Jesus the Liberator?

Signs of industrial affluence greeted the visitors--some 200 Protestant and Roman Catholic theologians, social scientists and assorted activists from North and South America--almost from the moment they arrived in Detroit last week. Even in a recession year, the Goodyear billboard near the airport was totting up by the seconds the autos manufactured in 1975: 3,835,001; 3,835,002. But deeper in the city the scene turned bleak: shuttered stores, decaying neighborhoods, jobless men wandering the streets. The contrast seemed particularly telling to the travelers, who had come to the Motor City for a conference on Christian responses to the inequities in modern society. The focus of their discussions at Detroit's rambling old Sacred Heart Seminary was a radical new mode of Christian thought: the theology of liberation.

The meetings themselves reflected the curious nature of the theology. The participants would defend an argument with a scriptural passage from Jeremiah or a verse from Luke, then, just as earnestly, cite Marx in condemning economic injustice. The theology of liberation in fact combines Marxist economic analysis with the teachings of the Old Testament prophets and the commands of the Christian gospel to fashion a demanding spiritual ethic: that it is every Christian's duty to fight "oppression," especially industrial capitalism, which is viewed by this theology as the central evil today.

Rich and Poor. The Latin American theologians who developed this strange alliance of Marx and Jesus see nothing contradictory in it. For an explanation of the chasm between rich and poor, between First World and Third World, they went to Marxist analysis and decided that the problem is capitalist oppression. For a solution of its ills, they went to Christian thought and Scriptures and concluded that Christians have a spiritual mandate to struggle on the side of the downtrodden. Jesus himself, they point out, citing the fourth chapter of Luke, declared early in his public life that he had come "to preach good news to the poor . . . to proclaim release to the captives . . . to set at liberty those who are oppressed."

Borrowing a leaf from the evolutionary theme of French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the theologians interpret human history as an upward curve, with God acting with man in a cooperative process of liberating humanity and the world. Sin is anything that resists or undercuts this process, or any oppression of one person--or group--by another. Salvation lies in a commitment to love of neighbor and thus a willingness to fight oppression, with revolution if need be. Camilo Torres, the Colombian guerrilla priest who was shot down by government troops in 1966, is the folk hero of liberation theology.

The theology developed in Latin America in the 1960s. One influence was the Second Vatican Council, which sharpened concern for the poor and challenged old alliances between church and state that had curbed religious protest in Latin America. Another was a growing trend in the World Council of Churches to attack injustices in the Third World. Most urgent of all, there was the deepening agony of the poor all across Latin America.

No ivory-tower thinkers, the Latin American liberation theologians developed their ideas while working among those poor. Their bitter analysis first caught wide public attention in a conference of Latin American bishops at Medellin, Colombia, in 1968 that denounced "institutionalized violence" in Latin American society. The principal architect of the unprecedented statement was a Peruvian priest named Gustavo Gutierrez, an old friend of Camilo Torres and theological adviser at Medellin. He later wrote A Theology of Liberation (Orbis Books), the movement's most influential text.

Gutierrez and many other Latin American liberation theologians journeyed to Detroit last week to argue that their theology has a prophetic role in northern industrial societies. Sounding a recurrent theme, Peruvian Economist Javier Iguiniz told an opening session at the conference that "the growth of capitalism is the same as the growth of world poverty." Uruguayan Jesuit Juan Luis Segundo, author of one of the movement's key works, A Theology for Artisans of a New Humanity, warned that the church, if it is to have any validity, "must become a function of liberation."

But what sort of liberation? The question was put poignantly by a U.S. nun who asked in one group discussion, "Do we have to opt for revolution?" The theologians' answer is yes--although they hasten to add that revolution covers a broad range of options, not all of them violent. Jesuit John Coleman of Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union says that there are elements of selflessness and idealism in the U.S. tradition that could be used to inspire Americans to "fight for structural reforms [that] most would call revolutions." But the blacks, feminists, Chicanos, American Indians and other North American minority groups at the Detroit meeting suggested that a different sort of tradition would be involved. Said Chicano Nun Maria Antonia Esquerra: "The theology of liberation in North America will be written by the oppressed."

Without Pain. One leading liberationist, Argentine Methodist Jose Miguez Bonino, worries that the theology may be surfacing in the U.S. and Europe as a trendy "new 'consumer good' in the theological market." But those who espouse it so far do not seem to be faddists, and they do not expect instant change. If anything, liberation theology may well be just too demanding to become a fad. Said one Detroit participant, Beverly Harrison, a professor of social ethics at Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary: "The liberal in me wants a different world, but the liberal in me also wants that world without changing myself, and without pain." This common, human contradiction, as much as some oppressive system, may be the most difficult challenge facing liberation theology, north or south of the border.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.