Lilian Calles Barger's "The World Come of Age"

Lilian Calles Barger was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and immigrated to the United States as a child. She received her PhD from The University of Texas at Dallas and is the author of Eve's Revenge: Women and a Spirituality of the Body and Chasing Sophia: Reclaiming the Lost Wisdom of Jesus.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, and reported the following:

The intellectual origins of liberation theology that includes the first generation of Latin American, Black and feminist theologies of the late 1960s and 70s, are diverse and multiple. On page 99, I examine one of those streams of thought. Theology crossed paths with the American philosophy of pragmatism espoused by Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, liberal theologians took up the challenge of pragmatism that experience was the test for any proposition. Theologians moved away from an abstracted concept of truth, or revelation, to social ethics as the measure of good religion. The theologian Douglas C. Macintosh, an alumnus of the influential Chicago Divinity School, embraced the claims of pragmatism in his book Theology as an Empirical Science (1919) and argued that belief “can be transformed into a categorical knowledge only by empirical verification.” The pragmatic approach to theological reasoning inspired the popular social gospel, in which the social effects of any belief determined its truth and value.

Pragmatism spread quickly to Latin America where quick translation allowed it to join the currents of positivism, the philosophy that had the greatest influence on the continent. The hemispheric spread of pragmatism prepared the intellectual environment for conceptualizing liberation theology in which the experience of the oppressed became the interpretive lens for reading the Bible. Unlike Protestant liberation theologians, Latin American Catholics had to transverse a greater distance between a pragmatic stance and Catholic orthodoxy. The Magisterium rejected pragmatism and in the words of Pope Pius X, it was the Protestant “synthesis of all heresies” that set the active virtues above passive values. The global spread of pragmatism also influenced the work of the Catholic French philosopher Maurice Blondel with his idea of truth as “critical reflection on action.” Blondel contributed a key idea later taken up and developed by liberation theologians.

Visit Lilian Calles Barger's website.

--Marshal Zeringue