latin American Theology vol. III, London: SCM Press, 2008, chapter 4.

When in 1977 I ventured for the first time on a large urban area of Santiago that I still remember as dark, always muddy and with shady characters on the street corners I felt fear. It was the fear of the political activist who feared to be caught but the physical fear of walking in places where if I were to be attacked by someone with a knife I would not have had a chance. I noticed that many times people walked with me from an urban shack to the bus stop but inside the bus I also felt fear. I learned to live with fear and the fear didn’t go away. It was like a performer who feels the adrenaline pumping before the performance, but the fear I felt was intense because I felt on my own and without agency. Yes, on arrival at the entrance to the shanty town I could chose not to walk further but it was an abandonment of my own choice and will that led me there, in order to share a few thoughts on the biblical text or try to support a youth outreach towards drug addicts. After a few weeks I felt myself supported by those youth and the values of solidarity and companionship came from the poor not from my own strength. In 1986 and as General Pinochet escaped assassination I was urged by a priest to get into a van because I was on the wrong side of the city, the police were searching and there was no way that friends were to allow further repression. Indeed, I was brought to my mother’s flat in the respectable side of the city as the following morning news reported that several men had been shot by the security forces, one for every military escort that was killed on the ambush on Pinochet’s entourage. This is what I wouldn’t like anybody to experience but there are the experiences that make the theologian realize that the poor and marginalized have an agency and strength for solidarity and for the Kingdom that those of us who were raised in better economic conditions lack.
It is that immersion in the periphery and in history that makes for a theologian the God of Life present in the agency of the poor and the marginalized. For ‘the God if life is present in human history; this presence reaches its supreme and unsurpassed expression in the incarnation of the Son’.[1] The incarnational principle of servanthood is the example, God sent his Son into human history, and thus all his followers must live there where he was immersed, with the needy, the poor and the lonely. In other words with the losers of this globalized community, those who do not count within the statistics apart from the fact that they ruined the possible promotions of politicians and technocrats by hindering better statistics on wealth and prosperity.
[1] Gustavo Gutiérrez, The God of Life, London: SCM Press, 1991, p. 2.