The problem of evil and suffering in the 20th century has not been confined to a focus on the Holocaust. In the wake of Vatican II, Christian theologians and clergy in Latin America developed “liberation theology.” This came in response to the enormous poverty of the continent and to what these theologians perceived as the evils of colonialism and the failure of the first world to spark “development” in the third world. Liberation theologians work in solidarity with the poor and argue that God is found as a liberating presence in the midst of and in the effort to resist and overcome suffering and oppression. This model has also influenced feminist and black theologies in Europe and the United States since the 1960s and has since developed into “contextual theologies” around the world and in a number of different religious traditions.
Outline
I. One of the most terrifying things about the Holocaust was the Nazis’ use of a scientific racism and a technological and rational approach to mass murder, which made the Holocaust a quintessentially modern form of evil.
A. Martin Buber and others were critical of the increasing dominance of technological and instrumental forms of rationality in Western culture and society.
B. Questions about particularly modem forms of evil were being pressed by cultural and social critics in the West in the l9th century, as well.
C. By the middle of the 19th century, voices from oppressed groups were beginning to question the social, cultural, and intellectual dominance of white European males and the ways in which their traditions ignored their own Enlightenment ideals or, worse, exploited them for evil.
II. Social criticism, especially as directed at capitalism, made its mark in theological circles with the social gospel movement at the end of the l9th century, but it was not until the 1960s that a major theological movement put social evils at the center of its thought.
A. This approach goes under the name liberation theology, and it took shape in three distinct contexts.
1. Two Catholic women, the German Elisabeth Schtissler Fiorenza and the American Mary Daly, published books critical of the place of women in the church and in the Christian tradition more generally.
2. In Latin America, following the reforms of Vatican II, such theologians as Gustavo Gutierrez developed a new approach to the cultural, economic, and theological forces that had condemned the vast majority of the Latin American population to poverty.
3. The civil rights and Black Power movements in the United States, the former very much shaped by black church traditions, led to the emergence of black theology, first articulated explicitly in James Cone’s A Black Theology of Liberation.
B. In Christian contexts, liberation theology has become a global phenomenon, reflecting the emergence of distinct Christian voices around the world, particularly in Africa and Asia. It is no longer only a Christian phenomenon but has taken Jewish and Native American forms, among others.
III. Let’s begin with a look at the common characteristics of liberation theologies, then turn to Latin American liberation theology in particular.
A. Despite important differences among these liberation theologies, they share five key elements.
1. They insist on the political, worldly relevance of theology and religion and draw a close link between political and social liberation and God’s work in the world.
2. They are “contextual theologies” that, in their Christian form, focus on the meaning of the Bible and Jesus Christ for particular contexts of suffering and liberation.
3. They are concerned to elucidate and give voice to particular forms of human suffering, not just in critical terms but as an essential part of the process of making the God who suffers with us a liberating and saving presence.
4. They are theologies of praxis, theologies that emerge as reflection on the struggle against particular forms of oppression.
5. They are deeply influenced by the hermeneutics of suspicion, which they apply not only to oppressive systems of sexism, racism, and economic exploitation but also to dominant theological perspectives and religious institutions.
B. The Latin American vein of liberation theology was shaped by the long history of colonization in that region and the wide gap between the rich and the poor that it had produced. It criticized the complicity of the church in this oppression.
C. Liberation theologians emphasize the preferential option for the poor as seen in the biblical books of Exodus and the Prophets. God responds in liberating fashion to concrete forms of human suffering.
IV. Why might liberation theologies be called contextual theologies?
A. In certain respects, the church’s saving work comes from the poor.
B. To call liberation theologies “contextual theologies” is to acknowledge a point that is crucial to Marxist theory: that the way people see, analyze, and think is decisively shaped by their social and material locations.
C. This shifts the site of the church from the institution to what liberation theologians called “base Christian communities,” where theologians and poor together study the Bible and form a new Christian vision and life.
D. Some have argued that liberation theology conflates political liberation and‘Christian salvation.
V. Liberation theology gives us a new perspective on the hermeneutics of suspicion.
A. It is quite explicit in its use of a hermeneutics of suspicion directed against both secular and religious sources of domination and oppression.
B. We tend not to find explicit theodicies in liberation theology.
C. Oscar Romero’s “beautiful but harsh truth” that “the Christian faith does not cut us off from the world but immerses us in it” is a key for thinking about the way liberation theologians seek to reimagine the task of religious thought.
Suggested Reading:
Chopp, The Praxis of Suffering.
Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation.
Daly, Beyond God the Father.
Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation.
Questions to Consider:
1. What do liberation theologians mean when they speak of a “preferential option for the oppressed”?
2. How does the liberation theology approach to evil and suffering differ from that of traditional theodicies?
Lecture Twenty-Nine -- Transcript
Liberation Theology
If we consider the ways in which the cultural memory of the West has been shaped in the past 50 years -- the books, the movies, the museums -- it’s safe to say that today the Holocaust is remembered as the most terrible manifestation of human evil in the 20th century -- and perhaps in human history. One of the most terrifying things about the Holocaust was that the way the Nazis’ use of a scientific racism and a technological and rational approach to mass murder made the Holocaust take shape as a quintessentially modern form of human evil. In this respect, we can view the Holocaust through the lens of a more general critical perspective on modernity that was emerging before World War II, especially in existentialist philosophy and theology.
Thus, Martin Buber and others were critical of the increasing dominance of technological and instrumental forms of rationality in Western culture and society. For them, the Enlightenment ideal of reason had developed in directions that emphasized control and mastery over nature and life. They led us to forget or undervalue what Buber described as the “I-Thou relationship” with other human beings and with the world. Questions about particularly modern forms of evil had also been pressed even earlier by cultural and social critics in the West in the 19th century. Marx, of course, is a primary example of this, but numerous critics in the second half of the 19th century were addressing the evils of capitalism and industrialization, slavery and colonialism.
Though colonialism, poverty, and slavery obviously predate the modern period, the combination of global travel, communication, capitalist economy -- these all combined with modern discourses of racism to help make the scale of exploitation and oppression of colonial peoples, poor workers, American slaves much more massive than in earlier periods. At least by the middle of the 19th century, voices from these oppressed groups were beginning to question the social, cultural, and intellectual dominance of white European males and the way their intellectual and cultural traditions had ignored their own Enlightenment ideals of freedom and autonomy -- or, even worse, had exploited them for evil purposes.
So, 19th-century feminists, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, argued that the ideals of liberty and equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence had to be applied to slaves and women. In his 1899 book, The Philadelphia Negro, and his 1903 book, The Soul of Black Folks, W. E. B. Dubois, the first African-American to earn a Ph,D. from Harvard, analyzed slavery and documented the contributions of African-Americans to U.S. history. Frantz Fanon’s 1961 The Wretched of the Earth established him as one of the leading anti-colonial thinkers of the 20th century. Such social criticism, especially as directed at capitalism, did make its mark in theological circles with the Social Gospel movement at the end of the 19th century, but really it was not until the 1960s that a major theological movement put such social evils at the center of its thought.
This approach, which I will address here under the name “liberation theology,” took shape in what were initially three quite distinct contexts. Two Catholic women, the German Elisabeth Schtissler Fiorenza and the American Mary Daly, both educated in European universities, published books critical of the subordinate role of women in the Christian tradition. In Latin America, following the reforms of Vatican II, Catholic theologians, such as Gustavo Gutierrez, developed a new theological approach to the cultural, economic, and theological forces that had condemned the vast majority of Latin and South Americans to a life of dire poverty. In the United States, the Civil Rights movement, very much shaped by Black church traditions as well as by more politically radical and secular Black Power movements, led to the emergence of Black theology -- first articulated explicitly in James Cone’s 1969 book, Black Theology and Black Power.
In this lecture, I’ll explore liberation theology, which is still exerting a powerful influence today, having become a global phenomenon that not only reflects the emergence of distinct Christian voices around the world, particularly in Africa and Asia, but also has found expressions in other religious contexts-such as Judaism and Native American traditions. I’ll begin by identifying a number of characteristics that I think apply to almost all forms of liberation theology. I’ll then look more explicitly at Latin American liberation theology to develop these characteristics in some more detail.
Finally, I want to connect this approach to theology with the questions of faith and suspicion that we have been considering in this lecture series. Liberation theology is as varied as the contexts in which it is practiced, but here I want to identify five key elements that, to one degree or another, I think all liberation theologies share. First, these are theologies that insist on the political, worldly relevance of theology and religion. Liberation theologians are critical of the modem tendency to reduce religion to a private matter of the individual, and they focus on the interconnections between political and social liberation on the one hand, and God’s salvific work on the other. They claim that much of this work takes place in and through social and political struggle.
The second point is that today we often see what I’m calling liberation theology referred to as “contextual theology.” This term “contextual” emphasizes the focus of liberation theologies on particular historical, social, and cultural contexts. Traditionally, and this includes most of the mainstream theology of the 20th century that we’ve been speaking about in previous lectures, theologians spoke of “man,” or the “human,” or the “human condition” in very broadly universalistic terms. Thus, existentialist theology focused on categories such as anxiety, and guilt, and death as categories that the existentialists claim supposedly applied to all people equally.
But with the advent of liberation theologies, it became more and more evident that traditional theology was done by theologians who assumed that their own experience -- and that was almost always the experience of privileged, highly educated, white European or North American males -- could serve as the basis for an analysis of the human condition as a whole. The contextual approach of liberation theologians, by contrast, emphasizes difference of context and perspective. It seeks not so much to develop a theology for human beings as such, but to focus -- at least first of all -- on the meaning of the Bible and Jesus Christ as it is developed in particular contexts of suffering and liberation, in the contexts of those who previously had been voiceless.
As Gustavo Gutierrez, perhaps the most influential of the liberation theologians, put it, the primary question faced by theologians in the context of Latin America is “how to proclaim God as Father in an inhuman world. How [to] tell the ‘non-persons’ that they are the sons and daughters of God?” This means, and this is my third point, that liberation theologies are concerned to elucidate and give voice to particular forms of human suffering, and are thus less interested in abstract, general approaches to questions of evil and oppression. The idea is that giving voice to these particular contexts of suffering is an essential part of the process of making God’s presence felt in a particular context.
In the last lecture, we saw something similar in some of the current discussions of religious responses to the Holocaust, that the point is not to explain evil in terms of God’s plan, but rather to address specific forms of evil and consider how religious ideas and religious practices can contribute to resisting them. Thus, the fourth point is that liberation theologies are theologies of resistance and theologies of praxis. This idea of praxis helps us think about the relationship between thought, theory, and theology on the one hand, and social and political action on the other. For liberation theologians, theology is not a theory of God and a vision of salvation that provides some sort of blueprint for resisting oppression -- rather, theology is understood as “critical reflection on practice.” That is, liberation theology begins in concrete experiences of oppression and resistance, and it develops theologically as it moves back and forth, in a dialectical fashion, between this experience and action on the one hand, and reflection guided by the Bible and the Christian tradition on the other hand. Finally, as a fifth point, these are theologies that are deeply influenced by the hermeneutics of suspicion, which they apply not only to oppressive systems of sexism, or racism, or economic exploitation, but also to dominant theological perspectives and religious institutions -- and I’ll come back to this point in a few minutes.
I now want to turn to a more specific discussion of Latin American liberation theology. Let me begin here with some background. Most of the major Latin American liberation theologians studied in Europe after World War II, so it’s not surprising that their work took shape as they both borrowed from, but also resisted, dominant trends in the European theologies of the time. Most important, the liberation theologians were critical of the abstract and universalizing perspective of dominant 20th-century trends of European theology -- as we’ve already discussed. In particular, they rejected the existentialist focus on privatized, individualistic conceptions of religious faith. They were also critical of the way even progressive or liberal Catholic theologians continued to conceive of the mission of the Church in exclusively “religious” as opposed to more general “sociopolitical” terms. In general, liberation theologians resisted the modern tendency, going back to the Enlightenment, to draw sharp distinctions between the religious and the secular. In other words, and this is to flag a theme that I’ll be coming back to frequently in the next few lectures, liberation theologians wanted to develop a theology that was immersed in the world -- directed not just to the sufferings of the soul or the so-called existential questions of meaning and salvation, but also to questions of material life in this world.
This has been expressed beautifully by Oscar Romero, who was the Archbishop of El Salvador in the late 1970s. Romero started his life in the Church as a relatively conservative priest, but after being appointed archbishop he found himself swept into the Liberation Theology movement -- to the point where he was seen as a threat by the ruling forces in his country and was assassinated, even as he administered the sacraments in 1980. Romero spoke the following words in an address:
I am going to speak to you simply as a pastor, as one who, together with his people, has been learning the beautiful but harsh truth, that the Christian faith does not cut us off from the world but immerses us in it; that the Church therefore is not a fortress set apart from the city. The Church follows Jesus who lived, worked, battled, and died in the midst of a city.
In some respects, this view of the relationship between the religious and the secular was made possible by Vatican It’s social teachings on human dignity, social justice, and the need for structural change in the world’s societies.
In 1968, at a conference of the Latin American Episcopal Council in Medellin, Columbia, Latin American bishops gathered to consider the significance of Vatican II for Latin America. It was here that a distinct Latin American theological self-consciousness found its voice. But this was a theological consciousness shaped not only by the reforms of Vatican II, but also by the long history of colonization in Latin America -- a history characterized, above all, at least for the liberation theologians, by the extremely wide gap between the few very rich and the many desperately poor of the continent. First-world powers had been trying to address the poverty of Latin America with policies of development, but many in Latin America -- including the liberation theologians -- argued that such policies failed to address the the root causes of poverty.
For the liberation theologians, the Catholic Church was one of these Causes: This was a Church that had for centuries been socially and politically aligned with the wealthy elite -- and that had propagated an otherworldly religious message that directed the people's hopes away from their dissatisfaction with political and social conditions and directed them to some sense of otherworldly salvation or reward So, according to the liberation theologians, the Church was guilty of using religion, as Marx would say, as an “opiate for the poor." Indeed, for this reason and because it is so focused on the problems of poverty and economic exploitation, Marxist categories of social and economic analysis have played a significant role in liberation theology. These theologians saw it as their task to help forge a religious vision through which the poor of Latin and South America would remake their place in the world and their relationship with God.
For liberation theologians, the claim that the Church must immerse itself in the world is grounded in their reading of the Bible and in the emphasis this reading places on the book of Exodus the Old Testament prophets, and Christ’s ministry in the Gospels. In each of these biblical texts they argue, we find explicit concern with concrete forms of suffering and oppression. As they see it, the Exodus story -- of a people being liberated from slavery -- is not just a metaphor for spiritual freedom, but a story of the relationship between political and spiritual freedom. In prophets such as Amos, they see explicit concern for the poor and for social justice. Here's a passage from Amos:
Therefore because you trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain, you have built houses of hewn stone but you shall not live in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine. For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins -- you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe and push aside the needy [at] the gate.
The Bible, then, as liberation theologians read it, proclaims a God who -- like Christ -- dwells and works with the poor, and this leads to one of the major principles and one of the most controversial claims of Latin American liberation theology -- what they describe as "the preferential option for the poor.” This is an idea articulated in the Medellin Conference of 1968 and further at another major conference at Puebla, Mexico, in 1979. As the Puebla documents put it, there is a “clear and prophetic option expressing preference for, and solidarity with, the poor [and] a need for conversion on the part of the whole Church to a preferential option for the poor, an option aimed at their integral liberation.”
A number of ideas are condensed in this brief passage. First, and most obviously, is the basic claim for the preferential option for the poor. Romero describes this as follows: “We have to tell poor persons that God loves them in a special way because God in Jesus established solidarity with the poor, especially in his passion and death.” The Puebla Documents elaborate this basic idea in a rather remarkable way by saying that the Church needs a conversion -- it needs to turn to solidarity with the poor.
Finally, the passage from Puebla also articulates the ideal of “integral liberation” -- that is, the idea that God’s preference for the poor involves not an otherworldly salvation, but a salvation that is at once material and spiritual, religious and political. Obviously, one reason why the idea of a preferential option for the poor is controversial is because it can seem as though liberation theologians are arguing that God favors the poor over other groups of people.
But this is not really what they mean. They’re not claiming that there is something about being poor that makes people more worthy of God’s love or makes them better people -- but rather that God is at work in contexts of suffering, oppression, and exclusion. Here, the idea of solidarity is important: Its not that if you are not poor, God is not with you, but that God is asking you to work with him by working with, and for, the poor out of love -- this is where God’s work is to be done, and so this is where God is to be encountered.
But this way of putting it needs to be supplemented by also pointing out that in certain respects the Church’s saving work comes from the poor. To call liberation theologies “contextual theologies” is to acknowledge a point that is crucial to Marxist theory -- that the way people see, analyze, and think about how to change the world is decisively shaped by their social and material locations. For liberation theologians, then, it is not enough for them, as educated members of the Church, to decide unilaterally what the problems are and what needs to be done. They must work in solidarity with the poor to help the poor voice their understanding of what Christ means and does in this particular context.
One consequence of this is that Latin American liberation theologians shift the site of the Church from the institution, especially from the official hierarchy, to what liberation theologians have called “Base Christian Communities.” In effect, they move the Church to the people in forming a new kind of Christian community -- sites where theologians and poor together study the Bible and form Christian visions and lives. In this way, they de-center the Church-they move it from urban centers of wealth and power to the margins of the society where it can serve and speak to, and with, the people. So, liberation theology only emerges as the Church turns toward the poor and, in a real sense, opens itself to the voice of God speaking through the poor -- or, as in the case of James Cone’s Black Theology, speaking from the words and actions of African-Americans resisting racism.
Cone puts it bluntly: “Revelation [he writes] is a black event-it is what Blacks are doing about their liberation.” This goes back to the idea of praxis that I mentioned earlier, and even back much further to Anselm’s “faith seeking understanding.” We can apply this idea in modified form to liberation theologies by keeping in mind, as I’ve pointed out, that this theology is a form of “critical reflection on praxis.” It begins in concrete experiences of oppression and resistance, and it develops theologically -- moving back and forth between experience and resistance on the one hand, and theological reflection on the other. In this movement, the Bible and tradition are reinterpreted in light of that experience and that resistance, even as the experience and resistance are being subject to critical reflection drawn from these same Christian sources.
A final point to make about this contextual nature of liberation theology is that the claim for a preferential option for the poor is a contextual claim. That is, the crucial perspective in the Latin American context is the poor, but if we examine other forms of liberation theology, other contexts in which it has taken hold, we find that other forms of suffering, oppression, and liberation are emphasized. So, Cone, in the quote I just read, was emphasizing the context of racism in the United States. This involves the recognition that every theology comes out of a particular place, a particular time and ideology -- it’s the effort by a particular group to voice and cultivate its relationship to God. So, the feminist scholar and theologian Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza puts it like this:
Feminist theology begins with the experience of women, of women-church. In our struggle for self-identity, survival, and liberation in a patriarchal society and church, Christian women have found that the Bible has been used as a weapon against us, but at the same time it has been a resource for courage, hope, and commitment in this struggle. Therefore, it cannot be the task of feminist interpretation to defend the Bible against its feminist critics but to understand and interpret it in such a way that its oppressive and liberating power is clearly recognized.
This brings me to the question of sin and salvation in liberation theology, and the further question of how it understands the relation between the political and the religious. By using the term “salvation” here, I want to signal the criticism that some make of liberation theology -- that it conflates political liberation and Christian salvation -- that, in other words, it’s too worldly. In response to this criticism, theologians such as Gutierrez argue that their point is not to equate liberation with economic or political liberation, but rather to stress that our material lives and our spiritual lives are intimately related. Or, as he puts it, we need to distinguish, but also always relate, three levels of liberation.
First, there is political and social liberation. Second, there’s human liberation, by which he means liberation for the development of all our human capacities. If we recall Marx and Marx’s distinction that I made in an earlier lecture between political emancipation and human emancipation, we can see that Gutierrez’s first two levels follow pretty closely to Marx. But Gutierrez adds a third level: liberation from selfishness and sin, which is only possible through the grace of God. Together, Gutierrez claims, these three levels of liberation, when properly related to one another, offer a holistic vision of salvation that is physical, social, and spiritual. One way to think about this integration is to note the focus on social liberation and its significance for thinking about the meaning of sin -- because for the liberation theologians, sin is not just in the hearts and minds of individuals, but it’s located or embodied in social, political, and economic structures as well. So, they emphasize what we can call “structural sin” -- the ways in which particularly economic and political systems support inequalities between people. So, change can’t just come from inside of people, but must also be a matter of changing relationships between them -- even more it means that these two types of change are closely related, but come from change in structures, such as political structures and economic structures that lead to various forms of oppression.
To conclude this discussion of liberation theology, I want to return to the question of suspicion and faith. I first should reemphasize the point already made that liberation theologians tend to be quite explicit in their use of a hermeneutics of suspicion, directing it against both secular and religious sources of domination and oppression -- as I think we’ve seen so far in this lecture. In this respect, liberation theologians emphasize the obvious, but often ignored or elided the fact that religious institutions and religious discourses are through and through human institutions and discourses -- and, as we see in the passage I just quoted from Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, the hermeneutics of suspicion must be brought to bear on the examination of the Bible itself.
This is not to say that God does not reveal himself and that the Bible, or the work of the Church, or the work of theologians do not participate in this revelation -- rather, it’s to stress that the human appeal to revelation in any given context is always the activity of sinful, fallible, finite human beings and must always be received cautiously. At the same time, however, liberation theologians refuse to accede to the claim made by secular and atheist forms of suspicion that we can reduce religion to such complicity, or dismiss it as a harmless illusion. So, they combine a hard-headed insistence on suspicion with a radical hope that’s indebted, as we’ve seen, to the biblical conception of history in which God liberates his people materially, politically, and spiritually in -- and through -- history.
This brings me to the second point, where I want to tie this liberation perspective on suspicion to the question of evil we examined in the last couple of lectures. We tend not to find explicit theodicies in liberation theology -- especially in the traditional form of abstract philosophical efforts to explain a possibility of evil and suffering in the world. As with thinkers such as Fackenheim and Surin that I mentioned in the last lecture, liberation theologians engage questions of suffering and evil not by trying to explain them with respect to God’s providence or the human condition, but in explaining and responding to particular forms of evil -- with a theological discourse that is aimed as much at liberating practice as at theological vision.
As the feminist theologian Rebecca Chopp has pointed out, liberation thought offers a new paradigm for theology, in that it is more oriented towards transformation than toward understanding. On this view, theology is not simply the effort to talk about what God is, but a crucial element of realizing God’s work in the world. With this in mind, we can conclude this lecture by making a final point about liberation faith: This is not an individualized faith, but a faith forged in solidarity and suffering, a faith that is better translated as commitment and persistent hope than as belief. Romero says that faith immerses us in the world, but we might also say that faith happens through an immersion in the world -- an immersion in the suffering of those who are oppressed and marginalized. This is not in any way to glorify such suffering, to make it a value in and of itself; but to claim that God is to be found in the response to this suffering.
Oscar Romero’s “beautiful but harsh truth” that, as he says: “The Christian faith does not cut us off from the world, but immerses us in it” is a key for thinking about the way liberation theologians sought to re-imagine the task of religious thought. But this is an idea that we can already see at work, though perhaps in a more individualistic and existentialist way, in thinkers such as Buber and Rosenzweig, and it is an idea that continues to shape Western religious thought -- as we see in the next lecture -- today.
