What is Liberation Theology?

excerpt from The Cambridge Dictionary of Christian Theology

When I was growing up in Evangelicalism, the only thing I heard about Liberation Theology was that it was “not the real gospel” and that it was somehow “watering down” the “real” gospel by making it only into some kind of “social gospel.” The message I received was that the “social gospel” was no gospel at all. (Spoiler alert: I don't agree with any part of that assessment.)

If you google “what is liberation theology?” the top results, including britannica.com will tell you that liberation theology developed in Latin America in the 1960s and that it arose in the context of Catholicism out of a reaction by the local priests and laity to the poverty and social injustice in the area. Gustavo Gutiérrez was the first to use the phrase, “liberation theology” in his 1971 book: A Theology of Liberation. And this is one of the best-known forms of this theology. This book caught the attention of the Roman Catholic Church and criticized Gutiérrez for making Christianity too political. But Gutiérrez said all readings of the Bible are political.

And these ideas were not brand new. As Miguel A. De La Torre points out, this cry of resistance against oppression echoes throughout our history, from some of the early Christian writers who claimed solidarity with the poor and said wealth was a hindrance to salvation, insisting that those who were rich “had a moral obligation toward the poor,” which if ignored “bordered on idolatry” (13). Of course, they were really only pointing back to the words of Jesus in Matthew 19:24: “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” 

I will give more background on the Liberation Theology that came out of Latin America in a future post. For now, I just want to emphasize that it is more accurate to talk about different liberation theologies instead of just one version of liberation theology. 

In the seminary course that I took on this subject, we spent time reading about not only Latin American liberation theology, but also Black liberation theology, womanist theology, queer theology, and disability theology. We can learn so much from all of these different perspectives, and we find areas of overlap and solidarity as well. In my notes from my Systematic Theology class, I wrote down:

"Theology is like a bowl of fishhooks because you try to pull out one and it’s linked to a bunch of others." - Shannon Craigo-Snell* 

*I'm pretty sure Shannon is the professor who said that but I'm not sure if she was quoting someone else or not.

Works Cited and Recommended Resources

• De La Torre, Miguel A. Liberation Theology for Armchair Theologians. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. 2013.
• Gutiérrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1988.

Previous posts in this series:

1. What is theology and why does it matter?

2. Introduction to Hermeneutics

Book Review: The Disabled God - Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability by Nancy L. Eiesland

The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability by Nancy L. Eiesland, 140 pages

Finished reading on 3/10/2021 for my seminary class on political and liberation theologies. What follows is an edited version of my summary of the book I wrote for an assignment.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I think pretty much everyone should read this: pastors, leaders of all kinds, and really just, everyone.

This book was published in 1994 but it started out as Nancy Eiesland’s Master’s thesis at Candler School of Theology. It seems significant that The Americans with Disabilities Act was just passed in 1990. She also writes out of her own experience of lifelong disability.

Eiesland argues that disabled people are a marginalized, minority group that society and churches have a responsibility to include and not discriminate against. The expectation should not be put on the disabled person to adjust and just have to figure it out for themselves as an individual. Disabled people do not need to be “fixed” and that mentality has been very damaging. Sadly, churches in the United States fought to be excluded from the requirements of The Americans with Disabilities Act so they would not have to bring their buildings up to the new accessibility requirements.

Chapter Three: The Body Politics “offers a social framework for reconceiving disability, incorporating the history of the civil rights struggle.” She examines a shift in the sociology of disability where the person with disabilities becomes the subject instead of the object of inquiry which led to “the emergence of the disability rights movement and continues to offer a theoretical construct for empowerment and liberation” for disabled people.

Chapter Four: Carnal Sins - Disability has never been religiously or theologically neutral. Eiesland talks about three themes that illustrate the theological obstacles encountered by people with disabilities seeking inclusion in Christian communities: 1) sin and disability conflation (blames the disability on the person’s sin and/or lack of faith), 2) virtuous suffering, and 3) segregationist charity. Eiesland spends the rest of this chapter talking about a particular case within the American Lutheran Church where their supposed theology of access for disabled people did not match their policies for ministerial qualification that rejected many disabled people as “categorically unsuitable for ordained ministry” (70).

Chapter Five: The Disabled God - This chapter explores the revolutionary implications of the resurrected Christ as the disabled God as a divine affirmation of the wholeness of “nonconventional bodies” (87). She opens by describing an epiphany where she saw God “in a sip-puff wheelchair,” the kind used mostly by quadriplegics. She writes, “I beheld God as a survivor, unpitying and forthright. [...] This theology of liberation emerged from those conversations, our common labor for justice, and corporate reflection on symbol.”

Chapter Six: Sacramental Bodies: The main focus of this chapter is on the centrality of the Eucharist in the symbolic and actual inclusion of disabled people. In the Eucharist the disabled God. In the resurrected Christ, “the nonconventional body is recognized as sacrament” (116).

View all my book reviews

Book Review: A Black Theology of Liberation by James H. Cone

A Black Theology of Liberation by James H. Cone, 200 pages

Finished reading on 2/11/2021 for my seminary class on political and liberation theologies.

James H. Cone (1938-2018) published this book in 1970. In the preface to the 1986 edition, Cone writes, “This book cannot be understood without a keen knowledge of the civil rights and black power movements of the 1960s and a general comprehension of nearly four hundred years of slavery and segregation in North America, both of which were enacted into law by government and openly defended as ordained of God by most white churches and their theologians” (Loc 186). Cone also says his style of doing theology was “influenced more by Malcolm X than by Martin Luther King, Jr.” (Loc 255). Peter J Paris points out in his forward to the 2020 edition that there was little to no conversation in their seminaries in the mid-twentieth century about Martin Luther King, Jr, and the civil rights movement as it was considered out of bounds for theological inquiry. This silence around all of that is what Cone would have been experiencing in seminary. Paris also tells us that Cone was not familiar with the rise of liberation theology in Latin America at the time he wrote this book. Instead, he took his seminary training and used those tools to construct his own theology of liberation (Loc 84). I appreciate what Cone wrote in his preface to the 1986 edition acknowledging his failure to pay attention to sexism in the black community and society at large, and so he changed the exclusive language from 1970 to more inclusive language (Loc 266).

Cone directly states in the preface to the 1986 edition: “A Black Theology of Liberation was first published in 1970, and it was written for and to black Christians (and also to whites who had the courage to listen) in an attempt to answer the question that I and others could not ignore, namely, “what has the gospel of Jesus Christ to do with the black struggle for justice in the United States?” (Loc 186).

Cone interacts extensively with many of the classical (white) theologians, especially Karl Barth. He mentions Paul Tillich a lot too, and Bultmann. I thought it was interesting that in the preface to the 1986 version he said that if he were writing the book at that time he would not follow the theological structure “that begins with a methodology based on divine revelation, and then proceeds to explicate the doctrines of God, humanity, Christ, church, world, and eschatology” (Loc 319). His reason for saying that is that he now believes that “Revelation as the word of God, witnessed in scripture and defined by the creeds and dogmas of Western Christianity, is too limiting to serve as an adequate way of doing theology today” (319).

This book is James Cone’s “attempt to construct a new perspective for the discipline of theology, using the Bible and the black struggle for freedom as its chief sources” (Loc 329). Liberation became the “organizing principle” (329). He explores the implications of this within the framework of classical theology, fully showing off all of the training he had received in seminary about the traditional (white) theologians. Chapters three through seven tackle Revelation, God, human beings, Jesus, the church, the world, and eschatology, always emphasizing "blackness" as opposed to "whiteness." He is writing a theology that is liberated from the racism of white supremacy and oppression. Over and over again he says in many different ways, that any message or theology that is not about the liberation of the poor is not Christ’s message. It’s not the Gospel. It’s not Christian theology. In his preface, he writes, “It is my contention that Christianity is essentially a religion of liberation. The function of theology is that of analyzing the meaning of that liberation for the oppressed so they can know that their struggle for political, social, and economic justice is consistent with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Any message that is not related to the liberation of the poor in a society is not Christ's message. Any theology that is indifferent to the theme of liberation is not Christian theology” (Loc 345).

View all my book reviews