Abstract
One of the revolutionary insights of early liberation theology was that theological discernment is, above all, a concrete undertaking. Yet this insight is accompanied by a persistent conundrum that arises from the way in which naming God’s activity in history is perceived as collapsing God’s objective distance into contingent affairs. This paper contends that this conundrum results from a constricting account of theological objectivity which is problematically conceived in opposition to concretization and so obstructs an account of liberating discernment. Locating this concern within the (de)colonial history of competing theological readings of the weather, and, in addition, prompted by Alice Crary’s expansion of objectivity in ethical theory, I argue that theological objectivity must not only include but begin with theological languages of the oppressed as its essential point of departure. Recovering the insight of early liberation theologians, this paper contends that theology may speak of God objectively only as it concretely shares in the liberating life and words of the crucified peoples of history. The purpose of this argument is then to envision Christian ethics as language accountable to the apocalyptic activity of the God of the oppressed.
Highlights
One of the revolutionary insights of liberation theology is that theological discernment is, above all, a concrete undertaking
Theological discernment so formulated entails that language about divine activity must be baptized in people’s struggles for freedom from enclosures of sin
Despite the persistence of this conundrum, it is a misconception generated by a governing and constricting view of theological objectivity which is problematically conceived in opposition to concretization, and, precisely so, obstructs the recovery of liberating discernment articulated by Melano Couch and others
Summary
One of the revolutionary insights of liberation theology is that theological discernment is, above all, a concrete undertaking. Theological discernment so formulated entails that language about divine activity must be baptized in people’s struggles for freedom from enclosures of sin This insight is often displaced or covered over by a certain anxiety arising from the way in which naming God’s activity in history seems to risk collapsing God’s objective distance into contingent affairs. Despite the persistence of this conundrum, it is a misconception generated by a governing and constricting view of theological objectivity which is problematically conceived in opposition to concretization, and, precisely so, obstructs the recovery of liberating discernment articulated by Melano Couch and others The consequences of this misconception include the idea that abstract and generalizable descriptions of divine activity are (most nearly) objective descriptions, in addition to a categorical resistance to concretization. On the theological concept of the “crucified peoples”, see (Ellacuría [1978] 2013, esp. pp. 208–10)
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