Liberation and Providence: Decolonial Trajectories in the Work of Gustavo Gutiérrez

Among its many interventions, An Yountae’s 2024 book, The Coloniality of the Secular attempts to resituate the tradition of Latin American Liberation Theology (LALT) as a tradition which must be taken seriously in any attempts to understand the development and origins of decolonial theory. An’s broader argument that theorizations of decoloniality appeal to notions of transcendence and the sacred (despite the supposedly secular character of this field) provide some explanation for why LALT is typically not thought of as contributing to contemporary trajectories of decolonial discourse. Though An acknowledges the necessity of LALT’s inclusion, he determines that LALT “…falls short, overall…as a compelling form of decolonial thought” (59). This presentation interrogates An’s claim more closely by way examining the work of Gustavo Gutiérrez, particularly his elaborations of both liberation and a notion of divine providence. In examining the interplay of liberation and providence (how God acts and intervenes in creation) throughout Gutiérrez’s work, I argue that these strands of his theology provide the clearest examples of a decolonial trajectory present in Latin American Liberation Theology. As decolonial thought emphasizes the delinking of Western-hegemonic ways of knowing and attempts to (as Walter Mignolo articulates) reconstitute ways of knowing by way of destituted or exterior sources, (Mignolo, 54) my attempt to unearth a decolonial trajectory in Gutiérrez will have a particular eye toward asking how theological knowing might be reconstituted by a liberative account of God’s providence.

The primary lens for this inquiry is Gutiérrez’s three levels of liberation, as articulated in A Theology of Liberation: political liberation, internal/psychological/human liberation, and liberation from sin/for communion. I note the participatory nature of these forms of liberation, and how God’s intervening ways (building on my previous work) might be understood as liberative in character. Tracing God’s agency and human cooperation through these levels of liberation, I intend to preliminarily identify what frameworks Gutiérrez marshals toward a sort of epistemological reconstitution, asking in what way Gutiérrez’s methodology and sources are attempting to reconstitute theological knowing by way of sources that exist outside of hegemonic discourse, or by way of sources and frameworks that have been left behind by said discourses at his time. This study will look primarily at three particular works of his: A Theology of Liberation, On Job, and Las Casas. In briefly surveying his three levels of liberation in these works by way of vignettes, my intention is to show how decolonial options for knowing and discerning God’s liberation and providence avail themselves in Gutiérrez’s work.

An Yountae, The Coloniality of the Secular: Race, Religion, and Poetics of World-Making (Durham: Duke University Press, 2024).

Walter Mignolo, The Politics of Decolonial Investigations, On Decoloniality (Durham (N.C.): Duke University press, 2021).