(Ir)religiosity

I’d like to preface this — some stuff I reworked from a paper I wrote earlier this semester — by saying that while it ends on a more critical note, Segundo is without a doubt my favorite Latin American liberation theologian.  I think that especially now, with the so-called triumph of capitalism, Segundo’s work offers the best liberative alternative precisely because it is methodological and provides an ideological analysis of the foundations of theology.  My critical analysis revolves around the question of whether theology itself can provide a impetus for liberation or, as Segundo maintains, if a prior ideological or political commitment must be made.  If the latter is true, then I don’t see the need for theology as a liberative, praxis-oriented discourse.  In short, the question is this:  why be a theologian at all?

It seems that Latin American liberation theology suffers from an unintended epistemological problem.  If, in the final instance, praxis is the ultimate criterion of theoretical theology as many first-generation theologians have compelling argued, then what is the norm by which theological hermeneutics are employed?  To put it more bluntly, if praxis is the criterion for theory, then what is the criterion for praxis?  Such are the questions Juan Luis Segundo raises vis-à-vis Latin American liberation theology.  Whereas important founding thinkers like Gustavo Gutiérrez aimed to construct a theology of liberation by reifying classical Christian theological tropes against the backdrop of the socio-political situation in Latin America with the aid of Marxist analysis, Segundo opts for a different approach altogether.  One with the intention of the liberating theology from the cold grip of the ideological status quo, a move he believes is mandatory before theology itself can even begin its own program of liberation. This fundamental difference in approach is revealed in the title of both Gutiérrez’s and Segundo’s books: A Theology of Liberation and The Liberation of Theology, respectively.  Indeed, the latter suggests that what is needed is not so much a task of critical reconstruction, but rather a wholesale reevaluation of the form and foundation of theology as a potentially revolutionary enterprise, that is the conscious separation of theology from the dominant power discourse brokered — and I use the economically charged verb intentionally — by Euro-America.

For Segundo, the liberation of theology begins with the admission that any intellectual discourse — perhaps especially theology — is “intimately bound up with the existing social situation in at least an unconscious way” (8).  It is therefore imperative that the liberation theologian make the crucial connection between the past and the present situation in her critical interpretation of the biblical text.  Indeed, without such a connection Segundo is fearful that liberation theology will end up being a theology which only deals with liberation, lacking any real potency due to its “methodological naïveté” and eventually “reabsorbed by the deeper mechanisms of oppression” and the “prevailing language of the status quo” (8).  Thus, Segundo answers the question of epistemology with recourse to methodology.  In fact, it would not be wrong, in this case, to assert that a true theology of liberation is one that is concerned not only with concrete historical praxis but with the methodological processes that give rise to such action vis-à-vis the current situation.  For as Segundo provocatively claims, “the one and only thing that can maintain the liberative character of any theology is not its content but its methodology” as it is “the latter that guarantees the continuing bite of theology…however much the existing system tries to reabsorb it into itself” (39-40). Read the rest of this entry »