We too readily forget, however, what it means to be “oppressed.” Liberation Theology has made it
fashionable to speak of “the poor” and “the disempowered.” But this approach is
too narrow. Hegel, Heidegger, Gadamer, Pannenberg, and others have shown that
humans may be imprisoned by their
historical finitude or “thrownness.” In other words, society and their
situation in history have foreclosed certain options. A thoroughly “rationalist”
or evidentially “scientific” society may
make Christian belief more difficult, and this becomes therefore a force of
oppression. Sometimes churchpeople may become a little complacent about
their privilege of not being among unbelievers. But if God’s vindication of the
oppressed includes those weighed down
with constraints imposed upon them, by their race, gender, or society, who
is to say how far God’s act of vindication can reach? To be born outside of the
heritage of the Christian Church or a Christian family is thereby to be exposed
to the dominating and oppressive structures of “principalities and powers,” whether
in the form of aggressive secularism or religious paganism.
Anthony C. Thiselton, Life after Death: A New
Approach to the Last Things (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 182
