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A Distorted Interpretation of Latin American Liberation Theology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Matthew L. Lamb
Matthew L. Lamb*
Affiliation:
Marquette University
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Type
Review Essays
Information
Horizons , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , Fall 1981 , pp. 352 - 364
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1981

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References

1 See Robert McAfee Brown, Theology in a New Key (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978), pp. 101–31Google Scholar, where Brown discusses the distorted criticisms of Latin American liberation theologies.

2 Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1981. vi + 250 pages. $9.95 (paper).

3 Goldmann, L., The Hidden God: A Study of the Tragic Vision in the Pensees of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, trans. Thody, P. (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964).Google Scholar Since McCann himself acknowledges that Goldmann's understanding of transcendence is very different from Niebuhr's (238), I was surprised that he did not also indicate how different it is from all contemporary Catholic theologians insofar as no one would take Goldmann's analysis of the tragic vision of the seventeenth century religious thinkers as normative for contemporary discussions of transcendence. See notes 11 and 15 below.

4 For example, Sobrino, Jonet al., Médo teolégico y cristología latinoamericana (San Salvador, 1975)Google Scholar; Dussel, Enrique, Método para una filosophía de la liberación (Salamanca: Sigueme, 1974)Google Scholar; Vidales, Raúl, Cuestiones en torno al método en la teología de la liberatión (Lima: Secretariado Latinoamericano, 1974)Google Scholar; Boff, Leonardo, Ensaio de teologia narrativa (Petropolis: Vozes, 1975)Google Scholar; Scannone, Juan Carlos, TeoJogía de la liberación y praxis popular: A portes críticos para una teologá de la liberación (Salamanca: Sigueme, 1976).Google Scholar There are also three very important articles dealing with methodological issues in Rahner, Karl, ed., Befreiende Theologie (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1977)Google Scholar: Boff, Leonardo, “Theologie der Befreiung–die hermeneutischen Voraussetzungen” (pp. 46–61)Google Scholar; Scannone, Juan Carlos, “Das Theorie-Praxis Verhaltnis in der Theologie der Befreiung” (77–96)Google Scholar; and Sobrino, Jon, “Theologisches Erkennen in der europaischen und derlateinamerikanischen Theologie” (123–43).Google Scholar

5 Vidales, Raúl, “Methodological Issues in Liberation Theology,” in Gibellini, R., ed., Frontiers of Theology in Latin America, trans. Drury, J. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979), pp. 34–57Google Scholar; Dussel, E. D., “Historical and Philosophical Presuppositions for Latin American Theology,” ibid., pp. 184–212.Google Scholar

6 Dussel, Enriqueet al., Liberación y cautiverio: Debates en torno al método de la teología en América Latina (Mexico City: Comite Organizador, 1975).Google Scholar

7 Gutierrez, G., A Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1973), p. 92 and the documentation provided on p. 98.Google Scholar

8 Freire, Paulo, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Ramos, Myra B. (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972), pp. 91ff.Google ScholarCollins, Also D., Paulo Freire: His Life, Works and Thought (New York: Paulist, 1977).Google Scholar

9 Ibid., p. 93.

10 Tracy, David, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (New York: Seabury, 1975), pp. 91–118.Google Scholar

11 Although McCann claims to have been “inspired” by David Tracy (5), and that he bases his conclusions on limit-situations on Tracy's work (181), it is too bad that this did not lead him to develop a more coherent and adequate framework besides the one he borrowed from Goldmann. Indeed, Tracy's revisionist project, with its dialectics between “limits-to” and “limits-of” (whereby the religious experience of limit-situations are experiences of transcending the limits-to human existence into the limits-of human existence as Divine Mystery), would have provided a more adequate framework than Niebuhr's “mythical method” as well. McCann shows no evidence of having understood Tracy in this regard. For Tracy's dialectic of self-transcendence moves decisively beyond a “paradoxical vision” by showing how the limit-questions in science can be formulated in terms of Lonergan's notion of the levels of self-transcendence (see Blessed Rage for Order, pp. 96-100); how the limit-questions in morality aim at disclosing an ultimate reassurance of transcendence in the ongoing struggles for moral goodness (ibid., pp. 100-04); and how the limit-situations in everyday life involve a dialectic of boundary and ecstasis in which we transcend the limits to our life through the limits of that life as grounded in Divine Mystery (ibid., pp. 105-09).

12 Tracy calls attention to a similarity between Lonergan's concern for consciousness and the conscientization of Freire (Blessed Rage, p. 82, n. 9). The irony of McCann's misinterpretations of the liberation theologians is that he is criticizing them for doing what Tracy called them to do. Tracy had interpreted them as basically within his neo-orthodox model (ibid., pp. 30-31) and calls for a “critical reformulation” of the Christian symbols, which “could aid what Paulo Freire has called the 'conscientização'of the masses” (ibid., p. 248). Tracy's interpretation of Freire is more exact since he–as against McCann–realizes how the criteria for genuine limit-situations, i.e., limit-situations which do not dehumanize people into oppressed objects, are bound up with self-transcendence. Such criteria are also those of Freire himself, cf. the study of the Brazilian theologian Cunha, Rogério de Almeida, “Illiteracy and the Development of Self-Awareness in the Thought of Paulo Freire,” in Jossua, Metz and, eds., The Crisis of Religious Language, Concilium, 85 (New York: Herder & Herder, 1973), pp. 114–26, esp. p. 118Google Scholar: “In the final analysis, it is the mark of the human dynamism of transcendence or self-transcendence.” On the inadequacy of Tracy's interpretation of liberation theologians, see R. McAfee Brown, pp. 109-10, and Lamb, M., “The Theory-Praxis Relationship in Contemporary Christian Theologies,” The Catholic Theological Society of America Proceedings, 31 (1976), 149–78.Google Scholar

13 See Rogério de Almeida Cunha, who writes of Freire's “anthropological concept of culture.” McCann's claim that liberation theology does not have a theological anthropology overlooks the many books in which those theologians develop their theological anthropologies quite extensively. For example, Segundo's, Juan L.Grace and the Human Condition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1973)Google Scholar; Boff, Leonardo, Liberating Grace (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979)Google Scholar; Dussel, Enrique, El dualismo en la antropologia de la Cristiandad (Buenos Aires: Guadalupe, 1974).Google Scholar The difference between Niebuhr's anthropology and those of the liberation theologians is the social and communitarian orientation of the latter. Thus liberation theologians are not caught in the difficulty of “bridging the gap” between self and society, as Niebuhr attempts to, since they do not begin with “the paradoxes and temptations characteristic of the private life of the self” (McCann, p. 64). But Niebuhr's theological anthropology is hardly so normative that it justifies McCann's dismissal of a liberation anthropology as not “really” an anthropology!

14 I am surprised that McCann, could claim that liberation theologians “apparently ignore” the mythical dimension of Marxism since he presumably read Segundo's The Liberation of Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1976) where on pp. 101–06Google Scholar Segundo discusses the “faith” dimension of those who opt for Marxism. Dussel, Enrique also analyzes the idolatry or fetishism intrinsic to “atheism”; see his “Historical and Philosophical Presuppositions for Latin American Theology,” pp. 197ff.Google Scholar; there are also book length studies on Marxism incorporating religious symbols. For example, Perez-Esclarin, Antonio, Atheism and Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1978)Google Scholar; Bonino, Jose M., Chris-tians and Marxists (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976)Google Scholar; Miranda, Jose, Marx Against the Marxists (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1980)Google Scholar—the original title of Miranda's book was El cristianismo de Marx (Mexico City, 1978).Google Scholar

15 The contrast of McCann between contemplation and political action—indicated in the “rather than”—shows an ignorance of how liberation theologians have developed a contemplative spirituality as the core of Christian involvement in liberation. See Galilea's, SegundoEspiritualidad de la liberación (Santiago: Ed. ISPLAJ, 1973)Google Scholar; also the articles in Geffre, and Guttierrez, , eds., The Mystical and Political Dimension of Christian Faith, Concilium, 96 (New York: Herder & Herder, 1974).Google Scholar The emphasis in theologians like Rahner, Lonergan, or Tracy on self-transcendence as immanent in human existence provides a more coherent and adequate framework than the “vertical” and “horizontal” metaphors in McCann and Jacques Maritain (see McCann, p. 240; also McCann's, article, “Reinhold Niebuhr and Jacques Maritain on Marxism,” Journal of Religion 58 [1978], 140–68).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 McCann's contrast between divine agency in history and human agency completely ignores the efforts of liberation theologians to do justice to the theological traditions on the relationship between grace and freedom; see Boff, L., Liberating Grace, pp. 8–17Google Scholar; Segundo, Juan L., Grace and the Human Condition, pp. 15–28, 46–50, 65–74.Google Scholar Both these theologians, as well as others, call attention to the two-fold aspect of grace as a gift and a call to conversion.

17 Gutierrez, Gustavo, “Liberation Praxis and Christian Faith,” in Gibellini, R., ed., Frontiers of Theology in Latin America, pp. 28–29Google Scholar (emphasis mine). This text, and others, indicates the hermeneutics of distortion operative in McCann's efforts to differentiate Gutierrez's “permanent detachment” from Niebuhr's “religious disinterestedness” (207) or from Metz's “eschatological proviso” (162-64). Contrary to McCann's assertion, Gutierrez does not make the Kingdom of God “represent” a Utopia (164), but differentiates the Kingdom from the level of Utopian imagination; see Gutierrez, , A Theology of Liberation, pp. 232–39.Google Scholar

18 Compare McCann, pp. 33-37, with his remarks on p. 195.

19 Dussel, Enrique, Para una ética de la liberación latinoamericana, vols. 1, 2, and 3 (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 1973–1975)Google Scholar; also his Ethics and the Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1978).Google Scholar

20 Lernoux, Penny, Cry of the People (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980).Google Scholar The Latin American bishops at Puebla did not see a marginalization of the basic Christian communities but their spreading vitality; see Eagleson, J. and Scharper, P., eds., Puebla and Beyond (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979), pp. 135–36, 142, 211–14.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., pp. 335-37; also Torres, S. and Eagleson, J., eds., The Challenge of Basic Christian Communities (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1981).Google Scholar

22 Richard, Pablo, “The Latin American Church 1959-1978,” Cross Currents 28/1 (Spring 1978), 42.Google Scholar That the popular church of the basic Christian communities is not “opposed” to the hierarchical church, as McCann asserts, is evident in the documents of Puebla.

23 See chap. IV on the laity in the dogmatic constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, of Vatican II, para. 35Google Scholar: “So too the laity go forth as powerful heralds of a faith in things to be hoped for (see Heb 11:1) provided they steadfastly join to their profession of faith a life springing from faith. This evangelization, that is, this announcing of Christ by a living testimony as well as by the spoken word.…” Also the decree on the missionary activity of the Church, Ad Gentes, para. 41: “Laypeople cooperate in the Church's work of evangelization.”

24 Segundo, , The Liberation of Theology, p. 124, n. 16.Google ScholarBateson, Gregory, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1974).Google Scholar For a correct interpretation of Segundo's position on this, see Hennelly, Alfred T., Theologies in Conflict: The Challenge of Juan L. Segundo (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979), pp. 123–39.Google Scholar

25 See Greshake, G., Historie wird Geschichte: Bedeutung und Sinn der Unterscheidung von Historie und Geschichte in der Theologie Rudolf Bultmanns (Essen: Ludgerus, 1963).Google Scholar

26 See Carr, Anne, The Theological Method of Karl Rahner (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977).Google Scholar

27 See McCann, pp. 55ff.

28 See Lonergan, Bernard, Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), pp. 133ff.Google Scholar

29 See Segundo, , The Liberation of Theology, pp. 120–22.Google Scholar While the procedure is in continuity with generally accepted theological efforts, the specific contribution of Segundo is to adopt sociological categories like “ideology” and relate them to a hermeneutics of faith through the notion of deutero-learning.

30 Segundo, ibid., pp. 174-77. Note how McCann (232, n. 7) tries to escape an insight into his false denial of ethical reflection in liberation theology by claiming that it is precisely this supposed “lack” which makes Segundo a “radical situationist.” I wonder how McCann will feel about “the lack of sustained reflection” on ethics in liberation theology after he reads the three volumes of Dussel (see note 19 above).

31 Segundo, ibid., p. 172.

32 Segundo, Juan L., The Hidden Motives of Pastoral Action: Latin American Reflections (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1978), pp. 65–82Google Scholar; also Alfred Hennelly, op. cit., pp. 87-96.

33 Segundo, , The Liberation of Theology, p. 231.Google Scholar There is a great deal of discussion among liberation theologians on the relations between majorities and minorities; see Scannone, Juan Carlos, “Theology, Popular Culture, and Discernment,” in Gibellini, R., ed., Frontiers of Theology in Latin America, pp. 213–39.Google Scholar