4 - Liberation Criticism

Summary

Liberation criticism begins with the hermeneutical insight that biblical interpretation is always affected by the experience and social location of the reader. For example, the description of Jesus as a kyrios or dominus by the early Christians meant that the Roman Caesar could not share this title. Thus the earliest Christians were unwilling to acknowledge the lordship of the Caesars and were, in fact, ready to die for their insistence that only Jesus Christ was their Lord. Yet by the time of the European Middle Ages, when Christians read in the Bible that Jesus was a kyrios or dominus, they understood this in terms of the feudal lord who owned the lands they tilled. The political and social structure of life in the Middle Ages influenced the meaning of the text, so that at the time of the conquest of the New World it was the kings of Spain and Portugal that were the lords and the language of lordship for Jesus Christ no longer had the same relevance as it did for the earliest Christians. At most, Christ was a lord in the image of the king of Spain or Portugal. This one example illustrates that the Bible is always read from our social context.

Liberation criticism is grounded in the experience of oppression, which necessarily affects the reading of the Bible.