Liberation Theology

Around 1959, One of my professors remarked, “The battleground of the remainder of the twentieth century will be the question of authority.” It wasn’t long before, as someone said, Pope John XXIII decided to open the shutters to let in a little air and the wind blew them off the hinges. The former Cardinal Ratzinger has pointed out more than once that unjustified extrapolations from the proceedings of Vatican II have formed the basis of liberation theology, which first took hold largely in a Latin American Roman Catholic context. Specifically, the adherents of the Catholic branch of the movement have set aside the teaching office of their church and attempted to bring their own authority to the development of their system.

Liberation theology is based on a complex set of presuppositions growing out of the deconstructionist aspect of postmodernism. Specifically, since even the Bible is thought to be informed by the prejudices of its time, it is felt that we may legitimately reinterpret it in the light of the pressing concerns of our own sociopolitical environment. As Cardinal Ratzinger, presently the Pope, expresses it, now “the experience of the ‘community’ determines the understanding and the interpretation of Scripture.” He goes on to say that Karl Marx’s dialectical view of history is brought into play in liberation theology’s approach to the Bible, leading to the view that human beings must engage in revolutionary activities to bring about the liberation of the masses.

The ideology itself is rather complex and has many submovements within it, and perhaps that is inevitable in the nature of the case. If no one’s truth is authoritative, ideologies tend to splinter. Be that as it may, at its most basic level, liberation theology goes to the Bible and finds that God often warns his people that he opposes the rich when they oppress the helpless, and that he is on the side of the dispossessed. This theme runs right through the Hebrew prophets and is picked up in a startling way in Mary’s inspired hymn of praise when she declares of God, “He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:53, NIV).

The problem for those of us who still believe the Bible should be approached through a set of consecrated common-sense hermeneutical principles is that there is a tremendous logical leap between God’s declaring himself to be on the side of the dispossessed and against the wealthy exploiter, and the idea that human beings should foment revolution, including the use of violence “if necessary.” What is plain on the surface of the New Testament is that Jesus never suggests that his followers should take up arms to change the world. A group of zealots tried that and ended up dead on top of the Masada fortress. It is also plain that Jesus and his apostles intended rather to undermine the evils of their time. St. Paul’s statement that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28) is one of the most radical pronouncements ever made in the ancient world. The fact that the church was extremely slow to implement its implications does not invalidate the case.

Furthermore, liberation theology strays so far from the clear meaning of the Scripture that it often ends in fanatical irrationality. A former colleague of mine was an extreme pacifist and, as a sincere Mennonite, profoundly dedicated to the cause of the poor and downtrodden of Latin America. Yet that led him to become so enamored of liberation theology that he believed it was legitimate for the poor to take up arms and massacre the rich. He even declared that the rich of Latin America did not deserve to have the gospel preached to them. Great idea. The Bible says I don’t either.

Back to the question of authority. The traditional Christian presupposition is that the Bible has God behind it and is therefore authoritative as it stands. Liberation theology’s presupposition is that the Bible is a fundamentally human document, complete with outdated ideologies that must be identified and rooted out. The only authoritative reading of it, then, is one that the proponents of liberation theology can convince the public is pertinent to our time.

Convince away, but Marxism isn’t doing so well, for all its talk about “praxis,” and the Judeo-Christian ethic of redemption of the whole person, when properly applied, still works in practice.