TALLER: POLITICAL THEOLOGY ARTICLE IN ENGLISH

NOMBRE: Jonathan José Medina Avendaño CÓDIGO: 2281698

Main ideas

1. Theology needed to be supplanted by practice, according to Marx's eleventh thesis on

Feuerbach.
2. Theology was seen as either a species of intellectual history or an academically
domesticated speculation without any practical bearing or importance.
3. The emergence of spiritual impoverishment from state-controlled monopolies in the East
and monopoly-controlled states in the West led to dissatisfaction and opposition to the
dependence engendered by colonialist and imperialist policies of advanced industrial
societies.
4. The stage was set for theology to shift from hermeneutical methods of mediating
Christianity with contemporary cultures to new approaches known as political or liberation
theologies.
5. Political theology seeks to change, rather than merely interpret, history.
6. Political theology is seeking to come to terms with the universal hermeneutic problem as
portrayed by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur.
7. Political theology asserts that interpretation of God is a practical and political issue.
8. Liberation theologies emanate less from the academic superstructure than from basic
communities at the popular level.
9. Liberation theology debunks bourgeois notions of "development" in favor of hypotheses
like "dependency" and "national security state" in which Lenin's ideas about imperialism
are applied anew.
10. Political theology is the chief symptom and response to the paradigm change theology is
undergoing.

Text

The article discusses the emergence of political and liberation theologies in response to the
spiritual impoverishment arising from state-controlled monopolies and imperialist policies of
advanced industrial societies. These new approaches seek to change history rather than merely
interpret it and assert that interpretation of God is a practical and political issue. Political theology
is seen as the chief symptom and response to the paradigm change theology is undergoing.
However, there are tensions and challenges within these approaches, including the tendency to
collapse the tension between Christianity and liberal democracy, and the risk of collapsing back
into secularist dialectics.