If we are going to take the Gospel of Jesus Christ seriously we must be at the work of doing theology on behalf of the poor.

Job: God Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent.  In this book, Gutiérrez, father of liberation theology and longtime pastor to the poor in Rimac (a Lima, Peru, slum), raises the following questions: “How are we to talk about a God who is revealed as love in situations characterized by poverty and oppression?”

“How are we to proclaim the God of life to men and women who die prematurely and unjustly?  How are we to acknowledge that God makes us a free gift of love and justice when we have before us the suffering of the innocent?  What words are we to use in telling those who are not even regarded as persons that they are the daughters and sons of God?”

When Gutiérrez wrote this volume he was struggling to find language with which to speak about God to the poorest of the poor — to people who literally did not know where their next meal would come from.  He was struggling to talk to his congregation about worshiping God when their lives were filled with pain and injustice.  Who is God anyway?  Who is this God who allows so much sorrow among the innocent?  These questions led Gutiérrez to a theological study of the book of Job.  Through this study Gutiérrez has drawn the following major conclusions concerning the common enterprise in which all of humanity participates:

Our common state:  Immersion in the doctrine
of retributive justice
Our common call:    Disinterested faith
The prophetic language of
lamentation
Our common hope:  God’s grace

Specifically the book of Job seeks to answer the question “Why do the righteous suffer?”  This question is raised in the light of the traditional teaching found in Old Testament wisdom literature of divine retributive justice, i.e., God will reward the righteous, but punish the wicked.  This doctrine hardened into dogma in the ancient world and as such is defined in the book of Proverbs (3:32–34) as follows:
For the perverse are an abomination to the Lord, but the upright are in his confidence.
The Lord’s curse is on the house of the wicked, but he blesses the abode of the righteous.
Toward the scorners he is scornful, but to the humble he shows favor.

The book of Proverbs is riddled with verses that depict this doctrine, as are many other passages of the Old Testament, such as the familiar blessings and curses formula of Deuteronomy 28:3–6 and 16–19.  If the doctrine of divine retribution is considered “orthodox” for early Israel, then the book of Job stands as a challenge to that doctrine in the face of circumstances and experiences that seemingly contradict it.  In essence, the author or authors of the book are not only asking what seems to us an age-old question, “Why do the righteous suffer?” but are also challenging a dogma of the time, and by so doing are daring to ask difficult, even uncomfortable questions.  They are daring to challenge the established religious institutions and are forging forward to institute a more satisfactory answer to the problem of evil and suffering.  In other words, a new time and culture calls for — even cries out for — a new conversation with more satisfactory conclusions.

In his book On Job, Gutiérrez has approached the book of Job from his perspective as pastor of the Rimac Peruvians.  In this book he asks the question, “Are suffering human beings able to enter into an authentic relationship with God and find a correct way of speaking about God?”  The implications of this question become clear when Gutiérrez interprets Satan’s question in Job 1:9 much differently than many contemporary commentators.  He takes the focus off of God and questions related to God’s justice and places it squarely upon the shoulders of humanity, suggesting that Satan’s question is really asking whether humans are capable of having a disinterested faith.  In other words, are humans capable of worshiping God if they have no hope or expectation of receiving anything in return?  For Gutiérrez, Satan’s question is not about justice and righteousness; it is about the human capacity for faith, and according to Gutiérrez, this is what is being tested.  Satan’s claim is that no human, not even Job, is capable of remaining faithful (i.e., full of faith) in the midst of suffering and will, in the end, curse God.

To this interpretation of the satanic question Gutiérrez offers a helpful response.  He suggests that two types of language are needed in order to speak about God correctly: the language of piety and the language of lament.  Speaking of the first language he says that the contemporary human sufferer must come to terms with the God of gratuitous love.  The key word for understanding this statement is grace.  The inference is that God’s love exhibited towards us is born out of grace, and does not come as the result of our own goodness.  The concept is reminiscent of the parable of the laborers in the vineyard found in Matthew 20:1–16, where the owner of the vineyard recruits workers several times throughout the day.  In the end those who began work early are paid the same wage as those who began in late afternoon.  In response to complaints from those who have worked all day only to receive the same pay as those who worked but a few hours, the owner asks, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?  Or are you envious because I am generous?”  In other words, the owner has the freedom to be gracious to whom he or she chooses.  How much more the creator of the universe!  Critical to creating a new model for thinking and talking about the justice of God is the profound truth that our God is a God of gratuitous love and that the “blessings” of God come to each of us solely as an act of grace.

The second means for speaking about God, according to Gutiérrez’s model, is the lament.  Gutiérrez states that this genre is not just accepted by God, but is actually God-ordained due to its prophetic nature.  Implicit within this language is a fundamental challenge to the human contribution to suffering in our contemporary society.  Frequently one person’s suffering is the product of another’s behavior or a consequence of the outworking of institutional and societal agendas.  Under these circumstances Gutiérrez understands the lament to challenge prophetically the ills of our social structures and, consequently, to call humanity to reform.  To use the language of Job, for those who know they are not what they are thought to be (cf. 9:35) the lament is a God-ordained, prophetic tool that challenges those at ease who have contempt for misfortune. (12:5)
We, like the early Israelites, live under the doctrine of divine retributive justice.  We often hear people who are suffering difficult circumstances say things like “What did I do to deserve this?”  We also hear accusations such as “You have brought this upon yourself” or “I wonder what they did to create that problem in their lives.”  While it is true that people frequently do create their own troubles, it is equally true that many people around the world suffer innocently.  A statement such as this one often conjures up theological debates around the doctrine of original sin.  In response to that impulse let us think about the faithful mother of four in South Africa who recently contracted HIV/AIDS from her roaming husband.  Or consider the child born with HIV/AIDS, having contracted it from his mother; or the cancer-ridden children born and raised near hidden toxic waste dumps; or the starving families of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the United States.  Let us remember also the victims of genocide in Darfur, and the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq.  Atrocities surround us — historically and in the present.  Each of these scenarios depicts innocent victims of intense suffering brought on by other individuals or inequitable social and political systems.  We live in a world filled with inequity, injustice, and poverty — a world to which Gutiérrez could not close his eyes, and neither should we.  We, too, must be at the work of doing theology on behalf of the poor, however difficult and unpopular it might be.

In 1971 Gutiérrez published Teología de la Liberación, and the English translation, A Theology of Liberation, was published in 1973.  This book, more than any other, has formed and directed the worldwide discussion of liberation theology, which continues to this day in spite of numerous attempts to disclaim it.

On November 25, 1981, Pope John Paul II named Joseph Ratzinger Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly known as the Holy Office of the Inquisition.  As head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Bishop Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) waged a campaign against liberation theology, which had gained ground among priests in Latin America and elsewhere as a means of involving the Church in social activism and human rights issues.

Since Ratzinger’s time as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, during which he wrote two significant Instructions on aspects of Liberation Theology (1984, 1986), much has happened in Latin America in the struggle for liberation.  Many have died in conflicts over basic human rights.  Some were political activists, some were Jesuit priests, and some were innocent bystanders.   The fight has spread to non-Latin American countries as well.  Today in Korea we find proponents of Minjung theology, and in India, proponents of Dalit theology.  These theologies are contextual variants of the Latin American liberation theology fathered by Gutiérrez and others.  Yet in every Job class I teach, students will ask, “Are there not significant criticisms that call liberation theology into question?”  To which I answer, “Why, yes, there are, but why and how?”  This response tends to lead us off into a long and drawn out, yet fascinating, discussion on the political, religious, and theological shifts that have occurred since Gutiérrez wrote his seminal volume in 1971.  Fundamentally, doing theology on behalf of the poor is risky business.  While almost everyone likes the idea of helping the poor by providing food to the hungry, giving toys to poverty stricken children at Christmas, and joining in other such Band-Aid approaches, few are willing to confront institutional, societal, and governmental structures that continue to impoverish large populations around the world.  The establishment church does not like it when its clergypersons do it, and the governments of impoverished populations do not like it much either.  People, regardless of their station in life, may be killed for attempting to confront repressive systems..  Foreign allies often step in to support oppressive governments with military dollars so that the poor who have gathered to fight a civil war are hopelessly outnumbered, outmaneuvered, and underequipped.

This is the world in which we are called to do our theological enterprise.  Many church leaders click their tongues and shake their heads at the idea of confronting societal and governmental structures, crying, “separation of church and state!”  But with the rise of the religious right in the United States those days need to come to an end.  Anyone who believes they can truly help the poor and not become involved politically is sadly mistaken.

Please do not get me wrong.  This article is not a call to arms or a proposal that tomorrow we all run down to our local governmental offices and storm their doors.  Rather, it is intended as a wake-up call to the church.  The time is now!  Liberation theology is not dead and it ought not to die.  If we are going to take the Gospel of Jesus Christ seriously we must be at the work of doing theology on behalf of the poor.  We must ask the hard questions and push for answers.  We, like the authors of Job, must lead our congregations into new ways of thinking theologically.  Gutiérrez has provided us a place to begin.  We must teach against the doctrine of retributive justice, we must preach a call for disinterested faith to our materialistic world, we must lead our congregations to loudly lament the inequities and injustices that surround us, and we must instill within our congregants the hope of a gratuitous God.  Then we must push even harder for deeper and clearer theological understandings of suffering and evil in a world created and sustained by the God of grace.