As an undergraduate student, I was briefly attracted to liberation theology while never completely signing on. At the time I fancied myself something of a campus radical, relishing the responses I received from my fellow students at our American Christian university in the upper midwest. To be sure, we weren’t UC Berkeley, and I wasn’t Abbie Hoffman or Daniel Cohn-Bendit. I searched through Karl Marx’s writings to find a pithy slogan to put on my dormitory wall, but, to my disappointment, found nothing worthy of even the bare plaster of a monastic-like cell. I genuinely believed that the Christian faith in which I was raised demanded structural social change. Liberation theology was not the first choice in my efforts to apply my faith to the ills of society, but I believed I had to take it seriously and at least look into it.
Back in the 1970s liberation theology was big in certain Christian circles. Associated largely with Latin America, it began with a famous bishops’ conference in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968. At that moment of revolutionary ferment, it appeared to be the wave of the future, calling on the church to advance a “preferential option for the poor” and to take the side of the oppressed against their oppressors. I read Gustavo Gutierrez, Leonardo Boff, José Miguez Bonino, and José Miranda, the major figures in the movement, thinking that perhaps their ideas would change the church for the better, shaking us out of our complacency and moving us to make a better world for everyone. I was intrigued by the establishment of base communities throughout Latin America, enabling the poor to take their lives in their own hands and to chart a future course together. Nevertheless, I eventually found the movement wanting and moved on.
Yet others obviously have not, as indicated by this recent article in Sojourners: Liberation Theology Calls Together the Religious and Political. Here Fran Quigley writes about the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cruz, a professor at Union Theological Seminary and pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church, both in New York City. There is much to like in it. The Bible really does call us to care for the poor and to free the oppressed from their oppressors, and recognizing this truth made a significant impact on me in my youth.
I was particularly struck by the Torah’s year of jubilee, when all land was to revert to its original family and debts were forgiven. Prescribed in Leviticus 25:8-13, the jubilee was one of a series of legal mechanisms to protect the vulnerable in ancient Israel, summed up in the terms widow, orphan, and sojourner. Moreover, liberation theologians have correctly understood that the economic structures of a society can be stacked against large numbers of people, trapping them in a poverty from which all of their hard work will not allow them to escape. This would obviously have resonance in a region characterized by a division between a small class of wealthy landowners and the Sem-Terra, or landless peasants. So far so good.
Despite my youthful sympathy for liberation theology, however, I found that I could not ultimately follow the path it set out. Reading this article reminded me why.
To begin, like other revolutionary movements, its followers speaks too facilely of “a radical break with the status quo,” as if every existing institution in our society is unsalvageable and must be replaced by something altogether new. Liberation theology may correctly identify man’s fallen condition and the social ills that follow from it, but it does not easily recognize what Abraham Kuyper called common grace, which God bestows on everyone irrespective of their status before him. God remains faithful to his creation, meaning that, no matter how much our endeavours are distorted by sin, something of his grace always shines through. After all, God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45). No status quo is without redeeming features.
Thus we err in following in the footsteps of Ivan Turgenev’s memorable nihilist character Evgeny Vassilyevich Bazarov from his brilliant novel Fathers and Sons (1862). When challenged as to his generation’s intentions for remoulding Russia and the world, Bazarov responds with “The ground wants clearing first,” assuming that future generations will be able to construct a more obviously rational edifice on top of the ruins of the old order. Sadly the twentieth century was littered with the corpses of the millions of victims of various ideological proposals for a new society. Breaking with the status quo meant nothing less than dispensing with flesh-and-blood persons implicated by association with it.
But if we are attuned to the normative patterns of God’s cosmos and immerse ourselves in the scriptures which point to these norms, we will be much more cautious in dispensing with a social and political structure just because it is imperfect. Better to adopt incremental reforms that will retain the best of the old and seek to improve it, while undertaking to remedy its undoubted imperfections.
This careful approach may lack the excitement of the various radicalisms vying for power, but it has the advantage of being closer to the real world, which is always a mixture of good and evil this side of Christ’s return. As radicals have upended social and political structures in the past, they have proved to be less radical than they claim, because they have failed to recognize the presence of sin at the root (radix) of even their own proposals for change, effectively replacing what may have been a mildly oppressive regime with a horrifically murderous one. This pattern has repeated itself so many times in recent history that it is a wonder that anyone still believes the empty promises offered under the guise of liberation.
A related error of liberation theology is its defective anthropology. “Liberation theology rejects Marx’s dismissive view of religion, of course. But it considers Marxist class analysis to be an accurate explanation for the suffering endured by working people and the poor.” But can we so easily separate Marx’s atheism from his class analysis? I don’t think so. Marx’s materialism is of one piece with his denial of God. Class analysis flows inexorably out of his understanding that human beings can be boiled down to their productive capacities and that everything else—philosophies of life, national and group loyalties, religious faith, and so forth—has no independent existence apart from these capacities.
Thus a quarrel between nations is in reality a byproduct of class struggle. Remove the reasons for the latter and the former will disappear. Theological differences cannot be taken seriously on their own terms, because traditional religion, in Marx’s words, is “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” Once the suffering and oppression of the vast majority of people is ended with the arrival of the classless society, religion will have no reason to exist. Man is homo faber, or man the maker, and not homo religiosus, that is, man intrinsically ordered to someone or something transcending the cosmos. While liberation theologians may wish to blend these two understandings of humanity into a higher synthetic whole—a move which Marx would scarcely find credible—the synthesis will be unstable, and the redemptive narratives underpinning it will conflict at a basic level.
Finally, liberation theology’s understanding of the gospel is deficient. Why did Jesus have to die? The church’s creeds and confessions agree on this: Jesus died to pay the price for our sins. This is not the account we see here:
“If you miss the reality of why Jesus was killed, you miss the whole story. Jesus was assassinated because he condemned injustice,” Cruz said. “In Jesus’ day, those who could afford good health care and medicine were not happy when the marginalized received good health care and medicine from Jesus … He died because there were evil individuals in society who wanted to maintain their power and found it necessary to kill him.”
There are elements of truth here. Jesus did condemn those who put their trust in material wealth (Matthew 6:24; Luke 12:16-21). Jesus’ claim to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6) was an implicit threat to Rome and the Judean authorities alike, who followed different ways based respectively on earthly glory and a kind of Judaic nationalism. Yet if we fail to recognize the central reason for Jesus’ death, namely, to redeem the fallen creation, we are grasping a very incomplete gospel, with no real call for repentance, no promise of forgiveness, and no genuine amendment of life through the power of the Holy Spirit, much less a resurrection to new life on the last day.
One of the best criticisms of liberation theology comes from the British cleric and author, Bishop Lesslie Newbigin, who makes two observations. First, the claim that we can only read the Bible from the standpoint of the clash between oppressors and oppressed is an interpretive lens that comes prior to any appeal to scripture itself and indeed is imposed on it from without. This does not mean that the Bible doesn’t speak to oppressive situations. Indeed it does. But to make of this the core of biblical teaching is a significant departure from orthodoxy. One could just as easily make the case, based on a Darwinian interpretive framework, that “the poor are simply those who have failed in the struggle for existence and—in the interests of the race—will be eliminated by those who demonstrate their fitness to survive.” In neither Marx nor Darwin will we find a lens through which to view scripture, not only because it fails to take into account their respective worldviews, but because it needlessly divides the church by annexing it to a particular secular ideological vision.
Second and most basically, Newbigin reminds us that Jesus Christ offers himself, not only to the oppressed, but to oppressors as well.
[T]he shocking thing [about Jesus] was not that he sided with the poor against the rich but that he met everyone equally with the same unlimited mercy and the same unconditioned demand for total loyalty. . . . Before the cross of Jesus there are no innocent parties. His cross is not for some and against others. It is the place where all are guilty and all are forgiven. The cross cannot be converted into the banner for a fight of some against others.
We cannot, contra Marx and his followers, divide the world into oppressed and oppressors, as if they constitute readily identifiable classes of people. Each of us is, in fact, oppressed in some situations and oppressor in others. As soon as we imagine ourselves as part of a permanently oppressed class, we become blind to our own oppressive capabilities—something we see played out in so many troubled parts of the world, from the Middle East to South Asia to Central America.
But really this is no more than to say that we are all sinners in need of God’s saving grace, is it not? Even where we disagree with its interpretive framework, liberation theology is right to seek to help the poor. Yet in identifying this preferential option for the poor as the heart of the gospel, as well as in accepting too easily Marx’s division of the world into oppressing and oppressed classes, it leads us away from the gospel’s life-giving message on the pretext of living out its implications for society. We can surely do better than this. How? By reading the gospel on its own terms and refraining from imposing on it an external interpretive agenda based on a different redemptive story.
abraham kuyper, class analysis, common grace, Karl Marx, Lesslie Newbigin, liberation theology, radicalism
