The book I never wanted to read

Nov 22, 2024

Sunday  Observer- Anil Netto

In 1971, a Peruvian Catholic theologian and philosopher, Gustavo Gutiérrez, wrote a book called A Theology of Liberation.

He was among a few theologians and thinkers like Leonardo Boff and the Jesuits Juan Luis Segundo and Jon Sobrino, who seemed to be radically interpreting the Gospels to connect the message of salvation with the experiences of the poor.

This thinking did not occur in a political vacuum. The world back then was caught up in the Cold War. Anyone working with the poor and questioning unjust structures was viewed suspiciously as “Marxist”. In fact, several church workers in Malaysia and Singapore in the late 1980s were among scores of people detained without trial under harsh security laws.

This coloured my naïve thinking back then or, perhaps, it was ‘safer’ not to think about it. Moreover, I did not want my belief system to be influenced or coloured by what was regarded a deviation from mainstream Christianity.

So, I deliberately stayed away from reading material that espoused liberation theology. Instead, I told myself I would only read the Scriptures and learn from the teachings of the Church. At most, I would look up the social teachings of the Church.

At an overseas students’ hostel run by evangelicals, who espoused the concept of being “born again”, I attended regular Bible study and read it from cover to cover.

Yet, years later, I would realise there something was missing from this fundamentalist or literal reading of the Bible.

When I got involved in social activism alongside people of other faiths from the late 1980s, I felt that everyone, not just Christians, could make a difference in the world.

But as I looked around the reality of the world through the lens of faith, the questions of poverty, injustice and oppression haunted me. It was around this time I realised that the Bible is replete with verses about justice and poverty – over 2,000 such passages.

I looked at God intervening in history and calling Moses to rescue the people in Egypt from slavery. I read the prophets like Amos and Micah and the Psalms, extolling people to practise “righteousness” (aka justice).

This made me realise that justice and compassion for the poor lie at the heart of the Good News. When Jesus outlined His mission statement, He began with: “I’ve come to bring the good news to the poor…”

Eureka! That was the thrust of the Gospel message, Jesus’ mission statement.

Meanwhile, throughout the 1990s, Guitierrez, Boff and company were shunned by the mainstream. The Church — and its people — it would seem, were not ready for them.

Still, other leading lights on the fringe of the Church working among the poor captured my attention. I devoured stories about the life and times of Mother Teresa, the late Dorothy Day (founder of Catholic Worker Movement), the assassinated Oscar Romero and the civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King Jr. They were not liberation theologians, but their compassion for the poor and the oppressed shone through.

That solidarity with the poor made me wonder about the poor in Jesus’ time and how He related to them. Was His ministry among them a central part of the Gospel or was it just incidental to God’s salvation for a fallen world though Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection?

I got the nagging feeling I was missing something even in the Gospel texts. At the back of my mind, I wonder about the political and socioeconomic milieu in which Jesus was operating.

That was when I stumbled on the work of New Testament scholars exploring the historical Jesus and the world He lived in. Writers like John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg shone fresh light into the “domination system” that Jesus found Himself in.

Jesus was not working in a vacuum. God chose to send Him when the Roman Empire was around its zenith. Jesus was born around 4 BC during the reign of the mighty Emperor Augustus Caesar, who ruled from 27 BC until 14 AD.

But He was born not in Rome. His infant cries pierced the night sky in a tiny hamlet on the distant eastern periphery of the empire. The peasants, already feeling the pain of colonisation, oppression, exploitation, were drawn to Him.

Added to that was a new phenomenon, the advent of “Roman Mediterranean globalisation”, as Crossan puts it. This was a prototype of a market economy when land and labour were subjugated in the quest for profits. Small farms producing food for the people were gobbled up and turned into large commercial estates producing cash crops for export. The result: a small group people grew fabulously wealthy while many independent farmers lost their land. Sound familiar?

Even the fishing waters were not spared this commercialisation, leading to overfishing for export markets. No wonder the early followers of Jesus struggled to catch enough fish, despite working long hours.

In sharp contrast to the dictates of the Empire and the Market, Jesus proposed an alternative kingdom — not based on Profit over People but where distributive justice – the heavenly banquet — would ensure that everyone had a place at the table.

But as Crossan puts it, Jesus’ passion for the kingdom and God’s distributive justice led Him to the Passion and Caesar’s “retributive justice” through crucifixion.

When I caught glimpses of the writings of Guetierrez, Boff and company over the last decade or so, they provided the theological assurance that the preferential option for the poor lies at the heart of the Gospel message. So did Catholic Social Teaching.

It is not that their interpretation of the Gospels was radically different. It was really a matter of perspective. They looked at the message of salvation not from the perspective of Empire and top-down domination, including colonialism and economic exploitation.

Instead, they looked at it from the bottom up - from the eyes of the teeming masses of exploited people across the centuries, their struggles for justice and their experience of faith. Their poverty, Guiterrez observed, was a “scandalous state” and underpinned his thinking.

“We have to break with our mental categories, with the way we relate to others, with our way of identifying with the Lord, with our cultural milieu, with our social class, in other words, with all that can stand in the way of a real, profound solidarity with those who suffer, in the first place, from misery and injustice” (Theology of Liberation).

This theology of liberation is not so much about life after death. It is about living the meaning of Jesus’ liberation of the world from sin, which is at the root of injustice, exploitation and oppression of the poor. It is about transforming people and unjust structures that hinder the kingdom.

When Guiterrez passed away on October 22, 2024 at the age of 96, he was vindicated when the Bishop of Rome, Francis, paid tribute to him: “Today, I think of Gustavo. Gustavo Gutiérrez. A great man. A man of the Church.”

It is time for me to finally read his book.

(Anil Netto is a freelance writer and activist based in Penang. He believes we are all called to build the kingdom of God in this world.)