Category: Contemporary violence

Sliman Mansour. Revolution was the beginning (2016), oil on canvas, 200 x 500 cm

The Bible as a weapon of genocide or a house of life

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

The State of Israel began this week a new phase of the strategy of control of the territory of Palestine (Israel approves controversial West Bank settlement project). Israeli settler settlements in the West Bank will expand to divide the territory, which was the result of the 1993 Oslo Accords to relocate Palestinian residents into two isolated groups, leaving only one outlet to the Jordan River on the Jericho side.

Christ at the Checkpoint, August 21, 2025

The ultimate goal is the creation of Greater Israel, once the possibility of a Palestinian state has been destroyed because, as Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said this week, “there is nothing to recognize, and no one to recognize” (Israel approves illegal settlement plan that would split occupied West Bank) once the genocide of the Palestinian people has been consummated.

This plan of contemporary Israeli expansionism "after Gaza" suggests at least two main objectives: the first is the isolation of Palestinians in apartheid zones, in addition to the invasion of the Gaza Strip, with the goal of their expulsion or subsequent extermination; and the second is the control of the Jordan River as a strategic source of water resources for times of global scarcity.

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But this is not merely the military strategy of a rampaging Zionist state supported by global capitalism, particularly the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom. The ongoing Zionist plan demonstrates the perversity of an ideology of genocide that manipulates the Bible to justify the supremacy of one state over others, subordinating peoples of diverse ethnic and religious origins to a selective process of annihilation in the name of a supposed divine promise.

Both Jewish and Christian Zionism, in fact, are the modern version of the manipulation of the biblical promises recounted by the saga of Abraham and Sarah as ancestors of the believers of the three monotheistic religions. The biblical account, in fact, tells us that God the Eternal promised the primordial couple offspring "as numerous as the stars of the sky and the sand on the seashore" (Gen 22:17). Hebrew Talmudic and ancient Christian commentaries saw in this double metaphor of the heavens and the earth the proclamation of the universality of the promise: the stars of the sky evoking the daughters and sons of Israel, and the sand on the seashore representing all the nations of the earth.

The ideology of the “chosen people” was later developed in the Bible by a religious movement that perverted the announcement of the promise of the land, focusing it on the conquest of a territory as an exclusive monopoly of one people over other Semitic peoples. This “political theology” was devised by an interpretation of messianism in a Davidic key, present in the Bible since the time of the judges of Israel, which is called the “Joshua factor” by the Palestinian Lutheran theologian Mitri Raheb (Imperial Theology, Colonization, Settler Colonialism, and the Struggle for Decolonization: A Review Essay) as a source of the theology of empire.

But the prophets of Israel, from Moses to John the Baptist—and Jesus of Nazareth and his community who were part of that lineage—were always critical of the powers that be, which have sought to supplant divine glory under various masks. Theology prophetic It is found at the origin of the Abrahamic faith as a universal vision of the promise and the land that includes all peoples. As the French Dominican biblical scholar Philippe Lefebvre (Conference: Jésus et le pouvoir – P. Lefebvre), prophetic messianism is present like an underground river throughout the Bible, from the book of Genesis to its fulfillment in the Passover of Jesus of Nazareth.

And the Jesus movement in Galilee takes up this prophetic vein to radicalize it with the innovation of a messianism scatological, as another Dominican, José Luis Espinel, commented a few decades ago in Salamanca (Eschatological Messianism of Jesus from his prophetic actions). A prophetic tradition that announces the fulfillment of the promise for all peoples as a call to the universal love that flows from the wounds of a crucified Messiah.

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Palestinian Christians, as the Palestinian Lutheran theologian Munther Isaac (Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza) call us today to decolonize the Bible, which has become the weapon of war of Israeli and Christian Zionism against the Palestinian people. There is no chosen people to conquer a land in the name of God, stealing it from its original inhabitants, from the ancient Canaanites and Jebusites to the Palestinians of today. Nor is there a promise of the land that justifies, in the name of God, an Israeli state imposed by war on territories inhabited by Semitic peoples for millennia.

Christian churches of all denominations, as well as universities and political movements that appeal to the Bible as their source, face a grave dilemma: either continue to justify the genocide of the Palestinian people in the name of the God of Israel, or decolonize the Bible to recover the messianic and prophetic spirit of the divine and human word that frees all peoples from the slavery of earthly powers that supplant divine glory, with their current avatars, such as Trump and Netanyahu, or Milei and Bolsonaro, who are today's false messiahs.

The promise of the land that Abraham and Sarah received in that story of origins when they left Ur in Sumeria in search of the Eternal One – as the Jewish thinker from Strasbourg André Neher says in his book The essence of prophecy – is only fulfilled in the silence symbolized by the desert as a land of incessant search for the Covenant.

Hence, Christianity drinks from that source of original Hebrew prophecy to announce the arrival of “the new heavens and the new earth,” as the book of Revelation (21: 1) said in the context of the devastation of the old, idolatrous Roman imperial world and the Temple religion that perverted the divine promise.

This radical critique of all imperial theology stemming from a prophetic and eschatological messianism that heralds the end of the corrupt world has been rejected by both old and new earthly powers that seek to continue domesticating the divine promise.

But from the rubble of Gaza, the promise of the land emerges today, with renewed vigor, summoning all peoples of humanity and compelling all spiritual traditions to care for the lives of the innocent victims and their survivors. It calls us to continue searching for the promised land as a utopia in the midst of dystopia. It invites us to cultivate hope as a promise of life that emerges amid the threat of imminent death, like that experienced by Gazans today and other peoples threatened by necropower.

The Bible is not a weapon of war but “the house of the people,” as Carlos Mesters said in Brazil in his beautiful and powerful parable (The parable of the house of the people of God). A house we are invited to inhabit, to recognize in our own stories the spring of life that emerges like living water gifted by God from the ruins of the power that kills.

Let us reread and inhabit these messianic and prophetic testimonies of the promise of the land and the choice of divine love for all peoples, so that we may be inspired by the consolation that comes from God to the victims and their survivors, as a moving promise that is happening in the silence of the desert.

Mexico City, August 24, 2025

August 24, 2025
Detail of a mural, Caracol de Oventic. Sosa, J., Rivero, E., and Wolkovicz, P. (2015)

Between water and land: from Soweto to Caracol Morelia

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

This weekend concludes in Chiapas the International meeting of resistance and rebellions "Some parts of the whole" Organized by the Zapatista bases of young EZLN militia members and their leadership, a new generation has expressed—through plays, concerts, workshops, and dance—the self-criticism of their decades-old movement to reaffirm their worldview and their struggle to build other possible worlds.

This new generation was born in autonomous territories, after the armed and media uprising of 1994, where their perspective on life and understanding of the world below has enabled them to develop a creative imagination about the human and the cosmic. As Raúl Zibechi astutely points out (Zapatista self-criticism), the meeting represents a valuable innovation in the Latin American left of the last half-century due to its capacity for self-criticism and its persistence over more than three decades in defending its territory, its ways of life, and learning a mode of governance where one “commands by obeying.”

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After my stay in South Africa this summer, I returned to Mexico with a clearer awareness of the connections that exist between the resistances of “those below,” from the refugees on the outskirts of Pretoria and the artists of “combative decolonality” in Soweto, to the Palestinian resistance of the Sumud in Gaza, the West Bank, and everywhere else the clamor to stop the genocide of the Palestinian people emerges from public squares and digital campaigns.

Driven by this awareness of the urgency of continuing to learn from these social movements and build bridges, I was preparing to participate in the meeting of resistance groups at the Caracol Morelia, when the chaos generated by the storm that hit Mexico City a week ago prevented me from doing so. A massive urban sludge—created by the amount of rain that fell with a force unseen in 73 years, exacerbated by the garbage accumulated in the streets by an indolent citizenry that clogged urban drainage systems, and worsened by the appalling water policy of governments in modern times of chaotic growth in ancient Tenochtitlan—paralyzed the lives of millions of people. I was stranded for hours at the airport, unable to reach southeastern Mexico due to the chaos that lasted into the following days.

So I had to settle for attending the event virtually, thanks to the online broadcasts made by the organizers (Live broadcast from the Meeting of Resistances and Rebellions "Some Parts of the Whole") and various civil society organizations were present at the Caracol Morelia, near Altamirano, for workshops, plays, and concerts. Among the presentations of resistance to the pyramid of privilege, it is worth highlighting the presence of women's collectives dismantling patriarchy, students creating alternative education networks, farmers resisting extractivism, and settlers confronting gentrification, among many other local, regional, and "intergalactic" initiatives resisting the capitalist and patriarchal hydra.

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However, in my opinion, it remains to be explored in these anti-systemic meetings spiritual resistances of these collectives and peoples. Because it's not enough to expose the strategies of resistance to the many-headed hydra. Nor is it enough to organize networks of solidarity and support between collectives and peoples to dismantle the pyramid of privileges. Rowing against the current often leads to desolation. That's why it's necessary to go to the source from which the fighting hope who does not cease his creative imagination in the midst of catastrophe.

What inner and collective strength enables surviving individuals and communities living amidst increasing systemic violence to resist? How do they experience an awakening from the destiny imposed by the hegemony that kept them subjugated and made them declare that the world had to change? What processes of personal and collective healing have they developed to strengthen their resistance? How do survivors support, accompany, and care for one another? Because we cannot forget that resistance is a way of life that also involves symbols, rituals, and celebrations, as profound expressions of collective memory that allow for a connection with ancestors, with Mother Earth, and with divinity celebrated in so many ways. This dimension has been cultivated for millennia by the religions and spiritualities of humanity, from shamanism in Mongolia to monotheistic religions and their diverse ways of nurturing peoples to live with dignity and hope.

As we mentioned a few weeks ago here, in order to explore this spiritual and political source of resistance, a meeting called “Re-exists: The Spirit connecting the peripheries”. A group of sixty people from social and religious movements in Asia, Africa, Europe and our America, together with university people and artists located in the interstices of hegemonic power, will meet to share these and other questions, analyzing the reality we face and nourishing ourselves with ethical-political ideals and ancestral knowledge. We will seek to listen to individuals and collectives of survivors, through words, rituals and workshops, to “heart” what we have learned, crowning each day with an urban performance that will tie up loose ends to recognize the Ruah divine that gives life to the people.

In every neighborhood and city, in every network of people and communities, the urgency to do something concrete to dismantle the systemic violence that plagues us has awakened. There we can open our imaginations, our hearts, and our intelligence to propose collaborative projects. Community gardens, soup kitchens, meditation groups, performances in public squares, interactive classrooms, research projects in a dialogue of knowledge, and so many other ways of weaving networks of shared care flourish today in the cracks in the walls of the world-system of privilege and greed.

The storms that create floods and ecological chaos in the city represent a world crumbling. The water that flows down from the mountains to irrigate the land, on the other hand, is like the web of care woven by the survivors of yesterday and today. Let us listen to those who say, "We are the earth growing autonomy," as the Caracol de Oventic mural that accompanies these lines tells us.

Let us trust in our imaginative capacity to navigate the living waters with their underground rivers that connect Soweto with Gaza, with the Caracol Morelia, and with so many other places of survival, resistance, and re-existence.

Mexico City, August 16, 2025

August 16, 2025
Julián Pablo, Apophatic Christ, oil on canvas, 2014

The Emperor or the Shadows

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez OP

The story goes that 1,700 years ago, Constantine I, Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, tired of the quarrels among his Christian subjects, called them to settle their differences over the identity of the founder of their movement, Jesus the Galilean, executed in the year 30 of the Common Era in a distant province of the Roman Empire.

Three centuries had passed since a group of women disciples testified that they had seen Rabbi Jesus again, after his bloody murder on the outskirts of Jerusalem, returning with his wounded but luminous body, reuniting with them in a garden or on the beach, rereading together the stories of their ancestors with new eyes, their hearts burning as they remembered his sayings and gestures around a bit of bread or fish shared with him.

At least five generations of Christian communities, scattered throughout Asia Minor on the fringes of the Roman Empire, had passed until the moment when the emperor took that initiative. These communities had followed the path opened by some of Jesus' closest friends, such as Peter and James, or those who had only heard of him, such as Paul of Tarsus. Each one told his story of a life change, after having welcomed into his heart the teachings of Rabbi Jesus, so ancient and so new in the lineage of his Hebrew ancestors, about the generous love of his Abba and the strength of his Ruah or Spirit given to those who follow him.

Throughout those years, lived by the first Christian communities in the diaspora, some didn't fully understand who the Galilean was. For all, he was an exceptional person who had marked their lives in unusual ways, sometimes experiencing his extraordinary power through miraculous acts that made him appear as an angel, not a human. Other times, the memory of his words and deeds left them with a new life lesson, like the great rabbi of the one God, whose absence left them orphaned. A good man, a prophet, an angel of God, an extraordinary being. But they couldn't quite work out who Jesus was.

Long ago, second- and third-generation Christians, who kept alive the memory of Jesus' beloved disciple in Ephesus, for example, preserved poems that sang of Jesus' life as the divine Logos who "existed from the beginning with God and was God" (Jn 1:1). Other inspired hymns had been collected by Paul of Tarsus, Priscilla, Lydia, and Phoebe during their time in communities in Asia Minor, later including them in letters, rituals, and Gospels to celebrate Jesus as "the one who did not boast about his status as God," in Paul's letter to the community of Philippi (Phil 2:6), or as "the firstborn from the dead," in his letter to the community of Colossae (Col 1:18). Those early second- and third-generation Christian communities recognized Jesus as the Son of Man, the firstborn of the dead, the Alpha and Omega of the new creation, as well as many other titles that expressed the human and messianic condition of the Nazarene.

Until the time came, at the beginning of the 4th century of the Common Era, when some experts in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the letters and stories of Jesus' friends - most of them monks and bishops from North Africa and Asia Minor, including some from Hispania, that distant Roman province - began to write treatises unleashing a polemic to name the novelty of the Galilean's being. Most of these learned masters in the philosophy of the time chose Greek words to name that intimate communion of Jesus with his heavenly Abba, among which stood out that of homoousious or “of the same being”, to designate that Jesus shares from all eternity the same “substance” or being as his Abba.

And so was born the declaration of the bishops gathered in Nicaea, convened by the Emperor Constantine in 325, which gave rise to the Creed of the Church that we still profess every Sunday at the Eucharist: “I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, born of the Father before all ages: God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, in the same way.” substance that the Father, through whom all things were made.”

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Although this expression is a treasure in the memory of the primitive community that is already part of the DNA of the Christian faith, over the centuries in the Mediterranean basin this expression was clothed with an imperial aura to designate the divine being as the "power" of God the creator and of his Son. Pantocrator or almighty.

These divine names later justified a model of Eurocentric imperial Christianity that was imposed on other cultures and other ways of approaching the divine mystery that were colonized, most of the time destroyed, in the name of that idea of a God-substance that is the principle and foundation of the civilizing order that expanded throughout the globe, claiming to be the most complete form of human culture.

But today it is necessary to recover those voices denied by imperial Christianity as part of the symphony of the faith of the peoples. How can we express with new words and symbols the faith of the people of God that celebrates the intimacy of the divine Ruah that Jesus shares with his Abba? Returning to the ancient faith of the Church that confesses that Jesus is a true human being and true God, we can reread his humanity through the lens of the desire that constitutes us as beings in relationship, in order to experience and understand that which unites Jesus with his Abba: both share the same loving desire to give life to the other, which is another way of stammering the strength or dynamis divine which is the Holy Spirit.

In this way, confessing that Christ lives the same desire as his Abba, opening space for a third person who is precisely the divine Ruah, also touches us intimately, including every creature in the cosmos, to be wrapped in the loving embrace of Trinitarian life. A dance that is an incessant gift of loving superabundance, accompanying the entire creation.

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This same loving desire animates the kenosis or self-emptying of the divine Word that the Christian faith affirms is the heart of redemption. Through the Incarnation, God "migrates" from full being to the realm of non-being to rescue those who live "in darkness and in the shadow of death," as the elderly Zechariah, one of the anawin or poor of Yahweh, celebrating his son John who would precede the steps of the Messiah.

Because Jesus shares in the same desire as his Abba, as the Messiah of God, he crosses the abyss to go from the light to the shadows of the shadows of the shadows. To share in the same being as his Abba means, on the path of cosmic and human redemption, to descend to the Sheol or place of the ancestors, as an act of radical solidarity with the entire creation and with the victims of violent history in order to, from non-being, bring forth life as a messianic insurrection.

He Apophatic Christ The extraordinary canvas by Julián Pablo, which accompanies today's reflection, painted in his studio at the Santo Domingo Convent in Mexico City a decade ago, emerges like a flash of light amidst the shadows, precisely from the realm of non-being, as an affirmation of life amidst death. This painting is a contemporary visual representation of the mystery of redemption "in the negative," that is, from the reverse side of violent history, where God brings about universal redemption.

May the commemoration of the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea be a propitious occasion for us to cross the abyss and encounter those who today cry out for life from the realms of non-being produced by systemic violence. These survivors, with dignified rage and eschatological imagination, participate in the divine-human communion as an anticipation of the new world that has come from God, and they call upon the entire human species to celebrate God-with-us.

Puebla de los Ángeles, August 3, 2025

August 3, 2025

English