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Liberation Theology and the Crisis in Western Theology
| Article
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14640 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1988 |
7,279 Words |
| Author
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Richard L. Rubenstein
Richard L. Rubenstein is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished
Professor of Religion at Florida State University and
president of the Washington Institute for Values in Public
Policy. He is the coauthor (with John K. Roth) of Approaches
to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and its Legacy |
One of Latin American liberation theology's most distinctive features has been the claim that, in spite of its diversity, it constitutes a radical departure from European and North American theology. According to liberation theologians, North Atlantic theologians have been largely preoccupied with the problem of credibility and "the challenge of the nonbeliever," who is a literate, well-educated product of post-Enlightenment secular society. Not infrequently, the nonbelievers are more likely to question the religious world than "the economic, social, political and cultural world" from which they have benefited and in which they feel more or less at home. By contrast, Gutiérrez and his colleagues have argued that theology must concern itself primarily with the "nonpersons" who exist at the bitter margins of society. According to Gutiérrez, the nonperson is he or she "whom the prevailing social order fails to recognize as a person--the poor, the exploited, the one systematically and legally despoiled of their humanness, the ones who scarcely know that they are persons at all."
Gutiérrez asserts that such people do not question the world of religion. No matter how superfluous to the processes and production they may be, the poor know the church regards them as children of God and objects of Christ's love. They do, however, question the economic, social, and political order that has allegedly degraded and exploited them and then expelled them to the utter margins of human society. Although few, if any, of Latin America's nonpersons have read Thomas Hobbes, they might well understand how his analysis of human worth applies to their condition. According to Hobbes:
The value, or Worth of a man, is as of all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his Power: and therefore not absolute but a thing dependent on the need and judgment of another.... And as in other things, so in men, not the seller, but the buyer determines the Price.
When no one is willing to offer a price for the labor of the poor, they become superfluous nonpersons. The poor are hardly likely to question the religious inheritance that alone accords them a measure of nonnegotiable human dignity. Nevertheless, it is my conviction that (a) liberation theologians and their constituency are no less vulnerable than their North Atlantic counterparts to the theological and sociological problems arising out of the question of religious credibility; and (b) insofar as Latin American societies succeed in demarginalizing the poor, a principal objective of liberation theology, the poor will be threatened with the same loss of
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