Las Casas as Theological Counteroffensive: An Interpretation of Gustavo Gutierrez's Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ (original) (raw)

2002, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion

Peruvian liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez's massive work, Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ, should not be read as a defensive or retreating move for liberation theology in the face of two decades of opposition. Rather, it is best understood as a creative and strategic counteroffensive to advance liberation theology in terms that the Vatican can only find difficult to counter. Nevertheless, liberation theology struggles with the difficulty of intellectually justifying itself on nondependency and non-Marxist grounds. In any case, the struggle for the work of liberation in Latin America continues. Conventional wisdom has it that liberation theology is in trouble. Multiple besetting challenges and oppositions are said to be inducing the movement's demise: the disintegration of socialism in the ex-Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Cuba; the replacement of many liberationist bishops with conservatives by an oppositional Pope John Paul II; the electoral defeat and splintering of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas; the shift in focus from Latin American dependency to Latin American debt; the Vatican's ignominious silencing of Leonardo Boff; the renewal of electoral democracy in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s; and the disillusioning character of multiple popular Latin American liberationist movements, including Peru's brutal Sendero Luminoso. Signs of liberation theology's plight are increasingly evident. Former liberationist militants, such as Hugo Assman, significantly moderating their thinking, and former champion of ecclesial progressivism, Leonardo Boff, feeling compelled to resign from the priesthood, it is suggested, disclose a movement in intellectual, ecclesiological, and political crisis. The 1993 publication of Gustavo Gutiérrez's Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ merely confirmed, for many, the impression of liberation theology's demise. This massive, 682page tome by the movement's leading light is not a step forward, but backward. Las Casas is a retreat to the past, a defensive move. The going has gotten tough. The present is in crisis. So Gutiérrez is leading his readers to hunker down and keep hope alive by tapping into the continuity and stability of history, by taking solace in a great hero of days gone by. The passion and militancy of Gutiérrez's earlier work is gone. But, given liberation theology's present troubles, a defensive retreat to the past is about the best, and perhaps wisest, move that Gutiérrez could currently make. So it is said. I suspect, however, that Gutiérrez had something entirely different and more clever in mind. Las Casas, it seems to me, is not most plausibly read as a defensive retreat to the comfort of the past. Rather, Las Casas is best read as a strategically offensive move that challenges Romeindeed, the entire Catholic Church-with the imperative to reconstruct the very essentials of Christian systematic theology. Gutiérrez is not hunkering down. He is taking aim at the heart of the Vatican-guarded doctrines of christology, soteriology, eschatology, and missiology, and doing so in a politically keen way that leaves him virtually invulnerable to counterattack. With Las Casas, Gutiérrez appears to be saying that, not only is liberation theology not collapsing,