Decolonizing Salvation

This chapter focuses on theologies of salvation oriented toward liberation in order to establish resources for a decolonized image of salvation, or an image of salvation that unsettles the coloniality of power and that offers an alternative way of being, way thinking, and eschatology. The chapter proceeds by first mapping three soteriologies oriented toward liberation, from Ignacio Ellacuría, Ivone Gebara, and Marcella Althaus-Reid. It then reads these theologies of salvation through orientations of decolonial love, and vice versa, in view of presenting decolonial love as a locus of salvation. This raises a question regarding norms within decolonial love and salvation, specifically how the violence and conflict embedded within decolonial love relates to salvation, which the chapter addresses in the final section. Salvation as decolonial love, it argues, includes both a posture of violence toward Western modernity, and within this, a letting go of a stake within Western modernity, on the one hand, and an encounter with and commitment to an eschatological reality, on the other.