146 - Justice in Latin American Theology of Liberation

Justice in Latin American Theology of Liberation

By Ismael Garcia

Atlanta, John Knox, 1987. 204 Pp. $15.95.

This volume should be of great value to North American students of liberation theology. A revised version of Garcia's University of Chicago dissertation, it provides a clear, insightful analysis of understandings of justice as a theological, moral, economic, and political norm in Latin American theologies of liberation.

The author describes the structure and points of emphasis of liberation theology through an explication of the theological methods of Hugo Assmann, Jose Miguez Bonino, Gustavo Gutierrez, and Jose Porfirio Miranda. He is concerned throughout the volume with the ways in which these theologians incorporate or give rise to notions of justice in their systematic treatments of theology. While Garcia's discussion of the theologians is rarely as exacting an analysis of them as those found in volumes devoted entirely to the systematic issues of liberation theology, he does succeed in demonstrating the vital importance of justice, as a foundational orientation for meeting the needs of the poor, for liberation theology.

A helpful feature of the book is Garcia's explanation of the political and economic theories that inform the social project of liberation theology. He provides synopses of developmentalist, dependence, and structural violence theories that are crucial for understanding the context out of which liberation theology has come. He also summarizes liberationist political views of democratic socialism and the importance of the poor for the vision of a liberated society. Garcia links these economic and political positions to liberationist theological notions, such as sin, anthropology, and the Kingdom of God, to demonstrate the coherence of liberationist concerns.

Garcia also compares a liberationist view of justice with traditional Catholic natural law, "positive law," and capitalist natural right understandings of justice. These comparisons display the distinctiveness of the liberationist approach to justice with its foundational concern for the wellbeing of the oppressed.

In the book's final chapters, the author attempts to explicate how such a view of justice would be implemented in society through economic and political means. Garcia insists that the liberationists' goal is a democratic socialist order that steers a middle course between an authoritarian Marxist state and Western capitalist democracy. He suggests that the liberationists desire a society in which an emphasis on meeting the basic requirements of human sustenance would co-exist peacefully with personal freedom and initiative: the state would not hold all power.

Garcia's volume is important because he has succeeded in displaying what liberationists mean when they refer to justice and how that view relates to understandings of justice in other traditions. He has shown how justice may serve as a point of contact for dialogue between North American theologians who do not claim to be liberationists and Latin American theologians who do. The author is to be credited for making clear the theological, moral, economic, political, and economic issues that are at stake in a liberationist view of justice.

Philip LeMasters, Duke University, Durham, N.C.