Gustavo Gutiérrez and A Theology of Liberation

Following the recent death of Gustavo Gutiérrez, David Tombs reflects on the influential liberation theologian and his work.
The sad passing of Gustavo Gutiérrez OP (22 October 2024) has prompted an appropriate outpouring of tributes and memories of his extraordinary theological impact. Luke Foster’s exceptional and timely study Gustavo Gutiérrez and the Liberative Sight of Christ (SCM Press) published earlier this year gives an excellent account of Gutiérrez’s work and faith and why it still has so much to offer.
My first contact with liberation theology was a chance discovery in an Oxford’s Blackwell’s bookshop in autumn 1985. I was starting my second year as an undergraduate student in philosophy and theology. I picked up the SCM 1981 edition of Gutiérrez’s book A Theology of Liberation.[i] The cover grabbed my immediate attention. It showed two dramatic scenes depicted in white outlines set against a black background. One scene showed a group of white-helmeted militarised police; the other showed the deprivation and poverty of a family in a Peruvian slum. The contrast was stark and oppositional. Between these two scenes the book’s title A Theology of Liberation in bold red jumped off the page.
I had spent the summer of 1985 travelling in Peru and I had witnessed the inequalities of life in both Lima and in the countryside. My first year studying theology had given me very little preparation for the encounter with poverty, global inequality, and structural violence that summer. So many Theology readings seemed to belong in an abstract and ideal world. Yet here was a book that placed what I had seen centre stage on the front cover. I lost no time in finding the book in the library. Reading Gutiérrez and other liberation theologians changed my understanding of what theology is and why it matters.
Gutiérrez took the ‘structural’ poverty of Latin America—that is, the poverty embedded in economic systems of inequality and injustice—as the starting point in all his work. Living and working in Rimac offered him daily reminders of the challenges of lived experience in Lima. He presented the first outline of ‘Towards a Theology of Liberation’ at a meeting of priests in 1968. He developed and published this argument in his classic book A Theology Liberation (1971, ET 1973) which he later described as a ‘love letter to the church’.
Liberation theology’s ‘preferential option for the poor’ was at the heart of all he did. He believed that he was called to answer the question of how the church can say with integrity to the poor, ‘God loves you’. He understood the poor not just as individuals but as a collective group. He recognised that they did not just happen to be poor by chance but had been impoverished through oppression and exploitation. The poor were victims of social inequality and were kept in poverty through repressive violence as shown on the cover of A Theology of Liberation. This dehumanising poverty was not God’s will but a sinful situation which the church was called to challenge. Gutiérrez did not worry unduly about a theoretical definition of poverty. He was concerned for all who faced material hardship or deprivation, and especially for the many in Latin America and throughout the Global South, for whom poverty was a life-threatening condition, which meant they died early and unjustly. As he often put it, ‘The poor are those who die before their time’.
Gutiérrez stressed that liberation theology did not just offer new content or an ‘add-on’ for theology but that it was an alternative way to do theology. His theological commitment to the poor led him to rethink his methodology and offer a new theological approach. To be appropriate to its own context, he believed that theology in Latin America should start with its pastoral practice in the Latin American social reality. This contextual reality is first and foremost the scandal of material poverty and exploitation that blights so many lives. Given such a social reality, theology should not start with itself as a self-contained exercise in introspection. Instead, a theologian should first experience the social reality directly, in solidarity with those who suffered and struggled. Gutiérrez therefore described theological reflection as a ‘second step’ in the light of this prior commitment.
Gutiérrez later summarised the methodological shift in liberation theology as a shift from the ‘non-believer’ to the ‘non-person’. He explained that for most western post-Enlightenment theology, the focus was the concerns and questions of the non-believer. These theologies—which he referred to as ‘progressivist’—were guided through rationalism and a concern for individual freedoms. By contrast, ‘The theology of liberation begins from the questions asked by the poor and plundered of the world, by ‘those without a history,’ by those who are oppressed and marginalized precisely by the interlocuter of progressivist theology’.[ii] He describes this alternative focus as a concern with the non-person rather than the non-believer. The questions raised by the non-person are more directly linked to the economic, the social, and the political challenges faced in everyday life. Responding to critics, he explains: ‘And yet this does not make for a nontheological discussion, as some seem to think. That would indeed be a facile solution. It is a matter of a different theology’.[iii] This commitment marks such a paradigm shift in the theological enterprise, and is so readily adaptable in different contexts of injustice and oppression, that it may prove to be Gutiérrez’s most influential and enduring legacy.
The last week has seen many welcome celebrations of his extraordinary work and gratitude for the theological gifts Gutiérrez leaves for future generations. I feel particularly grateful that I encountered his work so early in my studies and I am grateful that the SCM Press book cover drew me so effectively into his writing.
David Tombs is Howard Paterson Chair of Theology and Public Issues at the University of Otago, Aotearoa New Zealand.
[i] For more on this experience and how reading Gutiérrez has shaped my subsequent journey in theology, see David Tombs, Inaugural Professorial Lecture, ‘Latin American Liberation Theology and its Ongoing Legacy’ (8 September 2015),
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjfaqyRGKaw&list=PLbdf314ODCIYNwPh-VCpDGUHj2aaesXm3&index=2
[ii] Gustavo Gutiérrez, The Power of the Poor in History (trans. R.R Barr; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books; London: SCM Press, 1983), p. 212.
[iii] Gutiérrez, The Power of the Poor in History, p. 213.