Juan José Tamayo, theologian: ‘Jesus is a vulnerable, fragile person, by no means a hero; rather, he is a failure’

January 2006. Nobel laureate in Literature José Saramago and theologian Juan José Tamayo walk out of the Los Seises Hotel in Seville together. At 9.00 p.m. they pass in front of the Giralda and the bells begin to toll.

“They’re ringing the bells because a theologian is passing,” Saramago murmured.

“No,” Tamayo replied, “they’re ringing the bells because a confessed, convicted atheist is about to convert to Christianity.”

“Ah, not a chance. I was born an atheist, I’ve lived as an atheist, and I’ll die an atheist — and you’ll be able to see that for yourself because you’re much younger than I am.”

Tamayo answered with a definition of God: “God is the silence of the universe, and man is the cry that gives meaning to that silence.” Saramago sprang up like a jack: “That definition is mine!”

“That is why I quoted it. And that definition is closer to a mystic than to an atheist. Or perhaps mystics and atheists are more related than it seems. Don’t forget that the great mystic Meister Eckhart defines God as ‘the Nothing’ and John of the Cross says that God is found in emptiness and nakedness.”

“The conversation lasted barely two minutes. Pilar del Río (Saramago’s wife) and the painter Sofía Gandarías are witnesses,” concludes Juan José Tamayo (Amusco, Palencia, 79), one of the most important figures in contemporary theology in the Spanish language, author of more than 50 books — and also a columnist for outlets such as EL PAÍS — with an overwhelming academic record, as overwhelming as his disputes with the Vatican and the Spanish Church have been. “It is not possible to be a theologian without being heterodox,” he writes to this reporter after the interview. “As the German philosopher of hope Ernst Bloch said: ‘The best thing about religions is that they create heretics,’ and earlier, Paul of Tarsus: ‘It is necessary that there be dissensions so that the truth may shine forth.’”

The professor has lived in Cadalso de los Vidrios (Madrid) since the pandemic, during which he fell seriously ill. In the last two years he has published two essays, Cristianismo radical (Trotta) and Política y religión (Tirant).

Question. Cadalso (gallows or scaffold) is a bad name for a theologian on the blacklist.

Answer. It would have been worse in the 16th century. As a heterodox theologian, my life would have been in danger and my body might well have been consigned to the flames.

Q. They threw you into the metaphorical flames in 2003.

A. I have always had censorship in front of me: in 1976 the Tribunal of Public Order convicted and confiscated my book Por una Iglesia del pueblo (For a Church of the People). And in 2003 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which [Joseph] Ratzinger headed before becoming Pope, went after my book Dios y Jesús. It is one of the most spiritual and religious books I have written, but the verdict had already been predetermined by articles I published in EL PAÍS on the occasion of the canonization of [Opus Dei founder Josemaría] Escrivá de Balaguer. They immediately took my latest book to Rome and there it was subject to condemnation and severe censorship. I presented the image of Jesus of Nazareth in a different way: as a free man who carried out practices of liberation. That is why they killed him, and the resurrection is the triumph of justice. That is basically the book’s synthesis.

Q. Jesus was far more unsettling than the Christianity that was later built around him.

A. Undoubtedly, because the Christianity of Jesus is an egalitarian movement of men and women, a discipleship in which women had a hugely important role. The ethics of Jesus of Nazareth are radical. He is a vulnerable, fragile person, by no means a hero; rather, he is a failure. And the failure is shown at the end of his life. He was not tried; he was sentenced as a political criminal and executed as a subversive. This image of Jesus of Nazareth, which is the starting point or origin of Christianity, has very little to do with later Christianity. One of the fundamental keys of Jesus’s ethics is the option for the most vulnerable people, for oppressed groups.

Q. But the Vatican…

A. During the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI there were numerous condemnations of theologians who opted for the poor, and in those 33 years I did not know of a single condemnation of theologians who opposed the option for the poor and sided with the rich. Also, Jesus’s lifestyle has nothing to do with the lifestyle of our hierarchs: an itinerant life, shared austerity, no possessions, no security, no home. We could say he belonged to what we today call the homeless population. And there is something key that the Catholic hierarchy does not practice at the moment: the incompatibility that Jesus establishes between serving God and serving money.

Q. You turn 80 on October 7. Your academic, theological, and outreach biography is staggering. Why theology?

A. My mother’s greatest ambition was always for her children to get an education and to experience the world of culture that she herself had been unable to access. In 1957 she sent me to the seminary for that reason. I studied humanities, philosophy, and theology. The theology I studied there was more scholastic. In my first year I asked the theology professor: “What is a theologian?” And he said: “A theologian is a very sensible and thoughtful person who spends his entire life buried in books, trying to provide precise and extremely accurate answers to questions that no one ever asks.”

Q. What did you say to that?

A. Nothing. I was 18 and my first impulse was to take the train, go back to my village, about 10 miles outside Palencia, and climb onto my father’s tractor to work the land. But I was persistent and soon I approached Liberation Theology, where I am now situated. There I found another definition of theology that I liked more, that of Gustavo Gutiérrez: “Critical reflection on historical praxis through faith.”

Q. And that changed your life.

A. I discovered that at the beginning of Christianity there were no dogmas, but the message of Jesus of Nazareth: the liberation of the poor. That is the key to my orientation toward theology, which became a critical theory of religion and a force to fight injustice.

Q. Looking a long way back: what is Christianity’s greatest historical betrayal of Jesus?

A. The alliance between the throne and the altar from the fourth century onward: that is where the identification between political power and religious power occurred.

Q. What happened?

A. That alliance constitutes a falsification of the conflict that Jesus of Nazareth and his first followers had with power. Liberation became dogma; the presence and leading role of women in Jesus’s movement and in the Church’s early centuries gave way to the discrimination and exclusion of women from positions of responsibility; and the Church as a community of equals became clericalism, a phenomenon in which the hierarchs, all men, exercise all powers and strip the Christian community of any active role or responsibility in the running of the Church.

Q. You do not doubt Jesus’s existence. Nor the resurrection?

A. There is no doubt about his existence given the contributions and testimonies of Roman historians and, of course, the Gospels, which are testimonies of people’s relationship with him. The resurrection, however, is not an empirically verifiable fact. A theology professor from my early seminary years used to say: “If 4,000 paparazzi had been there at the moment of the resurrection, the resulting photo would have been completely blurred.” Because it is not the reanimation of a corpse. It is not the return to the life of the figure of Jesus of Nazareth as he existed in Galilee, in Israel, but the experience lived by some of the groups that accompanied him: that life triumphed over death and that the executioners did not prevail over their victim.

Q. When you claim the feminist or egalitarian character of Jesus’s movement, there remains a fact: he had 12 disciples and all 12 were men. Do we sometimes risk turning Jesus into a feminist because we need him to be one?

A. No, not at all. Jesus was not a feminist because feminism and women’s liberation movements came much later, starting about three centuries ago. But Jesus’s life and his relationship with women correspond to the liberation proposal of feminism. Right now there is a very powerful reflection within the Catholic Church called feminist theology. And feminist Christianity has its basis in Jesus of Nazareth’s inclusion of women in his movement on equal terms with men. A major biblical scholar and feminist theologian from Germany rooted in the United States, Elisabeth Fiorenza, says that women in Jesus’s movement played a role in solidarity from below. In many gospel accounts we read about the disciples led by Peter, James, and John and, at the same time, women who accompanied him in proclaiming the Kingdom of God, who followed and supported him.

Q. This clashes with what the Catholic Church is today.

A. It is a patriarchy where absolute power rests with men and women are subordinate. They are excluded from priestly ministries, from the places where major decisions are made, and from direct access to the sacred: to reach the sacred and God they need the mediation of men. In early Christianity that was not the case. The communities Paul of Tarsus created across the Mediterranean often had female leadership.

Q. If Christianity must fight capitalism, patriarchy, racism, or inequality, when does it stop being a religion and start becoming a political program?

A. What worries me most is that a new religion has arisen with an increasing number of followers: christoneofascism. It is the alliance and complicity between the extreme right and parts of the political, social and cultural right, and the fundamentalist Christian movements within the evangelical Protestant Church and the integralist movements within the Catholic Church.

Q. Have you ever been angry with God?

A. Yes. But the anger with God does not originate in my attitude, but in Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus’s relationship with God is that of a father and mother. The word he uses to relate to God is Abba, an Aramaic word that means father and mother. It is a relationship of trust, familiarity, and affection. He experienced God as someone he could fully trust. God was the center, the horizon of his liberating project and who gave meaning to life. He was not a distant God but the God of hope, the God who advocates for the poor, the compassionate God, and nothing separated him from him. What happens in the crucial moments at the end of Jesus’s life? When the moment of trial and persecution comes in Gethsemane, he feels real terror, anguish, and a profound sadness. And then he turns to God with the same trust but in an attitude of supplication and indignation: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” taking the words of a psalm from the Hebrew Bible. Jesus asks God to account for having abandoned him.

Q. Harsh.

A. There is a crisis of faith and hope in Jesus. A moment when he hits rock bottom and, as the great German theologian Jürgen Moltmann says, felt despair. That is the great paradox that Jesus of Nazareth experiences in his final moments: after such a close and direct relationship with God, which gave him the strength to propose a new religion freed from Jewish orthodoxy, God leaves him in total solitude.

Q. And he gets angry.

A. With everyone. With the religious, economic, and political authorities; even with his disciples, who fail to understand his liberating project and his image of the Kingdom of God, which is not that of a triumphant leader but of a totally failed person. The question is: where is God amid so many catastrophes in which the peoples who suffer are the most marginalized and impoverished sectors? Where is God? Hence our critique of God’s omnipotence. How can God be almighty, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and not act in the face of situations of destruction of nature and of the lives of the most impoverished sectors and the popular majorities?

Q. And where is he?

A. Elie Wiesel was in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and also asked where God was. He recounts a scene in which three people are being crucified and someone in the crowd asks: “Where is God?” And the answer is: “God is with the victims who are being crucified.” Hence my idea of the crucified people, Jesus crucified, the crucified God, who frees us from our comfortable state, from a selfish attitude that prevents us from seeing the suffering of other human beings.

Q. Tell me about the devil.

A. He does not physically exist, but he does have his representations. Today, he is represented by the oligarchs, the plutocrats, and the new theologians of neo-fascism. That is where the devil is embodied, for example, in Netanyahu and Trump. I define Netanyahu and Trump as the theologians of neo-fascism, who offer a warmongering, anti-immigrant, and anti-solidarity interpretation of the texts of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible. That is where I find the devil incarnate.

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