In December 1972 Luis Corvalán, the general secretary of the Chilean communist party, was asked if a coup d’etat was possible. ‘It is theoretically possible. But I don’t expect it to happen, because I’m full of confidence in the success of the policies being implemented by the Unidad Popular. And, moreover, there are two very important institutions, the Catholic Church and the armed forces, which have, through their leaders, made themselves very clear on this issue.’ Ten months later Corvalán’s expectations and the hopes of people inside and out of Chile were totally destroyed in a savage and brutal coup.

Corvalán and the communist party were not the only people to seriously misread the situation. I believe the Christian Democrats also totally misjudged the strength of extreme right wing forces. Certainly Corvalán was tragically wrong: the armed forces were the final agents of the coup; the Catholic Church stood by, and a couple of days later the hierarchy were gathered in prayer with the military leaders. The role of the church and of Christianity in the Chilean process is important and I shall return to the theme towards the end of this account.

Most people probably have at least fragmentary ideas of the events which led to the death of Salvador Allende and the installation of the military junta. A complete analysis of the history of the U.P. would need a book. All I can hope to do in a short article is to try to outline some of the main changes in the balance of forces in Chile between 1970 and 1973. Inevitably I shall have to omit discussion of many important factors—for reasons of space there will be little discussion of the agrarian reform, important though it was. However, I believe the outline here to be a reasonably coherent version of events.

The French theological landscape seems to have been lying comparatively fallow for the ten years since the great days of the Vatican Council, but the periodicals are now laden with the first fruits of a new generation. The notes that follow have been made in the course of reading essays by Michel de Certeau, and attempt to transpose his style and preoccupations into terms related to our own out of an idiom that is very different from most theological writing in English (though compare the valuable studies by Bernard Sharratt, hidden in the files of a sadly defunct review: ‘Locating theology’, Slant No 22 (1968), ‘Absent centre’, Slant Nos 24 and 25 (1969).

The Empty Tomb as Ideogram

On literary and text-historical grounds, as virtually all scholars now agree, the narrative of St Mark’s Gospel ends at verse 8 of the final chapter; the remaining verses printed in our bibles, though they appear in most of the extant MSS and are worth study in their own right, are clearly by some other writer and must therefore be set aside when we try to understand the message of St Mark. From the point at which the three women enter the sepulchre, then, the concluding verses read as follows

Tomorrow is a long time At the time of John F. Kennedy’s assassination Dylan was afraid that he too might be killed. Leaving aside his proverbial paranoia, what this fear showed is the extent to which Dylan considered himself ‘involved’ : he obviously thought that he was making a statement in his music radical enough for him to be made the target of a politically- directed bullet. Dylan was connected professionally with the Civil Rights Movement and was made into a young hero by that amorphous political and social group, but at certain points in his early career his own perspectives transcended the liberal optimism of the Civil Rights slogans.

Some of Dylan’s early songs were not in that one-dimensional rhetorical accusative one came to expect of the New York City folk crowd. Dylan became aware very quickly that there was only a simple answer to everything if you were simple enough to accept it. He did not wish to be made into a solo version of Peter, Paul and Mary, megaphoning easily-digestible platitudes to an auditorium full of hungry college students. In an early, unreleased song about Heze- kiah Jones he ‘accuses’ the white ‘rednecks’, the undifferentiated, anonymous, philistine mass who hide behind their respectable beliefs. But he was really more intelligent than that: he knew that the poor whites were as much victims of ‘society’s pliers’ as the exploited blacks (though often less spectacularly so).

His song, Only a Pawn in their Game, must surely rank as one of the most intelligent contemporary political comments upon the murder of Medgar Evans.

A theology of liberation purports to answer the question of the relation between Christian faith and the struggle for human liberation. From within the Bolshevik party, Bukharin and Proebrazhensky thought the two antithetical: ‘A communist who rejects the commandments of religion and acts in accordance with the directions of the party, ceases to be one of the faithful. On the other hand, one who, while calling himself a communist, continues to cling to his religious faith, one who in the name of religious commandments infringes the prescriptions of the party ceases thereby to be a communist’. But Gutierrez is a Peruvian who writes as a Latin American. Things in that strife-torn continent are less ossified, as in the third part of his book he makes clear. The struggle for liberation is not the possession of one revolutionary group or set of groups who can dictate the terms on which others may participate, and while the bulk of the church (for Gutierrez, the Catholic church) is still reactionary, many Christians are coming to see that their commitment to Christ places them within and not against or just outside the liberation process. Indeed, Gutierrez would claim, the scope and seriousness of the process of liberation is such that no one in Latin America, and no one in the world, is outside it (p. 143). Ostensible neutrality is a fraud, real neutrality a fiction. Gutierrez does not address himself to the world, though the world may have something to learn from him. He writes in a Latin American perspective, and for his own, for the oppressed and for the exploited.