Fifty years after its publication in English and forty years after its critique and near-burial by a bevy of evangelical scholars, Gustavo Gutierrez’s A Theology of Liberation (1973) continues to exert significant influence within segments of an emerging global evangelicalism. While Gutierrez’s work is best situated within a Roman Catholic and Latin American context, its reach has extended into the North American setting as well by way of the evangelical social justice movement. It can be clearly identified as a plank in the progressive evangelical platform as represented by Ronald J. Sider and Jim Wallis and within the Red Letter Christian movement as represented by Anthony Campolo. Further, tenets of liberation theology are increasingly and almost unquestionably assumed in more traditional expressions of evangelicalism as well as it relates to activism. Liberation theology, in its current permutations, is alive and well.
In essence, theologies of liberation claim to derive from more holistic soteriological commitments than are usually reflected within traditional evangelicalism. For example, Gutierrez asks: “what relation is there between salvation and the historical process of human liberation?” In his argument Gutierrez relies primarily and almost exclusively on the model of Christ as Liberator (Luke 4:17-19), offering that the Christological titles Liberator and Redeemer are essentially synonymous and more expansive than traditional evangelicalism recognizes. Consequently, theologies of liberation are not primarily concerned for individual conversion but are instead oriented toward deconstructing oppressive economic, political, and social as well as ecclesial societies and structures and reconstructing more equitable and just ones in their places.
The proposed paper will examine whether and how Gutierrez’s A Theology of Liberation is altering evangelicalism, particularly as it relates to its historical mark of activism. The paper’s thesis is that Gutierrez’s volume provides the true theological and philosophical foundation of the current evangelical social justice movement in at least its more progressive form, and that as a result both Gutierrez and progressive evangelicalism are together altering the trajectory of more traditional evangelicalism.
The paper’s primary conversation partners include Gutierrez’s A Theology of Liberation, David W. Bebbington’s Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730’s to the 1980’s (1989), the already-cited Sider, Wallis, and Campolo, as well as Luke 4:17-19 and Matthew 25:31-46, Scriptures usually marshaled to support theologies of liberation.