Volume 15, Issue 1, 2012
Violence
Geoffrey Karabin
Pages 219-239
The Heavenly Protest
Toward a Liberation Theology of the Afterlife
How would a liberation theologian respond to Marx’s famous critique that religious belief and, even more specifically, a hope for heaven is “the opium of the people”? I utilize the conceptual resources found within the work of liberation theologians Gustavo Gutiérrez, Enrique Dussel, and Jon Sobrino to argue that a belief in heaven is able to constitute a protest against oppressed persons’ present hell. To strengthen the connection between a believer’s heavenly hope and a commitment to worldly struggle, I examine how the hope must be conceived as the completion and fulfillment of a process of temporal transformation.