Latin American Liberation Theology: The Next Generation (review)

This volume is a much-needed addition to bring to an English speaking audience the currents of twenty-first century liberation theologies from Latin America. While many in the Anglo-European theological world know of the second generation of feminist and Black theologians, few are aware of the newest generation of Latin American theologians, while at the same time many of these same Anglo-European theologians have begun to use the language of liberation theology in a postmodern literary turn. The contributors to this volume remind the reader of the original intentions of liberation theology, as articulated by Bonino, Gutierrez, Sobrino, and Boff, to develop a hermeneutical praxis for the creation of historical projects, whose aim was the actual liberation of the poor with theological underpinnings. The authors in this volume seek to remind the reader first of the original intent of Latin American liberation theology and the uniqueness of its hermeneutic, then to access the theoretical, hermeneutical, and systemic limits contained within it. Finally, each author challenges both the reader and liberation theologians/theologies themselves to broaden, deepen, and envision new possibilities, whereby the oppressed of Latin America (and of Hispanic North America) can be liberated.

Latin American liberation theology was originally a phenomenon of the late 1960s through the late 1970s; some think that it has been eclipsed by a radical orthodoxy. In this volume Petrella has assembled some of the most innovative theologians in Latin America, who are continuing in the traditions set out by earlier Latin American liberation theology. This new generation of theologians is expanding the theological engagement with the social sciences, re-defining key terms such as socialism and democracy and demanding that Latin American theologians give voice to all the oppressed, for "the poor" is not a homogenous category. Women, sexual minorities, indigenous, mestizo, and Afrodescendent people are included in the poor and oppressed of Latin America.

Jung Mo Sung, named as one of the most original and prolific authors in Latin American theology today, opens the volume with a provocative essay challenging that the Exodus paradigm used by early liberation theology "overestimated the capacity to enact liberation in history" (xvi). Instead, Sung says, theology must again recover the ethical indignation in the faces of the poor. The crucifixion–resurrection event of Jesus Christ is the paradigmatic event, which exemplifies both the "ethical indignation" (9) experienced by substantive portions of humanity, as well as the "limits of human history" (11). The crucified God paradox gives the Christian community a "defeated-liberator messiah" (11), whose power lies in the ability to offer to each individual the power to continue to struggle against oppression regardless of how many defeats one may suffer. This incarnational theology challenges the insularity of some communities by calling them to praxis and claims that each human being is a subject responsible to "face the challenges of the world" (16).

Indecent theology is the theme of Marcella Althaus-Reid's essay. A precis of her monograph, "Indecent Theology: theological perversions in sex, gender, and politics," Althaus-Reid introduces the reader to a liberation theology that takes seriously the subversive, disturbing, transgressive nature of love (21). Althaus-Reid, however, asks liberation theology to interrogate its own hermeneutical structure. If its theology did indeed promote a hermeneutic of suspicion, it did not challenge the sexual norm promoted by the church. The "poor" were heterosexual subjects, however, since liberation theology is indecent theology, a theology that challenges "the normative values that regulated a society at a time when state terrorism considered it normal to throw pregnant women out of airplanes into the river below or to send children to concentration camps" (22). So should it be a theology whose subjects raise a "postcolonial critique on the subject of liberation" (32)? This critique will necessarily challenge traditional Christian valuations of the sexual subject—gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons are also those who are the epistemological subjects of liberation theology.

Nelson Maldonado-Torres disentangles the new European theologies of radical...