From time to time those who seek to make the 1960s social revolution the “new normal” advance ludicrous claims for the unreflective. This recently happened in a New York Times piece by Mark Oppenheimer on May 25. Oppenheimer made the claim that the religious version of sixties radicalism, liberation theology, is the true and original doctrine of Jesus Christ. Quoting Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary theologian Shannon Craigo-Snell, Oppenheimer reported that “Liberation theology, at its most simple, is the Sunday School Jesus who healed the sick or took care of the poor people … It’s what your Sunday school teacher taught you if you grew up in a church. It isn’t something people should be afraid of, unless they’re invested in poor people not getting fed or sick people not getting healed.”
This is the basic claim of the religious left, also made by the early twentieth century Social Gospel, that Jesus’ teaching has been misunderstood by traditional Christianity, perhaps even by the apostle Paul, who mistook Jesus’ gospel of salvation from suffering as a gospel of salvation from the wrath of God, and the consequent need to be saved, and then sanctified. People don’t need salvation from the wrath of God, liberationists think, they need personal and social liberation. What distinguishes liberation theology among ideas of this type is its Marxist basis. Rather than seeing the gospel as just “doing good,” or “helping the poor,” liberation theology attempts to identify oppressors and oppressed, views the world through the lens of the claimed oppression, and struggles for a complete social change to liberate the victims.
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