On the Side of the Poor: The Theology of Liberation

Excellent reading

"On the Side of the Poor" is a critical call to action to be a living church. More importantly, this collaboration between Gutierrez and Müller reminds us as to why liberation theology is an important gift to the global church. Müller's essays are particularly insightful as they clarify certain aspects of liberation theology (e.g. explaining its context and contribution to theology) while offering cogent reasons as to why liberation theology should be viewed as more than a mere regional theology. As the world tackles hunger, poverty, disease, and growing inequality, people of faith and theologians would be well served by reading this important follow-up to Gutierrez's classic work.

I just finished reading a theology of liberation a few weeks ago and someone recommended this as a more updated version of it. I really enjoyed it. To be honest, I probably should’ve just skipped reading the classic text and read this one instead.

This is excellent writing by two very competent theologians committed to demonstrating how to live the Christian life in solidarity and in encounter with the poor. Absolutely worth reading.

I haven't read the book, but like many wage slaves I spend about 3 hours or more a day driving to and from work - with the overtime necessary to hold my job, and to actually talk to my wife and kids for a few minutes over a meal - there is no time left.PLEASE MAKE AN AUDIO BOOK FOR THE MILLIONS OF US WHO CAN ONLY LISTEN DURING THOSE COMMUTES!

BOOK REVIEW:Context Matters When It Comes To TheologyON THE SIDE OF THE POORby Gustavo Gutiérrez and Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller1Liberation theology, according to Gerhard Müller, until 2017 Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Roman Catholic Church, ‘is one of the most significant currents of Catholic theology in the 20th century.’ With its emphasis on the ‘preferential option for the poor’, a theological perspective developed by Gustavo Gutiérrez in his ground-breaking work of 1971: A Theology of Liberation, that examined the context in which the poor resided in Latin America and considered them to have a special place in God’s people, it chimed perfectly with the analysis put forward by Pope Francis in his first apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, where he stated God shows the poor ‘his first mercy’. In this book, Gutiérrez contends that liberation theology is concerned with material (e.g. political, financial, environmental, technological) aspects of poverty on the lives of the poor, their causes, and the need to remedy them, and with the spiritual wellbeing of the poor. This is a key difference, of course, between liberation theology (with its foundations firmly rooted in a theological anthropology) and Marxism (with its historical materialism being devoid of any spiritual dimension).And drawing distinctions between the two, whilst also acknowledging what they share, is a key theme of the book, partly to lay to rest any anxieties some in the Roman Catholic hierarchy still harbour about liberation theology and its Marxist influences. With this purpose no doubt in mind, Müller is also keen to re-emphasise that liberation theology is a Catholic theology of grace and salvation ‘now applied to history and society’; something Gutiérrez’s classic text of 1971 also makes clear, stating: ‘The salvific action of God underlies all human existence’, and: ‘To work, to transform this world, is to become a man [sic] and to build the human community; it is also to save. Likewise, to struggle against misery and exploitation and to build a just society is already part of the saving action.’ Good works and grace thus go hand in hand, as, from a Catholic perspective, they must, to attain redemptive liberation via salvation.The book’s chief weakness is that it does not attempt to address the limitations that have been cited by several theologians about the extent to which Catholic liberation theology, as a lens through which to examine and strategise a response to the plight of the poor in post-industrial contexts, for example, can be seen to have much value. A case in point was its now infamous (and unfortunate) inclusion in the Church of England’s report on the social impact Mrs Thatcher’s policies were having on the less well-off in the UK in the 1980s called Faith in the City, published in 1985. As Malcolm Brown, currently Director of Mission and Public Affairs for the Church of England, has since pointed out: ‘Faith in the City was theologically deficient, flirting, as many of us did, with Liberation Theology with insufficient appreciation that urban England and its people were more than a little different from El Salvadorian base communities [of the kind that Gutiérrez’s study had focused on].’ In hindsight, many would now agree that a far better theological anthropology to have adduced in Faith in the City would have been the one that Archbishop William Temple had embodied; namely, the reformist strand of Anglican Socialist tradition out of which his concept of the welfare state had emerged, and to which Thatcher’s polices were  at least to some degree  antithetical.Nevertheless, On the side of the poor is a welcome reappraisal of Catholic liberation theology, written from a Roman Catholic perspective, and one wonders whether such a book would have been produced had it not been for the esteem with which Pope Francis holds Gutiérrez and his theological legacy. I doubt it, frankly, but welcome this book as an important contribution to our understanding of the influence that liberation theology has undoubtedly had on shaping some aspects of Catholic Social Teaching over the last fifty years. It is also written in a fairly accessible style (as is the classic text of 1971 by Gutiérrez), and so will be of interest to lay Christians who share a concern for the plight of the poor, and who are interested in exploring ways of approaching that aspect of Christian discipleship from a Catholic perspective.

Decent explanation of liberation theology and a call to action. A bit dated and needs a new edition to take in 21 century

good one