This is a continuation of the previous blogs (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20170703)(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20170704). They are excerpts. (Lily)
Structuralist Anti-Capitalism, Grass-roots Communities, and the Hermeneutic of Praxis
Gutierrez’s discussion of Christian community suggests a problem that was to dog the liberation theologians as their thinking developed — the relation between a conflictual and a cooperative model of society. The liberationists borrowed from the left a belief in conflicting interests and structural oppression as an explanation for poverty and oppression. Yet they also share the Christian belief in community and charity. The conflict is partially but not fully resolved through their support of Basic Christian Communities, made up primarily of the poor and underprivileged who are to apply the Bible to the solution of their day-to-day problems through a process of grass-roots democracy and participation. From the outset, liberation theology thus has contained both elements: a structuralist anti-capitalism, and a populist grass-roots communitarianism. The relation, interaction, and occasional tension between the two continues as it develops over time. The: different implications of the two elements also help to explain the varying reactions to the movement. The Brazilian bishops who see it primarily as the theoretical support for the Basic Christian Communities, of which there are now upwards of 100,000 in Brazil, take a different attitude from the members of the Colombian hierarchy, who view it as a justification for Christian participation in the guerrilla movements that have plagued that country for the last three decades.
For the academic theologian, however, what was exciting about liberation theology was its claim to have developed a new way of reading the Gospels — a “hermeneutic of praxis” arising out of the experience of the poor as related to the Bible and to historical experience. The rejection of the abstract intellectualism of the earlier social teachings of the church in favor of direct social involvement by committed Christians came at a time when new alternative approaches were being opened by the assimilation of the changes of the Second Vatican Council, and help to account for the rapid development of the movement.
The Critics of Liberation Theology
By the late 1970s, because of translations into other languages, the most important liberation theologians were beginning to get an international audience. (In the case of the United States, liberation theology is identified with Orbis Press, the publication house of the Maryknoll missionary order, which has published over 100 titles in the field, most of them translations from Spanish or Portugese.) In 1975 a Theology in the Americas:project, co-sponsored by the U.S. Catholic Conference and the World Council of Churches, brought the Latin American liberation theologians together with their American and Canadian counterparts. The meeting was the occasion for some harsh criticism by feminist and black theologians of the writings of the Latin American liberation theologians for their lack of concern with racial and sexual oppression in a continent which was built on the exploitation of the Indian, and in which machismo was the dominant sexual ethic. (See Sergio Torres and John Eagleson, eds., Theology in the Americas. [1976].)
The critics in Latin America were mainly on the right. Colombia was the principal center of the counter-attack, the first step of which was the election in 1972 of the Archbishop (later Cardinal) of Medellin, Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, as general secretary of the Latin American Bishops Conference (CELAM). Aided by Roger Vekemans, a Belgian Jesuit who had left Chile at the time of the election of Allende, Lopez Trujillo eliminated adherents of liberation theology from positions of influence in the CELAM structure, and both he and Vekemans wrote books and articles against liberation theology. Aside from occasional articles in religious journals in Europe and the United States — the two most notable being Thomas Sanders’ attack on liberation theology as “utopian moralism” (Christianity and Crisis, September 17, 1973) and the German theologian Juergen Moltmann’s “Open Letter to a Liberation Theologian,” arguing that it was nothing more than “seminary Marxism,” — liberation theology was still not widely discussed outside of Latin America. Two events changed this: the Third General Conference of Latin American Bishops at Puebla, Mexico, in January-February 1979; and the triumph of the Sandinista-led revolt against Nicaragua’s Somoza dictatorship in July of the same year.
(To be continued)
