Presentar el aporte científico de la investigación.

Elsa Tamez*® presents an analysis of Paul's letter to the Romans that permits us to apply it extensively to the social situation of the present. In Paul's world, under the Roman Empire, the presence of injustice and structural sin created a situation in which no one could be just, not even if they proposed to do so. They lived under a power that dominated persons, that reached into interpersonal relationship, relations with God, with nature and with themselves. According to Tamez, Paul uses the metaphor of slavery to discribe the inability to remove one's self from this impious and unjust world because of sin. It is for this reason that Paul discredits the law as a means of justification, because the

*2/ib/U , p . 65.

God.

Paul announces the good news of God's justice, as a gift of God that is revealed in history through the faith of Jesus Christ. It is extended to all persons who receive it by faith, independent of the law.

For Tamez, the key to justice is the faith of Jesus Christ who was obedient to God until death. This faith allows human beings to receive the gift of God's justice with the same faith that Jesus had. Justification is not attained by faith in Jesus Christ, as has been taught from a sacrificial theology that leaves the Gospel reduced to reconciliation with God. It is by faith in the life and practice of Jesus:

Jesus’s life of faith marks the end of the sacrificing of the innocent. He takes them upon himself once and for all, making possible a new way of life. The Christian faith consists in receiving and making one’s own the faith of Christ (to live in Christ). 1 ^

Now, according to Tamez, to justify - in the Pauline sense- - is to transform human beings into subjects who do justice; we enter into the order of faith and not that of the law. We receive from God the gift of justice through faith, so that human beings recover their generating capacity for justice in a world, as we said in the beginning, in which "there is no one who is just, not even one".

Hinkelammert's hermeneutical analysis of the payment of the foreign debt is comparable to Tamez' analysis on justification in Paul. In both cases the action of justice and forgiveness fails on

l^The author uses as the central text of her analysis Romans 3:21-26. See Tamez, Ibid., p. 126.

forgive and to do justice as grace received from God. In this sense, it is through their practice or their works that persons find redemption and re-create situations of social injustice. God forgives our debts in the same measure that we are capable of pardoning those who owe us.

In Tamez' reading of Paul's letter to the Romans, she rescues four fundamental theological concepts about justification that are tremendously helpful for reading the Latin American reality today.

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a) When Paul speaks of justification by faith, he places all persons and nations on an equal plane, bipolarities are overcome and the Christian faith is universalized. Exclusion is overcome and the excluded is included in the plan of salvation.

b) Paul is knowledgeable about the situation of injustice in which the poor live under the Roman Empire. He sees in this empire an economic, political and military structural power, that hides behind the cloak of protector and peacemaker, but that in its interior practices injustice. He sees it as an idolatrous power, absent from God, that carries its structure of sin into social relationships in such a way that those who believed themselves to be doers of justice (the Jews), fulfilling the law, were really doing injustice.

c) The message of God's justice brings new life to the Christian community, giving it hope, because with the freely given grace of God they dare to do justice despite the harsh domination and the unjust system.

d) The communities Paul’s time, insignificant in the face of Roman power, recovered the force of the Spirit which filled them with the power of God. It enables them to enter into the logic of God as God's children, as heirs with Christ, as freed from slavery and as heirs of their history.

Tamez broadens the sense of exclusion to include not only those marginalized by the market but also other oppressed groups, among which are street children, marginalized socially because of their poverty and their inability to live up to the social expectations of childhood. Their poverty Is produced by the exclusion from the market but at the same time, their poverty forces them to exclude themselves psychologically. That is to say, the physical, cultural, and social dehumanization can not be separated from emotional dehumanization.

in this reign of death which legitimizes exclusion, the excluded become identified in the Christ of the cross who ended up there because of a life of solidarity with the excluded, and who in his hour of death was abandoned. The excluded become justified in the resurrection, through which God gives justice to all. They become conscious that they are not alone, that they have at their side a God that suffers with them; they recover their sense of human dignity and look to re-create life with justice. It is this image of God in solidarity with Jesus, as a prototype of the excluded, which promotes solidarity between human beings and the rejection of exclusion. This three dimensional process counteracts individualism:

Human beings are justified precisely so they can be reconciled with themselves, with their neighbor, with God, and with their environment, and so they can carry on the ministry of reconciliation. Solidarity among human beings is a sign of God’s solidarity. Without solidarity there is no justification at all.i ®

To feel that one is worthy of justice requires an awareness of the roots of the situation of exclusion, and an act of receiving the solidarity of God. It requires us to live God’s grace with other excluded people and thus build the body of Christ. This salvific

become subjects of their own history. It reaches liberating dimensions at the personal and collective level. It embraces the totality of human beings in their physical, emotional, and spiritual sense.

This sense of faith and justice is reinforced in the Old Testament book of Job. Job's situation could not have been worse and is comparable to the lives of many of the poor at the present time. Nevertheless, in the midst of his unjust suffering, Job understands that grace does not oppose the search for justice, but gives it its meaning. That is to. say. Job opens up to the affliction of others, and demands that justice be placed within the framework of God's gratuitous love. There is no opposition between grace and justice; but there is opposition between grace and a justice that demands that the law be obeyed.1^

The sacrifice of Jesus is not seen as the payment of sins in order to receive divine pardon. According to Tamez, the Jesus’ death was not necessary, but inevitable because his life confronted the empire. What was necessary was the resurrection: to conquer death, confirm life and to reaffirm the practice of Jesus that leads to life. In this way, Jesus' sacrifice unmasks all those sacrifices that are not necessary and declares the end of sacrifices. Anyone who speaks of the need of human sacrifice is denying the resurrection of Jesus and justification by grace.i®