Liberation and New Creation: A Theological Conversation

Abstract

In theology as in other disciplines important changes in method and subject-matter occur from time to time. Sometimes these changes prove to be no more than transient fashions: ‘Death-of-God’ theology in the late 1960s appears now to belong to that category. Its exact contemporary, just developing in Latin America at that time and subsequently known as liberation theology, has proved to have much greater staying power and much greater impact on Christian theology beyond the geographical and cultural confines of its origins. Indeed it has become the major theological influence throughout the Christian world over the last two decades. And that influence is undoubtedly due to the theological profundity as well as the social relevance of the original intuition which discovered in this traditional Christian word and metaphor the key to so much that Christianity might offer to the fearful, struggling people of our time. This chapter seeks to review sympathetically yet critically some of the major achievements of that paradigm shift in Christian theology, to link it with another potentially transforming Christian metaphor, that of ‘New Creation’, and to relate both to the first world, European and Irish location of the author.