“With what can we compare the kingdom of God?” Latin American Liberation Theology and the Challenge of Political Projects

Who baked the pie in the sky? Who sowed and harvested its fruits, gathered the ingredients and put it into the oven? And also: who paved heaven’s streets of gold, crafted the trumpets of the cherubim, and erected God’s throne? Albeit the ethereal tune that marks speculative questions of this nature, there is a profoundly concrete dimension implied in images such as these I just described. Heaven, paradise, kingdom of God: these are theological categories for a reality that demand a ground on which to stand: someone has to bake the pie – even in the sky. Heavenly hopes are intrinsically connected to historical paths in a symbiosis that knows no division. Liberation theology emerges in Latin America claiming that there is no pie in the sky without pie on earth. The separation between “there” and “here” must be denied: “Christ does not ‘spiritualize’ the eschatological promises,” says Gustavo Gutierrez, “he gives them meaning and fulfillment today.” 1 Salvation is not the going away from history, but it is going beyond the signs of death that mark this very life. Gutierrez continues: “The grace-sin conflict, the coming of the Kingdom, and the expectation of the parousia are also necessarily and inevitably historical, temporal, earthly, social, and material realities.”2 Heaven and earth meet in the reign of God, which cannot be separated from the realm where we live our lives in