The sad death of Gustavo Gutierrez OP in October last year prompted an appropriate outpouring of tributes and memories to one of the foundational figures in Latin American liberation theology.
My first contact with liberation theology was a chance discovery in 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 Gutierrez’s book A Theology of Liberation.
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 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, 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 the capital, 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 I had seen that summer.
So many theology readings seemed to belong in an abstract and ideal world. Yet here was a book, first published in Spanish in 1971, that placed what I had seen on the front cover.
I lost no time in finding the book in the library. Reading Gutierrez and other liberation theologians changed my understanding of what theology is and why it matters.
Living and working in Rimac in Lima offered Gutierrez daily reminders of the challenges of that so many faced. He believed that he was called to answer the question of how the church can say with integrity to the poor, "God loves you".
This question guided all his work. It was one of the first points he made when he visited Dunedin in 1993 to speak at a conference on "Christ and Context".
Gutierrez 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 the sort of 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.
Gutierrez did not worry unduly about a theoretical definition of poverty. He was concerned for all who faced material hardship or deprivation.
He took his lead from the many in Latin America, and throughout the Global South, for whom poverty was a life-threatening condition, leading to early and unjust death.
In a particularly memorable phrase Gutierrez spoke of the poor as "those who die before their time".
Gutierrez later summarised the perspective taken in liberation theology as a shift in concern 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. The questions raised by the non-person are more directly linked to the economic, social and political challenges faced in everyday life.
Responding to critics, he explained: "And yet this does not make for a non-theological discussion, as some seem to think. That would indeed be a facile solution. It is a matter of a different theology".
A theological approach that takes global injustices seriously is needed as much today as it ever has been.
Reports of drastic cuts to United States foreign aid have hit the headlines in recent weeks. Gutierrez was not a fan of US aid. He advocated liberation in opposition to aid programmes that promised development but deepened dependency.
Nonetheless, he knew that until economic and political structures are transformed, many of the world’s most vulnerable are forced to depend on aid. He would have had no hesitation in condemning the callous cynicism behind the current cuts.
This week Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times and the Centre for Global Development in the United States released an assessment of the number of lives saved by US assistance worldwide and documented deaths that have occurred already from the cuts.
The figures are approximations but demonstrate beyond doubt the devastating future impact of reductions in aid.
If Gutierrez were still with us, he would remind us that many people will die before their time unless these brutal cuts are reversed.
■David Tombs is the Howard Paterson chair of theology and public issues at the University of Otago.
