Quotes: Liberation Theology

I just gave a presentation to a mixed group of clergy and professors from the University of Montana in Missoula. I've been inspired by its roots and the writings that are continuing to come as a result. Here are pieces from what I have gleaned. (more to come)

Quotes: Liberation Theology presentation.
(From these guys: Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo and Clodovis Boff, Lesslie Newbigin, and
Thomas Merton)
(Notice they are all guys, but! feminist liberation theology leaps from out of this tradition)
1.
“…much of the education offered in the past by mission schools and colleges has been designed to hide from it’s victims the real nature of the forces that control them and to condition them to accept their own powerlessness.” (Leslie Newbigin, The Open Secret pg. 94)
2.
“In Latin America the awareness is spreading – even among Christians – that Christianity has contributed to producing the cultural alienation that is seen today. The Christian religion has served, and continues to serve, as an ideology justifying the domination of the powerful. In Latin America Christianity has been a religion at the service of the system. Its rites, temples, and works have contributed to channeling popular dissatisfaction toward another world totally disconnected from this one. Thus Christianity has checked popular protest against an unjust and oppressive system”
(Juventud y cristianismo en America Latina, final document of the seminar on the problesmof youth organized by the Department of Education of CELAM (Bogota: Indo-American Press Service 1969), p. 22)

3.
“Blessed are you poor for yours is the Kingdom of God” does not mean, it seems to us: “Accept your poverty because later this injustice will be compensated for in the Kingdom of God.”
If we believe that the Kingdom of God is a gift which is received in history, and if we believe, as the eschatological promises – so charged with human and historical content – indicate to us, that the Kingdom of God necessarily implies the reestablishment of justice in this world, then we must believe that Christ says that the poor are blessed because the Kingdom of God has begun: “The time has come; the Kingdom of God is upon you” (Mark 1:15).
In other words, the elimination of the exploitation and poverty that prevent the poor from being fully human has begun; a Kingdom of justice which goes even beyond what they could have hoped for has begun. They are blessed because the coming of the Kingdom will put an end to their poverty by creating a world of fellowship. They are blessed because the Messiah will open the eyes of the blind and will give bread to the hungry. Situated in a prophetic perspective, the text in Luke uses the term poor in the tradition of the first major line of thought we have studied: poverty is an evil and therefore incompatible with the Kingdom of God, which has come in its fullness into history and embraces the totality of human existence.” (p. 171, A Theology of Liberation Gustavo Gutierrez

4.
“The end of the 1960’s…Development and underdevelopment are two sides of the same coin… The poverty of Third World countries was the price to be paid for the First World to be able to enjoy the fruits of overabundance.” (p68 Lonardo and Clodovis Boff Introducing Liberation Theology)

5.
“We must pay special attention to the words we use. The term poor might seem not only vague and churchy, but also somewhat sentimental and aseptic. The “poor” person today is the oppressed one, the one marginated from society, the member of the proletariat struggling for the most basic rights; the exploited and plundered social class, the country struggling for its liberation. In today’s world the solidarity and protest of which we are speaking have an evident and inevitable “political” character insofar as they imply liberation. To be with the oppressed is to be against the oppressor. In our times and on our continent to be in solidarity with the “poor,” understood in this way, means to run personal risks – even to put one’s life in danger. Many Christians – and non-Christians – who are committed to the Latin American revolutionary process are running these risks.”
And
“Only by rejecting poverty and by making itself poor in order to protest against it can the Church preach something that is uniquely its own: ‘spiritual poverty,’ that is, the openness of humankind and history to the future promised by God…And only in this way will it (the church) be able to preach the word which liberates, the word of genuine fellowship.”
(GG 173)

6.
Toward a theology of Love
“A theology of love cannot afford to be sentimental. It cannot afford to preach edifying generalities about charity, while identifying ‘peace’ with mere established power and legalized violence against the oppressed. A theology of love cannot be allowed merely to serve the interests of therich and powerful, justifying their wars, their violence and their bombs, while exhorting the poor and underprivileged to practice patience, meekness, longsuffering and to solve their problems, if at all, non-violently.
The theology of love must seek to deal realistically with the evil and injustice in the world, and not merely to compromise with them. Such a theology will have to take note of the ambiguous realities of politics, without embracing the specious myth of a “realism” that merely justifies force in the service of established power. Theology does not exist merely to appease the already too untroubled conscience of the powerful and the established. A theology of love may also conceivably turn out to be a theology of revolution. In any case it is a theology of resistance, a refusal of the evil that reduces a brother to homicidal desperation.”
- Thomas Merton