Liberation Theology | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Liberation theology is the name of a movement that arose in the churches, both Catholic and Protestant, of Latin America during the last third of the twentieth century. It also describes a theological trend that is found, often under different names and with somewhat different emphases across the world, as black theology in the United States and South Africa, as Dalit theology in India, as Minjung theology in Korea, and elsewhere in other forms.

The earliest and still definitive statement of the movement is A Theology of Liberation: History Politics, and Salvation (1988) by Gustavo Gutiérrez. The basic principles it sets forth are:

(1) Theology is critical reflection on Christian praxis. Faith, charity, and commitment to God and to others in the struggle for humanity and justice are primary. Theology relates this praxis to the sources of revelation and the history of the church.

(2) Biblical revelation commits the church to God's "preferential option for the poor." The poor are, by their condition, involved in a struggle to realize their humanity and to become "subjects of their own history," against the political, economic, and social powers that marginalize and oppress them. This struggle is revolutionary, not reformist. The church belongs with the poor in the midst of it, doing theology in a revolutionary situation.

(3) The struggle of the poor for social justice is a work of human self-creation that finds its source, meaning, and hope in God's work. Salvation history is at the heart of human history, in creation, covenant, Christ's incarnation, and the coming kingdom of God. Political liberation is a partial salvific event, a historical realization of the kingdom, that looks forward to its ultimate fulfillment by divine grace operating in the human struggle, informing its character and directing it toward ever larger goals of human community.

This is still its basic structure. In its development and spread, however, three major issues have arisen.

First, how are the poor defined? The Latin American theologians clearly have a dependent economic class in mind, created by exploiting landlords, industrialists, and bankers, along with their political and military agents. This definition, in terms of the dehumanizing dynamics of the capitalist system and class struggle against it, clearly borrows from Karl Marx. José Miguez Bonino (1976) acknowledges this explicitly as do many others. The Vatican, though affirming a preferential option for the poor, has been severely critical of this tendency to identify the poor of scripture with the proletariat that Marx defined. Liberation theologians claim, however, that this analysis is the secular expression in modern industrial society of a theme in Christian history that finds its source in the Hebrew prophets and the incarnation of Christ: the saving work of God liberating the people from the economic and political power of organized human sin. The Kairos Document, Challenge to the Church: A Theological Comment on the Political Crisis in South Africa—(1986), without appealing to Marx, makes the same argument concerning the apartheid system, calling it prophetic theology, as opposed to (a) state theology, which justifies the status quo, and (b) church theology, which is cautiously critical but without social analysis or a strategy for revolutionary change. Minjung theology in Korea focuses on a politically oppressed people (minjung), given hope by biblical history and promise, to strive for their liberation in a messianic kingdom where Jesus the suffering servant is lord. For Dalit theology in India, like American black theology, it is a subjugated minority, the outcastes (the dalits), to which the promise of God comes, in their conflict with an oppressive majority. Black theology draws especially on the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt to legitimate black people's fight for freedom.

All these movements agree that liberation is the basic theme of the Christian message. All see political, economic, cultural, and even religious powers as the instruments of oppression against which they struggle in God's name. They differ in their perception of how the poor are defined and which powers are their primary antagonists. The power analysis that Marxism provides is determinative for some and secondary for others. All of them, however, incorporate it into a more subtle and insightful guide that scripture provides to Christian understanding of the poor and to action that will realize God's promise.

Second, how is the truth claim of liberation theology validated? This question arises on two levels. First, the hermeneutic of suspicion, which probes the roots of all truth claims in social experience and defines theology as a reflection on social praxis, owes much to Marx. It contradicts the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas about the universality of reason and natural law as perfected, not destroyed by revelation. It reflects, however, the reformation understanding of reason distorted by human sin and is rooted, liberation theologians would claim, in the way God is known in the biblical history of calling, covenant, and promise.

The question remains, then, how divine revelation corrects and redeems the self-understanding also of the poor. How is truth, beyond the interests of one social group, known? Juan Luis Segundo (1976) describes the process as an expanding hermeneutical circle. Experience of reality from the perspective of the poor leads to ideological suspicion toward received structures of authority, morals, and dogma. This leads to a new awareness of God, which in turn creates a new hermeneutic for interpreting the biblical story. One does not escape ideology through this circle. But biblical revelation at one pole and the human condition of the poor at the other direct and correct it toward political and spiritual liberation. Paulo Freire develops the same line of thought as a teaching method in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), with its emphasis on learning to be human in Christian-base communities through defining and struggling against oppressive powers while being transformed by God's saving love in the struggle.

Third, is liberation theology a universal message that offers hope to all, or a theology of and for the oppressed only? Vatican critiques, primarily in Pope John Paul II's speech to the Latin American bishops at the 1979 Puebla Conference in Mexico and in two "Instructions" from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 1984 and 1986, were especially strong on this point. (cf. A.T. Hennelly, Liberation Theology: A Documentary History, 1990). Authoritative for theology is not contemporary social analysis but the truth of the saving gospel of Christ revealed in scripture and interpreted by church tradition. The human situation must be understood in the light of the experience of the church through the ages as it responds in faith to God and the world. In this context one understands that the basic bondage is not just political oppression, but slavery to sin in all forms, that preferential option for the poor is concern for all who are caught in this bonda, and that Jesus's transforming, peacemaking, pardoning and reconciling love is the true liberation. Therefore, the church cannot sanction the violence of class war. It cannot identify God with historical achievement. It cannot understand freedom only as political.

To these and to other criticisms, also from Protestant sources, liberation theologians reply variously. In replying to critics in his introduction to the revised edition (1988) of A Theology of Liberation Gutiérrez clearly addresses the community of the whole church with a call to join the poor in their struggle for liberation, confident of the reign of God, which is for all. Liberation, he says, is salvation on three levels: freedom from economic and political oppression, personal transformation, and ultimately redemption from sin. It is a movement with both historical and eschatological dimensions. However, his view of the church is less hierarchical and institutional than the Vatican critique. His emphasis on praxis as response to faith is also more social and historical.

Others, in their contexts, deal with the question in various ways. The Kairos Document calls the church to struggle against tyranny with appropriate force, with the hope that the coming reign of the risen Christ offers, but also with love for the oppressor and justice for all. Both Dalit theology in India and Black theology in the United States are more exclusively focused on the minority group whose faith they seek to express. Dalits, they claim, have their own participation in the liberating presence of the suffering Christ. They can only bear witness to God's promise for all people if they are not integrated into the ethos of the majority, of Hindu India, or even of the Christian church dominated by other castes. Similarly, for James H. Cone (1969, 1975), Christ's affirmation of black people is central to God's liberating purpose, and salvation for white people means identifying with this experience. Minjung theologians speak in and for the church, but they understand the experience of the people of God and the suffering messiah in the Bible as offering God's promise and hope to the suffering people of Korea today. It is the minjung who are the messianic people.

These theologies differ in their identification of oppressed peoples seeking liberation, though they communicate with and learn from one another. Their views on the relation between these peoples and the church are not the same, though all have grown out of the church and speak to it. They are not always of one mind about the use of violence in the struggle against oppressive powers, though they all would condemn hatred and seek nonviolent methods where possible. They do not all agree about the relation between the struggle of the poor for political, economic, and social liberation and the ultimate freedom promised in the coming of the kingdom of God. But for all of them Christian faith is fundamental. This means for them God's special concern for the poor in their fight for justice and freedom, God's identification with them in the servanthood and suffering of Christ, and God's promise of a world in which both oppressed and oppressors will be freed from power and domination. The movement has been called utopian, a term that Gutiérrez accepts as a provisional expression of Christian hope. Whether it is also realistic, history must judge.

Marxist Philosophy; Marx, Karl; Natural Law; Philosophy of Religion; Reason; Reformation; Revelation; Thomas Aquinas, St.

Cone, James H. Black Theology and Black Power. New York: Seabury Press, 1969.

Cone, James H. God of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury Press, 1975.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Herder and Herder, 1970.

Gutiérrez, Gustavo. The Power of the Poor in History. Translated by Robert R. Barr. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983.

Gutiérrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation. Translated and edited by Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1973. Rev. ed., 1988.

Hennelly, Alfred T., ed. Liberation Theology: A Documentary History. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990.

The Kairos Document, Challenge to the Church: A Theological Comment on the Political Crisis in South Africa—. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986.

Kim Yong Bock, ed. Minjung Theology: People as the Subjects of History. Singapore: Commission on Theological Concerns, Christian Conference of Asia, 1981.

Miguez Bonino, José. Christians and Marxists: The Mutual Challenge to Revolution. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976.

Miguez Bonino, José. Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1975.

Nirmal, Arvind P., ed. A Reader in Dalit Theology. Madras, India: Gurukul Lutheran Theological College and Research Institute for the Department of Dalit Theology, 1994.

Rowland, Christopher, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Segundo, Juan Luis. The Liberation of Theology. Translated by John Drury. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1976.

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