Book Recs for Liberation Theology

[nodito]

I have a good friend who left the Catholic Church several years ago. His largest qualms were with the Church’s teachings on sexual morality. Though misguided, he’s a great guy, with a genuine love and concern for the poor and suffering.

Recently he has expressed interest in learning more about Liberation Theology. I get the sense that it’s more of an academic interest that anything else. He has asked me for a book recomendation but I haven’t read anything about Liberation Theology since college.

So I’m looking for resources. Ideally, I’d like to offer him an interesting and balanced piece that highlights the good qualities of Liberation Theology (care and justice for the poor) while explaining how others aspects aren’t in keeping with Catholicism (like the emphasis on armed violence).

In other words, if possible, I’d like to avoid handing him something that contains a blanket condemnation of Liberation Theology, but I also want him to understand that the Church has real problems with it.

Any thoughts? Any books out there that meet my criteria? Thanks in advance.

 

[Elizabeth502]

From bad to worse.

Left the church, now wants to learn about an invented theology called “liberation” theology which puts words in Jesus’ mouth.

Yes, I know titles of books. And I’ll share them when hell freezes over. I will never promote this anti-intellectual and purely political movement which defies every academic discipline.

Your friend needs a lot more than book titles. He needs prayers. He’s on the wrong track. (Or several wrong tracks.)

 

[aspawloski4th]

Thought I’d never hear this topic ever mentioned again after the 80’s were over. Basically it substitues communism and socialism for Catholic teaching. Go to your local Catholic book store and there shouldn’t be trouble finding what you want. liberation theology is heresy.

 

[Elizabeth502]

Thought I’d never hear this topic ever mentioned again after the 80’s were over. Basically it substitues communism and socialism for Catholic teaching. Go to your local Catholic book store and there shouldn’t be trouble finding what you want. liberation theology is heresy.

Good reply, i.m.o.

I resent anyone misusing texts of any kind, by the way. It’s just perhaps a little more offensive when it’s a tradition’s sacred texts. Hey, if anyone wants to become an activist for a political cause, go for it. The Lord knows there are plenty of unliberated peoples in the world. Some are in South America, some in Africa, the list goes on. I think the poorer classes in Mexico are terribly unliberated because of the economic corruption in the gov’t which keeps the masses under the oppression of poverty (which is why they come north). But that doesn’t mean that Jesus’ message in the First Century was explicitly intended for future politically and economically oppressed classes in the 21st century.

But become an activist not by hijacking apolitical literature and declaring it political.

 

[nodito]

Is it not possible to study a field, discipline, or topic without subscribing to its assertions? If my friend had wanted to read about Quakers, the Inquisition, the Protestant Reformation, Islam, or the Holocaust would you have me refuse him book recommendations on the basis that the claims made during those events and through those religions were false? I would much rather provide him with a book that deals with Liberation Theology from a Catholic perspective than send him to the local bookstore with no direction.

 

[Contarini]

I have a good friend who left the Catholic Church several years ago. His largest qualms were with the Church’s teachings on sexual morality. Though misguided, he’s a great guy, with a genuine love and concern for the poor and suffering.

Recently he has expressed interest in learning more about Liberation Theology. I get the sense that it’s more of an academic interest that anything else. He has asked me for a book recomendation but I haven’t read anything about Liberation Theology since college.

So I’m looking for resources. Ideally, I’d like to offer him an interesting and balanced piece that highlights the good qualities of Liberation Theology (care and justice for the poor) while explaining how others aspects aren’t in keeping with Catholicism (like the emphasis on armed violence).

In other words, if possible, I’d like to avoid handing him something that contains a blanket condemnation of Liberation Theology, but I also want him to understand that the Church has real problems with it.

Any thoughts? Any books out there that meet my criteria? Thanks in advance.

This is not what you are looking for, but I would recommend Gustavo Gutierrez’ *Theology of Liberation. *One of the classic texts in the field.

People on this forum may like to sneer at liberation theology, and certainly it gave rise to plenty of foolishness. But Gutierrez is well worth reading, and I would argue that most of liberation theology’s best insights have been incorporated into more mainstream theology, both Protestant and Catholic.

For a younger theologian who draws on liberation theology but is not strictly a liberation theologian, I’d recommend William Cavanaugh. His book *Torture and Eucharist *addresses the problems liberation theology set out to tackle (the abominably apolitical stance of the Church in Latin America in the face of torture and tyranny), but (from what I’ve heard, and from what I’ve read of his other work–I haven’t read this book) without the narrowness and overdependence on secular ideology that marred much liberation theology.

I think a major influence on younger Catholic theologians (admittely the ones I knew were studying at Duke which is a Protestant seminary with a strong orientation in this particular direction) is John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus. I would strongly recommend this to your friend (though the author is Mennonite, not Catholic), because he explains why a robust orthodoxy goes hand in hand with political engagement–not in the sense of a Marxist “take up guns and go to the hills,” but in the sense of providing an alternative way of living as a Church that witnesses to the power of the Gospel and defies the powers of this world. (The Anglican scholar N. T. Wright has a similar approach in many ways.)

A recent collection of essays on Catholic moral theology influenced by this perspective but also faithful to the Thomist natural-law tradition is Gathered for the Journey. Many of the authors were friends of mine at Duke.

The folks on here will tell you that this is all nonsense and that Jesus’ message was really “apolitical.” But the question is: do you want your friend to be a Christian, or will it only satisfy you if he is an apolitical, quasi-Gnostic Christian of the kind the pundits on this forum consider orthodox?

Edwin

Edwin

 

[manualman]

Alas, I know of no specific books on the matter. Pay attention to Edwin above though. He’s one of the best educated minds on the boards.

The biggest problem with Liberation Theology is that concern for the plight of the poor is generally allowed to obscure Divine Revelation and the truth of the human condition. It seems to me that LT adherents generally forget that Original Sin is a fatal flaw in ALL humans, not just the rich and politically powerful class. Their solutions tend to revolve around toppling the unjust from power but fail to account for the fact that those doing the toppling almost inevitably end up just as bad as the tyrants they replace.

Catholic teaching is the humanity is GOOD, but also FALLEN. It’s not a contradiction, it’s a complexity. Virtually all humans have both the good that God intended for us in them and the bad that enters via sin.

IMO, that is the roadway junction where LT fundamentally goes off course.

 

[SpiritMeadow]

I agree that Guitierrez is great. Try “On Job” which is superb, “The God of Life” and “They drink from their own wells” Also Jon Sobrino, “Christology at the crossroads” also anything by Leonard Boff.

The ultra right wing hates this stuff for reasons I don’t fathom. They are required reading in Christology at my Catholic College, taught by Catholic theologians.

Hope this helps.

 

[Elizabeth502]

Dear Spirit Meadow & Contarini,

Do NOT equate me with the people on CAF you call “right wing.” I am not. I do not approve of their message or their tactics, for the most part. You completely misread me. I am well and broadly educated in both traditional and liberal theologies. To me, it was especially revealing that my theology school, while considered one of the most extreme liberal and “edgy” of them all, included many students disgusted with so-called “liberation theology” not at all for political reasons, but, like me, for literary reasons.

I am an academic first. Liberation theology is not academically sound. It sounds good when you say it real fast, and it appeals to people who like to be trendy and people who are constantly looking to justify their politics when no justification is needed. On moral grounds, on secular grounds, political liberation of oppressed peoples can be justified. For that matter, on general spiritual grounds as well, but do not say that Jesus came in the First Century to liberate the Mexican peasants 20 centuries later; he did not. I’m well acquainted with the premises of so-called “liberation theology,” and those premises compromise the text, distort it, and ultimately are dishonest to it. Lots of people use lots of literature in inauthentic ways as a manifesto for their agendas: People do it to scripture, to Shakespeare, and to Sylvia Plath. Terrific if whatever your cause or uprising is, you feel some identification with some ancient text. But that is very different than claiming a determinism from that text.

Own your political philosophies and quit trying to re-author ancient texts and traditions in some retrospective, serpentine way. It is neither respectful nor credible. On another thread I pointed to a fascinating modern notion of Christology which has provocative implications for an increasingly smaller globe. But that notion is intellectually sound and can fit within a theological system. It is not at all “traditional” Catholic systematics, but its premises can apply within a Christological framework; “liberation theology” does not. It is an artifact without a valid context.

 

[Elizabeth502]

Let’s put it another way:

I have no problem with liberation spirituality. I have a huge problem with liberation theology as it is posited.

Two different animals.

 

[Contarini]

Do NOT equate me with the people on CAF you call “right wing.” I am not. I do not approve of their message or their tactics, for the most part. You completely misread me.

I apologize.

I am an academic first.

What’s your field? Mine is church history (primarily the Reformation era). My advisor was a specialist in the history of Biblical interpretation, so I have a strong bias toward defending theological interpretations of Scripture against narrowly historical ones.

Liberation theology is not academically sound.

By the standards of what discipline?

On moral grounds, on secular grounds, political liberation of oppressed peoples can be justified

And theology has nothing to say to this? I think we disagree radically on the nature of theology.

For that matter, on general spiritual grounds as well, but do not say that Jesus came in the First Century to liberate the Mexican peasants 20 centuries later; he did not.

Jesus came to save the world. To save bodies as well as souls. There is no aspect of human life that is not affected by Jesus’ work of redemption. That is a sound and orthodox theological premise, and it is the basic premise of liberation theology as I understand it. That doesn’t mean that I like everything that liberation theologians have done with that premise–their understanding of salvation/liberation has indeed been all too often filtered through a Marxist lens.

Have you read Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus? I don’t agree with everything he says, but I find his general argument convincing, and in my opinion he captures the truth in liberation theology without the Marxist silliness.

I’m well acquainted with the premises of so-called “liberation theology,” and those premises compromise the text, distort it, and ultimately are dishonest to it.

You appear to be working with a fairly strict historical-critical understanding of the meaning of Scripture (in which case I did indeed misunderstand where you were coming from, and should have been more attentive to the nuances of what you were saying). I strongly disagree with this in the first place–the meaning of Scripture for the Church cannot be limited to what historians say it originally meant. However, in the second place the trend among scholars of the “third quest for the historical Jesus” is on the whole toward emphasizing the political nature of Jesus’ mission. Richard Horsley, one of the leading scholars of first-century Galilee, takes this approach, as in their own way do scholars as different as Dominic Crossan, N. T. Wright, and Paula Fredriksen. Now perhaps all of these scholars are faddish and overly influenced by the vogue of liberation theology and postcolonialism and so on (I’m particularly suspicious of Crossan myself, though I know his work the least well of the four). Perhaps they are all just trying to serve their [very different!] theological agendas. But they are all renowned scholars of the historical Jesus and deserve to be taken seriously. I don’t think you can dismiss political interpretations of Jesus as cavalierly as you do, and I’d like to know what contemporary scholarship of the historical Jesus you find convincing in contrast to the work of the scholars I’ve named.

Edwin

 

[SpiritMeadow]

Dear Spirit Meadow & Contarini,

Do NOT equate me with the people on CAF you call “right wing.” I am not. I do not approve of their message or their tactics, for the most part. You completely misread me. I am well and broadly educated in both traditional and liberal theologies. To me, it was especially revealing that my theology school, while considered one of the most extreme liberal and “edgy” of them all, included many students disgusted with so-called “liberation theology” not at all for political reasons, but, like me, for literary reasons.

I am an academic first. Liberation theology is not academically sound. It sounds good when you say it real fast, and it appeals to people who like to be trendy and people who are constantly looking to justify their politics when no justification is needed. On moral grounds, on secular grounds, political liberation of oppressed peoples can be justified. For that matter, on general spiritual grounds as well, but do not say that Jesus came in the First Century to liberate the Mexican peasants 20 centuries later; he did not. I’m well acquainted with the premises of so-called “liberation theology,” and those premises compromise the text, distort it, and ultimately are dishonest to it. Lots of people use lots of literature in inauthentic ways as a manifesto for their agendas: People do it to scripture, to Shakespeare, and to Sylvia Plath. Terrific if whatever your cause or uprising is, you feel some identification with some ancient text. But that is very different than claiming a determinism from that text.

Own your political philosophies and quit trying to re-author ancient texts and traditions in some retrospective, serpentine way. It is neither respectful nor credible. On another thread I pointed to a fascinating modern notion of Christology which has provocative implications for an increasingly smaller globe. But that notion is intellectually sound and can fit within a theological system. It is not at all “traditional” Catholic systematics, but its premises can apply within a Christological framework; “liberation theology” does not. It is an artifact without a valid context.

Please accept my apologies as well if you thought I was speaking to you. I most assuredly was not. There are some here, as I learned on my first day after asking a similar question, that reject all “other” theologies out of hand as heretical. They are married completely to only what is produced by the Magisterium.

I can’t say that I am well versed in LT, but I have read extensively I believe in the area, and find nothing that is as you frame it. Authors such as Sobrino, Crossan, and others are now rejected out of hand by people here by and large, though they have high respect among their peers as exceptional theologians and exegetes.

We are all too aware that the Magisterium has attempted to clamp down on those who challenge “official” teaching. The church has always been so it seems. Aquinas was once considered a heretic and had he been writing at a time of the internet, no doubt folks here would be calling him such and declaring that no one should be reading such “filth.”

I’d like to see your specific arguments rather than the conclusions myself. Care to enlighten us?

 

[manualman]

SM, That’s intriguing!

Which pope wrote against the inherent problems underlying Aquinas’ theological writings?

Since critics here largely base their opinions on the fact that JPII and BXVI have been highly critical of major aspects of LT on several occasions, your analogy requires a similar occurence to be valid. I was unaware he ever ran afoul of the hierarchy.

 

[Contarini]

SM, That’s intriguing!

Which pope wrote against the inherent problems underlying Aquinas’ theological writings?

Since critics here largely base their opinions on the fact that JPII and BXVI have been highly critical of major aspects of LT on several occasions, your analogy requires a similar occurence to be valid. I was unaware he ever ran afoul of the hierarchy.

No Pope did. The bishop of Paris in 1277 condemned a number of propositions taught by university theologians, including several that Aquinas had taught. I’m not sure this was the only example, but it was by far the most famous.

Edwin