In the 1970s, I was introduced to A Theology of Liberation by my professors when I studied theology in college in Hong Kong. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the Spanish version of the book.
The 1970s was a time of protests among
students in many parts of the world. In Hong Kong, students took to the streets
to demonstrate against government corruption and colonial rule. Gutierrez’s
theology of liberation spoke to the situation much better than the books of those European
theologians I read, such as Karl Barth and Paul Tillich.
A Theology of Liberation
begins with a critique of the theological enterprise. It offers a new
definition of theology as critical reflection of praxis. Reflection cannot exist without praxis. But praxis also needs the aid of critical reflection. The book helps
me fathom the vocation of a theologian, because Gutierrez is someone steeped in
the Christian theological tradition who cares about the suffering of the non-person.
The 1970s was the period when contextual theology began in Asia. Taiwanese theological educator Shoki Coe coined the term “contextualizing theology.” There was a conscious attempt to develop theology relevant to the socio-political changes happening in many Asian countries. Various Asian theological movements, such as Minjung Theology in South Korea, Homeland Theology in Taiwan, and Theology of Struggle in the Philippines, emerged in the 1970s and 1980s.
Similar to Gutiérrez’s work, Asian contextual theologies began with
critical analyses of the socio-political contexts. But except in the Philippines,
Asian countries have not been shaped by the Christian tradition. Thus, the kind
of living theology emerging from Asia could not rely on the Christian paradigm
alone but had to take into consideration religious and cultural elements of Asian peoples. It was eye-opening for me to see that Asian mask dance, poems of
dissidents, folk idioms, stories, protest songs, and shamanistic practices found
their way into theologizing for the first time.
In An Asian Theology of Liberation, the Sri
Lankan theologian Aloysius Pieris writes, “The irruption of the Third World is
also the irruption of the non-Christian world. The vast majority of God's poor
perceive their ultimate concern and symbolize their struggle for liberation in
the idiom of non-Christian religions and cultures.”* Pieris argues that Jesus
needs to be baptized not only in Jordan but also in the Ganges and other Asian
rivers.
As Latin American theologians paid more attention to
popular religiosity and the religious heritages of black and indigenous peoples
in the continent, they opened new avenues of dialogue with Asian and African
theologians. Gutierrez has also expanded his views on the culture and religiosity
of the poor. As Maria Clara Bingemer points out, in the new Brazilian edition
of his theology of liberation published in 2000, Gutierrez wrote a long preface
and emphasized the importance of dialogue with African and Asian theologies. He
acknowledged the fact of religious pluralism and the emergence of interreligious
dialogue as challenges of our time.**
Even though Gutierrez’s book emphasizes the
preferential option for the poor, there is no analysis about gender and
sexuality in the examination of dependence theory and the proposed liberation
project. In 1981, Ghanaian theologian Mercy Amba Oduyoye calls the emergence of
third world women’s theology “irruption within the irruption.” This
irruption has given rise to various women’s theological movements in the
two-thirds world. They argue that we need to pay attention to the ways patriarchy
intersects with poverty, militarism, gender and sexual violence, and political
discrimination.
In the last two decades I have worked in postcolonial
theology. What I found missing in A Theology of Liberation is a more
nuanced analysis of the subjecthood of the poor and the colonized. Influenced
by Marxism, the book has a rather homogenous and flat description of the poor. Many
have pointed out that the poor need to be examined through the critical lenses
of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and culture. Postcolonial theory opens
up a space to interrogate the construction of colonial and postcolonial
subject. It asks, what decolonization process would enable a postcolonial
or a politically engaged poor subject to be formed.
I have been keenly aware of the cooptation and
collaboration of the colonized in the colonial project. I have found that a
binary and clear distinction between the colonizers and the colonized is less
than satisfactory, for it does not speak to the ambivalence and mimicry of the
colonial subject. The poor and the colonized can’t be the subjects of history
without going through a decolonial process. For the colonial system would not
have been sustained for so long without the complicity and collaboration of the
colonial subject willingly or unwillingly, consciously or unconsciously.
I also find that the paradigm of liberation theology can be over-determined if it is not open to critique. The paradigm starts with social analysis of oppression—be it class, race, gender, and sexuality—and then Jesus Christ is seen as the liberator of all from suffering and exploitation. Jesus can be seen as identifying with the suffering people or as the savior who intervenes in human history. As the late Marcella Althaus-Reid has pointed out, Gutierrez has included the poor as theological subject, but his theology is still traditional in the sense that it continues to work within the existing paradigm.
As a theologian of Chinese background, I also ponder how the rise of China has impacted my response to the book and what kind of future I imagine. When Gutierrez wrote the book, the cold war was raging. Today, we witness a new cold war between China and the US. Much to the chagrin of Gutierrez, his theology will be considered orthodoxy in China for China has been waging a war against Western imperialism for a long time. The change of China from Communism to state capitalism raises the question of what happens after the social revolution?
Today, it is no longer dependency or developmentalism, but the forces of globalization and neoliberal economy that are shaping the world. President Joseph Biden talked to President Xi Jinping of China recently and decoupling between the two biggest economies in the world will not be easy. We need to think about political theology in Asia Pacific that takes into consideration the contestation of two empires with different cultural, religious, and political outlooks. This comparative political theology needs to look beyond Western Christianity to widen its critique of religious and political ideologies shaping world politics.
For fifty years, A Theology of Liberation has challenged us to think about the nature and scope of theology and the vocation of a theologian. This challenge remains. I brought my copy of A Theology of Liberation across the Pacific when I moved. In 2000 when I met Gutierrez while speaking at a conference in honor of him, he signed my book “To Pui Lan, In the same option.” It was in reading Gutierrez’s work in college that I became who I am as a theologian today. And I know doing theology is a commitment and a vocation.
*Aloysius Pieris, An Asian Theology of Liberation
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), 87.
**Maria Clara Bingemer, Latin American Theology: Roots
and Branches (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2016), 113.
(Adapted from a presentation at the session “Fifty Years of Teología de la Liberación—Examining Gustavo Gutiérrez’s Influence and the Task of the Liberation of Theology,” at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, November 19, 2021)