STATEMENT DL-100-1
CHRISTIAN REVOLUTION IN LATIN AMERICA: The Changing Face of Liberation Theology (Part One in a Three-Part Series on Liberation Theology) by Ron Rhodes
In 1985, a leader of the conservative wing of the Roman Catholic church in Latin America, Bishop Hoyos, denounced liberation theologians, saying: "When I see a church with a machine gun, I cannot see the crucified Christ in that church....We can never use hate as a system of change. The core of being a church is love."1 Theological controversies are often confined to seminary classrooms or theological journals. But the controversy provoked by Latin American liberation theology has been public and it has been worldwide — involving the Vatican, orthodox and not-so-orthodox priests, lay people, sociologists, socialists, capitalists, economists, government leaders and their military, and much more. Liberation theology has certainly not been the passing fad some analysts thought it would be when it first emerged in the late 1960s. Strictly speaking, liberation theology should be understood as a family of theologies — including the Latin American, Black, and feminist varieties. All three respond to some form of oppression: Latin American liberation theologians say their poverty-stricken people have been oppressed and exploited by rich, capitalist nations. Black liberation theologians argue that their people have suffered oppression at the hands of racist whites. Feminist liberation theologians lay heavy emphasis upon the status and liberation of women in a male-dominated society. This article, the first of a three-part series on liberation theology, will focus on the Latin American variety — examining its historical roots, growth, doctrine, and present status in the world. Primary emphasis will be on how the movement has changed since its emergence in the late 1960s. In Parts Two and Three respectively, I will examine the Black and feminist varieties. With a few notable exceptions, Latin American liberation theology has been a movement identified with the Roman Catholic church. For this reason, I shall direct most of my attention to the views of Roman Catholic liberation theologians. First, however, we must become acquainted with the roots of this controversial theology. EUROPEAN ROOTS Some of the theological roots of Latin American liberation theology can be traced directly to the writings of certain European theologians. Three of the more notable of these are Jurgen Moltmann, Johannes Baptist Metz, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Without going into detail, Moltmann has suggested that the coming kingdom gives the church a societytransforming vision of reality as opposed to a merely private vision of personal salvation. Metz has emphasized that there is a political dimension to faith, and that the church must be an institution of social criticism. Bonhoeffer has issued a call to redefine religion in a secular context. His theology emphasizes human responsibility toward others, and stresses the value of seeing the world with "the view from below" — the perspective of the poor and oppressed.
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