Liberation Theology

Theology that identifies with the experience, needs and struggles of the poor and oppressed.

Liberation theology originated in Roman Catholic communities in Latin America in the 1960s out of the struggles of the poor against oppression and social injustice. From these origins it has developed into a political theology which has been applied to the experience of many oppressed groups, including women, lesbians and gays in the prosperous West.

Although liberation theology has drawn upon the theoretical insights of Marxism and twentieth-century Catholic social theology, the earliest liberation theology was rooted in the real experience of the struggles of the poor rather than in academic theology. The underlying conviction of liberation theology is that God is uniquely revealed in the lives of the oppressed:

Christian poverty, and expression of love, is solidarity with the poor and is a protest against poverty. This is the concrete, contemporary meaning of the witness of poverty. It is a poverty lived not for its own sake, but rather as an authentic imitation of Christ; it is a poverty which means taking on the sinful human condition to liberate humankind from sin and all its consequences.

(Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation)

Christ was seen essentially as a ‘liberator’ with a political programme, the kingdom of God, which would deliver material freedom and justice, and not merely ‘spiritual’ benefits and abstract ‘truth’. Indeed, ‘liberation’ and ‘divinity’ were seen as one and the same thing, so that any manifestation of freedom and justice became a divine revelation: ‘wherever brotherhood, justice, liberation and goodness occur, there true Christianity becomes concrete and there lives the Gospel – even though it might be under an unnamed different banner’ (Leonardo Boff).

However much it interested Western intellectuals, liberation theology never took root among the poor communities of First-World nations. And in the Latin American homelands of liberation theology, the poor are increasingly turning to Pentecostal churches. There is a consensus now that Latin American liberation theology is in crisis.

A basic weakness in Latin American liberation theology was its alignment with Marxism and socialism. As a consequence, its credibility was challenged severely by the collapse of Eastern European Marxist regimes in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Liberation theology never quite shrugged off its Catholic fondness for dogma. At the same time as liberation theologians were recognising the need to ground theology in human experience rather than doctrine, they were also aligning themselves with Marxist political ideology.

As a political theology, with the explicit aim of serving the poor, we might expect the main achievements of liberation theology to be improved material conditions for the poor. Despite its origins in practical political struggle, liberation theology has increasingly become an academic discipline, or an ideological ‘stance’. One critic has summarised the achievements of liberation theology as enabling us to ‘hear the voice of the poor’; ‘opening up new ways of speaking about the political person’; and ‘making a convincing case for the situatedness of all knowledge’ (Rebecca Chopp in The Modern Theologians, Blackwell, 2005). These may be interesting intellectual outcomes, but they offer little comfort to the world’s poor and oppressed.

The emergence of black theology, particularly in the United States, was a separate development, arising from the history of black people’s oppression in North America and the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s. Black theology connects black people’s experience of racism and oppression with the Christian narrative. Of particular importance are the biblical narratives of liberation – for example, the story of the exodus of the oppressed Hebrew slaves from their captivity in Egypt. At the centre of black theology is the identification of Jesus as a black Christ challenging the white Christ of orthodox Christian mythology. The fact that Jesus of Nazareth was depicted as a white man in the Western Christian imagination is emblematic of a general racism present in European Christianity.

What liberation theologies have done best, and what they must keep doing, is to remind the churches and nations of their primary religious obligation to eradicate poverty, inequality and oppression.

THINKERS

Leonardo Boff (1938– ): a Brazilian Franciscan and a leading liberation theologian who was suspended from duties and punished with ‘obedient silence’ by Pope John Paul II in 1985. In 1992, under threat of renewed censure from the Vatican, Boff gave up his role as a priest. In Jesus Christ Liberator Boff argues that we must discard ‘the dogmatic Christ’ in order to discover Christ as liberator of the poor.

Albert Cleage (1911–2000): pastor of the Shrine of the Black Madonna in Detroit. In his book The Black Messiah (1968) he argued that black Christians need to realise their identity as a ‘Black Nation’, rediscovering Jesus as ‘a revolutionary black leader, a Zealot, seeking to lead a Black Nation to freedom.’ Cleage adopted an African name: Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman, meaning ‘liberator, holy man, savior of the nation’.

Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928– ): a Peruvian Dominican, regarded as the father of Latin American liberation theology. In A Theology of Liberation (1971) – the most influential work of liberation theology – Gutiérrez argued that theology must be a critical refection upon praxis.

Juan Luis Segundo (1925–96): a Jesuit priest and a founding figure in Latin American liberation theology. In The Liberation of Theology (1975) he argued that a radically new hermeneutic of liberation is required in theology. The interpretation of Scripture and tradition must transform and be transformed by both our material circumstances and our political commitments.

Martin Luther King (1929–68): the black civil rights leader who rejected the ‘separatist’ approach of the more radical black theologians, such as James Cone. In his famous ‘I have a dream’ address, King recommends a faith that ‘will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.’

James Cone (1938– ) is arguably the first theologian to offer a systematic expression of black theology. In Black Theology and Black Power (1969), he criticised not only the racism in societies but also the ways in which racism had been fostered by Christian thinking and practice.

Countée Cullen (1903–46): an African-American poet who in ‘The Black Christ’ compared the lynching of a black man to Christ’s crucifixion, questioning the adequacy of a white Messiah: ‘Christ who conquered Death and Hell/ What has he done for you who spent/ A bleeding life for his content?/ Or is the white Christ, too, distraught/ By these dark sins his Father wrought?’

IDEAS

Base communities: a form of church organisation that started in Latin America with small groups of poor Christians meeting to discuss Scripture in the light of their experiences of poverty and oppression.

Orthopraxis precedes orthodoxy: the idea that the correct practice of Christian ethics is more important than the correct articulation of doctrine.

Praxis: a term meaning what we actually do, rather than a theoretical perspective on what we do.

The preferential option for the poor: the idea that God shows particular concern and favour towards those in material poverty.

BOOKS

Leonardo Boff, Introducing Liberation Theology (Orbis, 1987)

Harvey Cox, The Silencing of Leonardo Boff: Liberation Theology and the Future of World Christianity (Meyer Stone & Co., 1988)

Christopher Rowland (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology (CUP, 1999) Gayraud Wilmore and James Cone, Black Theology (Orbis Books, 1980)