The Wider Setting of "Liberation Theology"Author(s): John H. YoderReviewed work(s):Source: The Review of Politics, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Spring, 1990), pp. 285-296Published by: Cambridge University Press for the University of Notre Dame du lac on behalf of Review ofPoliticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1407719 .

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Commentary:

The Wider Setting of "Liberation Theology"

Jolhn H. Yoder

We are now rounding the twenty-year milepost in the career of "liberation" as the theological leitmotif characterizing a widely ob- served current of Latin American Catholic thought. It is widely agreed that Gustavo Gutierrez is to be celebrated as the founder- father of the "school?' This landmark quality ascribed to the work of Gutierrez is well represented in two articles in the spring 1988 Review ofPolitics1. Daniel Levine, although alluding to "a long [prior] period of writing and reflection" (note 15, p. 248), pegs the begin- nings of the phenomenon at 1971. James T. Burtchaell, C.S.C., while noting (his note 2) varieties among the six writers he names (p. 265) finds in the "young movement" enough consistency to address to it as a whole three or four dimensions of theological challenge.

Both those who have been critical of liberation theology as im- properly innovative (McCann2 and Ogden3 from mainstream the- ological ethics, Novak from the new Catholic right,4 Cardinal Rat- zinger from Rome5) and those who celebrate it as good news (the best friendly interpreters are Berryman6 and Brown,' cf. also Ferm8) are quite right in operating within this frame of reference. For their universe of discourse, that is, for Latin American Catholicism, with its own long historical roots, the ideas are new and the movement is young.

A fuller assessment of the place- and ultimately of the validity- of any theology and therefore also of liberation theology as a school or movement will however be served by broadening the narrative frame of reference, so that the ambivalent claim (or blame) of nov- elty would be less prominent. The intent of the present review is less to argue than to locate the phenomena. My concern here is not to enter into the substance of the debate on either hermeneutics or social commitment, nor to pursue detailed documentation, but only to fill out the narrative with a number of observations, not neces- sarily all linked to one another. Toward that end I shall need to desim- plify some of the most current readings.

I. LIBERATION THEOLOGY AND "ECCLESIAL BASE COMMUNITIES"

Especially in the last few years (e.g., Levine p. 250ff) the base

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community movement has been written about as symbiotically com- plementary with liberation theology. This is true now, but it is not true of how it all began. Burtchaell (p. 266) notes a difference which it would be good to delineate more fully. The base community model developed as a response to concern for pastoral care and evangelism, as developed by priest-sociologists, some of them North American, and approved by their bishops, especially in Brazil. It had no neces- sary link to any theology of the political. It was initiated on the grounds of wise pastoral-theological insights, responding to the realistic awareness that there would never be enough priests to go around by providing all Catholic communities with regular eu- charistic ministries.9 It was a lesser evil to have people meeting and praying without a qualified priest than for them to have no spiritual resources at all. The base community made it possible for commu- nity life, prayer, praise, moral solidarity, the training and recogni- tion of leaders, and growing social awareness to grow without benefit of sacerdotal ministers. In short, it protestantized the common folk, enabling with full episcopal authorization a local life of faith without regular eucharist. Something similar theologically, different formally, is the widespread ministry carried on in the Central American coun- tryside by unordained itinerant catechists, called delegados de la palabra, "delegates of the Word."

The liberation theology movement, on the other hand, arose in response to an authentic disciplinary concern of academic theolo- gians educated in the North, and published here. The two streams of change had in the 1960's quite distinctive authors, literatures, publishers, languages. Numerous of the liberation theology authors were priests in poor parishes, but they wrote books for their intellec- tual colleagues. Only at Puebla (1979) did the two streams flow to- gether, in an authentically complementary way which the friends of both may well consider providential. It was however the com- plementarity of an authentic marriage, not the merging of Doppel- giinger.

II. ExODUS AND THE TEMPTATION OF TRIUMPHALISM Gutierrez is followed by the majority of his fellow interpreters

of liberation theology in giving special weight to the metaphor of Exodus. Strong in many important ways, undeniably foundational in Old Testament holy history, Exodus however has shortcomings as a master metaphor. It may be triumphalistic. It may be unable to sustain the devotion of suffering peoples in nontriumphal set-

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tings, where freedom is not just around the corner. 0 Taken alone, the Mosaic rhetoric provides few resources for fostering fair treat- ment of the Canaanites.

A part of the "triumphalist" temptation is the pragmatic justifica- tion of revolutionary violence as the path from here to freedom. For some, in fact - including contemporary Protestant critics - the notion of justified revolution is almost equated with liberation the- ology. This juxtaposition is neither fair to the facts nor a legitimate argument against liberation theology, unless the critic is herself pacifist. It is true that most theologians of liberation hold that war waged on behalf of popular liberation can be justified according to the criteria of cause, intention, last resort, legitimate and propor- tionate means, etc. So do most other theologians, with less justifi- cation, less reluctantly, less proportionately. Their justifying vio- lence (under certain circumstances) is not a part of their originality as theologians of liberation. It is rather a place where they agree with mainline moral theology since Ambrose.

Every major renewal of liberation vision (see below IV-VI) has seen the birth within it of a nonviolent wing. 11 Nonviolent commit- ment and initiatives in nonviolent action (whether on principled or on pragmatic grounds12) arise more frequently within liberation theology settings than within establishment or uninvolved theolog- ical milieux. To hold against liberation theology the room made by some thinkers for some violence in extreme revolutionary situations comingfrom anyone but some kind of pacifst is in serious danger of being an argument in bad faith.

A liberationist nonpacifist is probably more restrained in the room he or she is ready to make for violence than is the average nonliber- ationist nonpacifist. In the Latin American setting "last resort" is a real restraint; the partisans of the poor will never match a super- power arsenal. Most of the causes for which establishment churches have historically justified war (taking territory, collecting debts, punishing insults, protecting missionaries, keeping satellites in line) are not recognized as valid causes by liberation theology. Libera- tion theology does not approve of most of the means or most of the "legitimate authorities" that other nonpacifists have historically been willing to accept.13

Nonetheless triumphalism is a temptation. A too simple juxtapo- sition of the Moses story with various possible modern visions of powerful political change can fail to be self-critical about the temp- tations and the limits of power. To add to Exodus the metaphor of

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Exile would more adequately represent the whole of the biblical her- itage, both hebrew and Christian. Since 1970 (i.e., since the begin- ning) this point has been made by Ruben Alvez14 and Miguel Brun,15 who have been scolded by other liberation theology voices (a) for undercutting the unity and momentum of mainline liberation the- ology (what in the U.S. black setting is called "Uncle Tom") and (b) for being Protestant, therefore not authentically indigenous. The Burtchaell article alludes to the need for this critique, but not to the presence of the self-criticism within the movement. Correcting internally for the temptation of triumphalism, and correcting for the inadequacy of the lone master metaphor of Exodus, have thus been from the start a part of liberation theology.

The metaphor of diaspora as the predictable setting for the church in the future (thinking however about postmodern Europe) has come into Catholic thought on a very abstract level in the work of Rahner and Metz. There, what it means is mostly being reconciled to the waning of membership and political clout on the part of the hierar- chical church. The German authors have not dwelt on the note of loss or alienation included in "exile," nor have they spelled it out as component of a liberating vision for the poor.

The component of suffering has entered into the liberation the- ology agenda from the real experience of the base communities and the prototypical victims like Oscar Romero. Yet being serious about a spirituality of the cross, and affirming comparable concern for an ethic of nonviolence, derived not from pragmatism or defeatism but from spirituality, have been rejected by some of the liberation theology theologians as defeatist. Thus the place of Exile in the Jewish experience or of the cross in the Gospel can be underweighted in some of the liberation theology literature.16

III. HORIZONTALISM AND SPIRITUALITY After reading with care some of the changes of nuance introduced

by Gustavo Gutierrez in the "15th Anniversary Edition" of Theology of Liberation, Dennis McCann concludes that "Gutierrez' liberation theology . . . can no longer be understood primarily as a form of political theology""'17 That means that for McCann the horizontal dimension within liberation theology was exclusive or reductionist, and that that reductionism is definitional. For some this may be true; most openly such a characterization might be fair to Assmannt8 or to Belo.19 Yet it is clearly not correct for the major voices. They

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maintain their rootage in the classical theological agenda,20 and they write on pastoralia and spirituality.21

McCann's phrase "political theology" alerts us to one more need for careful crossreferencing. This label has been chosen for self- ascription by Johann Baptist Metz, with parallels in Dorothee S611e andJurgen Moltmann.22 It is a European phenomenon, arising out of the apologetic concern of those who ask, "How can we speak meaningfully of God in and to a secularistic, materialistic world?" The thought is that politics as frame of reference is more accessible to our contemporary "cultured despisers of religion" than spiritu- ality or metaphysics would be. McCann is like many23 in thinking that liberation theology is a subcategory of "political theology" so that Gutierrez's trueness to type can be evaluated by whether he remains faithful to the materialist reductionism. Others would re- verse the dependency, suggesting that in the "political theologians" European theology has for the first time been moved by hearing from someone outside its own world, For our purposes the point is neither to merge nor to divorce them. They have common adver- saries but different styles; neither is really derived from the other.

IV. SUPPORT FROM OTHER QUARTERS One of the characteristics of much liberation theology writing

has been its being more at home in systematic-theological styles than in detailed historical and exegetical study of biblical texts. The Scrip- tures are used, but often this is done in systematic-theological ways, as a quarry from which to mine overarching and undergirding general concepts. This concern for finding and then elaborating upon a general axiom, rather than working inductively through the de- tails of history and text, marks the "Latin" intellectual style of many of our writers.

There is, however, a sizable body of corroborative evidence now developing which builds an exegetical foundation inductively, with all the detailed linguistic, literary-critical, and historical care one can ask, under the edifice already constructed by the systematicians. I gathered some of the early fruits of this development in my Politics ofJesus.24 It has been followed since by a spate of scholarship, the most weighty landmarks being probably the work of Gottwald,25 of Wink,26 of Gerhard Theissen,27 and of Myers.28 This broad-gauge historical-critical work, proceeding by its own disciplinary rules,discerns an underlying unity in the very character and pur- pose of God, reflected in the covenant with Israel, incarnate in the

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shape of the man Jesus and the community of his disciples. It thus builds an exegetical floor under what the more practically and po- litically concerned advocates of liberation theology were already doing. Liberation theology is thus not faddist, modernist, or progres- sivist, but restorationist. It retrieves in the canonical documents a witness which the intervening generations (whether culpably or not) had lost.

V. BEGINNINGS AND BORROWINGS

Within the Spanish-language world of our generation, the selec- tion of "freedom" as a proper synonym for salvation, and of social justice as the church's agenda, was prefigured by the study center Iglesiay Sociedad located in Montevideo, a largely interprotestant entity with links to the World Council of Churches. Miguel Angel Brun, Methodist of Uruguay, wrote in 1970 his Concepto Cristiano de la Sal- vacian Hoy, the first pamphlet in the series Cuadernos del Centro de Es- tudios Cristianos del Rio de la Plata, also a predominantly Protestant- ecumenical agency. Brun (who later spent over a year in Uruguay's prisons and now, as an 6migr6, serves as pastor of the parish of St. Paul in Strasbourg, in the Reformed Church of Alsace and Lor- raine) thus preceded Gutierrez by some months in the use of the rhetoric of "liberation" as the right way to say "salvation."29 Brun's text was not as full as Gutierrez's flagship book in the exposition of a biblical argument. Neither was he as explicit as Jos6 Miguez Bonino (Methodist of Argentina, President of the World Council of Churches, 1975-1983) in critically dissecting (also very early in the game) the place of Marxist categories in the service of libera- tion theology.30 What matters if we are asking the genetic question is that Brun did not claim to be making a new proposal, but only clarifying and classifying what was afoot.31

A surface reading of "women's" and "black" and perhaps "red" liberation literature current in our North American culture in the late 1960's might indicate other ways in which the Latin American movement found precursors or models in the North. Segundo's Liber- ation of Theology, for example, begins with direct reporting on Harvey Cox and James Cone.32

VI. EARLIER PRECURSORS

A preeminent specimen of the same line of argument in the ecu- menical Protestant world was the landmark book by M. M. Thomas andJ. D. McCaughey, The Christian in the World Struggle, published

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by the World's Student Christian Federation, Geneva, 1952. Au- thor Thomas was one of the most respected Asian leaders in the early ecumenical movement which grew out of the World Student Christian Federation. The assumption that there is a "world revo- lution" which is sure to come, by virtue of the inner dynamic of the world's politico-economic process, is very close to the vague an- alogues of Marxist analysis which much liberation theology since 1970 appropriates as its secular language. The critical response con- tributed to the same volume by Keith Bridston and Max-Alain Chevallier (both also later to be prominent ecumenical Protestant theologians) prefigured the way critics like McCann and Burtchaell were to respond to liberation theology decades later. The same ecu- menical conversation continued, with its high point represented by a study conference held in Geneva in 1966, whose report M. M. Thomas edited.33

VII. STILL DEEPER ROOTS

In the widest sense, almost all of the argumentative moves now called "liberation theology" were already made in the British Refor- mation of the seventeenth century. The moral imperative of re-form- ation for the sake of a God who sides with the poor was already stated there. That story provides a triumphal alternative, namely, the format which takes over society by ajustified and successful revo- lution (Cromwell and the protectorate34). At the same time others were making more radical claims, with a less triumphal and more radical vision, with involvement from the base, civil disobedience, utopian and anarchistic rhetoric (the Levellers and Diggers35), just as a few years later we see the surfacing of a still more radical spiritu- ality, questioning not only ends but means (Friends36). There are differences between the puritans of the seventeenth century and today's Latin Americans, but they are superficial and conjunctural. The logical moves are parallel.

This entire Puritan experience is formative in all English-speaking political science and philosophy of government. The failure of Crom- well's success has permanently vaccinated Anglo-Saxons against cheap promises of greater justice based on an easy change of re- gime. On the other hand, Anglo-Saxons remember the success of the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688/89, which established without vio- lence what by now is the oldest civil regime in Western history, per- haps the oldest in world history, the mother of democracies.37

It is that English-speaking experience which the Latin American

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Catholic world (and even the Latin European Catholic world) never lived through. It was nowhere in the background culture against which a Gutierrez, a Segundo, or a Camilo Torres is reacting. Throughout his secondary education, even through university, a priest-sociologist like Camilo Torres, a pastoral theologian like Gutierrez, or a systematic theologian like Segundo never had to en- counter in depth the Puritan story of the seventeenth century, any more than the Protestant-ecumenical debate of the 1950's. That is why the "new" movement could authentically take off with a high sense of creative originality, saying with a sense of discovery things that had been around a long time in another world.

There were two other revolutionary stories, closer home, more evident,which minds formed by a Latin American classical educa- tion did know about. There had been Enlightenment unbelief, rep- resented by the catastrophic French Revolution's heritage, and there had been the feudal-bourgeois "liberators" of the Latin American nineteenth century. Those models were well known where Torres, Segundo, Gutierrez, etc. went to school, but they had understand- ably been set aside, the former as antichurch, and both as not having achieved real justice.

VIII. THE RELATIVE VIRTUE OF ORIGINALITY

For obvious psychological and cultural reasons it does not interest Catholic liberation theology leaders to study, much less to avow, their formal closeness to the Puritan story of three centuries before, or to the Protestant-ecumenical models of a generation before. Nei- ther do I want to make much of it, as if it meant some kind of de- pendency or inauthenticity, or as if it were a flaw. The parallel is not a matter of genetic dependency, but rather a recurrence in a new setting of something that was done before. What "was done before" was a pattern put together at least once a century since 1415.38

To notice a parallel does not indicate a judgment on the moral worth of a position or on its cultural utility. The sixth person in world history who invented the wheel may have been far more im- portant than the first five, if for the first time the sixth invention coincided with craftsmanship able to fabricate good wheels and a market able to use them as never before.

Nor is being first a special proof of intelligence or creativity. To invent the wheel the first five times, in cultural settings propitious to invention in general and to axial imagery, may have taken less courage or less creativity than to replicate the invention the sixth

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time in an unfriendly environment. For a Catholic in Peru to write The Theology of Liberation in 1971 may have been harder than for a Methodist Indian in Protestant-ecumenical milieux to formulate the same thoughts in 1948.

Yet our noticing the parallels should help to articulate, as the con- versation goes on, why some Anglo-Saxon interlocutors are not as impressed by the presumed novelty of the argument as are their Latin brothers, very aware of blazing a new trail even though others had been through those same woods before. To note that the parallels reach farther than some leading thinkers have been aware should also permit clarifying in a finer-grained way how the current de- velopments are in fact unprecedented.

More important: to situate liberation theology within the longer story of analogous efforts would undercut some of the cheaper criti- cism of liberation theology for positions in which it is not (and does not claim to be) original, such as its version of the just war tradi- tion. There is room for criticism of its making little of the Jewish- ness of early Christianity, or of its limited attention to the lessons of the Holocaust, or to the challenge of non-Christian faiths. In such respects as these, liberation theology is (like the Puritan and the Protestant-ecumenical precursors I have noted) best understood as a prophetic corrective movement within mainstream (i.e., catholic) Christianity, not a brand new beginning or a radical reformation.

NOTES 1. Daniel H. Levine, "Assessing the Impacts of Liberation Theology in Latin

America," Review ofPblitics 50(1988): 241-63; andJames Tunstead Burtchaell, CS.C., "How Authentically Christian Is Liberation Theology?" ibid, pp. 264-91, since reprinted in Burtchaell's Giving and Taking ofLife (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Univer- sity Press, 1989), pp. 188-208.

2. Dennis McCann, Christian Realism and Liberation Theology: Practical Theologies in Conflict (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1981).

3. Schubert Ogden, Faith and Freedom: Toward a Theology of Liberation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1979), best represents the effort of the liberal establishment to sub- sume a new phenomenon under one's own prior hermeneutic. Whether such co- option is a compliment or a mistake is the theme of a debate between Anselm Kyngsuk Min (pp. 83-102) and Mark Lloyd Taylor (pp. 103-47) in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion 57 (1989).

4. Michael Novak, Will it Liberate? Questions about Liberation Theology (New York: Paulist 1986).

5. "Instruction on Certain Aspects of the Theology of Liberation," Sacred Con- gregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 3 September 1984, in Origins 14 (13 Sep- tember): 193-204.

6. Phillip Berryman, Liberation Theology (New York: Pantheon, 1987). 7. Robert MacAfee Brown, Theology in a New Key; Responding to Liberation Themes

(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978).

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8. Deane William Ferm, Liberation Theology; a Survey and Liberation Theology; a Reader, both Maryknoll, Orbis, 1986. My own statement of the case for liberation theology was stated in my "Biblical Roots of Liberation Theology," Grail (St. Jerome's College, Waterloo, Ontario) 1 (1985): 55-74.

9. "Latin America Re-Evangelized Through Basic Ecclesial Communities," chap. 5 (pp. 290-371) in Jane Elyse Russell, O.S.F., "Renewing the Gospel Community; Four Catholic Movements with an Anabaptist Parallel" (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 1979). The most prolific South American author in the early phase of base community theory development was Jose Marins, published by Bonum of Buenos Aires. Cf. Alois Muller and Norbert Greinacher, eds., Les Communautis de Base; Concilium 104, Paris, Beauchesne, 1975 (not the same as the English-language Concilium volumes by the same editors).

10. The theology of the underdog people (minjung) is the Asian counterpart of liberation theology. It is more sober about how soon "we shall overcome": cf. Jung Young Lee, An Emerging Theology in World Perspective: Commentary on Korean Minjung Theology (Mystic CT: Twenty Third Publications, 1988); Kim Yong Bock, ed., Minjung Theology: People as the Subjects of History (Singapore: Christian Confer- ence of Asia, n.d [c. 1981]). Minjung thought counts less on the achievement of liberation within a manageable future. Thus it affirms more simply than does Latin liberation theology God's identification with the victims, in their capacity as victims, less than as bearers of the promise of a new order.

In an analogous way, some Original American thinkers find liberationist opti- mism inappropriate not only to their setting but also to their hopes: cf. Robert Allen Warrior, "Canaanites, cowboys, and Indians," Christianity and Crisis, 49/12, 11 September 1989, pp. 261-65.

Within South America, the Maoist sendero luminoso in the peruvian countryside exemplifies challenges to which liberation theology offers no specific answers.

11. The violent Taborites of 1418 were outlived by the nonviolent Petr ofChelcic, the violent Thomas Miintzer by the nonviolent Swiss Brethren, Mennonites, and Hutterites, the (rhetorically) violent Levellers by the Friends, Cf. Geoffrey Nut- tall, Christian Pacfism in History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958) and Berkeley, World Without War Council, 1971. Similarly Helder Cgmara and Adolfo Perez Esquivel have arisen as nonviolent leaders in response to the confident commitment of a Nestor Paz or a Camilo Torres to liberating violence. It is thus regularly the case that pacifism is articulated not from scratch but, in critical situations, in response to an advocacy of violence which it rejects on both principled and pragmatic grounds. Cf. note 12 on the limited value of the principle-pragmatism split.

12. The distinction between rejecting violence on the grounds of general moral principle and rejecting it on the grounds that something else will work better is a standard concern of ethicists concerned for varieties of method. The distinction is not meaningless but it is usually overdone. Most committed interpreters of the conviction that violence is always wrong are also ready to argue that it is always counterproductive. Few of them would agree that the "principles" which outlaw violence are unrealistic. Few of those who on the other hand assume that the rejec- tion of violence is "unrealistic" have followed through with the consequentialist calculus of all the comparable costs and benefits which their argument would imply.

13. In concrete political fact one does not generally see liberation theologians uncritically blessing extant military efforts or calling for new ones. They have some- times argued the legitimacy of the governments of Cuba or Nicaragua, but mostly after their having come to power. The treatment of "revolution" and "violence" in their writings is more a commonplace, a topic always asked about, and rou- tinely answered in the traditional "just war" way, than it is a central concern. Ass- mann (below note 18, p. 87) makes the same point.

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14. Ruben Alvez, A Theology of Human Hope (Corpus, 1969). In Tomorrow's Child (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), Alvez goes on to state how an alternative "com- munity of hope" maintains an alternative construction of the future when "realism" has demonstrated the inadequacy of juxtaposing the Gospel with the promises made by either liberal or marxist visions.

15. Miguel Angel Brun, Thiologie de l'Exil (Ph.D. diss., University of Strasbourg, 1987). Volume 198 of Concilium, entitled Exodus: A Lasting Paradigm, ed. Bas van Iersel and Anton Weiler, demonstrates further how widely the theme has been applied and suggests gently some of its limits. Cf. my "Exodus and Exile: Two Faces of Liberation" Cross Currents 23 (1973): 297-309. A similar, briefer text was printed as "Withdrawal and Diaspora: Two Faces of Liberation," in Freedom and Discipleship, ed. Daniel S. Schipani (Maryknoll, Orbis Books, 1989), pp. 76-84.

16. The above lines have followed, as the sources do, the notion that "exodus" is an apt metaphor for triumphal power. That is however historically an over- simplification. Cf. my "Exodus and Exile." Modern Christians have sometimes felt that only the cross of Christ can enable the restraint of triumphalism; yet the earliest Christians clothed their witness to the cross in the already available language of the exilic servant songs.

17. Dennis McCann, "The Developing Gutierrez," Commonweal, 4 November 1988, pp. 594f.

18. Assmann's Prologue to Habla Fidel Castro sobre los cristianos revolucionarios (Mon- tevideo: Tierra Nueva, 1972) is critiqued in Segundo's The Liberation of Theology (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1976), pp. 90f. Cf. pp. 74ff"The Crisis of Theistic Lan- guage" in Assmann's own Theology for a Nomad Church (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1976). A more thorough working of the biblical message through the categories of historical materialism is offered, by the Europeans; cf. Alfredo Fierro, The Mili- tant Gospel (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1977). Fierro, however, does not claim to be interpreting the liberation writers; he rather accuses them of not being thorough enough. Cf. Belo (note 19). Alistair Kee, Marx and the Failure of Liberation Theology (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1989), argues a similar thesis.

19. Fernando Belo, A Materialistic Reading of the Gospel(Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1981).

20. Cf. Jon Sobrino, Crossroads in Christology, as a treatment of classical doc- trinal themes. Segundo's three-volume Christology Jesus of Nazareth Yesterday and Today is as ambitious in his setting as are the works of Schillebeecqx. His five- volume Theologyfor Artisans of a New Humanity is Rahnerian in its ambitious vision though happily not in its density or bulk.

21. Cf. Gutierrez, We Drink from Our Own Wells and his On Job, Orbis, 1988. Cf. Sobrino's Spirituality of Liberation (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1988).

22. An especially clear early characterization of European "political theology" in its distinctness from "liberation" was the paper by Francis Fiorenza, "Political Theology and Liberation Theology: An Inquiry into Their Fundamental Meaning," in Liberation, Revolution, and Freedom: Theological Perspectives, ed. Thomas M. McFadden (New York: Seabury, 1975), pp. 3-29.

23. Notably Douglas Sturm, "Praxis and Promise - On the Ethics of Political Theology" Ethics 92 (1982): 733-50. Sturm merges both movements in one ac- count. Alvez, Theologyfor a Nomad Church; and Segundo, Liberation of Theology, p. 139.

24. Cf. an early synthesis in my The Politics ofJesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972).

25. Norman Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1979). 26. Walter Wink, Naming the Powers; The Language of Power in the New Testament

(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1964).

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27. Gerd Theissen, The First Followers ofJesus (London: SCM, 1978); The So- ciology of Early Palestinian Christianity (Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1978); The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982).

28. Chad Meyers, Binding the Strong Man (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1989). 29. Brun had written as much still earlier in El Rincon Teoldico, the organ of

the tiny Seminario Evangelico Menonita de Teologia, where he was then teaching: Mon- tevideo, Agosto, 1969, pp. 8-18.

30. Jose Miguez Bonino, Christians and Marxists: The Mutual Challenge to Revolu- tion (London: Hodder/Stoughton, 1976). A very widespread unfair critique of liber- ation theology says that its use of the analytical resources of marxist social theory is uncritical. Such critics have not read Miguez or Segundo. Cf. also Miguez's Toward a Christian Political Ethics (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983).

31. In later reminiscing, Gutierrez reaches back farther, to the preparations for the 1968 Medellin Latin American Episcopal Conference; cf. "Liberation The- ology: Its Message Examined," an interview, Harvard Divinity School Bulletin 19 (1989): 6f. That is true in the very broad sense of"something's being afoot"; yet the Medellin documents do not announce a new theological methodology. They rather set out to exposit and apply, self-consciously, the implications of Vatican II . Cf. the title of the Medellin reports: The Church in the Present-Day Transformation of Latin America in the Light of the Council, 2 vols. (Bogota and Washington: Latin American Epis- copal Council and U. S Catholic Conference, 1968-70).

32. Segundo, Liberation of Theology, pp. 10ff., 25ff. 33. Christians in the Technical and Social Revolutions of our Time (Geneva: World

Council of Churches, 1967). 34. Christopher Hill, God's Englishman (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson/

Penguin, 1970). 35. Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom and Other writings, ed. Christopher

Hill (London: Pelican, 1973 and Oxford University Press, 1983). 36. Hugh Barbour, Quakers in Puritan England (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1963); Barbour and Arthur Roberts, Early Quaker Writings (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973).

37. The British government after 1689 was not nonviolent toward overseas colo- nies; our theme here is the concern for domestic empowerment. Obviously the Irish or the Indians did not see the regime of William and Mary as liberators. The question of the rights of ethnic outsiders is also sometimes delicate for libera- tion theology today.

38. Cf Peter Brock, Social Doctrines of the Czech Brethren; cf. also Murray L. Wagner, Petr

Cheltick. (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1983). Others would reach back yet farther;

to the pataria who were a political power in eleventh-century Milan, and to the various pauperes Christi remembered as precursors of Francis and Waldo. Cf. Her- bert Grundmann, Religiose Bewegungen im Mittelalter (Berlin: Ebering, 1935; Hil- desheim, Ohms, 1961). The historical depth of liberation theology could benefit by more reading in the premodern undercurrents of antiestablishment Christianity. When G. Gutierrez set out to study the prehistory of the notion of liberty ("Freedom and Salvation: a political problem," in Liberation and Change, ed. Ronald H. Stone (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1977), he read not the underdogs but the mainline classic authors.

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