Latin American Liberationist Approach Essay

Liberationist approaches. With the rise of liberation theology in Latin America in the 1960s new theological frameworks developed from within the perspectives of particular social identities, e.g. black theology, feminist theology, third world theologies, etc. These often created new ways of interpreting the biblical text from the perspective(s) of people who have been marginalized and oppressed.
In North America, feminist biblical criticism has become an extremely important approach to reading the Bible. It aims to a) expose the patriarchal character of biblical literature and, where possible, to recover women’s insights, perspectives and knowledge that have been suppressed in the past; b) show how traditional approaches to interpreting the
Bible have been used to discriminate against women and how we may change our way of reading the Bible in order to empower women as well as others; c) advance equality for women’s perspectives within the field of biblical scholarship, the academy, the church, and society generally. This essay seeks to compare two popular modern approaches taken to biblical interpretation, the liberationist and feminist approaches. Discussion presented in this essay will identify strengths and weaknesses of each approach to evaluate their individual importance. Both liberationist and feminist theologies introduced people to new horizons enabling them to understand the holy text from the point of view of those who have remained the subject of discrimination. Both are contemporary scholarly approaches and they are employed by people of all faiths to explicate the biblical text in different ways. The liberationist approach is also called Latin American liberation theology.
This is because the foundation of this theology was laid by Latin American theologians. Due to a unique situation of Latin America, conventional methods of biblical interpretation could not answer the questions of people in this region. Since Latin America had a long history of economic contraction, the liberation theology was created from the perspective of those people from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds who had always been marginalized. The strength of this theology is that it was invented for noble reasons like to properly address misfortunes of the poor people in society and to encourage them to put up a relentless fight against social disorder or inequality. Elimination of poverty, in contrast to conventional biblical interpretations, remains the most important characteristic of Latin American liberation theology. Another strength of this theology was that it motivated the Catholic Church to stand with the disadvantaged people and issue the address of poverty. Before this theology, the churches overlooked the interests of the marginalized groups. However, this theology introduced reforms into Latin American society in that it made the religious institutions emphasize indefinitely on the world of the poor (Johnson, 2007, p.
72).