Liberation Theology

Liberation Theology (perhaps more accurately in the plural, Liberation theologies), an understanding of the role of theology in moving from abstraction to praxis, in which the actual condition of the poor is the starting-point. It was defined by H. Assmann as ‘teologia desde la praxis de la liberación’ (‘theology starting from the praxis of liberation’), and by G. Gutiérrez (b. 1928) as ‘a critical reflection both from within, and upon, historical praxis, in confrontation with the word of the Lord as lived and experienced in faith’. Liberation theology arose in S. America out of ‘an ethical indignation at the poverty and marginalisation of the great masses of our continent’ ( L. Boff), and it is theology both lived and written ‘from the underside of history’ (Gutiérrez). It is Christian community in action, arising from what Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth (his final work, publ. months before he died in 1961). From the start, liberation theology saw itself as different from the social gospel programme of the turn of the century, epitomized in W. Rauschenbusch (1861–1919). Liberation theology saw itself facing a different agenda from that of Anglo-Saxon theology: for the latter, the agenda, set by unbelievers, is of how to speak of God in an unbelieving world. For liberation theology, the agenda is set by the question of the non-person: ‘Our question is how to tell the non-person, the nonhuman, that God is love, and that this love makes us all brothers and sisters’ (Gutiérrez).

Major themes of liberation theology can be discerned in the titles of some of the leading books. Jesus Christ Liberator ( L. Boff, 1972) points out that in Christ, not words, but the Word was revealed in act, to make ‘the utopia of absolute liberation’ a topia, a place here and now. Church: Charism and Power ( L. Boff, 1981) contests the ‘institutional fossilisation’ of the centuries which has produced a hierarchical Church, oppressive and clerical, which cannot be amended by minor reform; in its place, Boff (and others) propose Iglesia popular, the church arising from the people by the power of the Holy Spirit (desde el pueblo por el Espiritu)—in which connection, the importance of base (ecclesial) communities is paramount. We Drink from Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People ( G. Gutiérrez, 1984) took the phrase and argument of St Bernard that in matters of the spirit, one must draw first on one's own experience: whereas this has usually, in the past, been a matter of individual process, aimed at an improved interior life, in S. America the experience is communal, and often of solidarity for survival. The Power of the Poor in History ( G. Gutiérrez, 1983) reflects ‘the preferential option for the poor’: by this is meant that ‘the poor deserve preference, not because they are morally or religiously better than others, but because God is God, in whose eyes “the last are first”’—a mother with a sick child does not love her other children less just because she commits herself immediately to the child in need; it also allows the possibility that violence may be a necessary means of bringing about justice: ‘We cannot say that violence is alright when the oppressor uses it to maintain or preserve order, but wrong when the oppressed use it to overthrow this same order.’

The response of the Vatican to liberation theology was initially hostile, but became more circumspect. The second Latin American Episcopal Conference at Medellín (CELAM II) in 1968 condemned institutionalized violence and the alliance of the Church with it; CELAM III at Puebla in 1979 endorsed the preferential option for the poor, commended base communities, and made ‘a serene affirmation of Medellín’. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, ignoring the more reflective findings of the International Theological Commission's Dossier of 1976, issued its Instruction on Certain Aspects of the Theology of Liberation in 1984, and it summoned L. Boff to Rome for investigation, forbidding him, as a result, to lecture or publish—a ban that lasted for a year. The poverty of the analysis, thought by many to amount to a caricature, led to a second Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation (1986). This was to be read in conjunction with the first Instruction, and was not to be taken as contradicting it, but it is a far more positive document; nevertheless, Gutiérrez was banned from lecturing in Rome in 1994.

Liberation theology has had extensive influence outside S. America. From the Detroit ‘Theology in the Americas’ Conference in 1975 (Proceedings, ed. S. Torres and J. Eagleson, 1976), the connections with black theology and with feminist theology were so clear that the phrase ‘liberation theologies’ became preferred. In 1976, the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT) held its first meeting in Dar-es-Salaam, with a clear commitment to the struggle for a just society. Equally important has been the determination to require theology to arise from the context of experience (e.g. K. Koyama, Waterbuffalo Theology, 1974; C. S. Song, Third-Eye Theology, 1979; minjung theology in Korea, which takes the concept of people who are ruled and dominated, but who use the process of history to become free subjects).