Liberation Theology Quotes

“My son, the Holy Church is on the right, but Jesus Christ was always on the left.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist. Dom Helder Camara – one of the great prophets of Christian "Liberation theology".”
― Dom Helder Camara Archbishop of Recife in Brazil

“The gospel of Jesus is not a rational concept to be explained in a theory of salvation, but a story about God’s presence in Jesus’ solidarity with the oppressed, which led to his death on the cross. What is redemptive is the faith that God snatches victory out of defeat, life out of death, and hope out of despair.”
― James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree

“The core of liberation theology is profoundly "theologal" - that is, rooted in the very nature of God. You see, there's an immediate relationship between God, oppression, liberation: God is in the poor who cry out. And God is the one who listens to the cry and liberates, so that the poor no longer need to cry out. ( Leonardo Boff, p. 166)”
― Mev Puleo, The Struggle Is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation

“Education is the key for self liberation.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“I just called the slaveholder version of Christianity "false." I believe that. But note that in situations of conflict participants view reality differently. The more intractable the conflict, especially where both sides have the capacity to hurt each other, the more difficult it is to determine who is "victim" and who is "oppressor." Think about how nothing is quite as predictable and fruitless as hearing estranged spouses blame each other for being abusive or oppressive. Liberation theology dealt with this perceptual gulf in conflicted situations by speaking of the "epistemological privilege of the poor/oppressed." This meant: the view of the truth of a conflictual situation is clearer from the underside than from the position of power. But this assumes that we know who is on the underside and who holds the power. I am not saying that the exodus-liberation-deliverance motif is invalidated; I am saying that few situations present themselves to us in such clarity as Exod. 1-2 enslavement and infanticide do.”
― David P. Gushee, The Sacredness of Human Life: Why an Ancient Biblical Vision Is Key to the World's Future

“So we speak of a Black God, Mother God, Worker God.
This de-mystifies what's been passed on to us! In our process of organization and liberation of our people, it's important to meet a God who is more like us. (Silvia Regina de Lima Silva, p. 105)”
― Mev Puleo, The Struggle Is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation

“Liberation of the Spirit

As a girl, touched by the mystical dimensions of Christian faith, I felt the presence of the Beloved in my heart: the oneness of our life. At that time, when I had not yet learned the right language, I knew only that despite the troubles of my world, the suffering I witnessed around and within me, there was always available a spiritual force that could lift me higher, that could give me moments of transcendent bliss wherein I could surrender all thought of the world and know profound peace.
Early on, my heart had been touched by its delight. I knew its rapture. Early on, I made a commitment to be a seeker on the path: a seeker after truth. I was determined to live a life in the spirit. The black theologian James Cone says that our survival and liberation depend upon our recognition of the truth when it is spoken and lived:

'If we cannot recognize the truth, then it cannot liberate us from untruth. To know the truth is to prepare for it; for it is not mainly reflection and theory. Truth is divine action entering our lives and creating the human action of liberation.'

In reflecting on my youth, I emphasize the mystical dimension of the Christian faith because it was that aspect of religious experience that I found to be truly liberatory. The more fundamental religious beliefs that were taught to me urging blind obedience to authority and acceptance of oppressive hierarchies-- this didn't move me. no, it was those mystical experiences that enabled me to understand and recognize the realm of being in a spiritual experience that transcends both authority and law.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community

“The greatest single reason for [the] Christian church’s failure . . . is its failure to combat racism.”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“The women who needs to be liberated most ist women in everyman,and a man who needs to be liberated most is the man in every woman.”
― Magnus Hirschfeld

“Only the oppressed can receive liberating visions in wretched places. Only those thinking emerges in the context of the struggle against injustice can see God's freedom breaking into unfree conditions and thus granting power to the powerless to fight here and now for the freedom they know to be theirs in Jesus' cross and resurrection.”
― James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed

“. . . anyone who wants to elaborate relevant liberation theology must be prepared to go into the 'examination hall' of the poor. Only after sitting on the benches of he humble will he or she be entitled to enter a school of 'higher learning.”
― Leonardo Boff and Clodovis Boff

“Self love and forgiveness is a liberation.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“In liberation theology, Marxism is never treated as a subject on its own but always from and in relation to the poor. Placing themselves firmly on the side of the poor, liberation theologians ask Marx: 'What can you tell us about the situation of poverty and ways of overcoming it?' Here Marxists are submitted to the judgment of the poor and their cause, and not the other way around.”
― Leonardo Boff and Clodovis Boff

“The evangelically poor are those who make themselves available to God in the realization of God's project in this world, and thereby make themselves into instruments and signs of the kingdom of God. The evangelically poor will establish solidarity with the economically poor and even identify with them, just as the historical Jesus did.”
― Leonardo Boff and Clodovis Boff

“To be wounded by the suffering of others is a gift of the Holy Spirit.”
― Gregory Baum, The Oil Has Not Run Dry: The Story of My Theological Pathway

“Ignoring the poor is to show contempt for both God and humanity.”
― Phillip Michael Garner

“I fully understand the trepidation of placing God on trial. I would rather follow the lead of others and say at the conclusion of time, it will all be explained and make sense. I too feel a pull toward fixing my gaze at a happy ending, joyfully proclaiming ‘it is well with my soul.’ Oh, how much more comforting it would be to proclaim, 'God is good – always!’ With all my heart, soul, mind, and being, I wish to become intoxicated with the simplicity of an unquestionable and uncomplicated faith. But to do so would be an insult to the God in whom I claim to believe.

To challenge God, to yell out in protest, to place God on trial is not the ultimate act of arrogance; rather, it is to take God seriously by crucifying our Christian-based idols for an honest appraisal of the metaphysical – whatever that might or might not be.

And maybe this is the ultimate beauty of faith – to doubt, to wrestle, to curse, to question, to disbelieve, to oppose, to joder, and to hold accountable God in defense of God’s creation. God is placed on trial, not rejected.”
― Miguel A. De La Torre, Embracing Hopelessness

“Mere sitting at home and meditating on the divine presence is not enough for our time. We have to come to the end of a long journey and see that the stranger we meet there is no other than ourselves—which is the same as saying that we find Christ in him. For if the Lord is risen, as He said, He is actually or potentially alive in every man.”
― Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters

“Being a theologian is not a matter of skillfully using methods but of being imbued with the theological spirit. . . liberation theology is a new way of being a theologian. . . Theology (not the theologian) comes afterwards; liberating practice comes first.”
― Leonardo Boff and Clodovis Boff

“[Liberation theology] means challenging the stories that the authorities tell us about God, especially if these stories have the same outcome for every single person.”
― Dianna Anderson, Damaged Goods: New Perspectives on Christian Purity

“For the liberal humanist legacy to which Ditchkins is in indebted, love can really be understood only in personal terms. It is not an item in his political lexicon, and would sound merely embarrassing were it to turn up there. For the liberal tradition, what seems to many men and women to lie at the core of human existence has a peripheral place in the affairs of the world, however vital a role it may play in the private life. The concept of political love, one imagines would make little sense to Ditchkins. Yet something like this is the ethical basis for socialism. It is just that it is hard to see what this might mean in a civilization where love has been almost wholly reduced to the erotic, romantic, or domestic. Ditchkins writes as he does partly because a legacy which offers an alternative to the liberal heritage on this question is today in danger of sinking without trace.”
― Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate

“without – apart from – the poor there is no salvation, without – apart from – the poor, there is no Church, without – apart from – the poor, there is no Gospel.”
― Pedro Casaldaliga

“The journey is from the Prakriti to Purusha and again from Purusha to Prakriti, and again back to Purusha when you master all the paths, there is no journey - you are everywhere - liberated and free from the births and the sufferings.”
― Amit Ray, Yoga The Science of Well-Being

“I suggest that the Restoration was a direct intervention by God to reject and push back against the widescale adoption of the capitalist ethic and ideology during the Industrial Revolution”
― Ryan D. Ward, And There Was No Poor Among Them: Liberation, Salvation, and the Meaning of the Restoration

“The heterosexual foundation of Liberation Theology can claim for toleration of the abnormal in its communities, but it us heterosexuality as a compulsory system in itself which is abnormal, not Queer, indecent people. Indecent people challenge precisely the unnaturality and abnormalities of the present sexual ideology, in all the consequences of this sexual and political theology.”
― Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics