Liberation theology is a Christian doctrine that attempts to fight poverty and oppression through addressing their roots in the sin of greed. Unlike many theological approaches, it takes into account cultural, social, ethnic, and political issues in interpreting Christian commandments as well as Scripture.
Liberation theology is one of the newest branches of Christian theology. It has also been one of the most controversial.
While all Christians are called on to help the poor and oppressed, liberation theology goes further than charity. It holds to the belief that Christians should not just alleviate the suffering of the poor, but also assist them in lifting themselves out of poverty and oppression entirely.
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The controversy is that this is also necessarily a call for political action. While God is the ultimate arbiter of justice, humans are the vehicle to realize His plan. As Thomas Aquinas reasoned, all justice is necessarily social justice, in that it involves acts among people.
Therefore justice is concerned only about our dealings with others. …since justice by its name implies equality, it denotes essentially relation to another, for a thing is equal, not to itself, but to another.
Recognizing systemic factors behind poverty and oppression, the originators of liberation theology believed that human governance was a matter of concern for the church. But other theologians have disputed concepts of sin that point toward systemic rather than individual failings. Liberation theology remains both influential and controversial in many denominations.
Liberation Theology Applies Modern Scholarship to Ancient Problems of Social Justice
Christianity has always offered comfort to the afflicted and assistance for those in need. It’s a duty laid out in many places in the Bible and through the history of the church.
Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy.
Liberations theology takes an extra step in this calling, paying attention to why some classes of people are in poverty or oppressed in the first place. It differs from traditional Christian doctrine in making the root causes a part of the business of the church and applying Christ’s message to socioeconomics as well as personal behavior. Community organizing around Biblical concepts of care for the poor and justice for the oppressed is a key feature of the doctrine.
Liberation theology also calls for a strong emphasis on evangelism and outreach. Taking God’s message to the poor is seen as an important first step in assisting them with their liberation.
This branch of theology examines Christ’s message through the lens of social and economic well-being. In some cases, it adopts Marxist economic theory, recognizing that political questions are tightly linked with matters of social justice.
Liberation theology has become both more accepted and more broadly developed since the 1950s. In North America, liberation theology was sometimes seen as the basis for religious support of the Civil Rights movement. The heavy involvement of many Black pastors, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jesse Jackson, was in part due to the influences of liberation theology.
Liberation Theology Emerged From Some of the Poorest Countries on Earth
Liberation theology is unique in the church for having originated in Latin America. It grew out of great social injustice and societal breakdown caused by poverty and oppression in South and Central American countries in the mid-Twentieth Century.
Priests and the church hierarchy in those countries in the 1950s were face-to-face with the atrocities and the suffering experienced by the lower classes suffering under authoritarian rule. They began to prioritize their assistance to those classes and to combine it with advocacy for greater social change. Their emphasis become on social organization, combining evangelism with social responsibility.
A 1971 book called “A Theology of Liberation” by Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez described many of the ideas of liberation theology that had been practiced since the 1950s.
Liberation theology was primarily seen as an outgrowth of the Roman Catholic theological thoughts that dominated Latin America, but the doctrine also found supporters in Protestant denominations, particularly as it migrated north into the United States and took hold among some religious supporters of the American Civil Rights movement.
Liberation Theology May Be Only a Piece of Larger Social Movements
As one of the more recent developments in Christian theology, liberation theology may not be too easy to classify just yet. Society itself is becoming more aware of social justice issues that it deals with. It’s entirely possible that liberation theology will be seen as part of a broader historical context, in the same way that the Protestant Reformation is closely linked to the Enlightenment.
Many Christian degrees will involve at least some teaching of liberation theology concepts. The doctrine is not widely adopted by major denominations, but part of theology is understanding how and why certain concepts are viewed as heretical while others are not. Although perspectives may still be changing on the role of liberation theology in Christianity, studies will help continue to define it.
