From previous blogs, I have several Peircean categorical tools for imaging commentaries on “sin”, including the intersecting nested forms.  This tool may be integral to a postmodern definition of “religion”.

In 1962, Schoonenberg had none of these tools.  As a Dutch Jesuit theologian, he had the tools of scholasticism and modernism, the same tools that had failed the Liberation Theologians of Latin America.  He was like a chemist trying to synthesize a novel molecule. Chemistry and Theology have something in common.  Both can be flammable.

Liberation Theologians distilled their life experiences, their society, and the Bible into concepts, such as “a preferential option for the poor” and “social sin”, that unwittingly fueled the ambitions of leftist tyrants throughout Central and South America as well as leftist Progressives in North America.

South of the border, “the preferential option for the poor” became “a preference for the tyrants who claim that the poor are victims of the rich”.  You have heard the slogans: It is not your fault that you are poor.  Even the wealthy imagined that they were victims of the (even more) rich.

North of the border, the concept of “the sins of the world” transformed into “the political incorrectness of the world”.  You have heard the slogans: Who is more politically incorrect than the racist, woman-suppressing, homosexual-damning, money-grubbing, Catholics?  OK.  The Baptists.  They must be re-educated.  Let them be baptized by immersion in the fiery solvents of Progressivism.

By 2012, the crass, defiant, entrepreneur-hating, crony capitalist tyrants of South America and the hygienic, high-minded, sharp-tongued, self-anointed Progressives of North America had rebranded the elixir of Liberation Theology and made it their own.