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Liberation Theology and the Crisis in Western Theology
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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
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