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The Confused Protest of Liberation Theology
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10840 |
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Book World
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7 / 1986 |
2,631 Words |
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John W. Cooper
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THIRD WORLD LIBERATION THEOLOGIES: AN INTRODUCTORY SURVEY
Deane William Ferm
Orbis Books
150 pp., $10.95
THIRD WORLD LIBERATION THEOLOGIES: A READER
Deane William Ferm
Orbis Books
386 pp., $16.95
Liberation theologian Geevarghese Mar Osthathios of India believes that God chose Marx, Engels, and Mao "to fulfil [sic] his plan to evolve a classless society." Gustavo Gutierrez, the progenitor of Latin American liberation theology, argues that an indigenous socialism "represents the most fruitful and far-reaching approach" to rid the Third World of foreign capitalist domination. According to the "Christians for Socialism" document issued in Chile in 1972, "there is a growing awareness that revolutionary Christians must form a strategic allegiance with Marxists."
Such statements abound in the literature of liberation theology--a theological movement that has achieved widespread legitimacy, if not virtual dominance, among Christian social ethicists. Yet, even among liberation theologians, an occasional word of caution emerges:
In Marxist revolution there is no freedom for the people, only for the party. The same science that expels freedom from history and revolution expels God from humankind and history. The party is supposed to be sufficient to create a new world, but it ends by creating a new power.
Thus liberation theologian Jose Comblin criticizes the expulsion of freedom that has accompanied a score of Marxist revolutions in the twentieth century.
The greatest achievement of Deane William Ferm's Third World Liberation Theologies: An Introductory Survey, and its companion volume Third World Liberation Theologies: A Reader, is to underscore the diversity of thought among liberation theologians. They are not all Marxists with a totalitarian bent, though some are. Some are social democrats. They are Latin American, African, Asian--they have different perspectives. They are all opposed to capitalism--they see it as an "oppressive structure." They are all involved in a massive theological project which Dennis McCann has aptly called "a sincere but confused protest."
Ferm's volumes fill a significant gap in the literature--they are the first comprehensive survey and accompanying reader of liberation theology available in English (or in any other language, for that matter). They are published, appropriately enough, by Orbis Books. Orbis is the official publishing house of the Roman Catholic Maryknoll order, based in Maryknoll, New York. Almost everything put out by Orbis is liberation theology, and almost every work of liberation theology published in the United States is from Orbis. These books will surely find a wide audience in the many college and seminary courses on liberation theology that have emerged in recent times. (These courses themselves suggest certain problems concerning the uncritical way in which political theology is often taught today.) Heretofore there has not been a single, systematic survey of liberation theology that covered
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