My recent interest in liberation theology comes out of an attempt to think the radical social critique of Marcuse together with the neglected potential of Christian eschatology to holistically envision and humanely enact the kingdom of heaven. Like most Marxists, Marcuse accepts the commonplace Protestant binary between God’s activity and human activity, such that we either are politically complaisant as we await Godot, or we are crypto-humanists who think God takes no part in what goes in the world we and only we transform. The idea that God could be at work in the world alongside us—or a synergistic conception of grace—is totally absent in the dichotomy Marcuse presents: The ideology of death is not yet an indispensible instrument of domination [at the time…

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