Gustavo Gutierrez: Solidarity and the Preferential Option for the Poor

The preferential option for the poor is both the most central and the most controversial notion in the thought of liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez. This paper will attempt to synthesize and clarify Gutierrez’s understanding of the option and its connection to solidarity. Most of the paper will be spent defining the terms “preference,” “option,” and “poverty” respectively. Then I will briefly discuss the importance of the preferential option to Gutierrez and some of the concrete shape that he thinks solidarity with the poor should take.

It should be noted that this entire undertaking cannot but be incomplete because, for Gutierrez, understanding of the preferential option is impossible for those who are not living or have not lived in solidarity. In the words of Stephen J. Pope,

Because social location is critical, the preferential option can only be properly understood if we first “try to be present in their world,” i.e. the world of the poor, of “the other.” …As Gutierrez puts it, “we must start by opening our ears and listening to” the poor.[1]

Preference

For Gutierrez, “preference” is a gratuitous choice God makes to favor the poor within the scope of his universal love. The poor are favored not because they earn it by being somehow morally superior to the rich, but simply “because God is God”[2] and chooses to stand in solidarity with them. Pope identifies two ways in which Gutierrez rationalizes God’s preference for the poor. In one sense it is a “pedagogical strategy” intended to underscore the inclusiveness of God’s love:

According to Gutierrez, God’s love is universal, “but it is from a point of departure in his preference for the poor that he manifests his universal love, his love of all humanity.” Divine partiality in this case is depicted as a pedagogical strategy, i.e., divine love for the outcasts, the poor, and the powerless emphatically underscores God’s inclusive love for all human beings.[3]

In other words, God prefers the poor in order to counteract the notion—promoted by the privileged—that wealth and power are the seals of God’s special love and approval. In another sense Pope hears Gutierrez speaking of preference for the poor as a natural result of their greater need. He here offers what he feels is a clarification of Gutierrez’s view:

Because care is proportioned to need, it makes perfect sense to speak of the preferential love for the poor as long as love is specifically understood under its subcategory of care or caring love. For this reason, the phrase special care for the needy seems in some ways more accurate (if less inspiring) than “preferential option for the poor,” “preferential love for the poor,” or “love of predilection for the poor.” The expression “preferential love” is helpful because it highlights the important truth that for Christians care flows from love rather than from an attitude of noblesse oblige or from religious exhibitionism (Matt 6:1-4).[4]

While this does detract from some of the shock value that has helped make the preferential option so popular, I think it is an explanation Gutierrez could resonate with. It is very important to him to maintain the universality and inclusiveness of God’s love—to link them together[5]—because in so doing we clarify the demands on those who would imitate him.[6] Christians are to imitate God by loving all people but preferring the cause of the poor. Indeed, in one place Gutierrez even emphasizes that God loves all people in an equal fashion![7] Pope rightly observes that such terminology can be confusing,[8] but for Gutierrez it is all part of the mystery of God. A final note on the universality of God’s love: Gutierrez is very careful to emphasize that equal love does not mean equal acceptance or approval; it means simply that all—even oppressors—are offered grace and forgiveness if they repent and enter into solidarity with the poor.[9]

In the preface to a book about Gutierrez, Curt Cadorette tells of his own experience as a pastor in Peru. It casts some very helpful light on why Gutierrez feels so strongly about the preferential option. Cadorette and another pastor tried to take a fairly neutral stance in the conflict between the mestizos and campesinos in their congregation. But the hostility between the groups is too deeply rooted. Simply preaching in Aymara (the campesino language) was enough to enrage the mestizos. In fact, they took any outreach to the campesinos as an affront to their power. Pastors in Peru are expected to continue the “long-standing alliance between the dominant class and the church,” or else they become “dangers to [mestizo] hegemony.” The mestizos reacted swiftly and bitterly. Two prominent mestizos hired thieves to rob the parish church and steal religious artwork; they then blamed the robbery on the pastors.[10]

In this particular situation the pastors found it impossible to be neutral. Before very long they were forced to outright declare their loyalties to the campesino cause. Since Gutierrez lives and works in the same context, it may be the bitterness of the class conflict in Peru that led to his conclusion that, “knowingly or not, we always do ‘take sides.’”[11] The truth is, Cadorette was already on the side of the campesinos even before the conflict came to a head. He had only two choices: to support the status quo or to go against the flow. To join the mestizos or to join the campesinos. To do or not to do. There was no middle ground. The same is true—perhaps less dramatically in some places, but true all the same—of any culture where there is social stratification.

Option

“Option” and “solidarity” are virtually synonymous terms for Gutierrez; indeed, he even speaks of the “option of solidarity.”[12] To make an option for the poor is to enter into solidarity with them.[13] For Gutierrez, it is not only God who makes an “option” for the poor. It is incumbent upon Christians to imitate God in choosing the poor, and this is the “option” all believers in Christ are supposed to make.[14]

“Preference” may be the most controversial of our three terms, but “option” is clearly the most important in Gutierrez’s own mind. This is demonstrated by the fact that he prefers the Matthean beatitudes to the Lukan ones. Luke’s version—“blessed are the poor”—speaks of God’s preference for the materially poor. Matthew’s version—“blessed are the poor in spirit”—offers blessing to those who make the option to enter into solidarity with the poor. Luke’s version commends a state of being we cannot help; Matthew’s commends a state of being we have obediently chosen for ourselves. Says Gutierrez, “The spiritual poor are followers of Jesus. The Matthean Beatitudes (Matt. 5:2-17) indicate the basic attitudes of the disciple who receives the Reign of God in solidarity with others.”[15] It is far more important to Gutierrez that liberating action be taken on behalf of the poor than that their privileged state in God’s eyes be well- established.

The option for the poor is one with its roots firmly grounded in Gutierrez’s theology. In the person of Jesus Christ is the ultimate solidarity.[16] God, who stands in a position far superior in power and glory than that of created beings, lowered himself to our level and became a man. He entered into our world and our experience. Since the Christian ideal is imitatio Dei, we should take God’s choice of solidarity as a demand for us to do the same. Gutierrez writes,

As Christians, we base [the commitment to the poor] fundamentally on the God of our faith. It is a theocentric, prophetic option we make, one which strikes its roots deep in the gratuity of God’s love and is demanded by that love.[17]

Poverty

“Poverty” Gutierrez defines as economic, social, and political conditions leading to physical or cultural death.[18] He distinguishes three kinds of poverty: “Real poverty, as an evil (that is, as not desired by God); spiritual poverty, as availability to the will of the Lord; and solidarity with the poor, as well as with the situation they suffer.”[19] Real poverty is something we are to attempt to overcome, but solidarity as poverty is something we are to strive to enter into. This creates a strange tension in Gutierrez’s thought. Pope summarizes, “Far from involving a romantic idealization of poverty, commitment to ‘voluntary poverty’… reflects both solidarity with the poor and a denunciation of that very state of deprivation.”[20]

While Gutierrez’s focus is primarily on economic poverty in Latin America, he is certainly willing to include oppressed groups of all kinds and from all over the world in the category of “the poor.” In the Latin American context he specifically mentions blacks, Amerindians, and women, who he says are “doubly oppressed.”[21]

Importance of the Preferential Option for the Poor

Gutierrez speaks of making the option for the poor as a “conversion.”[22] In fact, he might even go so far as to say it is the conversion—or rather a fundamental part of it. Solidarity with the poor is something that every Christian is compelled by “genuine neighbor-love” to enter into.[23] “The new way that conversion and pardon opens up,” Gutierrez says, “takes the form of an option in behalf of life. The option finds expression particularly in solidarity with those who are subject to ‘a premature and unjust death.’”[24] Equating conversion with solidarity, of course, makes solidarity the distinctive—nay the defining—mark of a true Christian. The preferential option is therefore of the utmost importance for Gutierrez.

While Gutierrez would argue that where the church is not in solidarity believers should choose to make the preferential option on an individual basis, he does affirm that the option is meant to be made communally. In fact, talk of the “conversion” of the whole church gained acceptance at Puebla![25] If Gutierrez feels that the church is not currently in solidarity and needs to be converted, then other statements he has made condemn it as a fundamentally un-Christian institution. He writes that knowledge of God (in John equated with eternal life) and relationship with God are equivalent to solidarity. In fact, there is no true worship without solidarity![26] For Gutierrez, an encounter with God can only be had through an encounter with the poor.[27] “An authentic, deep sense of God,” he declares, “is not only not opposed to a sensitivity to the poor and their social world, but it is ultimately lived only in those persons and that world.”[28]

In short, Gutierrez does not believe that we can call ourselves Christians if we fail to live in solidarity with the poor.

Entering Concretely into Solidarity

What does it concretely look like to live in solidarity with the poor, to make the preferential option? Gutierrez gives us guidelines, not specifics. Ultimately he feels we should “involve [ourselves] creatively in the different stages of humanity’s liberation process.”[29]

First of all, solidarity should take the form of grief on behalf of the poor. Gutierrez pronounces great woe upon anyone whose eye is dry when the Lord returns.[30] We are to sympathetically enter into a loving relationship with our neighbors and share their burdens. We are to do this not only with neighbors of the near variety—neighbors who happen to be on whatever road we’re traveling. We are to go out into the countryside, to the streets, the factories, and the marketplaces. We are to seek out the poor wherever they are, no matter how distant, because, Gutierrez says, they are the “neighbor par excellence.”[31] When we find them, we should not attempt to remove them from their oppressive situation. That is not solidarity. We must love them within their social context and try instead to change the systems of domination that are bringing them such misery.[32] Says Gutierrez,

“Sin demands a radical liberation, but this, necessarily, includes a liberation in the political order and in the different dimensions of personhood… The Liberation of Christ cannot be equated with political liberation but it takes place in historical and political acts of liberation.”[33]

Our task, in fact, is fundamentally political: to bring in an entirely new social order. But we cannot reduce the gospel’s demands to charity or evangelism or even “human development.”[34] The gospel demands nothing less than the kingdom of God on earth. In that vein Gutierrez says, “The solidarity with the poor and the starving… leads to an ongoing transformation of history and requires behavior to this end.”[35] We are not only transforming history, in fact, but “leading [it] to something beyond itself.”[36]

For a concrete vision of what it means to live in solidarity, perhaps we need look no further than the Bible itself. Gutierrez understands Luke 4:18-19 as Jesus’ programmatic statement:[37]

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

The modern “church of the Beatitudes” is to carry on Christ’s work by embarking communally on a mission of solidarity.[38] We are to “choose” the poor and to creatively transform their concrete situation. In this way we carry on the Lord’s salvific work and actualize our own humanity.

Conclusion

I believe that Gutierrez’s call to “convert” to solidarity, to make the “option for the poor,” is a prophetic one. The few correctives I might deign to make to his theology are scarcely even worth mentioning. The absence of joy from his stringent demands, for example, is ameliorated by the fact that true joy is found only in full service of and encounter with God. Gutierrez is telling us how to find joy, even though he does not use the term. I prefer to let his work stand on its own. I have no criticism; I strive only to be worthy of the grace that makes solidarity possible for me. To Gustavo Gutierrez, wherever he is, thank you for sharing your hermeneutical privilege with me.

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[1] This is a result of what Pope calls the “hermeneutical privilege” of the poor. Stephen J. Pope, "Proper and Improper Partiality and the Preferential Option for the Poor," Theological Studies 54, no. 2 (1993): 245.

[2] Gustavo Gutierrez, "Transcendence and Historical Liberation," in Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology, ed. Ignacio Ellacuria and Jon Sobrino (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 241. Cf. also Gustavo Gutierrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, trans. Matthew J. O'Connell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987), 94.

[3] Pope, "Proper and Improper Partiality and the Preferential Option for the Poor," 247.

[4] Ibid.: 249.

[5] Gutierrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, 96.

[6] Stephen J. Pope, "Christian Love for the Poor: Almsgiving and the "Preferential Option"," Horizons 21 (1994): 297.

[7] Gutierrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, 41.

[8] Pope, "Proper and Improper Partiality and the Preferential Option for the Poor," 247.

[9] Pope, "Christian Love for the Poor: Almsgiving and the 'Preferential Option'," 298.

[10] Curt Cadorette, From the Heart of the People: The Theology of Gustavo Gutierrez (Oak Park, IL: Meyer-Stone, 1988), xiv-xv.

[11] Pope, "Proper and Improper Partiality and the Preferential Option for the Poor," 245.

[12] Gustavo Gutierrez, "Faith as Freedom: Solidarity with the Alienated and Confidence in the Future," Horizons 2 (1975): 32,49.

[13] Ibid.: 33.

[14] James B. Nickeloff, Gustavo Gutierrez: Essential Writings (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 144-46. It is also one Gutierrez himself has made. Cf. ibid,: 145.

[15] Gutierrez, "Transcendence and Historical Liberation," 244.

[16] Gustavo Gutierrez, The God of Life, trans. Matthew J. O'Connell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 89.

[17] Gutierrez, "Transcendence and Historical Liberation," 240.

[18] Nickeloff, Gustavo Gutierrez: Essential Writings, 144-45.

[19] Gutierrez, "Transcendence and Historical Liberation," 235.

[20] Pope, "Proper and Improper Partiality and the Preferential Option for the Poor," 250.

[21] Gutierrez, "Transcendence and Historical Liberation," 236-37.

[22] Gutierrez, "Faith as Freedom: Solidarity with the Alienated and Confidence in the Future," 54.

[23] Pope, "Christian Love for the Poor: Almsgiving and the "Preferential Option"," 298.

[24] Gustavo Gutierrez, We Drink from Our Own Wells, trans. Matthew J. O'Connell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1985), 100.

[25] Ibid., 101.

[26] Gutierrez, "Faith as Freedom: Solidarity with the Alienated and Confidence in the Future," 38.

[27] Ibid.: 39.

[28] Pope, "Proper and Improper Partiality and the Preferential Option for the Poor," 245.

[29] Nickeloff, Gustavo Gutierrez: Essential Writings, 239.

[30] Gutierrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, 103.

[31] Gutierrez, "Faith as Freedom: Solidarity with the Alienated and Confidence in the Future," 32.

[32] Gutierrez, We Drink from Our Own Wells, 101.

[33] Gutierrez, "Faith as Freedom: Solidarity with the Alienated and Confidence in the Future," 49.

[34] Ibid.: 55.

[35] Gutierrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, 99.

[36] Gutierrez, "Faith as Freedom: Solidarity with the Alienated and Confidence in the Future," 56.

[37] Gutierrez, The God of Life, 6-9.

[38] Gustavo Gutierrez, The Truth Shall Make You Free: Confrontations, trans. Matthew J. O'Connell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990), 160. Cf. also Gutierrez, The God of Life, 23.