All for one One for All.

At the onset of the apartheid regime halfway into the twentieth century, many Afrikaners believed they engaged in a righteous God ordained struggle of liberation. After decades of British suppression they would now be free to fulfill their Christian mission and preside over South Africa. Later that century antiapartheid activists would similarly invoke the Scriptures, this time to urge the liberation of blacks from Afrikaner oppression. In both cases people claimed the right to self-determination partly on the basis of their faith. In the first case theological notions of liberation and election helped bolster a profoundly exclusivist ideology and systematic racism. Within the anti-apartheid movement theologians, on the contrary, sought to develop an inclusive theology that advocated freedom for all of humanity.1 Although the above illustration involves significant difficulties on its own accord, the two divergent attitudes towards theology and freedom bring us to an important broader question. How might theologies of liberation boost a community’s search for self-determination without resorting to exclusivism or nationalism and its potentially lethal excesses? Liberation theology may help release people from dominating forces, whether economic, political, cultural, or otherwise. But what to do when one community’s fight for freedom becomes another’s source of oppression? To explore these questions this paper will draw from four different traditions. Comparing major liberation theologies from Latin America, Israel, Palestine, and among American Indians in the United States,2 it aims to analyze how