World Christianity as Public Religion

Raimundo Barreto Jr., Ronaldo Cavalcante, Wanderley P. da Rosa, Wanderley Pereira da Rosa, Raimundo C. Barreto

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781506433714
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506433721
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In a context of globalization, socioeconomic disparity, environmental concerns, mass migration, and multiplying political and social upheavals, Christians from different parts of the world are forced to ask complex questions about poverty, migration, race, gender, sexuality, and land-related conflicts. Scholars have gradually become aware that world Christianity has a public face, voice, and reason. This volume stresses world Christianity as a form of public religion, identifying areas for intercultural engagement. It proposes a conversation that includes voices from South and North America, Europe, and Africa, highlighting differences and commonalities as Christian scholars from different parts of the world address concerns related to world Christianity and public responsibility. Divided into five sections, each formed by two chapters, this volume covers themes such as the reimagination of theology, doctrine, and ecumenical dialogue in the context of world Christianity; Global South perspectives on pluralism and intercultural communication; how epistemological shifts promoted by liberation theology and its dialogue with cultural critical studies have impacted discourses on religion, ethics, and politics; conversations on gender and church from Brazilian and German perspectives; and intercultural proposals for a migratory epistemology that recenters the experience of migration as a primary location for meaning.

III

Ethics and Society: Latin America

5

Theology, Ethics, and Society

Latin American Liberation Theologies

Luis N. Rivera-Pagán

The Bible . . . unlike the books of other ancient peoples, was . . . the literature of a minor, remote people—and not the literature of its rulers, but of its critics. The scribes and the prophets of Jerusalem refused to accept the world as it was. They invented the literature of political dissent and, with it, the literature of hope.

—Amos Elon, Jerusalem: Battlegrounds of Memory

A Theological Enfant Terrible

Latin American liberation theology was the unforeseen enfant terrible in the academic and ecclesial realms of theological production during the last decades of the twentieth century. It brought to the conversation not only a new theme—liberation—but also a new perspective on doing theology and a novel way of referring to God’s being and action in history. Its project to reconfigure the interplay between religious studies, ethics, and politics became a meaningful topic of analysis and dialogue in the general theological discourse. Many scholars perceive in its emergence a drastic epistemological rupture, a radical change in paradigm, a significant shift in both the ecclesial and social role of theology.

Its origins are diverse and not only native to theological and ecclesiastical horizons. One important source, neglected by some clerical accounts, was the complex constellation of liberation struggles during the sixties and early seventies. It was a time of social turmoil, when many things seemed out of joint: a strong antiwar movement protest, mainly directed against American military intervention in Vietnam and the global nuclear threat; a spread of decolonization movements all over the third world; the feminist struggle against masculine patriarchy; a robust challenge to racial bigotry; the Stonewall rebellion (June 1969) against homophobia and gay discrimination; student protests in Paris, Prague, Mexico, and New York in opposition to repressive states of all stripes; and guerilla insurgencies and social unrest in many Latin American nations. Many of these agents of social protest adopted the title of “liberation movement” as their public card of presentation. “Fronts of national liberation” flourished all over the third world.^[1]

Another significant factor was the development of a nondogmatic Marxism that read Marx’s texts as an ethical critique on human oppression and as a projection of a utopian non-oppressive future. This heterodox way of reading Marx, by authors like the German philosopher Ernst Bloch, made possible something up to then considered unthinkable—a constructive and affirmative dialogue between theology and Marxism, at the margins of church and party hierarchies’ rigid orthodoxies. Influential in this intellectual milieu was Bloch’s 1968 Atheismus im Christentum,^[2] whose hermeneutical performance diagnoses inside the biblical texts a struggle between the voices of the oppressors and those of the oppressed and provocatively asserts that whoever wants to be a good Marxist should constantly read the Bible (and vice versa: whoever wants to be a good Christian should have Marx as bedside reading).

Other iconoclast authors, including Herbert Marcuse and Franz Fanon, were passionately read from Buenos Aires to Berlin, from Bogotá to Nairobi, with intentionalities not limited to academia.^[3] Exiled from Brazil, Paulo Freire delivered scathing critiques of traditional educational systems and promoted a pedagogy for the liberation of the oppressed.^[4] Martin Luther King Jr. and Ernesto “Che” Guevara are probably the main emblematic icons and martyrs of those turbulent times. Paul Éluard’s poem “Liberté,” recited and sang in many languages, became its poetic hymn.

Within the churches, important processes were taking place. Pope John XIII summoned, to the surprise of many, the Second Vatican Council. Progressive Roman Catholic theologians consider Vatican II an important turning point in the modern history of their church.^[5] According to their interpretation, the council had three main objectives:

1. To change the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church toward the modern post-Enlightenment intellectual world from censure and condemnation to openness and dialogue. The Italian word aggiornamento became the watchword of the attempts to update the church.
2. To heal the fragmentation of Christianity by inserting the Roman Catholic Church in the emerging ecumenical movement. Delegates from Protestant and Orthodox churches were invited to observe the proceedings of the council. A series of bilateral and multilateral dialogues began between Rome and other Christian denominations.
3. To face with honesty and compassion the plight of a world suffering violence, oppression, and injustice. The council took place in a world sundered by national liberation struggles, civil wars, and the painful gap between the haves and the have-nots of the globe. The quest for peace and justice was conceived as an essential dimension of the being in the world of the church.

John XXIII’s 1963 encyclical Pacem in terris, published in the context of that conciliar process, seemed to be another sign of renewal, from an attitude of anathema to a spirit of dialogue and solidarity. This ecclesiastical openness was accompanied by several theological projects that seemed to shape an alternative way to look at social conflicts.^[6] An attempt was made to configure a “political theology,” as a way to design a creative dialogue with Marxism and post-Enlightenment secular ideologies.^[7]

Latin American Liberation Theologies

Vatican II was followed by regional synods of bishops. The most famous of them was the general meeting of Latin American Roman Catholic bishops that took place August 26 to September 6, 1968, in Medellín, Colombia. To the amazement of many observers, the Roman Catholic Church, which the radical intelligentsia in the continent had considered the ideological bulwark of prevailing social inequities, was promulgating, as a decisive pastoral challenge, solidarity with the poor and destitute.

If Vatican II opened the theological dialogue with modern rationality, Medellín was perceived as a prophetic convocation against poverty, inequality, and oppression. If Vatican II was mainly concerned with the gap between the church and secular modernity, Medellín, according to this reading, was more concerned with the scandal of social injustice in a Christian continent. In a crucial section of their final resolutions, the Latin American bishops linked the Christian faith with historical and social liberation:

The Latin American bishops cannot remain indifferent in the face of the tremendous social injustices existent in Latin America, which keep the majority of our peoples in dismal poverty that in many cases becomes inhuman wretchedness. A deafening cry pours from the throats of millions of men and women asking their pastors for a liberation that reaches them from nowhere. . . .

Christ, our savior, not only loved the poor . . . but also centered his mission in announcing liberation to the poor.^[8]

Certainly, the Medellín conference was a meeting of bishops, not of theologians. But several Roman Catholic theologians perceived the final documents and the general tone prevailing in the conference as allowing the possibility of rethinking the theological enterprise from the perspective of the liberation of the poor and downtrodden.^[9] Prior to the Medellín meeting, on July 1968, Gustavo Gutiérrez had given a lecture at Chimbote, Peru, significantly titled “Toward a Theology of Liberation,”^[10] which coupled closely spiritual salvation and human liberation. It proved to be a pioneer text for Latin American liberation theology. It also inaugurated Gutiérrez’s more than five decades of fertile theological production.

In 1971, the first edition of his most famous book, Theology of Liberation, was published, a landmark in Latin American theological writing. His triadic understanding of human liberation—liberation from social and economic oppression, history as a process of self-determined humanization, and redemption from sinfulness—became classic.^[11] That same year, Hugo Assmann’s book Opresión–Liberación: Desafío a los cristianos was also published. Assmann placed the emerging liberation theology in the wider context of the third world: “The contextual starting point of a ‘theology of liberation’ is the historical situation of domination experienced by the peoples of the Third World.”^[12] Gutiérrez and Assmann were followed by a spate of other theologians (Leonardo Boff, José Porfirio Miranda, Juan Luis Segundo, Jon Sobrino, Pablo Richard, and Jorge Pixley, among others) whose writings were conceived as expressions of a new intellectual understanding of the faith: liberation...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Theology, Doctrine, and Ecumenical Dialogue: Perspectives from Latin America
• Pluralism, Ecumenism, and Intercultural Communication
• Ethics and Society: Latin America
• Church and Gender: Contributions from the Global North and South
• World Christianity and Migration
• Bibliography
• Index