4 - Clodovis Boff: Keeping the dialectical tension

Summary

Introduction

So far we have not found a straightforward answer to the question as to whether there is anything that can prevent the iconicity of the poor being turned into an idolatry. Emmanuel Levinas helped me to argue that the poor can be viewed as the other who challenges the liberation theologian. This alterity of the poor is at least one reason for the various attempts to define or describe the poor and the poverty to which they are subject. In addition, the clarity and precision offered by Jean-Luc Marion gave me a new way to speak about liberation theology. He helped to show how language and concepts can become themselves idolatrous or, as liberation theology would hope when it talks of the poor, remain or become iconic.

Therefore I now turn to liberation theology itself to see if it can provide any answers to the dilemma it faces: is it possible to focus on the poor as a privileged locus theologicus, icons of God, without turning them eventually into an idol? To this end, I turn to Clodovis Boff. I begin with his first major work, his doctoral thesis defended at the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve in 1976 and published in Brazil in 1978. This work has been described as “a significant mark in the evolution of method [in liberation theology]”, even as “the official liberation theological method”. This is exaggerated, though the relationship to the “See-Judge-Act” of the pastoral cycle gives it some foundation.