Sobrino, Jon (1938–)

Born in Barcelona, Spain, to a Basque family during the Spanish Civil War, Jon Sobrino earned a master's degree from St. Louis University in engineering mechanics in 1965 and a doctorate in theology from the Hochsuchle Sankt Georgan, Frankfurt, in 1975. He has worked among the poor of El Salvador for more than 40 years, and teaches theology at the Catholic University in San Salvador. Numerous attempts have been made on his life. On November 16, 1989, while lecturing in Thailand, he received news that his entire Jesuit community—the six priests with whom he lived, as well as two women, their cook, and her daughter—had been brutally murdered at the hands of 30 men dressed in military uniforms. The experience of this execution profoundly impacted the subsequent development of Sobrino's theology. He was among the first liberation theologians whose writings were questioned by Vatican officials. Sobrino's work shows the influence of not only Jürgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenburg but also Ignacio Ellacuría.

Four headings parse Sobrino's contributions to liberation theology. First, he is widely regarded as the principal exponent of a liberationist Christology, or theological inquiry into Jesus Christ. Sobrino refuses to distinguish the person of Christ from his redeeming work, and equally criticizes the distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. The result is a Christology from below, or one that takes as its starting point the historical Jesus of the New Testament. Sobrino's thinking centers on questions of Christological method, Jesus' message and mission, and the circumstances and meaning of Jesus' suffering and death. For him, Jesus was executed because of his subversive teachings of love and actions of solidarity on behalf of the poor and oppressed. Throughout, a unique focus on cross produces a fundamentally activist Christology. Second, Sobrino articulates a theology of martyrdom—a reality that has shaped his life through the deaths of Archbishop Romero and his Jesuit community. He sees a complementary and essential relation between liberation and martyrdom, which for him concretize the two central Christian symbols of kingdom and cross. Here the influence of Ellacuría is most felt. Third, he has systematically grounded the preferential option for the poor within a theology of the church that focuses on the poor as the conduit through which God's spirit is manifesting itself in contemporary life. This is a church not simply for the poor, but a true church of the poor. Fourth, Sobrino has been a key figure in the international dissemination of Latin American liberation theology. Essential here is the collaborative editorial work with Ellacuría that produced the volume Mysterium Liberationis (1994), which remains the field's most comprehensive systematic overview.

A number of rhetorical features may also be noted: he (1) employs a style of writing that weaves a technical form with deeply personal reflections, (2) emphasizes the inevitably partisan and conflictive character of Christian political involvement, and (3) consistently aims not only to promote understanding but solidarity and conversion. Sobrino's theology is a theology from and to the victims, the crucified peoples.

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