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Expanding the View: Gustavo Gutierrez and the Future of Liberation Theology
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- GenresTheology
226 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
13 people want to read
About the author
Marc H. Ellis
35 books11 followersMarc H. Ellis is retired University Professor of Jewish Studies and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Baylor University. Among his publications are Encountering the Jewish Future (2012), Reading the Torah Out Loud (2007), Practicing Exile (2001), Oh, Jerusalem! (1999), and Unholy Alliance (1997), all from Fortress Press. He is also a regular contributor on Mondoweiss: The War of Ideas in the Middle East with a series called Exile and the Prophetic.
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June 27, 2024
ESSAYS LOOKING AT “FUTURE TRENDS AND POSSIBILITIES” FOR LIBERATION THEOLOGY
Coeditor Marc Ellis wrote in the Preface to this 1990 book, “In July 1988 over one hundred theologians and activists from around the world gathered at Maryknoll to celebrate two significant historical events: the twentieth anniversary of the Latin American episcopal conference at Medillin, Columbia… and the fifteenth anniversary of the publication of the English translation of Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation]], the seminal work of Latin American liberation theology. On a more personal note, those assembled celebrated Gutiérrez’s sixtieth birthday in a special tribute to his life and work as a pioneering figure in the development of liberation theology…
“The success of the conference led nine months later to the publication of fifty essays representing voices from twenty-four countries… The response to this volume has been enthusiastic and … Thus, we present this paperback edition… We have also included Gustavo Gutiérrez’s introduction to the fifteenth anniversary edition of ‘A Theology of Liberation’ as a way of providing the framework for the ensuing essays… [This book is] less as a definitive look at liberation theology and more as an exploration of its diverse and expanding visas… these essays… point to future trends and possibilities for the global theological enterprise.”
In the new introduction by Gutiérrez, he states, “What we have often called the ‘major fact’ in the life of the Latin American church---the participation of Christians in the process of liberation---is simply an expression of a far-reaching historical event: the irruption of the poor. Our time bears the imprint of the new presence of those who in fact used to be ‘absent’ from our society and from the church. By ‘absent’ I mean” of little or no importance, and without the opportunity to give expression themselves to their sufferings, their comraderies, their plans, their hopes.” (Pg. 6)
Later, he adds, “The meaning given to poverty in the Bible is therefore a cornerstone of liberation theology… This is the context of a theme that is central in liberation theology and has now been widely accepted in the universal church: the preferential option for the poor… The very word ‘preference’ denies all exclusiveness and seeks rather to call attention to those who are the first---though not the only ones---with whom we should be in solidarity… from the very beginning of liberation theology… I insisted that the great challenge was to maintain both the universality of God’s love and God’s predilection for those on the lowest rung of the ladder of history. To focus exclusively on the one or the other is to mutilate the Christian message.” (Pg. 12)
But he admits, “if we view the church… as the sum total of Christians---we must acknowledge that the effort to see the Lord’s features in the faces of the Latin American poor… has also brought difficulties within the church itself. Some have felt their interests adversely affected by the challenges the bishops have issued, and they have tried to draw a curtain of silence around these alerts. Others… from their positions of power … have openly violated the human rights defended in the documents of the church and have struck hard at Christians who were trying to express their solidarity with the poor and oppressed. These latter cases have led bishops … to adopt means not often used in our day, such as excommunication of those who claimed to be Christians but disrespected the most basic demands of the gospel message. Others have claimed to be in solidarity with the poor and oppressed but have acted impetuously, not respecting their slower pace or making them uneasy, and have therefore met with rejection.” (Pg. 29)
He ends his introduction, “Some years ago, a journalist asked whether I would write ‘A Theology of Liberation’ today as I had two decades earlier… I said that though the years passed by, the book remained the same, whereas I was alive and therefore changing and moving forward thanks to experiences, to observations made on the book, and to lectures and discussions… My book is a love letter to God, to the church, and to the people to which I belong. Love remains alive, but it grows deeper and changes its manner of expression.” (Pg. 33)
Leonardo Boff says in his essay, ‘the theology of liberation, like any other theology, talks about God, the blessed Trinity, Christ, the Spirit, grace, sin, the church---about all the topics of theology; but that is not where its specificity and originality lie---it talks about all these topics from the perspective of the oppressed person who longs for liberation. Reading history from the position of the poor is the dominant (though not the only) perspective of the Bible. This methodological option gives the theology of liberation a strong biblical coloring and places it within the same field of activity as the message and activity of Jesus, who made the poor the arbiters of his messianic status.” (Pg. 52)
Boff says of Gutiérrez, “He uses Marxism, not for its own sake, but as an instrument of clarification to unmask mechanisms of oppression and destroy illusions absorbed by the poor about the possibility of finding solutions to their problems within the capitalist system.” (Pg. 55) He adds, “He is an activist before he is a professor, committed to the fate of the oppressed. His own lifestyle is poor: he shares the hardships of the area he belongs to and out of which he develops his theological reflection. This reflection is not the product of his speculation. It is the product of the community of life and work with which he lives and whose destiny he shares. In his own flesh he experiences the oppression of illness and in his own skin the weight of discrimination against native peoples and those of mixed race… he has been able to confront … the hostility of his own brothers in the faith and persecution to sectors of the church in his own country, Peru, and by doctrinal authorities of the Vatican.” (Pg. 57-58)
Arthur McGovern points out, “Why do liberation theologians find the Marxist analysis useful? Some liberation theologians have said that the very pervasiveness of Marxist ideas in Latin American political and intellectual movements make some use almost inevitable. But this would not explain the generally positive assessment attributed to Marxist analysis… When liberation theologians stress the usefulness of Marxist analysis as a scientific tool, the more fundamental reason… is that they believe that Marxism has correctly identified the basic root of Latin America’s problems---the capitalist system. But the usefulness of Marxism depends on its correctness in naming and analyzing capitalism as the central problem.” (Pg. 88)
Aloysius Pieris, however, asserts, “I find it quite significant that Gutiérrez not only makes absolutely no use of the human rights language… but has also ignored the whole human rights movement, as if to say that it has no relevance in a Third World context. This movement… began from an elitist concern, not form the underside of history, as is made evident by the nature of the major events that contributed to that movement from the Magna Carta to the American Bill of Rights. The implication of this observation is not that the human rights movement has no global message but that it constitutes the mood and method of a theology that continues to speak from elitist and conceptual heights, and presupposes Western democratic structures, whereas liberation theology is born out of a struggle that in some way is directed against those same democratic systems and their domination in the Third World.” (Pg. 164)
Robert McAfee Brown says, “There are two reasons why it is important to try to carry on the liberation theology struggle within the churches. First, the churches themselves need to hear a liberation message that can deliver them from excessive cooptation by the principalities and powers of this world… The second reason… is that there is no other vehicle in society that has more potential for keeping the struggle alive and well, and overcoming the burnout factor that hamstrings so many other social groups. The recuperative power of the gospel can keep churches from becoming subservient to any ideology---in a world where all sorts of ideologies, particularly those of the right wing, trap or subsume liberation concerns within their own very different agendas.” (Pg. 202)
This is an excellent volume, that will be of exceptional interest to those studying Liberation Theology.
Coeditor Marc Ellis wrote in the Preface to this 1990 book, “In July 1988 over one hundred theologians and activists from around the world gathered at Maryknoll to celebrate two significant historical events: the twentieth anniversary of the Latin American episcopal conference at Medillin, Columbia… and the fifteenth anniversary of the publication of the English translation of Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation]], the seminal work of Latin American liberation theology. On a more personal note, those assembled celebrated Gutiérrez’s sixtieth birthday in a special tribute to his life and work as a pioneering figure in the development of liberation theology…
“The success of the conference led nine months later to the publication of fifty essays representing voices from twenty-four countries… The response to this volume has been enthusiastic and … Thus, we present this paperback edition… We have also included Gustavo Gutiérrez’s introduction to the fifteenth anniversary edition of ‘A Theology of Liberation’ as a way of providing the framework for the ensuing essays… [This book is] less as a definitive look at liberation theology and more as an exploration of its diverse and expanding visas… these essays… point to future trends and possibilities for the global theological enterprise.”
In the new introduction by Gutiérrez, he states, “What we have often called the ‘major fact’ in the life of the Latin American church---the participation of Christians in the process of liberation---is simply an expression of a far-reaching historical event: the irruption of the poor. Our time bears the imprint of the new presence of those who in fact used to be ‘absent’ from our society and from the church. By ‘absent’ I mean” of little or no importance, and without the opportunity to give expression themselves to their sufferings, their comraderies, their plans, their hopes.” (Pg. 6)
Later, he adds, “The meaning given to poverty in the Bible is therefore a cornerstone of liberation theology… This is the context of a theme that is central in liberation theology and has now been widely accepted in the universal church: the preferential option for the poor… The very word ‘preference’ denies all exclusiveness and seeks rather to call attention to those who are the first---though not the only ones---with whom we should be in solidarity… from the very beginning of liberation theology… I insisted that the great challenge was to maintain both the universality of God’s love and God’s predilection for those on the lowest rung of the ladder of history. To focus exclusively on the one or the other is to mutilate the Christian message.” (Pg. 12)
But he admits, “if we view the church… as the sum total of Christians---we must acknowledge that the effort to see the Lord’s features in the faces of the Latin American poor… has also brought difficulties within the church itself. Some have felt their interests adversely affected by the challenges the bishops have issued, and they have tried to draw a curtain of silence around these alerts. Others… from their positions of power … have openly violated the human rights defended in the documents of the church and have struck hard at Christians who were trying to express their solidarity with the poor and oppressed. These latter cases have led bishops … to adopt means not often used in our day, such as excommunication of those who claimed to be Christians but disrespected the most basic demands of the gospel message. Others have claimed to be in solidarity with the poor and oppressed but have acted impetuously, not respecting their slower pace or making them uneasy, and have therefore met with rejection.” (Pg. 29)
He ends his introduction, “Some years ago, a journalist asked whether I would write ‘A Theology of Liberation’ today as I had two decades earlier… I said that though the years passed by, the book remained the same, whereas I was alive and therefore changing and moving forward thanks to experiences, to observations made on the book, and to lectures and discussions… My book is a love letter to God, to the church, and to the people to which I belong. Love remains alive, but it grows deeper and changes its manner of expression.” (Pg. 33)
Leonardo Boff says in his essay, ‘the theology of liberation, like any other theology, talks about God, the blessed Trinity, Christ, the Spirit, grace, sin, the church---about all the topics of theology; but that is not where its specificity and originality lie---it talks about all these topics from the perspective of the oppressed person who longs for liberation. Reading history from the position of the poor is the dominant (though not the only) perspective of the Bible. This methodological option gives the theology of liberation a strong biblical coloring and places it within the same field of activity as the message and activity of Jesus, who made the poor the arbiters of his messianic status.” (Pg. 52)
Boff says of Gutiérrez, “He uses Marxism, not for its own sake, but as an instrument of clarification to unmask mechanisms of oppression and destroy illusions absorbed by the poor about the possibility of finding solutions to their problems within the capitalist system.” (Pg. 55) He adds, “He is an activist before he is a professor, committed to the fate of the oppressed. His own lifestyle is poor: he shares the hardships of the area he belongs to and out of which he develops his theological reflection. This reflection is not the product of his speculation. It is the product of the community of life and work with which he lives and whose destiny he shares. In his own flesh he experiences the oppression of illness and in his own skin the weight of discrimination against native peoples and those of mixed race… he has been able to confront … the hostility of his own brothers in the faith and persecution to sectors of the church in his own country, Peru, and by doctrinal authorities of the Vatican.” (Pg. 57-58)
Arthur McGovern points out, “Why do liberation theologians find the Marxist analysis useful? Some liberation theologians have said that the very pervasiveness of Marxist ideas in Latin American political and intellectual movements make some use almost inevitable. But this would not explain the generally positive assessment attributed to Marxist analysis… When liberation theologians stress the usefulness of Marxist analysis as a scientific tool, the more fundamental reason… is that they believe that Marxism has correctly identified the basic root of Latin America’s problems---the capitalist system. But the usefulness of Marxism depends on its correctness in naming and analyzing capitalism as the central problem.” (Pg. 88)
Aloysius Pieris, however, asserts, “I find it quite significant that Gutiérrez not only makes absolutely no use of the human rights language… but has also ignored the whole human rights movement, as if to say that it has no relevance in a Third World context. This movement… began from an elitist concern, not form the underside of history, as is made evident by the nature of the major events that contributed to that movement from the Magna Carta to the American Bill of Rights. The implication of this observation is not that the human rights movement has no global message but that it constitutes the mood and method of a theology that continues to speak from elitist and conceptual heights, and presupposes Western democratic structures, whereas liberation theology is born out of a struggle that in some way is directed against those same democratic systems and their domination in the Third World.” (Pg. 164)
Robert McAfee Brown says, “There are two reasons why it is important to try to carry on the liberation theology struggle within the churches. First, the churches themselves need to hear a liberation message that can deliver them from excessive cooptation by the principalities and powers of this world… The second reason… is that there is no other vehicle in society that has more potential for keeping the struggle alive and well, and overcoming the burnout factor that hamstrings so many other social groups. The recuperative power of the gospel can keep churches from becoming subservient to any ideology---in a world where all sorts of ideologies, particularly those of the right wing, trap or subsume liberation concerns within their own very different agendas.” (Pg. 202)
This is an excellent volume, that will be of exceptional interest to those studying Liberation Theology.
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