The theology of John A. Mackay as Praeparatio liberationis 1

The theological task

One way of investigating the origins of Protestant liberation theology in Latin America is to review the development of thought about the social situation of the continent and Christian responsibility as expressed by gatherings of Protestant leaders in Latin America. This is the methodology followed by Alan Neely in the doctoral dissertation he defended at American University in 1977 on the Protestant antecedents of Latin American liberation theology. Though Neely analyzes the declarations of several meetings in Latin America and other parts of the world in which Mackay played an active role, Neely does not treat Mackay as a precursor to Protestant Latin American liberation theology. ⁴

I propose to proceed in a different way. I want to start by exploring how Mackay understood the theological task, as expressed in the first book he wrote after he became president of Princeton, A Preface to Christian Theology, published in 1941. ⁵ The book, translated into a luscious Spanish by the Mexican Methodist Gonzalo Báez-Camargo, was first published in Mexico and Argentina in 1945. ⁶ The book was republished in 1957 and again in 1984, the year after Mackay died. ⁷ There are several copies of each edition of the book on the shelves in the library of the Latin American Biblical University, a testimony to the popularity of the book and its use as a theology textbook over the course of several decades. Dr. Ofelia Ortega, the first woman pastor ordained by the Presbyterian and Reformed Church in Cuba and the president of the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Matanzas from 1996 to 2004, affirms the importance of this text which was required reading in first-year theology classes from the founding of the seminary in 1946 onward. ⁸ Samuel Escobar, in his acceptance speech when he received the Jorge Borrow Prize in 2011 at the University of Salamanca, spoke of the importance of this text for a generation of Latin American Protestant seminary students that included Pedro Arana, Rene Padilla, and Jose Miguez Bonino. ⁹ The first two, like Escobar, are associated with the socially progressive wing of Latin American evangelicals, while the last is clearly identified with liberation theology. I doubt Mackay’s text was still being read in theology classes at Princeton in the mid-1980s, but my students and I were reading it at the Evangelical Faculty for Theological Studies in Managua, Nicaragua.

Writing in the context of World War II, Mackay began the book by stating that theology, a fresh understanding of God, is the greatest need of the time. Theology must start anew to relate God’s self-revelation to the strivings of human beings to find meaning. This theology must be prophetic and missionary, that is to say focused on the action of the church in the world. ¹⁰

Mackay then went on to introduce his famous metaphor of the balcony and the road to refer to two different perspectives from which the world can be perceived. Perspective for Mackay is not defined necessarily by location, but is determined by the attitude of the person seeking knowledge, in this case knowledge of God or theological knowledge. The balcony Mackay had in mind is not that in a church or a theater, but rather the balconies of the second-story windows of houses in Spain or in Latin America from which the observer can watch all that happens in the street below. The balcony represents an observation point removed from that which is observed, the classic point of view for philosophy and theology. The balconized spectator believes it necessary to transcend all partial viewpoints in order to arrive at the truth, but such a perspective makes it impossible for this person to make any commitments to real human beings. Another problem with the perspective of the balcony is that it treats human beings as objects rather than as subjects. ¹¹

We must, Mackay insisted, move from the balcony to the road (el camino). Here I want to say a few words about what, in this case, is gained in translation. “El camino” in Spanish is a much more dynamic term than “the road” in English. El camino brings to mind a poem written by Antonio Machado Ruiz (1875–1939), who, together with Mackay’s mentor Miguel Unamuno, formed part of the Spanish intellectual circle known as the Generation of 98. “Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.” ¹² “Wayfarer, there is no road, the road is made by walking.” And in John 14:6, Jesus says, “Yo soy el camino.” “I am the way.” Mackay described the road as “the place where life is intensely lived, where thought has its birth in conflict and concern, where choices are made and decisions are carried out. It is the place of action, of pilgrimage, of crusade, where concern is never absent from the wayfarer’s heart. On the Road a goal is sought, dangers are faced, life is poured out.” ¹³ Mackay went as far to say that “[t]ruth is found upon the Road. It might even be said that only when a man descends from the Balcony to the Road, whether of his own free will, or because he has been pitched from it by providential circumstances, does he begin to know what reality is.” ¹⁴ For Mackay, this is particularly the case for religious or theological truth. Only the experience of concrete reality generates thought. ¹⁵

The move from the balcony to the road seems to me to be an apt description, at least in part, of the epistemological rupture proposed by Latin America liberation theology in its break with theological paradigms generated in the ivory towers of the North Atlantic. Theological thinking is only possible when it is done in a concrete context, where women and men are spending their lives in struggle. Guido Mahecha, a Presbyterian from Colombia who taught New Testament at the Latin American Biblical University for several years, spoke of how the reading of Mackay’s text, particularly this image of the balcony and the road, while he was a seminary student in the late 1960s defined his theological outlook. ¹⁶

Mackay was clear that the content of theology is God’s self-revelation. However, God’s self-revelation was not Mackay’s starting point for the process of theological reflection:

In a formal sense, knowledge of things divine can be obtained only by those people in whom personal concern has been born and an absolute commitment produced. We cannot insist too often or too strongly that no true knowledge of God is possible where concern and commitment are absent … The further question arises, therefore, what is that concern, and what is that commitment which lead to a true knowledge of God and His will? Our answer is: a concern about righteousness and a commitment to righteousness. ¹⁷

Those Christians who are committed to struggles for justice will inevitably find themselves on the road with others who are committed to justice. And in Latin America, those committed to justice during the 20th century have been revolutionary movements.

Encounter with revolution

Encounter with Revolution is the title of the book written by Richard Shaull for the YMCA in 1955. ²² Decades before Shaull’s address to the Geneva Conference on Church and Society in 1966 on a theology of revolution, Mackay was writing in positive terms about revolutionary movements in Latin America. ²³ My interest here is to explore briefly Mackay’s writings as an interpreter of Latin American social movements to, in part, Latin American Protestants themselves, but primarily to a North American church audience and especially to the ecumenical leadership making decisions about mission involvement in Latin America. Mackay fully expected revolutionary movements in Latin America to form the future of the continent and he expected Christians, Protestants and Catholics, to be involved in such movements.

As Samuel Escobar reminds us, Mackay arrived in Peru in 1916, just six years after the Mexican revolution. ²⁴ As principal of the Colegio Anglo-Peruano, Mackay was able to hire several university students he met at the San Marcos University to teach at the school. ²⁵ Of this group, Mackay’s relationship to Victor Raul Haya de la Torre stands out. When Mackay hired Haya de la Torre, he was president of the Students Federation of Peru and one of the founders of the Gonzalez Prada People’s University, a night school for workers. ²⁶ The relationship between Mackay and Haya de la Torre, who founded the Popular Revolutionary Alliance of America (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana—APRA) while in exile in Mexico in 1924, has been written about by various authors. ²⁷ I will confine my comments to the way Mackay portrays Haya de la Torre and the APRA movement to examine briefly how Mackay saw revolutionary movements and the ways followers of Christ in Latin America should relate to those movements.

First, though, a few words about how Mackay understood Latin American revolutions. In That Other America, written in 1935 while Mackay was secretary for the Board of Foreign Mission of the Presbyterian Church in the USA for Latin America and Africa, Mackay described the revolutionary turmoil that has marked Latin America since most of the republics of the continent gained independence from Spain starting in 1810. Mackay wrote,

The conditions under which these lands were conquered and governed, the diversity of racial types, the jealousies between whites and mestizos and between different geographical areas within a single country, the persistence of feudal conditions, the clutch of foreign imperialism, the absence of a controlling spiritual loyalty, the explosive characters of the people have all contributed in varying degrees to this revolutionary situation. ²⁸

This cultural inclination to political upheaval has been expressed as two types of revolutions. In the first type Mackay saw revolutions as political instruments, an upheaval that brings about a change in who controls political power in a given country but does not alter the social order. With the Mexican revolution of 1910, however, a new kind of revolution appeared on the scene seeking to reorder national life. Mackay wrote appreciatively of the revolution’s efforts in education and agrarian reform, but he decried the anti-religious turn in the government’s policies. ³¹ However, there is another revolutionary movement in Latin America that inspired hope in Mackay, the APRA party in Peru. Already in The Other Spanish Christ, published in 1932, Mackay described Haya de la Torre as “the most representative and revolutionary figure in university and labor circles in South America during the last decade.” ³² In looking for a Latin American solution to Peru’s problems, APRA clearly rejected both communism and fascism while respecting religious values and pursuing the establishment of a functional democracy that would guarantee citizens political and economic rights. Mackay noted that APRA was explicitly Marxist, yet did not treat Marxism as dogma. Mackay praised the ethical idealism of Haya de la Torre and noted the ways he had been influenced by both the reading of the Bible and evangelical friends. ³³ In 1935, Mackay noted approvingly that Christians, both Roman Catholics and Protestants, were members of APRA. ³⁴ At the time Mackay believed that APRA was “a finger-post pointing one of the main directions that thought and life in these countries will take in the future.” ³⁵ After his 1946 tour of Latin America, Mackay asserted that Haya de la Torre and APRA were the greatest promise for the political life of the continent. ³⁶

On January 1, 1959, a “volcanic social revolution,” in Mackay’s words, overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. ³⁷ Mackay traveled in Cuba in November of 1963 to give a series of lectures for the National Presbyterian Institute on the mission of the church. In discussing the church’s prophetic function, Mackay wrote that he strove to make clear to the crowd of Cuban Protestants that

Marxism, with however much realism and concern it faces the problem of the world’s disinherited masses, has no answer whatever for the ultimate striving of the human spirit. That striving, for which Christianity does have an answer, is man’s hunger for spiritual freedom and the eternal God. I added that if Christianity and the church are to be true to their Founder they cannot fail, they dare not fail, to be concerned about the hungry, the poor and the oppressed. ³⁸

In the mid-1960s, Mackay traveled through six countries of Latin America giving lectures under the auspices of the South American Federation of Young Men’s Christian Associations (YMCA). Mackay found that “‘revolution,’ both as a historical tradition and as a sacred reality,” had entered a new phase. ⁴⁰ Here we see Mackay adopting the language of humanization that was developed by Paul Lehmann and used by Richard Shaull as well as other Latin American liberation theologians.

This new revolutionary mood has been inspired by a new question that has emerged among the common people and is likewise being raised in university and political circles and in the churches: How can man [sic] become truly human? How can the forces of injustice that have contributed to the dehumanization of man in Latin America be creatively dealt with? What can be done to make people truly human in daily living, in their national life, in international relations? What contributions can culture, can social reform, can religious bodies make to the humanization of man, to making man truly man in his environment, in his country and in the world? ⁴¹

In the article he presented on Protestantism in Latin America at the meeting of the Catholic Inter-American Cooperation Program in Boston in 1967, Mackay pointed to the work of Evangelism in Depth, the transdenominational project launched by the Latin America Mission in 1959, as a sign of hope for Latin America. ⁴⁵ Mackay was also thrilled by the new social concern found in both Protestantism and Catholicism in Latin America and he pointed to this example among others:

Outstanding, and an augury of what is to come, is the action of a young Roman Catholic Colombian priest Camilo Torres. Torres, concerned about the welfare of the peasant masses in his country and disillusioned by the insensitivity of the Colombian hierarchy on this social issue, joined the guerrilla bands and soon thereafter was killed by government forces. ⁴⁶

As we have seen, John Mackay fully expected revolutions to change social structures in Latin America in the direction of more justice. He also expected that Christians should be involved. Mackay would have agreed with the title of the lectures Jose Miguez Bonino delivered in London in 1974, Christians and Marxists: The Mutual Challenge to Revolution. Mackay would also agree with Miguez Bonino when he said that the ultimate horizons of Christianity and Marxism “are radically different.” ⁴⁸ However, revolutionaries and Christians share a deep passion for justice. The revolutionaries of Asia and Latin America, whom Mackay calls “mystic guerrillas,” challenged Christians and the church to dedicate itself to its mission, the cause of Christ and the cause of humanity, with the same level of sacrifice and commitment. ⁴⁹

Mackay also sees another revolutionary force at work in Latin America. “[T]he Pentecostals,” he wrote in 1965, “are spiritual revolutionaries, with an answer for the deep yearnings of the common people.” ⁵⁰ Mackay was one of the first observers of the Latin American religious scene to recognize the importance of Pentecostalism. “This movement,” he wrote in The Other Spanish Christ in 1932, “is a testimony to the fact that no mere dogmatism nor ethicism can make its way among the South American masses. The future lies with the production of religious passion centered in a reinterpretation to the people of the significance of the Cross and the Crucified.” ⁵¹ Mackay’s own profound mystical experience of his encounter with Christ made him open to appreciating Pentecostal experience. ⁵²

The function of the church

Mackay was above all an ecumenist, a theologian for whom the church universal occupies a central place in his thought. Mackay saw God as interested in the creation of a world fellowship of men and women who seek to extend the Lordship of Jesus Christ to all areas of human life. ⁵³ Looking briefly at Mackay’s writings on the church over several decades allows us to grasp more fully what he meant by using the metaphor of the road as his locus theologicus. In A Preface to Christian Theology, Mackay noted that both the church and the world are living a pilgrim life on the road. ⁵⁴ For Mackay, the Christian is not a lone traveler, but rather part of a “fellowship of the road.” ⁵⁵ Mackay developed this idea most fully in his 1964 book, Ecumenics: The Science of the Church Universal, where he wrote that the Christian Church, in order to carry out its mission, must be “a mobile, dynamic community, a fellowship on the march in every land and culture.” ⁵⁶

Mackay also expressed ideas that later came to be called contextualization. In That Other America, Mackay told all evangelical Christians in Latin America, be they Latin American Protestants or missionaries from abroad, “to learn to think in Eurindian,” a term he borrowed from the Argentine writer Ricardo Rojas to describe the synthesis of European and indigenous cultures in Latin American society. Mackay’s model, of course, is the incarnation. ⁵⁷ In Ecumenics, Mackay used the awkward term “man-likeness” as a way of describing what today we call diversity, the contextualization of the church in different cultures, ethnic groups, and political situations. ⁵⁸ Mackay expected the church to become more and more diverse as it becomes incarnated in different cultures and responds to the problems present in different contexts.

The church as a fellowship of the road is always on the move toward the frontier. For Mackay, “frontier” was a polyvalent term for that place where both human need and God’s purposes are most clearly perceived. Today we would use the terms “margin” or “border.” In Ecumenics, Mackay called on the church to embrace what he called “dynamic centrality.” This has nothing to do, he said, with staying in the “middle of the road” between right and left. It means to be centered on Jesus Christ and allow the gospel to move the church both to the edges of the road and toward the frontier. ⁵⁹ Mackay even said that the church must choose between standing with Christ on the frontiers and being without Christ in the sanctuaries. As in liberation theology, the church should be found on the margins of society with those who are suffering from hunger, displacement, poverty, or disease. ⁶⁰

Over the course of the decades, Mackay described the functions of the church in various ways, but the prophetic function always occupies a prominent place. In the presentation of the prophetic function of the church in A Preface to Christian Theology, we see a foreshadowing of the three-step process of theological reflection used in Latin American liberation theology that is often summarized with three verbs: see, judge, and act. ⁶¹ The prophetic action of the church leads to and requires an adequate theology. This theology must provide an analysis of the human situation, what comes to be known in liberation theology as the socio-analytical mediation. The church then uses the tools at its disposal, above all the Bible, to diagnose the state of society. This is what is called the hermeneutical mediation in liberation theology, judging the current context through a rereading of the biblical text to discover what God has to say. The gospel, according to Mackay, offers human beings new life, and on basis of this new life a new world can be built. ⁶² The collaboration of the church with God in building this new world is missionary motion, which for Mackay combined evangelistic proclamation and social action. Liberation theology calls this third step practical mediation.

Mackay’s legacy

It may seem incongruous to some readers that Mackay would mention both Evangelism in Depth and Camilo Torres as signs of hope in Latin America. But for a significant sector of Latin American Protestants in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s who sought to serve the cause of God’s Reign under repressive military dictatorships, evangelism and the struggle for justice went hand in hand. There were also Protestants who lost their lives defending human rights. I believe that Mackay’s greatest legacy in Latin America consists in having taught generations of Protestant seminary students, through his writings, to reflect theologically en el camino, on the road, within the concrete contexts where they lived and sought to follow Christ. For this reason, we can say that John Mackay’s theology served as Praeparatio liberationis.