П р а в н о и с т о р и ч е с к и ф а к у л т е т катедра «социология»

Liberation Theology

In the second half of the twentieth century, the Liberation Theology became undoubtedly one of the most significant forms of political theology. This was developed by G. Gutiérez, L. Boff, J. Sobrino and other Latin American theologians. At the second General Assembly of Latin American bishops, held on August 26 – September 7, 1968 in Medellín, the local church turned attention to the injustice and poverty in the sub-continental countries and set goals, which should have been its answer to a difficult social situation. The General Assembly was organized by the Latin American Episcopal Conference³⁹ and proceeded under the motto: The Church in the Present-day Transformation of Latin America in the light of the Council. This resulted in sixteen documents, where the first five were dedicated to the society needs and the others to the internal church issues. After Medellín, two more General Assemblies of the Latin American Episcopal Conference were held. It was in Pueblo in 1979 and in Santo Domingo in 1992, and they both repeatedly expressed and indeed supported the interest in the poor. They also presented initiatives in favor of the necessitous and suppressed.

In the year 1971, Gustavo Gutiérez issued a document under a program name Teologia della liberazione, which immediately awakened an interest and reaction mainly among theologians in Latin America, Asia and Africa.

The Liberation Theology works on the experience of poverty, underdevelopment and enslavement in the so-called Third World countries. It makes use of social analyses and turns to the Biblical revelation and tradition in order to look for incentives for liberation practice. It tries to become a base for current theological knowledge that wants to address and transform the consciousness of a human. It states that redemptive action includes also liberation from social and economic suppression and the church is obliged to help the suppressed not only by means of support in need, but also by means of political action rectifying unjust social structures. It refers to the Biblical Exodus from Egypt, where the God’s plan of Salvation includes partly the liberation of the Israelite nation from slavery and partly the spiritual freedom contained in the covenant.⁴⁰

The Liberation theologians declared that their divinity comes into existence from the particular needs of a subcontinent and it can not be transferred into other areas. Each area has to go into the reflexion of its own problems and needs, and to create a theology that will provide solutions. The Liberation theology became a supra-denominational project, acknowledged not only by Catholic theologians, and evoked heated controversy.

In 1984 and 1986, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued two instructions on this issue.⁴¹ The Vatican Instruction from September 3, 1984 ⁴² reproached for the uncritical adoption of the Marxist analysis into the theological discourse - mainly into ecclesiology and Christology, and incompleteness and excessive concentration on the ideological attitudes. The Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation⁴³ from March 22, 1986 appealed to an organic relation with the previous instruction and positively elucidated the main theoretic aspects of this subject matter. It defined freedom as a gift that becomes a task and highlighted its soteriologic and ethic-social dimension. It acknowledged that the Liberation Theology shifted the discourse on freedom into liberation, requesting conditions for the real exercise of freedom, and left some space opened for the “responsible liberation theology”.⁴⁴ Liberation Theology became an impulse for the subsequent theological reflexion, a challenge for the Western and ecumenical theology as well, and was almost generally accepted as a “third-worldliness” dimension of the Third World theology.

Asian Political Theology

The Christian Theology in Asia, or the family of Asian theologies, respectively, originates on the ground of a reflexion of social condition, and at the same time in contact as well as in dialogue with non-Christian religions and non-Western cultures. The authentic Asian theology began to develop after the year 1965, after the conference of Christian churches in Eastern Asia in Kandy, Sri Lanka, and was further influenced by mainly ecumenical meetings of theologians on the continent territory.

Duraisamy Simon Amalorpavadass, an Indian Jesuit, elaborated the theology of inculturation, according to which the Gospel and the culture must enter a mutual dynamic relationship. The dynamics of the church towards Catholicity then becomes effective by means of evangelism and inculturation. A Protestant Chinese theologian from Taiwan, Shoki Coe, outlined the effort to overcome the dialogue on nativitation, and encouraged the contextualization and the searching for the truth, appearing in different contexts. A Japanese, Kosuke Koyama, appealed for a creative dialogue between Asian and Biblical spirituality, and thought about the relationship of technological progress and the sacred. A Philippine Protestant theologian Emerito Nacpil expressed the challenge to pay more attention to the diversity of Asian situations. He also tried to formulate a theology, interpreting the Gospel and tradition in compliance with the needs of particular situation. Choang-Seng Song, a Chinese Presbyterian theologian in Taiwan, created the “Third-Eye Theology,⁴⁵ which realizes that Asia sustained the “Western burdeness” it must be liberated from. A Sinhalese Catholic theologian, Aloysius Pieris, searched for a synthesis between an Asian, i.e. cultural-religious, and social dimension. He spoke about a need for the theology of religions, which would address a large numbers of continent’s “God’s paupers”.⁴⁶ In the course of time, a question about the necessity of a “new theology of religions”, elaborated from the Third World perspective, emerged. For the Third World, the clash of cultures, traditions, and religions is an everyday experience and at the same time a challenge, the church is permanently facing.

Каталог: sociolabswu -> izsledvanija
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