“Liberation theology” was the name given to a species of theology that emerged in late 1960s and early 1970s Latin America. It called for a radical reassessment of theology, pastoral works, and the Catholic Church itself. The Church and its clergy had historically coexisted with –– or morally authorized –– slavery, conquest, colonialism, and neocolonialism. By the late 1960s, this was no longer as politically, let alone ethically, tolerable. Anticolonial wars and national liberation struggles had erupted throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America as the “Third World” came to signify an anti-imperialist project to build a world predicated on equity, solidarity, and sovereignty.
In the midst of these revolutionary times was convened the Second Vatican Council, colloquially known as Vatican II (1962-65), out of which came a call for a more “worldly” Catholic Church. The clergy of the Third World made it clear, however, that a “worldlier” Church was not merely one in which priests wore less ornate regalia and held Mass in vernacular languages (in lieu of Latin). A “worldlier” Church was to be one that solemnly reckoned with dire issues in the world, not least of which was poverty.
In 1968, Latin American Bishops convened in Medellín, Colombia to flesh out the “spirit” of Vatican II. Out of that conference emerged declarations that rejected poverty as the lot of morally or intellectually inferior peoples. They concluded, rather, that poverty was a species of “institutionalized violence” and that our lives are lived in a situation of “social sin” insofar as we can but collectively choose not to eradicate poverty. The proper Christian choice is to “opt for the poor” (Ellacuría and Sobrino, 1994).
Continued at: https://globalsouthstudies.as.virginia.edu/key-thinkers/latin-american-liberation-theology
Excerpt from Global South Studies, University of Virginia, https://globalsouthstudies.as.virginia.edu/key-thinkers/latin-american-liberation-theology
Image: Station 15: Triumph of Life” From the “Stations of the Cross from Latin America 1492-1992” by Adolfo Pérez Esquivel of Argentina.
Luther and Liberation by
With the approach of the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther's inauguration of the Protestant Reformation and the burgeoning dialogue between Catholics and Lutherans opened under Pope Francis, this new edition of Walter Altmann'sLuther and Liberation is timely and relevant. Luther and Liberation recovers the liberating and revolutionary impact of Luthers theology, read afresh from the perspective of the Latin American context. Altmann provides a much-needed reassessment of Luther's significance today through a direct engagement of Luther's historical situation with an eye keenly situated on the deeply contextual situation of the contemporary reader, giving a localized reading from the author's own experience in Latin America. The work examines with fresh vigor Luther's central theological commitments, such as his doctrine of God, Christology, justification, hermeneutics, and ecclesiology, and his forays into economics, politics, education, violence, and war. This new edition greatly expands the original text with fresh scholarship and updated sources, footnotes, and bibliography, and contains several additional new chapters on Luther's doctrine of God, theology of the sacraments, his controversial perspective on the Jews, and a new comparative account with the Latin American liberation theology tradition.
The World Come of Age by
On November 16, 2017, Pope Francis tweeted, "Poverty is not an accident. It has causes that must be recognized and removed for the good of so many of our brothers and sisters." With this statement and others like it, the first Latin American pope was associated, in the minds of many, with a stream of theology that swept the Western hemisphere in the 1960s and 70s, the movement known as liberation theology. Born of chaotic cultural crises in Latin America and the United States, liberation theology was a trans-American intellectual movement that sought to speak for those parts of society marginalized by modern politics and religion by virtue of race, class, or sex. Led by such revolutionaries as the Peruvian Catholic priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, the African American theologian James Cone, or the feminists Mary Daly and Rosemary Radford Ruether, the liberation theology movement sought to bridge the gulf between the religious values of justice and equality and political pragmatism. It combined theology with strands of radical politics, social theory, and the history and experience of subordinated groups to challenge the ideas that underwrite the hierarchical structures of an unjust society. Praised by some as a radical return to early Christian ethics and decried by others as a Marxist takeover, liberation theology has a wide-raging, cross-sectional history that has previously gone undocumented. In The World Come of Age, Lilian Calles Barger offers for the first time a systematic retelling of the history of liberation theology, demonstrating how a group of theologians set the stage for a torrent of new religious activism that challenged the religious and political status quo.
Christ Our Companion by
Roberto Goizueta unites this book around the disjuncture between the Christian claim that Christ's life, death, and resurrection are the key to universal human meaning, on the one hand, and our increased consciousness of the diverse, pluralistic world in which we live, on the other hand.
A Critical Introduction to Religion in the Americas by
A Critical Introduction to Religion in the Americas argues that we cannot understand religion in the Americas without understanding its marginalized communities. Despite frequently voiced doubts among religious studies scholars, it makes the case that theology, and particularly liberation theology, is still useful, but it must be reframed to attend to the ways in which religion is actually experienced on the ground. That is, a liberation theology that assumes a need to work on behalf of the poor can seem out of touch with a population experiencing huge Pentecostal and Charismatic growth, where the focus is not on inequality or social action but on individual relationships with the divine. By drawing on a combination of historical and ethnographic sources, this volume provides a basic introduction to the study of religion and theology in the Latino/a, Black, and Latin American contexts, and then shows how theology can be reframed to better speak to the concerns of both religious studies and the real people the theologians' work is meant to represent. Informed by the dialogue partners explored throughout the text, this volume presents a hemispheric approach to discussing lived religious movements. While not dismissive of liberation theologies, this approach is critical of their past and offers challenges to their future as well as suggestions for preventing their untimely demise. It is clear that the liberation theologies of tomorrow cannot look like the liberation theologies of today.
Evangelicals and Liberation Revisited by
Despite the fact that the theological gains of Latin American Liberation Theology (LALT) have been incorporated into several theologies around the world, many North Atlantic evangelicals still consider LALT a heresy. The underlying reason for the lack of positive engagement between North Atlantic Evangelical Theology in general--and American Evangelical Theology in particular--and LALT is the mistaken perception that LALT and evangelical theology are necessarily contradictory. In Evangelicals and Liberation Revisited, Joao Chaves analyzes instances of the evangelical-liberationist interaction and examines the generally suspicious responses given to LALT by North Atlantic Evangelicals. Evangelicals who think of LALT as a heresy have failed to look not only into the diversity that exists among liberationists, but also into the different theological expressions within their own movement.Joao Chaves argues convincingly that if evangelicals think about both liberation theology and their own theological commitments critically, then they will be able to recognize that LALT can be an indispensable ally in their commitment to following God.