The Theology of Liberation

The theology of liberation came into prominence with the World Conference on Salvation Today held by the World Council of Churches in Bangkok early in 1973. Its message is very simple: salvation is liberation. Liberation from what? From injustice, from every form of oppression and exploitation, from everything that prevents man from being “truly human.” Although the theologians of liberation acknowledge personal sin, they ascribe its existence to oppressive political and social structures; these alone produce and perpetuate it, they say. Guilt is fundamentally social; consequently no liberation from individual sin is possible except through the overthrow of these oppressive structures that make it inevitable.

Liberation theology began with the end of World War II. What Bangkok did, however, was to put the weight of the World Council of Churches behind it and thus confer upon it a measure of respectability. Its main impetus comes from the new churches in the Third World—in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—but it is spreading to the developed countries. It draws on the secular theologies of Americans like Harvey Cox, on Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers From Prison, on the death-of-God movement. It is the ultimate expression of social activism, reaching a point that few American social activists are as yet ready to embrace but that its proponents claim to be the future of the Church.

The theology of liberation is most articulate in Latin America. Unlike Asia and Africa, Latin America is a Christian continent, at least nominally. No Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Shintoists, or primitive animists muddy the religions waters there. On the other hand, conditions in Latin America make it a natural breeding ground for the theology of liberation. A small privileged class rules in every area of life and confronts the underprivileged masses. The masses are poor, hungry, largely illiterate, and without land or other property. They are also hopeless because there is very little social mobility in Latin America. Education has been one of the two ladders of upward mobility, but it has produced revolutionists because there were no jobs for its products. The other ladder has been the army, but those who have risen in it have joined the upper privileged class rather than struggle to raise the level of the masses from which they came.

The word commonly used to describe this situation is “colonialism.” By using that word, Latin Americans acknowledge their kinship with the peoples of Asia and Africa and point to the international dimension of their own position. To describe their own position they speak of “neo-colonialism.” In this way they assert that political independence is not enough. The Latin Americans have had political independence for two centuries, but it has not brought liberation from foreign and domestic oppression. The inequality among nations is as great as the inequality within the nations. Because underdevelopment is an international problem, the Latin American liberationists show great sympathy for the struggle of the masses in the developed countries, notably the emergence of black power in the United States. Liberation must be world-wide if it is to be complete, and worldwide liberation means world revolution.

The connection between the Latin American theology of liberation and Marxism is obvious. Everything is to be interpreted in terms of the class struggle; revolution is inevitable; Lenin’s theory of imperialism is accepted lock, stock, and barrel. However, the liberation theologians prefer the word “socialism” to “communism” because they look upon the Soviet Union as just another exploiting power. This nationalist orientation leads them to prefer Havana to Moscow.

The Latin American liberationists are very conscious of their minority status. Many and perhaps most revolutionists are not Christians at all. The Roman Catholic Church is recognized as one of the pillars of the existing social order and is therefore considered an enemy by most revolutionists. Nevertheless, almost all the Latin American theologians of liberation are Roman Catholics—indeed, Roman Catholic priests. A few, such as Alves and Fals-Borda, are Protestants. Like the Fascists before World War II, they look upon their movement as the wave of the future. Like the Marxists, they believe they are destined to win because of the “laws” of historical development. They will lose many battles, but they will win the war.

What the Latin American liberationists have done is to cast Marxism in Christian terms and to give their movement a foundation in Christian theology. The movement is widespread, taking in Uruguayans like Juan Luis Segundo, Peruvians like Gustavo Gutierrez, Colombians like Orlando Fals-Borda and Camilo Torres, Brazilians like Rubem Alves and Paulo Freire and Dom Helder Camara, and Mexicans like Jose Porfirio Miranda. While there are some differences among them, the resemblances are striking.

Liberty And Equality

What is the central thread of the Christian faith? The Latin American liberationists answer with one word: liberty. It is true that the concept of justice plays a very important role in their thinking. Miranda, for instance, says that God can be known only in a struggle for justice: “Yahweh is not among the entities nor the existings nor in univocal being nor in analogous being, but rather in the implacable moral imperative of justice” (José Porfirio Miranda, Marx and the Bible: A Critique of the Philosophy of Oppression, Orbis, 1974, p. 49). Again: “To know Yahweh is to achieve justice for the poor” (ibid., p. 44). But justice means liberation: “In the view of the Bible, Yahweh is the God who breaks into human history to liberate the oppressed” (ibid., p. 77). The great example always cited is the Exodus, in which the Jews were delivered from Egyptian slavery—in other words, set free. Commenting on this point, Gutierrez says: “The liberation of Israel is a political action” (Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation, Orbis, 1971, p. 155). “Let my people go” is the constant refrain. And, of course, there is a heavy emphasis on the Old Testament prophets.

Liberation is identified with conversion: “To be converted is to commit oneself to the process of the liberation of the poor and oppressed, to commit oneself lucidly, realistically, and concretely” (ibid., p. 205). Liberty is no secondary means to some other end or ends: “Instead liberty is a value in itself, and this more than compensates for the evil that may result from the act of choice” (Juan Luis Segundo, Grace and the Human Condition, Orbis, 1968, p. 44). Christians, observes Alves, are more and more committing themselves to liberty: “And when they do this they are simply recovering an element which is absolutely central, although many times forgotten, in the consciousness of the community of faith, namely, its vocation to freedom” (Rubem A. Alves, A Theology of Hope, Corpus, 1969, p. 76; italics supplied). Again: “For liberty is the gift of God himself, the presence of divine life within us” (ibid., p. 8).

Liberty, then, is the answer to oppression. What is wrong with oppression? One could say, of course, that oppression is a denial of liberty. But how do we know that liberty has been denied? By virtue of the fact that mankind suffers from inequality. The liberationists point to the poor—the wretched of the earth, diseased, landless, propertyless, illiterate, ignorant, starving, and hopeless. There is an enormous distance between rich and poor in Latin America, a distance that cannot be justified in the eyes of a God who loves all men. A similar inequality exists among the nations, e.g., between the United States and Bangladesh. This intra-national and inter-national inequality is not a fact of nature, something inevitable and immutable. The wretched of the earth were not intended by God to be that poor. “They were made poor” (Gutierrez, op. cit., p. 43).

Who made them poor? The social system. Among the social systems that exist and have existed, capitalism is the worst: “There never existed a socio-cultural system whose refined constrictive power was as capable of entrapping and hooking people on such deep psychic level as the capitalist system” (Miranda, op. cit., p. 22). Miranda calls it capitalism, Gutierrez calls it developmentalism, Segundo calls it history, and Alves calls it colonialism. The name does not matter. The point is that inequality is not the result of evil-designing men, though their evil designs are undeniable, because they too are prisoners of the system.

How far is the drive for equality supposed to go? The liberationists are fuzzy on this question. Obviously, it must go a long way, though most of them refrain from pushing for absolute equality. The most radical on this point is probably Miranda: “The fact that differentiating wealth is inacquirable without violence and spoliation is presupposed by the Bible in its pointed anathemas against the rich; therefore almsgiving is nothing more than restitution of what has been stolen, and thus the Bible calls it justice” (ibid., p. 19).

Poverty And Liberty

It should be noted that the rich are themselves the prisoners of the system from which they benefit but that this in no way excuses them. The liberationists’ animosity toward them is vocal: “Sooner or later,” says Dom Helder Camara, “money covers the eyes with dangerous scales and freezes the lips, the hands and the heart of the creature” (Dom Helder Camara, The Church and Colonialism: The Betrayal of the Third World, Dimension, 1969, p. 34). Another Brazilian says: “Love for the oppressed is wrath against the oppressors” (Alves, op. cit., p. 124). Miranda is of the same opinion: “But frankly I do not see how there can be an authentic compassion for the oppressed without there being at the same time indignation against the oppressor” (Miranda, op. cit., p. 47). Miranda goes on to say: “In fact, the absolute impossibility of salvation for the rich is something which no primitive Christian community … would have dared to assert if it were not basing its assertion on the authority of Christ himself” (ibid., p. 18). What Miranda has reference to is Christ’s statement concerning the rich young ruler: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25).

A few rich people feel considerable sympathy for the poor and are appalled at their status as oppressors, “but it does not necessarily lead to solidarity with the oppressed” (Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Herder and Herder, 1968, p. 34). For this to happen, there would have to be a genuine conversion experience: “Conversion to the people requires a profound rebirth. Those who undergo it must take on a new form of existence; they can no longer remain as they were. Only through comradeship with the oppressed can the converts understand their characteristic ways of living and behaving, which in diverse moments reflect the structure of domination” (ibid., p. 47). Therefore, if a rich man is to be helpful in the liberation process, he must become poor and identify himself with the oppressed so that he becomes one of them. He must become, says Paulo Freire, not an investigator but a co-investigator, not an actor but an actor in communication. Another word for it is “insertion,” which “means accepting the ordinary conditions of life endured by the populace being studied” (Denis Goulet, A New Moral Order: Studies in Development Ethics and Liberation Theology, Orbis, 1974, p. 58). Anything short of this conversion or insertion is reformism, which “by its very shallowness … perpetuates the existing system” (Gutierrez, op. cit., p. 48). Either that, or it is reconciliation, which is also unacceptable: “To preach reconciliation now, at a time when established structures support paternalism, privilege, and exploitation is not only to commit vicious hypocrisy; it is also to place the church in a nonhistorical posture which can only benefit the status quo” (Goulet, op. cit., p. 125). This conversion is extremely rare and not sufficient to bring a change in any case.

It follows that liberation can come only from the poor, i.e., the wretched of the earth, the exploited, the oppressed. “But in order for this liberation to be authentic and complete, it has to be undertaken by the oppressed people themselves and so must stem from the values proper to these people” (Gutierrez, op. cit., p. 91). The poor are God’s chosen people. “The human areas that are poorest in every way” says the Italian Enzo Gatti, “are the most qualified for receiving the saving Word. They are the ones that have the best right to that Word; they are the privileged recipients of the Gospel; they are the ones whom Christ and Paul would unhesitatingly seek out in proclaiming salvation” (Enzo Gatti, Rich Church—Poor Church? Some Biblical Perspectives, Orbis, 1973, p. 43). Liberationists, therefore, must “accept class struggle both as an undeniable fact and as a starting point for divising strategies of change” (Goulet, op. cit., p. 124).

Subversion And Revolution

However, the “privileged recipients of the Gospel” present some serious problems. They constitute a distinct social class, but they do not know it. They are hopeless and inert, accepting their status as though it were conferred upon them by nature. They have no class consciousness. This class consciousness must be aroused, and Freire calls it conscientization. It begins with the awareness of their class status and a realization that this status is not inevitable. At this point, a great temptation raises its head, namely, that of going up into the oppressor class. “It is a rare peasant” observes Freire, who, once ‘promoted’ to overseer, does not become more of a tyrant toward his former comrades than the owner himself” (Freire, op. cit., p. 30). It was the temptation of the blacks in the United States: “Since they could not become Whites they could at least behave as Whites do and gain their respect and confidence. This was the dream of integration. And that was all right with the Whites.… And suddenly they realized that in order to become whole, they had to abandon the white man’s game and create their own” (Rubem A. Alves, Tomorrow’s Child: Imagination, Creativity, and the Rebirth of Culture, Harper & Row, 1972, p. 68). It is a temptation that is being resisted internationally: “The poor nations of the world, with their banners of nationalism and self-determination—what are these if not rebellion on the part of the oppressed and their refusal to move ahead according to the logic of the oppressor?” (ibid., p. 69). For that reason, a total change is indispensable if the wretched of the earth are to attain liberation. “As long as they live in the duality in which to be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this contribution is impossible” (Freire, op. cit., p. 33).

The process of conscientization begins with subversion. “Subversion is thus defined as that condition reflecting the internal incongruities of the social order discovered by its members during a given historical period in the light of new, valued goals” (Orlando Fals-Borda, Subversion and Social Change in Colombia, Columbia University, 1969, p. 13). Subversion has its roots in the Bible: “The first rebel of this type was probably Moses, rallying his people against the tyranny of the Pharoahs” (ibid., p. 8). Christ is presented as the Liberator. “The Gospel was thus an ‘act’, a new insertion of freedom into history which opens new horizons for human liberation” (Alves, The Theology of Hope, p. 93). This emphasis on action leads to an interesting interpretation by Miranda of the commandment against making graven images:

Why is there a prohibition of images of God, even human images, if the Bible insists that man is the image of God? Evidently there is a great difference between a real man and an image, even if it has a human figure. The image does not speak; it enjoins no commandment, no imperative; it does not prohibit murder. The real man does; and the Bible does indeed consider the real man, the flesh-and-blood man, to be the true and legitimate image of God [Miranda, op. cit., p. 39].

The transcendence of God is knowable only in action: “Transcendence does not mean only an unimaginable and inconceivable God, but a God who is accessible only in the act of justice” (ibid., p. 48; italics supplied).

Subversion must lead to revolution. By revolution the liberationists do not mean a mere change at the top, the substitution of one government for another. What they have in mind goes much deeper: “The goal is not only better living conditions, a radical change of structures, a social revolution; it is much more: the continuous creation, never ending, of a new way to be a man, a permanent cultural revolution” (Gutierrez, op. cit., p. 32). It is too easy to “forget that rebellion is the presupposition of any creative act” (Alves, Tomorrow’s Child, p. 127). Creation begins with negation, negation of the state and of the law: “Completely opposite to the defense of the status quo, the realization of justice not only subverts it, it also demands that we abolish the State and the law” (Miranda, op. cit., p. 38). Speaking of the Apostle Paul, Miranda says: “The law, the generative segment of civilization, is now by its acquired and inextirpable essence the instrument of sin …” (ibid., p. 190). He labels law observance as “a carnal attitude” and asserts that “Paul rejects the law—every written or formulated law. If the term refers to the law of God, much more does it refer to the law of men” (ibid., p. 257).

Violence

The concept of violence plays an important role in the theology of liberation. We usually distinguish between law enforcement and violence. One is legal, the other illegal. This distinction does not hold for the liberationists. Some of them distinguish between violence by public authority and counter-violence by private persons, but most of them do not bother. In any case, the liberationists hold that violence is necessary. Many Latin American governments are dictatorships whose regime cannot be justified on the basis of either constitutional legitimacy or popular election; hence no peaceful alternative for change is present. But this does not make any difference because the liberationists hold that constitutional regimes based on universal suffrage are just as oppressive. The oppression is only disguised somewhat. Says Freire: “Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons—not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized” (Freire, op. cit., p. 41).

It is therefore necessary, argues Fals-Borda, to respond in kind:

It is under this light that painful acts like the kidnapping of foreign ambassadors and national personalities by truly revolutionary groups should be understood. Counter-violence of this type depends on the violence executed previously by reactionary groups in power.… The strategy of subversive war therefore requires to respond in kind to the onslaughts of those who oppose radical progress because this social change would end their selfish vested interests [Fals-Borda, as quoted in Goulet, op. cit., p. 72].

No sense of wrongdoing is associated with subversive violence: “A supreme sense of moral worth pervades the subversive enterprise in Latin America” (Goulet, op. cit., p. 63). Alves adds his words of commendation: “Man is absolved from inhumanity and brutality in the present, as the time of transition, the time which does not count” (Alves, A Theology of Hope, p. 155).

The effect of these liberationist attitudes is to escalate violence. Violence breeds counter-violence. As the Brazilian archbishop of Recife, Dom Helder Camara—who does not believe in violence—says: “It is true that violence belongs to all ages, but today it is perhaps more topical than ever; it is omnipresent, in every conceivable form: brutal, overt, subtle, insidious, underhand, blind, rational, scientific, solidly entrenched, anonymous, abstract, irresponsible” (Dom Helder Camara, op. cit., p. 101). This escalation of violence cannot be limited to dictatorships or other regimes customarily described as oppressive. It applies to all regimes and therefore must be world-wide in scope. “The insurrection of authentic Christianity against all law and all civilization which has ever existed in history is a subversion which knows no limits …” (Miranda, op. cit., p. 189).

It follows from the position taken by the liberationists that salvation is by and through politics. Alves, for instance, speaks of “the ongoing politics of God” and “the politics of the Messiah.” Segundo adds his word: “In the domain of time, then, salvation is a ‘political’ maturity. It is the maturity of ‘political being’ that every human being is” (Segundo, Our Idea of God, p. 39). Alves explains that “the creative event cuts its way through the social inertia by creating a counter-culture. In the. Old Testament, the community of Israel was a counterculture.… The early Christian community was a counter-culture. Or more precisely, an underground counter-culture” (Alves, Tomorrow’s Child, p. 202). The counter-culture creates a new man: “This is why the new consciousness believes that the new man and the new tomorrow are to be created in and through an activity which is political in character” (Alves, A Theology of Hope, p. 16).

Secularization

The effect of this exclusive concentration on politics is to rule out all religion in the traditional sense. Citing the prophets, especially Isaiah, Miranda rejects cultus as something which causes man to deviate from the pursuit of justice. “See how people close their eyes,” remarks Alves, “when they pray. They do not know why. It has become an automatic reflex. But the reason is that they believe God begins where the body ends. The act of closing one’s eyes is an act of refusal of the body and of rejection of the world” (Alves, Tomorrow’s Child, p. 159). The liberationists endorse radical secularization or desacralization: “The language of theology and of the Church, the language of many hymns, liturgies, and sermons sounds to the secular man like the voice of an alien and remote sphere. This is one of the reasons why a growing number of people are leaving the churches and opting for a totally secular humanism” (Alves, A Theology of Hope, p. 29). Alves does not hesitate to go all the way with secularization:

God, thus, is not freedom for man. He is the domestication of man, the end of the “homo creator.” When the death of God is proclaimed, obviously man is made free again for his world, for history, for creation. The world is desacralized. Its frozen values thaw. Nothing is final. The horizons become permission and invitation. Man is free for experimentation.… Religion, therefore, is to be destroyed for the sake of the earth, for the sake of man’s freedom to criticize his world in order to transform it [ibid., p. 33].

The same thought is echoed by Gutierrez: “Secularization poses a serious challenge to the Christian community. In the future it will have to live and celebrate its faith in a nonreligious world, which the faith itself has helped to create” (Gutierrez, op. cit., p. 68).

Secularization, i.e., a completely desacralized world, is the wave of the future. It is the sign of the times, what God is doing in the world: “The Church has the duty of scrutinizing the signs of the times in order to ‘be able’ to reply in a suitable way …” (Segundo, op. cit., p. 126). God had been eliminated from the world and man is in full control: “Secularization is a central postulate of the Christian message.… Now everything is under man’s dominion” (ibid., p. 39).

Interpreting secularization in this manner as the sign of the times, the liberationists profess great hope for the future. “Political humanism is a language of hope” (Alves, A Theology of Hope, p. 27). There is no basis for accepting the status quo “which many Christians, it would appear, find so normal” (Miranda, op. cit., p. 168). Such acceptance is but a vestige of colonialism, which has “defuturized and defuturizes the nations under its power” (Alves, A Theology of Hope, p. 112). More and more, Christians are coming to their senses:

The commitment of militant Christians to liberation is not confined to rhetorical professions of principle or to new conceptual models for the conduct of theology. It finds its expression in everyday life: Dominican priests in Brazil offer sanctuary to urban guerrillas; Protestant missionaries in Uruguay actively support the Tupamaros; United States churches contribute funds to liberation groups in South Africa and Mozambique; priests issue public ultimatums to their religious superiors urging them to return church-owned lands to Bolivian peasants or to reject government subsidies for their school. Such activists openly accept all political risks: suppression, jail, torture, exile, even assassination [Goulet, op. cit., p. 84].

Evaluation

The first fallacy of the theology of liberation is its emphasis on liberty. Liberty is not the central theme of the Christian faith. Taking the favorite theme of the liberationists, namely that of Exodus, let us note what the Lord told Moses to say to Pharoah: “Let my people go, that they might serve me” (Exod. 8:1, italics supplied). Service to God, to glorify God, and not some abstract idea of liberty, is the reason for liberation. The people of Israel were shifted from servitude to Pharoah to servitude to God, and, instead of leaving them to their own devices, God gave them the moral law and detailed forms of worship—yes, cultus! Contrary to what Miranda has said, God also gave them government. In all this the concept of liberty is secondary.

A second defect in the theology of liberation is its concept of equality. Let us note in passing that there is an inescapable contradiction between liberty and equality. If men are absolutely free, inequality must result because the ablest—whether by nature, training, or circumstance—will come out on top. If, on the other hand, men are absolutely equal, the liberty of the ablest will necessarily have to be so severely curtailed as to be non-existent. More serious is the idea that inequality is wrong in itself. It may be justly argued that the distance between the rich and the poor within a country and the rich nations and the poor nations is excessive and cannot be justified in terms of God’s love for all people. In that sense, the cry of the wretched of the earth does reach into the heavens as it did in Israel of old, and Christians should do what they can to mitigate it. But let us not forget that inequality of some kind is an inescapable fact of life. God did not endow us equally. There will never be complete equality on this earth and perhaps not in heaven either.

To cite only one of the sayings of Jesus; the parable of the talents illustrates the justice of inequality. Jesus did not say that all should have received the same talents but only that more would be expected of those who were more richly endowed. The favorite reference to the least of Christ’s brethren means that Christians should minister to the needy but not that the distinction between rich and poor should be abolished. The poor, said Jesus, are always with us.

To say with Enzo Gatti that the poor are “the privileged recipients of the Gospel” is a violation of repeated biblical declarations that God is no respecter of persons. Lowly shepherds celebrated Christ’s birth, but so did the wise men, whose presents indicated that they were wealthy as well as wise. Peter was a lowly and uneducated fisherman, but Paul was a highly educated Pharisee and a member of the establishment. Luke was a Greek physician and therefore a professional man. Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea who buried Jesus were rich and were members of the establishment. Jesus did say, “Blessed are ye poor,” but they were not the only blessed ones. The truth is that Jesus never judged people according to their social status.

The advocacy of subversion and revolution runs counter to Romans 13, which instructs us to obey the powers that be. Jesus specifically rejected the concept of the “ongoing politics of God” (Alves’s term) when he was tempted in the desert and steadily refused the pressure to make him an earthly king. In the Sermon on the Mount he told us not to resist evil but to seek righteousness and be perfect as is our heavenly Father, who sends his rain on the just and the unjust. He well understood the fallacy of negativism in that those who indulge in it become like those whom they resist.

It is significant that the doctrine of original sin plays no part in the thinking of the liberationists. That is why they do not recognize the ambivalence of resolution, which always engenders its Napoleons. The end result is always to substitute one inequality for another—e.g., that of the political party elite for the rich capitalists in the Soviet Union—and the second is often worse than the first.

One of the fundamental messages of the Christian faith is instruction in how to live under adversity. The Apostle Paul repeatedly prayed that he would be delivered from his thorn in the flesh, but he was not. Instead, he learned how to live victoriously with his affliction. The early Church lived and thrived under slavery, and countless slaves found salvation without legal emancipation. The Church lives and thrives today under the Hammer and Sickle. Man has to realize that he is not God and must learn to put up with some poverty, injustice, and oppression. Improve on these evil conditions, he may; remove them, he may not.

As for the liberationists’ espousal of secularization, it is enough to say that no doctrine that reads God out of life can rightfully be called Christian. It cannot even be called religious! The task of the Christian is to sanctify the secular, not secularize the sacred. The idea that man is in full control and needs no supernatural help flouts reality and is a twentieth-century reappearance of the first temptation to which Adam and Eve succumbed.

Why should we Americans and citizens of other developed countries pay attention to the theology of liberation in the underdeveloped countries? Because the theology of liberation is the logic of social activism. As long as we are fed with the vague generalities of Harvey Cox and Richard Shaull, some of us may not get very excited. What the Latin American theologians of liberation have done is to spell out in concrete detail exactly where these vague generalities lead us when we take them seriously and put them into practice. By their fruits ye shall know them.

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