Dick Boer,Deliverance from Slavery: Attempting a Biblical Theology in the Service of Liberation

Reviewed by Anthony Gwyther, Basisgemeinde Wulfshagenerhütten, Germany

Dick Boer’s Deliverance from Slavery (2016) was originally published in German, with the title: Erlösung aus der Sklaverei, Versuch einer biblischen Theologie im Dienst der Befreiung (2008).

Boer begins his book with the following words:

’Delivery from slavery’: these words, taken from a Dutch labour movement song, perfectly map onto the Bible’s central concern. They are so similar to the Torah’s key phrase, they might as well be a quotation. (1)

The key phrase to which Boer refers is from the biblical book of Exodus: “I am YHWH, your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Ex. 20:2). Boer sees his book as an attempt to speak biblically of similar aspirations toward freedom as they were understood in the workers’ movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Boer’s theological work takes place in the context of and in cooperation with this “liberation movement” whose aim was “to free labour from the rule of capital” (1).

The back cover of the book contains the following biographical note from the publisher:

Dick Boer, Dr. theol. [1939], theologian, retired professor at the University of Amsterdam. He has published monographs on ‘theology and ideology’, the history of modern theology and Karl Barth.

This rather dry note is expanded by Roland Boer in his Foreword to the book. Roland Boer describes Boer as “a theologian of the revolution, or rather, as a biblical theologian of the revolution” (X) and recounts that in 1984, Boer went to East Berlin to be a minister in the Dutch Ecumenical Congregation in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). There he was a minister for six years “until 1990, after the fall of the wall and the end of the GDR” (XV). In this time, Boer came to know the “actually existing socialism” of the GDR from the inside and further developed his understanding of biblical theology in this context.

Reading Boer’s book with this contextual information, Deliverance from Slavery can be read as an attempt at biblical theology, but also as an attempt to make sense—biblically—of the liberation project which socialism was; both in its theoretical self-understanding and in its actually existing form in the GDR alongside its demise. The question for all those committed to liberation projects in the face of actually existing capitalism: What now?

Boer’s writing is unabashedly biblical, which could be a stumbling block to non-theistic people of the Left. It is also unabashedly political, which could be a stumbling block to many Christians. Boer writes:

Biblical theology needs this language—of the Internationale, of Marxist critique of religion, of modern liberation movements in general—especially when establishing what the God of the Bible effects. (8)

Central to Boer’s theology is the conviction that the Bible does not offer slaves deliverance in heaven after their death, but rather deliverance on earth in their lifetimes, exactly as Marx would have it:

For the God of the Bible does not deliver from the world, but liberates a slave people to search for and find their salvation on earth. This movement knows only one direction: his will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Marx is right: ‘the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, is to establish the truth of this world.’ This does not contradict the God of the Bible; it is in fact spoken in his spirit. (6)

For Boer, theology is not the “queen of sciences” in search of timeless truths. Rather, because biblical theology has as its source the Bible which pronounces delivery from slavery, biblical theology is obliged to partiality: to be a partisan of slaves. “Theology is hence forced, not by coincidence but by this precariousness, to search for an analysis of reality that will provide insights and then perhaps exit routes to those people who suffer from this reality” (22). In this sense, the biblical theologian—because he (sic) usually comes from the privileged sectors of society—participates in class betrayal.

The main part of Boer’s book, the biblical theology of the Bible, is divided into eight parts: Text and Context, Canon, Exodus, Covenant, Creation, Anthropology (Gen. 2–4), Entry, and the Real Israel. Following these are two postscripts. For Boer, it is clear that theologians’ ideas do not fall from heaven. They arise in particular contexts. Biblical theology operates in the context of resistance to an oppressive order and engages this order ideologically. The Bible is a work of “fantastical story” which imagines an alternative to the ruling system of enslavement, “despite all evidence to the contrary” (26). Another aspect of the particularity of the biblical context is its address to a particular people. The God who is portrayed as enacting liberation addresses his words to one people specifically: the people of Israel. Israel is read by Boer as a “project of liberation” in an attempt to “realise a just society without lords and slaves” (12–13).

A biblical theology requires a Bible as its object of investigation. Boer regards the Masoretic Canon (the authoritative Hebrew text of the Tanakh for Rabbinic Judaism) as the proper object of inquiry, and not the Septuagint upon which the Christian Bible is based. The difference between the two is in the differing order of the texts, which in turn affects the structure of the canon. To read the Bible as a work of liberation requires faithfulness to this liberating story expressed through its liberating canonical structure.

At a surface reading, the biblical canon purports to be a work of history. Boer reads it as an “a-historical history.” This expression works in two directions. First, it is not important in Boer’s reading of the Bible to claim that its narrative expresses events which took place historically—as empirically factual. For example, Boer writes that the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) “is a utopia depicting that which should have been but never was” (38). Second, and perhaps more importantly, the Bible is “a-historical” in that it narrates a story unheard of in history, about a God who took the side of the slaves in their struggle against the slaveholders.

The core of the Canon is the story of the deliverance of the people of Israel from slavery in “Egypt” under the Pharaoh: the Exodus. This core is directly connected to the self-revelation by God, of God’s name. This is a God unlike every other god. This God is—contra Marx—not simply a reflection of earthly power relations, but stands against them.

The revelation of God’s name, as the God who stands against Pharaoh and his gods is an intervention in the dominant order: in the order of the gods, in the field of ideology and of politics. Israel’s story is a political story (61), which enables a radical new beginning in the field of ideology and politics. The enslaved are delivered from an ideology which has held them captive and initiates a liberation movement. The God who delivers this people from slavery enters into a contract with them, a covenant, a bond. The liberation movement which Israel should be is accompanied by a God who liberates, who stands as a partisan for this “project.” This bond ensures that even when the people betray the revolution, as they do time and time again, it remains possible to choose the liberation project again, because this God “remains aligned with society’s underbelly” (90).

Boer understands the creation story not as “a theoretical contemplation on the emergence of the world” (106), but as taking sides in the ideological battle against the dominant order. This ideology secured people in their fear that everything is ultimately futile and chaotic. The creation story makes the necessary move to ground the possibility of liberation on earth: that the earth was created by the God who is the partisan of slaves and that the earth is “good.” A good life is possible.

The becoming of Israel in the midst of the people is told in the becoming of “the human”—“Adam” and his “counterpart” “Eva” (Gen. 2–4). This story is at once an anti-patriarchal narrative and at the same time establishes the human as an essentially social being. The anthropology of the human includes their “Fall.” Boer reads “the Fall” as adherence to the ideology, the mythical wisdom of “eternal ambivalence” (122), a fatalism which holds that an alternative order can never be realized. For Boer, “the Fall” is not something which happened at the beginning of humankind, but something that occurs time and again: “Here we encounter the great problem of the liberation movement: often, all too often, it betrays its own liberation” (132).

Boer is clear that “delivery from slavery is not complete until the slave people actually live in a society in which the order of liberation has been established” (146). The liberation movement acts as a critic of an oppressive system, but their work aims at the concrete realization of a domination free order. This requires a concrete place (hence the biblical occupation with “land”—specifically the Land of Israel) and a concrete regulation of life (hence the social imagination contained in the Torah—the “Law”). The Torah proposes a vision in which the primary means of production—the land, understood agriculturally—does not belong to people, but to God, and where slaves are freed and debts forgiven.

The biblical portrayal of this lived situation after the entry of the people of Israel into the land is what Boer refers to as the “real Israel,” which (like life in actually existing socialism) was full of ambiguity. Here, Boer lacks clarity as to what he means by the “real Israel.” The Bible constructs a literary history which ran parallel to the actual events of history in this time and place. The archeological and historical evidence as to “what actually happened” is meagre. For example, the Bible depicts God as ordering, and the people as waging wars of destruction against the inhabitants of the land. Archeologically, the current research finds little evidence for this. Whether Boer reads the “real Israel” as a “fantastical story” or as an actually existing historical entity is unclear.

The first “postscript” is a reading of Paul and the “messianic community” in the light of his biblical theology. Here, taking his place in the debate among leftist intellectuals who have shown renewed interest in Paul, Boer reads Paul “as a communist,” by which he means that Paul “turned communist, because he experienced Jews and Goy coming together in a commune in which the differences were free of hierarchy” (229). For Boer, Paul sees the best strategy to implement the Torah as a domination-free order in the messianic communities who recognized Jesus as kyrios in the face of the Roman Empire and its own kyrios, the Imperator.

The second is a “meditation” entitled: “Though he freed others, he could not free himself,” which reads the crucifixion of Jesus in conversation with the sculpture by the GDR sculptor Fritz Cremer “Sich vom Kreuz Lösender” (1983). Here, Boer meditates on “a Christian aesthetic of resistance” (270). For Boer, the crucifixion of Jesus represents a “limitless solidarity” (270) with the victims of empire. Over the centuries, this has been turned into making a virtue out of the necessity of suffering, not a protest in the face of suffering; or has been nullified by an “aesthetic of victory” (268), which portrays Jesus Christus Triumphator, the judge of the world, “according to which good people will enjoy eternal bliss in paradise, evil people will suffer eternal damnation in hell” (268). Rather, Boer’s Jesus “descends from the cross so as to be with his own, the condemned of this earth, again, and to stay with them” (271).

Dick Boer set himself the task of bridging the gap between the workers’ movements and adherents to the Bible, both of which held deep suspicions against the other. For Boer, this suspicion is unnecessary because they share the same goals: freedom from slavery and a good life in this world. Whether Boer can convince either group of the credentials of the other will only be seen in practice. His book, however, is an excellent contribution to the alternative movements of those who choose to read the Bible as a call to liberation. Deliverance from Slavery keeps the vision of an alternative alive, in a world in which—according to many—“there is no alternative.”