December 30, 2012          David Timbs (Melbourne)       David's previous articles

Fr Gustavo Gutierrez OP, popularly known as the father of Liberation Theology, has been criticised for many things. One of them is his long homilies during the Eucharist. On one occasion many years ago he was asked why he had preached at great length on one Hebrew word, Shalom. He replied, “I do this for my mother. She was illiterate. Most of the people who come to this church are illiterate too, so when they hear words they don’t understand, they feel ignorant and backward. I want them to come to Mass and understand so they won’t feel stupid anymore.”

Ultimately, it’s all about that: respect for the dignity and worth of the human person. Gutierrez recognised very early on that central to the Gospel message is the restoration of a new humanity in Christ. This, he sees, as the great task of Liberation Theology; putting God-talk into action and transforming the human condition.

The praxis theology of Gutierrez is not grounded in a disembodied Platonist-tinged Christianity but in the mystery of the Incarnation and its extension in history, the People of God. Gutierrez acknowledged the great debt of gratitude he owed to his fellow Dominican, Yves Congar. He was inspired in particular by Congar’s parabolic insight into what is at the heart of the Christian narrative. He called it “the Sacrament of the Neighbour”. This is a metaphor of extraordinary depth and power especially when one enters into the parabolic world described by John Dominic Crossan. He intensifies the shock effect of the Jesus story by proposing that the wounded man, left for dead on the side of the road, should be seen as none other than God!

Gutierrez teaches that while progressive theologies are concerned principally with conversion of non believers via catechesis or other means, Liberation Theology is concerned with those things which perversely dehumanise people and strip them of their personhood.

“Our [liberation theology’s] question is not how to speak of God in an adult world [as Bonhoeffer did]. That is the old question posed by progressivist theology. No, the interloquter of the theology of liberation is the “nonperson,” the human being who is not considered human by the present order – the exploited classes, marginalised ethnic groups, and despised cultures. Our question is how to tell the nonperson, the nonhuman, that God is love, and that this makes us brothers and sisters.” [1]

While the Catholic Church has warned against some expressions of LiberationTheology slipping into political ideology and even into armed confrontation – Card. Ratzinger’s criticism – Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Mueller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, just as strongly warns that this caveat “must not be taken as some kind of approval, even indirect, of those who keep the poor in misery, who profit from that misery, who notice it while doing nothing about it, or who remain indifferent to it. The Church, guided by the Gospel of mercy and by the love of humanity, hears the cry for justice and intends to respond to it with all her might.” [2]

Inevitably, much of Gutierrez’s reflection on the causes of endemic poverty and socio- economic exploitation involves politics and class privilege, but he is careful to distance these things from any validation that they might seek in the Gospel. What Gutierrez warns against most energetically is people, especially Christians, confusing and conflating politico-economic systems with the moral reign of God. He writes, “The denunciation of injustice implies the rejection of the use of Christianity to legitimize the established order.”

Gutierrez believes, as do the other great teachers of the Christian Social Gospel, that the credibility of the Church’s message stands or falls on the way the disadvantaged poor are treated. “How are we to talk about God who is revealed as love in a situation characterised by poverty and oppression? How are we to proclaim the God of life to men and women who die prematurely and unjustly? How are we to acknowledge that God makes us a free gift of love and justice when we have before us the suffering of the innocent? What words are we to use in telling those who are not even regarded as persons that they are the daughters and sons of God?”

Conscious of the ongoing traditionalist hostility towards Liberation theology, Archbishop Gerhard Mueller has recently offered a spirited personal defence of its enduring evangelical value, “The theology of Gustavo Gutierrez, independent of how you look at it, is orthodox because it is orthopractic. It teaches us the correct way of acting in a Christian fashion since it comes from true faith.” This is an extremely significant endorsement as it is discontinuous with the rather negative evaluation of Liberation Theology and its proponents by JP II and a number of key Latin American bishops especially those aligned with Opus Dei.

For the Catholic Church, still constrained in many ways by narrow evangelisaton, fixated on saving souls and with an associated missiology often limited to a kind of paternalistic charity, Gustavo Gutierrez provides a welcome corrective. His teaching on the Theology of liberation challenges Christians to a larger Incarnational vision of the Gospel and the extravagant grace it offers all humanity especially the restoration of authentic personhood. Gutierrez invites us to recognise that it is Christ himself standing in the sandals of the poor, outcast, the de-humanised. It is then possible to acknowledge him/her as not only our ‘neighbour’ but as our nearest relation.

[1] The Power of the Poor in History: Selected Readings, London: SCM, 1983, 193.

[2] Vatican Insider. La Stampa, 03/07/12

Further reading: For Archbishop Mueller’s address, My experiences with Liberation Theology, click [here]

David Timbs writes from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia