As Aquinas baptised Aristotle, so liberation theologians sought to baptise Marx. While the result was planted among the Church's grassroots, in today's climate of human rights a new theology is springing up to express God's ‘preferential love for the poor'

I lived in Nairobi nearly 30 years ago. Since then, the city has become a teeming metropolis plagued by violent crime, with up to half of its three million inhabitants living in slums while an affluent minority lives behind high walls protected by armed guards.

Like many African countries, Kenya is deeply religious, with different forms of Pentecostalism flourishing among the poor. It is hard not to see this as "the opium of the people", offering as it does a potent form of spiritual consolation but little by way of social action. However, in recent years greater freedom of the press has allowed for the emergence of a robust campaign for democracy, economic justice and an end to corruption, and at grassroots level many involved in this struggle are clearly empowered by their Christian faith.

That strong Christian presence was also in evidence at the World Social Forum, or WSF, the annual meeting of members of the anti-globalisation movement that was held this year in Nairobi. Indeed so strong was the Christian influence at the WSF that it took some Western observers by surprise. An article in The Economist pointed out that Catholics constituted the "biggest single group of anti-poverty campaigners in Nairobi".

The predominantly Christian ethos of the WSF was established early on the first day when Bishop Desmond Tutu addressed a gathering at the Holy Family Basilica in Nairobi. He emphasised two themes that were the focal point of many of the campaigns at the WSF - sexual equality and environmental justice - using the story of Genesis to make a lively appeal for respect for God's Creation and for the equal dignity of male and female made in the image of God.

Later, Dr Kenneth Kaunda, a former president of Zambia, addressed a larger gathering at the official opening of the WSF in Nairobi's Uhuru Park. He too spoke of Genesis in the context of the goodness of creation and equality of the sexes. A devout Christian, he took as his key theme the message that love of God and love of neighbour lie at the heart of all social justice.

Yet despite the centrality of Christian theology and practice for much of the work being done at the WSF, the theology conference that preceded it, organised by the World Forum for Theology and Liberation, was disappointing. Based on the theme "Spirituality for Another Possible World", it echoed the theme of the WSF: "Another World is Possible". I attended both these events with a Cafod group, after which we visited various of the Catholic overseas development agency's projects in Kenya and northern Tanzania. Those visits put into perspective the role of liberation theology and did cause

me to question its relevance for the contemporary Church. Some of the papers sounded dated when they invoked Marxist economic analysis to criticise the current global order. Others offered a perspective informed by more by the notion of inculturation than by the social sciences, giving a sense of the plurality of Christianity in different contexts, but lacking the critical analysis that academic theology demands.

It was in the wide range of workshops rather than the keynote lectures that the full vitality of people working for justice across differences of faith and culture became apparent. Among the main speakers, Jon Sobrino offered the most engaging insights into liberation theology. He suggested that the key question we must address is not "does God exist?" but "does God care?" He spoke of his own life's journey from a young priest wanting to be holy, to an existentialist philosopher wanting to be authentic, to a liberation theologian wanting to be revolutionary, and finally to his human desire to be real. The quest to be real, he said, involves avoiding all forms of docetism - in order to live a fully incarnational life. (Docetism is the belief that the body is a temporal encumbrance to the spirit and therefore Christ's humanity was merely an illusion.)

Visiting Cafod projects, I was interested in the extent to which much of the work we saw seemed to be informed by the concept of base Christian communities first developed in the Latin American Churches. Yet when I asked a priest about this, he told me that his model was not liberation theology but the early Church. This led me to reflect that perhaps liberation theology never was quite as innovative as its early advocates would have us believe.

Rather, coinciding as it did with the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council and the continuing development of the Church's social teaching, it provided a method for incarnating Christ's love for the poor in a context that demanded new approaches to politics and economics. Just as Aquinas had baptised Aristotle, so liberation theologians sought to baptise Marx - to the chagrin of the Vatican and atheist Marxists alike.

But Marxist economic analysis is insufficient to address the challenges confronting us in a world that has changed dramatically since the 1970s, even although many would argue that it remains an important tool for analysing the dynamics of global capitalism. In an era when the language of human rights has taken the place of socialism among those who seek to transform society, theologians must once again reformulate what it means to express God's "preferential love for the poor".

Alongside the idea of human rights, which is well developed in Catholic social teaching, the recurring themes of creation, incarnation and sexual equality invite the development of contextual theologies capable of incarnating a liberating Christian vision. This needs to be within the diverse cultures of our time, while also offering critical reflection on the increasingly divisive economic and political structures that shape our world. Many feminist and non-Western theologians already adopt this approach, but the challenge remains to find a theological voice that is intellectually rigorous rather than descriptive, without succumbing to a postmodern esotericism that renders theology inaccessible to all but an elite minority.

A liberating perspective clearly exists in the Kenyan Church, but there is still a strongly hierarchical element in African Catholicism. We attended Mass in one of Nairobi's slums, where a large congregation of slum-dwellers had gathered in the open air. The Gospel reading seemed heaven-sent for the occasion, with Christ reading from Isaiah to describe his mission of bringing good news to the poor and letting the oppressed go free (Luke 4: 18-19).

In his homily, the priest told this gathering of some of the most excluded people on earth that, if we want to understand the causes of poverty and injustice, we must not look outwards at structures and institutions, but inwards at the evil in our own hearts. It seemed a harsh message for people whose lives are blighted by political corruption and a global economic order that is indifferent to the misery of millions like them.

Then, when it came to Communion, a deacon reminded us that only those in a state of grace were entitled to receive the Eucharist. Very few went up and, when someone in our group asked why, we were told it was because most of them were single mothers. Some of us left that Mass feeling distressed and angry, and I felt ashamed of having taken Communion in a rite in which the rich felt qualified to receive while the destitute felt themselves to be unworthy.

Like much else over the last few weeks, this encounter with Catholicism in Africa was a challenging experience of contrasts and paradoxes. On the one hand, there was a vibrant sense of a Church that takes its place at the forefront of the struggle for justice, so that, if liberation theology itself has become somewhat exhausted, its message has seeded itself in the grassroots life of the Church of the poor. On the other hand, it is still a Church capable of stifling Christ's incarnational presence through an excessive emphasis on hierarchical structures and moral values ill-suited to cope with the struggle against HIV/Aids.

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