Martin Marty

Martin Marty

Award-winning author and professor emeritus, University of Chicago

Martin E. Marty is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he taught religious history, chiefly in the Divinity School, for 35 years, and where the Martin Marty Center has been founded to promote “public religion” endeavors. For a decade prior to entering academia, the “On Faith” panelist served parishes in the west and northwest suburbs of Chicago as an ordained Lutheran pastor. Marty is the author of more than 50 books including Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (1970), for which he won the National Book Award. His additional honors include the National Humanities Medal, the Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the University of Chicago Alumni Medal, the Distinguished Service Medal of the Association of Theological Schools, and the Order of Lincoln Medallion (Illinois’ top honor). Marty has served as president of the American Academy of Religion, the American Society of Church History, and the American Catholic Historical Association. He also has served on two U.S. Presidential Commissions and was director of the Fundamentalism Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Public Religion Project at the University of Chicago. He is Senior Regent of St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Close.

Martin Marty

Award-winning author and professor emeritus, University of Chicago

Martin E. Marty is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he taught religious history, chiefly in the Divinity School, for 35 years, and where the Martin Marty Center has been founded to promote “public religion” endeavors. more »

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Social and Non-Violent

"Social revolutionary" is not a concept that would fit in the time of the 8th century B.C.E. prophets or of Jesus; "social" is a modern understanding and "revolution" is a word invented in recent centuries. So, no, it'd be unfitting to put Jesus in that category.

HOWEVER, in the gospel portraits of Jesus we find plenty of attitudes, expressions, sayings, and teachings which are more readily appropriable by people we call "social revolutionaries" than they would be to those who oppose them.

Of course, that does not mean that all social revolutionaries who want to invoke Jesus can do so fittingly and with authority. Many of them can be nihilistic, anarchic, paranoid, egocentirc. On the other hand, many of them aren't: they can see through the imprisoning hold of those in power and honestly represent the voices of those out of power. That was certainly the case of most "Liberation Theologians" of the sort that are now out of favor in Rome.

What the gospel portraits of Jesus show is that he "non-violently" -- with the exception of one "Temple" incident that should not be ripped out of context -- was an upsetter for the sake of justice and love. In the gospels, from Mary's song "the Magificat" through the Sermon on the Mount and all the rest, everything is topsy-turvy: the rich get sent away hungry and the poor are fed, the secure are dumped and the marginalized brought to the center.

Pope John Paul II looked at Liberation Theologians and criticized their use of Marxist analysis but appreciated some versions of their other theme, that God had a "preferential option for the poor." When he visited Latin America he wanted the vestiges of Marxian influence to be put aside, and, from then on, when he turned biblical, he sounded like the Liberationists. We will see how his successor sounds, since he owns the same Bible.

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