Liberation Theologies and the Struggle for the Soul of Humanity and the Church: The First Fifty Years and What’s Next

An Interventions Series on the Legacy of Frederick Herzog

Liberation theologies have been declared trendy, sexy, cool, passé, obsolete—even dead. Yet they have proven irrepressible and, at the beginning of the second quarter of the twenty-first century, more relevant than ever.

The origins of liberation theology are shrouded in myth. One of the most persistent is the belief that it was invented by towering theological figures such as Gustavo Gutiérrez and James Cone. Equally misleading is the assumption that liberation theology was a uniquely Latin American innovation later exported to the rest of the world.

Closer to the truth is that liberation theologies emerged out of concrete liberation movements. This is why the term appeared almost simultaneously in different contexts, without theologians borrowing from one another. In the early 1970s, Cone and Gutiérrez independently articulated liberation theology within their own struggles: the African American civil rights movement in the United States and Latin America’s recognition that liberation—not development—was urgently needed. Less widely known is the fact that a white theologian in the southern United States also arrived independently at the term, giving rise to another, often overlooked strand of liberation theology.

That theologian was Frederick Herzog of Duke University. Herzog was the first to publish an article titled “Liberation Theology” (republished here), in 1970—two months before Cone’s A Black Theology of Liberation and prior to Gutiérrez’s Teología de la liberación and Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Liberation Theology, which appeared in 1971 and 1972 respectively.

What matters is not precedence for its own sake, but the recognition of a genuine and less well-known strand of liberation theology that still has vital lessons to offer today. Since Cone, Gutiérrez, and Ruether are better known, this volume focuses on Herzog, his legacy, and what emerged from his work in the decades that followed.

Notably, the year 2025 marked several important anniversaries: fifty-five years since Herzog’s article “Liberation Theology” was published, thirty years since his untimely death during a faculty meeting at Duke Divinity School, and one hundred years since his birth.

In the entries that follow (releasing weekly), Herzog’s students and colleagues—from multiple generations and long engaged in liberation struggles—reflect on what they learned from him, how their own work developed through conversation and disagreement with him, and what they see as the most pressing theological and political challenges of our time.

Contributors: Joerg Rieger, Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., Melinda Wiggins, M. Douglas Meeks, Mark W. Wethington, Jürgen Moltmann.

Joerg Rieger

February 2, 2026

“You don’t understand what theology is unless you have looked in the face of suffering, unless you have become an atheist in the presence of pain.”

A few months before Fredrick Herzog published his inaugural article on liberation theology, he penned this sentence in the newsletter of Duke Divinity School in April of 1970 (“Let us Still Praise Famous Men,” republished in Theology from the Belly of the Whale). In this article, he remembered his friend William Edwards, an African American fireman, sharecropper, and eventual paraplegic, who taught him what he called “the Bible in hand method.”

In his office at Duke Divinity School in the late 1980s, the only picture Herzog kept on his wall was of William Edwards, rather than of any of his famous teachers. His students and even some of his colleagues were unaware that Herzog once was the favorite student of Karl Barth and lived in Barth’s house for several years. While Barth’s theology has its place in history and is still of value in many theological circles, what Herzog learned from Edwards changed the course of theology for him: reading the Bible in the deepest struggles of everyday life, starting in the cottonfields of North Carolina, was the engine that for Herzog would transform theology, the church, and ultimately the world.

At the heart of this transformation was a rejection of dominant conceptions of God in the image of the powerful that had failed people, planet, and religion. It took me a while to understand the full implications of this after I began my studies with Herzog. But this is what changed everything. As a result, I ended up writing my Ph.D. dissertation on his work, comparing North American Liberation Theology with Latin American Liberation Theology and the work of Gustavo Gutiérrez, using the lens of poststructural theory.

I came to realize—much later—how essential becoming “an atheist in the presence of pain” was, not only in that moment but for Christianity as a whole. In Jesus vs. Caesar, I explore how Roman philosophers accused early Christians of atheism—not because they denied God, but because the Christian God did not conform to the dominant gods of theism. This is what Herzog rediscovered: atheism was an essential part of Christian theology because it meant the rejection of dominant theisms, and this kind of atheism allowed for the embrace of an altogether different God: the God of Jesus Christ.

For Frederick Herzog, what was at stake was never merely theological ideas. It was also how theology emerged in real life and was lived—in solidarity with those exploited and oppressed by the powers that be. Deeply engaged in the civil rights struggle (three African American choirs sang at his funeral years later), and supportive of liberation movements from Durham, North Carolina, to Lima, Peru, Herzog understood that struggles for liberation are where faith truly matters—and where God is to be found.

In the final article he wrote before his untimely death, he insisted: “Only if we change ourselves in view of these ‘invisible people’ will we become aware of the ‘invisible God.’ Here anchors our theological future” (“New Birth of Conscience,” republished here).

Some of Herzog’s later theological insights emerged through rediscovering and reclaiming God in what he came to call liberation theology. In the Solidarity Circles of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt we continue to remember his powerful insistence that “the church cannot be built from within” (“Dual Citizens”) —a claim developed at a time when many of his colleagues assumed the church was the center of everything.

The theological point should be obvious but makes all the difference: God can never be confined to the church. At the center is not the church, but the divine. This is closely tied to a question Herzog often posed in the classroom: “What is Jesus doing now?” Frequently mistaken for a Sunday school question, it is in fact central to liberation theology—and it surpasses the worn-out WWJD formulation, “What would Jesus do?”

In my own work, I developed these insights further and explored one of the most widespread misconceptions about liberation theology: that liberation theologies are merely special interest theologies, relevant for some and not for others. This misconception is furthered by a widespread understanding of liberation theologies as contextual theologies.

Yet if context is understood not as personal circumstance but as what hurts—and if God in Christ is at work precisely in those places—then what appears to be special interest becomes common interest. Herzog used to call it “solidarity of suffering” (“Full Communion Training”), in response to the apostle Paul’s reminder that “if one member suffers, all suffer together with it” (1 Cor 12:26). In my own work over the past dozen years, I have been calling this “deep solidarity” (Theology in the Capitalocene).

The lesson for theology, the church, and social movements alike is this: special interest is not a matter of engaging particular forms of suffering, but of a failure of solidarity.

Joerg Rieger is the Distinguished Professor of Theology, Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion, Affiliate Faculty, Turner Family Center for Social Ventures, Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, and the Founder and Director of the Wendland-Cook Program.

Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr.

February 9, 2026

COMING SOON

Reverend Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and a 60-year veteran of the American Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Chavis is the former Executive Director and CEO of the NAACP and currently Senior Fellow for Divinity and Interdisciplinary Studies, Duke University Divinity School.

Melinda Wiggins

February 16, 2026

COMING SOON

Melinda Wiggins is the director of Labor South: Center for Working Class Studies, which engages workers, movement leaders and academics to come together for political education and labor studies and to build a career pipeline with working class young people in the US South. For over 25 years, she directed Student Action with Farmworkers advancing just living and working conditions for and with immigrant workers in the Carolinas. Melinda studied liberation and feminist theology at Duke Divinity School and is the daughter and granddaughter of sharecroppers from the Mississippi Delta.

M. Douglas Meeks

February 23, 2026

COMING SOON

Professor Meeks teaches in the area of Constructive Theology, concentrating in modern and post-modern theology. His research interests focus on the relation of Christian doctrine to economic, social, and political theory. Current writing projects include an ecclesiological study of the church in the global market society and a christology in the post-modern setting. He received his B.D. and his Ph.D. from Duke University and studied as a Fulbright Fellow at Tubingen University.