Gustavo Gutiérrez would furrow his brow whenever people spoke about the dead as having gone “a la casa del Padre” — to the Father’s home. When hearing such common expressions, he would ask, “¿Y esta casa, que es?”— What is this home then?
On October 22, 2024, at age 96 and in his native Peru, Gutiérrez made his own transitus, although I refrain from saying “to the Father’s home.” Rather, he continued his transformation into what we believe in faith to be new life in Christ. To paraphrase St. Paul, this transformation moves from glory to glory (2 Corinthians 3:18). That is, in the mystical theology of Gregory of Nyssa, death is just one part of an eternal progress into the infinite mystery of a loving God, in whose home we always and already live.
I begin with this pastoral observation about life in “our common home” (as Pope Francis called it in his encyclical Laudato Si’) because so many theological insights that Gutiérrez gifted us in his long life reframe our relationship to this world – to this time, this beloved and suffering humanity – where Gutiérrez taught us to encounter the reign of God.
Working against spiritual dualisms that separate matter from the spirit – that separate our time from the time to come, or part eternal salvation and historical liberation struggles – Gutiérrez offered an incarnational theology that worked out the implications of God becoming flesh to dwell among us. His theology emphasized not some generic human flesh in which God continues to become present, but focused on the poor: particular human persons and communities who in myriad ways live on the threshold of life and death. God’s preferential option for the poor, as revealed in Scripture, oriented all of Gutiérrez’s theological reflection on the Christian tradition and discipleship. From his nearness to the poor, Gutiérrez spoke credible words about God’s universal love for all persons and all creation.
Ecumenism and liberation
His first major book, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, (published in English in 1973), helped Christians to think about our faith amid the violence of poverty and institutionalized injustice rampant in Latin America and across the world. The book provided a theological framework for reconciling a Christian community’s faith with its work for structural change. But this landmark book was not the product of an isolated theologian thinking through faith behind a desk or in a library (though Gutiérrez certainly spent a lot of time in libraries).
Instead, the book represented the outgrowth of regional discussions among diverse and ecumenical Christian communities (pastors, worshipers, theologians, social scientists, etc.) who for many years had been discussing and writing differently about following Jesus according to the Spirit of the times. The Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops held in 1968 in Medellín, Colombia, produced evidence, in the form of official documents that became cornerstones for rebuilding the Latin American church. Some of the most prophetic documents – addressing justice, poverty and peace – later became key references for liberation theology. Gutiérrez always affirmed that liberation theology was born ecumenical and that this ecumenism was experienced at the bishops’ conference in Medellín.
“Gutiérrez’s ecumenism was not simply a theological commitment, but one lived in friendship.”
Gutiérrez’s ecumenism was not simply a theological commitment. He lived it in friendship. Years ago, I told Gustavo that I would visit the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, to research the writings of Robert McAfee Brown on the sanctuary movement of the 1980s. To my surprise, his eyes lit up. Gutiérrez then told me that Brown had been “un buen amigo,” a good friend, and he shared about his visits to the library at the University of California at Berkeley to research Bartolomé de Las Casas. His studies there provided opportunities for Gutiérrez and Brown to converse with each other about their shared concern for the church and the world.
In 1980, Brown had published one of the earliest and best brief U.S. biographies of Gutiérrez, titled simply Gustavo Gutiérrez. Ten years later, he significantly expanded the book and republished it as Gustavo Gutiérrez: An Introduction to Liberation Theology. I use the revised edition in my classes at Fordham University to give my students a nuanced reading of the context in which Gustavo’s work emerged and of the intraecclesial and extraecclesial struggles he faced. Using Brown’s book also emphasizes the importance of doing theology ecumenically.
Gutiérrez’s engagement with Presbyterian theologians was certainly not limited to his friendship with Brown. One has only to read the 1977 book Liberation and Change to encounter his 1970s dialogue with Richard Shaull and to explore their occasionally critical differences in thinking about the meaning of liberation and revolution. The ecumenical spirit of Gutiérrez’s theological work presents an ongoing challenge for new generations of theologians who are committed to solidarity with the poor: a solidarity that always demands rethinking our ecclesial borders and differences.
The spirituality of liberation
Gutiérrez’s writing in the 1980s shifted more toward spirituality and even mystical theology. This decade was a time of persecution: not only sociopolitical persecution in Peru, but also the Vatican’s persecution of liberation theology. Books such as We Drink from Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People (1984) or On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent (1987) are now classics of the spiritual search for God amid the wilderness and exile we encounter both in the biblical world and our own contemporary histories.
His shift to spirituality was not a retreat from the liberation theology that had become synonymous with his name, and it was certainly not a retreat from solidarity with the poor and the struggles for justice, even as these became controversial and misunderstood. Rather, his shift to writing books that unpack the spiritual journey of a people was the most natural evolution of his work because theology is inseparable from spirituality.
…his shift to writing books that unpack the spiritual journey of a people was the most natural evolution of his work because theology is inseparable from spirituality.
A Theology of Liberation
Already in the early 1970s, Gustavo had been conscious that he was putting forth a theology that still had to elaborate its spirituality. In other words, he recognized that A Theology of Liberation was a systematic theology that at some point needed additional texts to further develop the process, the method, the way of life according to the Spirit that led to the theological perspectives contained in his book. His more spiritually attuned 1980s books invite readers to go deep into their own lived experience of God. In spiritually breaking into the ground of their being (to use an image from the mystical theology of Meister Eckhart), readers would also encounter the ground of God’s being in history; for as Gutiérrez emphasized in all his theology, there is one history of salvation that is both human and divine.
On Job
On Job, widely considered a masterpiece of spirituality, is Gutiérrez’s attempt to teach us how to converse with God in both prophetic and contemplative language: two complementary ways of speaking with God. The first embodies a protest at the suffering of the innocent, a struggle to make sense of the profound incongruency of a God of life and what appears to be the reign of death.
On Job, widely considered a masterpiece of spirituality, is Gutiérrez’s attempt to teach us how to converse with God in both prophetic and contemplative language…
The second, contemplation, comes from an old term for mystical theology: that knowledge forged in the radical acceptance of the ultimate incomprehensibility of God. As we know, Job cannot accept the comfortable theologies of his own time – theologies that with near-mathematical precision explain away the problem of the suffering of the innocent – but Job also does not have a meaningful response to the problem. The language of contemplation completes but does not silence Job’s protest.
Using classical categories of mystical theology, we can say that Job’s prophetic language exemplifies cataphatic theology; his surrender to the ineffability of God exemplifies apophatic theology. Cataphatic and apophatic, a language of excess and a language of nothingness — both are necessary for they complete each other in the fullness of the immanence and transcendence of God. For Gutiérrez, Job teaches how to speak rightly of and to God, how to do theology that breaks the chains of easy answers and how to discern who we truly are before the Creator of all that is, has been and will be. At the end of our struggle for answers to the suffering of the innocent, perhaps a silent cry (to echo Dorothee Soelle’s apt phrase and title of her 2001 book on mysticism and resistance) is our deepest language. As Soelle reminds us, a silent cry is also a name for God: “thou silent cry, no one can find thee who knows not how to let thee go.”
Good theology and genuine Christian spirituality do not separate us from the world. Rather, they locate us within the world in the following of Jesus.
Las Casas
Good theology and genuine Christian spirituality do not separate us from the world. Rather, they locate us within the world in the following of Jesus. The deeper one enters the mystery of God, the deeper one enters the heart of human history. Gutiérrez’s longest book, 1993’s Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ, offers one of the clearest expressions of this incarnational logic in the life and witness of Las Casas. Even now, 500 years after the colonial project began – along with its extraction of natural resources, both human and more than human, from the so-called Indies – forms of colonialism continue to structure the life of the church and theology itself.
As we become more aware of how Indigenous cultures, languages and whole worlds were destroyed in the name of Jesus Christ, we need to reexamine how even our best theologies embed a colonial violence that erases not only the humanity of the other but the other’s capacity to bear the very mystery of God. Las Casas appears to focus mainly on the work and struggle of a 16th-century bishop: one who was never a formal university theologian but whose theological arguments in defense of Indigenous communities and their worlds could counter the most famous theologians of the time, who used theology instead to justify wars of conquest. More than this, the book explores the need to remain close to suffering reality and to use every gift and talent to find and reach the causes of that suffering, for in that search, one encounters Jesus Christ. Las Casas is a Christology that teaches us how to live and think our faith in a modern world where whole cultures and populations are rendered disposable byproducts of progress.
Gutiérrez, the pastor
Gutiérrez was a pastor who did theology. At the University of Notre Dame, where he taught from the early 2000s until 2018, he was present only one semester every year. This arrangement allowed him to continue to serve his parish in the Rimac neighborhood of Lima, Peru, and engage in other forms of pastoral ministry within the broader church. Gutiérrez always held firm in asserting that theology is an ecclesial function, done with and for the church. His capacity to think faith within and beyond the academy is one element that keeps his insights fresh and accessible without ossifying them into an academic language and argumentation: a tendency that too often becomes intellectual gymnastics, severed from the lived faith experience of a people.
Gutiérrez was a pastor who did theology.
For new generations of theologians – especially those who are not in ministry or who do not have a given pastoral context – the very methodology of liberation theology can become a challenge. According to Gutiérrez, theology is critical reflection on Christian praxis; in other words, it critically reflects on the committed activity or work of one’s community. If theology is not to be reduced to a career or university discipline, then it needs a community with whom one engages in the historical struggles for greater humanity: the struggles for liberation. The vitality of theology is tied to the vitality of communities of faith; both are nourished by a committed presence in a suffering world.
The vitality of theology is tied to the vitality of communities of faith; both are nourished by a committed presence in a suffering world.
Gutiérrez kept working until a few years before his passing in 2024. A new book has been posthumously published in Spanish: Vivir y pensar el Dios de los pobres, featuring a preface from the late Pope Francis. The title loosely means “living and thinking the God of the poor.” An English translation is currently underway for publication in 2026. In the book, Gutiérrez reaffirms the long journey of the poor’s sudden, forceful emergence into the consciousness of society and of the church. He continues to locate the preferential option for the poor in Scripture, and he invites readers to consider the future of the poor in a postmodern, religiously plural world. Vivir y pensar el Dios de los pobres invites us to enflesh our faith according to the Spirit of God, who leads us in following Jesus. And he invites us to reflect critically on following Christ in light of a constantly changing history that reveals God in the smallest and most forgotten.
Gutiérrez’s life and thought were an offering to God, to humanity and to this beloved more-than-human world that is our common home. Here we pitch our tent with the God of all creation, who deems it fundamentally good. We are constantly called to participate in the liberation of this world, for in this historical process, we encounter the very mystery of salvation whose fullness transcends but is never separate from this humble earthly abode.
We give thanks to the God of the poor for the gift of the life of Gutiérrez, our brother in Christ, who even in his bodily absence continues to be “¡presente!” with the cloud of witnesses who accompany us from glory to glory in our own transformation.
