What Liberation Theology is
Liberation theology is a distinctive and controversial school of thought in the theology of the Catholic Church. It explores the relationship between Christian theology and political activism, particularly in areas of social justice and human rights. According to Phillip Berryman, liberation theology is an interpretation of Christian faith through the poor’s suffering (i.e., their struggle and hope). It is a critique of society, as well as the Catholic faith and Christianity, through the eyes of the poor. As a new social and intellectual movement among Latin American Catholics after the Second Vatican Council, liberation theology attempts to unite theology and sociopolitical concerns. From a liberationist’s perspective, the Gospel of Christ demands that the church concentrate its efforts on liberating people from poverty and oppression. In other words, the Christian Gospel demands “a preferential option for the poor” and the involvement of the church in the struggle for economic and political justice throughout the contemporary world—particularly in Third World countries. Often cited as a form of Christian socialism, liberation theology has had particularly widespread influence in Latin America and among the Jesuits, although its influence has diminished since important parts of its teaching were rejected by the Vatican. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, former priest and president of Haiti, is one example of someone who was greatly influenced by the tenets of liberation theology. The themes that have been developed in the Latin American context have served as models for other theologies of liberation.
Liberation theology, though explicitly mentioned for the first time in 1968 in a speech by Peruvian Roman Catholic priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, has its roots in religious and social movements that swept the Latin American continent during the 1950s. Concerned at the time with the increasing influence of Protestant missionaries, the growing secularization of the population, and the spreading of communist ideas, Catholic bishops insisted that these issues be addressed during the first plenary meeting of CELAM I (Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano, Latin American Bishops’ Conference) in 1955 in Río de Janeiro. Church problems were further aggravated by the lack of clergy to serve poor people in the country and the visible complicity of the Church with an unjust social order. Following Vatican Council II in 1965 and the Second Latin American Bishops Conference (CELAM II) in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968, a significant number of Latin American leaders within the Roman Catholic Church pushed toward a more progressive stance, turning to liberation theology as the theological voice for the Latin American church. The Magna Carta of this new pastoral approach to social problems encouraged Christians to be engaged in the struggle to bring about society’s transformation. The movement called for renovating societal changes, for the defense of human rights, for consciousness-raising evangelization, and for the creation of “comunidades de base” (i.e., lay-led groups of poor Christians as basic organic units of society and pastoral activity that join together to improve their lot and establish a more just society). The documents of CELAM II also denounced institutionalized violence and named it a “situation of sin.” The dominating role of the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America made it a significant vehicle for the spread of liberation theology throughout the South American continent.
There are at least four major factors that have played a significant role in the formulation of Latin American liberation theology. First, it is a post-Enlightenment theological movement. The leading proponents, such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, Juan Segundo, and José Miranda, were greatly influenced by the philosophical perspectives of Immanuel Kant, who argued for the autonomy of human reason, and the political perspectives of Karl Marx, who argued that man’s wholeness could be realized only through overcoming the alienating political and economical structures of society. Second, liberation theology has also been influenced by the European political theological findings of J. B. Metz, Jürgen Moltmann, and Harvey Cox, whose perspectives have criticized the ahistorical and individualistic nature of existential theology. Third, liberation theology is for the most part a Roman Catholic theological movement. With notable exceptions such as José Miguez-Bonino (Methodist) and Rubén Alves (Presbyterian), it has been identified with the Roman Catholic Church. Fourth, liberation theology is a theological movement specifically and uniquely situated in the Latin American context, where 70% of the population live in poverty. Liberation theologians contend that their continent has been victimized by colonialism, imperialism, and multinational corporations. They claim that, as a result of economic “developmentalism,” underdeveloped Third World nations have been placed in a situation of dependence, resulting in control of the local economies of Latin America by decisions made in New York, Houston, and London. In order to perpetuate this economic exploitation, liberationists argue, the powerful capitalist countries, especially the United States, give military and economic support to secure certain political regimes supportive of the economic status quo.
Liberation theologians agree with Marx’s famous statement: “Hitherto philosophers have explained the world; our task is to change it.” Liberation theology thus emerged as a result of a systematic, disciplined reflection on Christian faith and its implications. By viewing the poverty of people largely as a product of the way society is organized, liberation theology became a critique of economic structures—a conflictual sociological analysis meant to identify injustices and exploitation within the historical situation. Liberation theologians usually do not teach in universities and seminaries. Instead, they are a small group of Catholic or Protestant clergy who have direct contact with grassroots groups as advisers to priests, sisters, or pastors. Since they spend at least some time working directly with the poor themselves, the questions they deal with arise out of their direct contact with the poor. Liberation theology interprets the Bible and the key Christian doctrines through the experiences of the poor. It deals with Jesus’ life and helps the poor interpret their own faith. They learn to read the scripture in a way that affirms their dignity and self-worth and their right to struggle together for a more decent life.
Liberation theology explores the theological meaning of human activities through two basic principles. First, it recognizes a need for liberation from any kind of oppression—political, economic, social, sexual, racial, religious. Second, it asserts that the theology must grow out of basic Christian communities and should not be imposed from above, that is, from the infallible source book or from the magisterium of an infallible Church. Phillip Berryman described liberation theology in the following terms: (a) It interprets Christian faith out of the suffering, struggle, and hope of the poor. (b) It critiques society and ideologies sustaining it, pretends not to lay down specific rules for how to struggle for justice, but stresses that a responsible commitment with class conflict is an expression of love for one’s neighbor. Through solidarity with the poor, theologians of liberation advocate the transcendence from class division to a new type of society. (c) It critiques the activity of the church from the angle of the poor.
The primary concept of liberation in liberation theology is interconnected at three levels of meaning. At the social and political level, liberation is an expression of aspirations of the oppressed classes and peoples. This liberation emphasizes the conflict in the economical, social, and political process between the oppressed and the oppressors. At the human level, liberation is viewed as a historical process in which people develop consciously their own destiny through social changes. At the religious, salvific level, liberation means liberation from sin, the ultimate source of all deviation from fraternity, of all injustice and oppression. It brings one back into communion with God and with others, which is radical, total liberation. These three processes cannot be separated. Instead, they form a unique, complex process (proceso unico y complejo) that posits sin in social terms as a concrete social act while explicitly linking the religious, salvific plan to the human experience in a society. Such liberation embraces three levels of meaning: (1) an aspiration of the poor and liberation from oppression; (2) gradual expansion of freedom and actualization of the ability of human beings to take charge of their own destiny; and on the religious level, (3) attainment of the freedom of Christ as a communion with God and with other human beings.
Gutiérrez defined theology as critical reflection on praxis in the light of the word of God. He and other liberation theologians insisted that theology is a secondary reflection, the first commitment being the work among the poor. The shift is from the abstract speculation to living one’s faith, from discussing theology to doing theology (i.e., being immersed in one’s own intellectual and sociopolitical history). For liberationists, theology is a dynamic, ongoing exercise involving contemporary insights into knowledge (epistemology), man (anthropology), and history (social analysis). Gutiérrez advocated a more complementary relationship between the church and the world (i.e., a theology of the church in the world and a theology of the world in the church). Joining in solidarity with the oppressed against the oppressors is an act of conversion, and evangelization is announcing God’s participation in the human struggle for justice. In these terms, praxis means more than the application of theological truth to a given situation. It means the discovery and the formation of theological truth out of a given historical situation through personal participation in the Latin American class struggle for a new socialist society. The general assumption was that basic changes would come through a conversion on the part of the privileged and powerful.
This emphasis on the primacy of praxis over the abstract contrasts with Catholic orthodoxy. Traditionally, priests preached resignation to God’s will in a way that reinforced the belief that the present distribution of wealth and power comes from God. Peasant society indoctrinated this way tended to internalize a fixed and even fatalistic view of the universe with symbols and rationalizations, viewing God as “up there” or “out there.” In such a religiously dominated society, Marian Hillar found that there was no room for innovation, for social mobility, for free and spontaneous thinking, for democracy and democratic institutions. Such a society represented a rigid, hierarchical, feudal structure fixed once forever, resembling the ecclesiastical institution. As a result, Latin Americans became passive in the face of injustice and superstitious in their religiosity.
Liberation theology actually condemns religion for serving the rich and being out of touch with real life, for supporting the status quo and legitimating the power of the oppressor, for manipulating God in favor of the capitalistic social structure. But unlike Marxism, liberation theology turns to the Christian faith as a means for bringing about liberation. The strength of liberation theology is in its compassion for the poor and its conviction that the Christian should not remain passive and indifferent to their plight. Man’s inhumanity to man is sin and deserves the judgment of God and Christian resistance. Liberation theology is a plea for costly discipleship and a reminder that following Jesus has practical social and political consequences. Liberation theology focuses on Jesus as liberator, as bringer of justice, as a figure representing struggle, death, and vindication. The importance of Jesus’ incarnation lies in his exemplary struggle for the poor and the outcast, in his total immersion in a historical situation of conflict and oppression. In this sense, God is not a perfect, immutable entity looking over the world. Instead, God stands before us as the driving force of history causing the Christian to experience transcendence as a “permanent cultural revolution” (Gutiérrez). Suffering and pain become the motivating force for knowing God. The God of the future is the crucified God who submerges himself in a world of misery; God is found on the crosses of the oppressed rather than in beauty, power, or wisdom. All communion with God is predicated on opting for the poor and the exploited classes, identifying with their plight, and sharing their fate. Theology is no longer worked out in response to God’s self-disclosure through the divine-human authorship of the Bible. This revelation from outside is replaced by the revelation of God found in the matrix of human interaction within history, mediated through the lives of oppressed human beings. Liberation theology equates loving your neighbor with loving God—the two are inseparable and indistinguishable. As such, God is found in our neighbor and salvation is identified with the history of “man becoming.”
There are many disagreements and controversies within the world of liberation theology. Since the 1960s, the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy has criticized liberation theology and its advocates, accusing them of wrongly supporting violent revolutions. Although liberation theology is partially compatible with Catholic social teaching as expressed in official statements, it has been rejected by the Vatican because of Marxist concepts that tend toward materialism; this aspect of liberation theology is the most objectionable to orthodox Catholic critics, who regard it as “incitement to hate and violence and the exaltation of class struggle.” The church calls for development through consensus rather than perpetual struggle. Although Pope John Paul II acknowledged the exploitative and evil nature of capitalism, he opposed liberation theology, claiming that the conception of Christ as a political figure, as a revolutionary, or as the subversive of Nazareth does not tally with the church’s teaching. Biblical theology reveals that God is for the poor, but it does not teach that the poor are the actual embodiment of God in today’s world. Liberation theology stirs Christians to take seriously the social and political impact of Jesus’ life and death but fails to ground Jesus’ uniqueness in the reality of his deity. As a result, liberation theology threatens to politicize the Gospel to the point that the poor are offered a solution that could be provided with or without Jesus Christ.
The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, also praised the aspect of the liberationists’ movement that rejects violence and instead stresses the responsibility that Christians necessarily bear for the poor and the oppressed. At the same time, Ratzinger accused Gutiérrez of politically interpreting the Bible, of supporting a temporal messianism, and of criticizing traditional church institutions as hierarchical. During the 1980s–1990s, as prefect of Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger continued his doctrinal condemnation of liberation theology, prohibiting some priests to teach, excommunicating others, and prohibiting theological formation schools from teaching liberation theology. Later church documents supported a moderate form of liberation theology.
Today it is more accurate to speak of liberation theology in the plural, for these theologies of liberation find contemporary expression among blacks, feminists, Asians, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans. Liberation theology is the effort to think clearly about the meaning of religious faith in the context of oppression, war, poverty, inequality, and environmental destruction. It is the effort to live a compassionate, courageous, and life-sustaining response to those conditions, a response that both addresses the needs of those who are injured and oppressed and also works to change the structures and ongoing processes of injury and oppression. Liberation theology varies greatly according to the culture in which it arises. It is a work in progress.
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