The Role of History in Liberation Theology

This sub-essay addresses an issue which is important to all theology.  It is the role of history in the origin, emergence, formation of that theology on the one hand, and on the other, the historical issues that theology deals with.  At this point, we take a look at the role of history in Liberation Theology.

As we have seen from previous essays, Liberation Theology, like all other theologies, did not begin in a vacuum.  It was born and bred within the historical context of certain cultural, economic, political and social realities.  In the essay on the history of Liberation Theology, we saw that there were certain antecedents that carried the seeds of LT's emergence.  Unlike much of Euro-American theology, LT was not characterized by being linked to philosophical abstraction and speculation. LT was born as a result of a dysfunction in human relations, which in turn led to the agony, misery, oppression, and suffering of the masses of people in Latin America, in the so-called Third World, among certain ethnic/racial groups in Slavetown, U.S.A., and of women world-wide.  Some in our time may want to include people of same-sex orientation in the category of "oppressed" people. That is an issue which is worthy of full consideration.

What is the role of history in theological reflection?  This question merits our attention, in that theological reflection does not and cannot take place in a vacuum. Bonino's answer is that:

"We are not concerned with establishing through deduction the consequences of conceptual truths, but with analyzing a historical praxis which claims to be Christian.  This critical analysis includes a number of operations which are totally unknown to classical theology.  Historical praxis overflows the area of the subjective and private.  If we are dealing with acts and not merely with ideas, feelings, or intentions, we plunge immediately into the area of politics, understood now in its broad sense of public or social.  Billy Graham, the South African Reformed Church, Martin Luther King, or 'Christians for Socialism,' do not confront us primarily as a system of ideas or a theological position, but as historical agents in certain directions and with certain effects which are objectively possible to determine.  The area of research is the total society in which these agents are performing; economic, political, and cultural facts are as relevant to a knowledge of these praxes as the exegesis of their pronouncements and publications.  Their Christianity must be verified in relation to such questions as imperialism, apartheid, integration, self-determination, and many other sociopolitical magnitudes (Bonino in Gibellini, p. 91)."  These statements serve to underscore Bonino's conviction that theological reflection cannot be divorced from history.  He indicates that Christian faith and practice are to me measured by one's attitude towards these issues that are raised.

It is the position of Liberation Theology, and of this writer, that theology must be contextualized. 
If theology is divorced from history, either by intent or by default, it is both irrelevant and moot. If theology is not historicized, it fails in its mission to the Church and to the world. It becomes, then, abstract gibberish and idle talk.

In the Name of the Creator, and of the Liberator, and of the Sustainer. Amen.

Please share your insights with us relative to the role of history in theology. Your contributions are very important.

Dr. Juan A. Ayala-Carmona