God's preferential option for the poor: A study in liberation theology and metaphysics (Juan Luis Segundo, Gustavo Gutierrez, Enrique Dussel)

The dissertation concerns itself with what justification can be given of the claim that God makes a preferential option for the poor. The thesis is that the classical metaphysics of Western Christian theology, which conceives God as the “ground of being,” remains vital to a justification that can meet doubts and criticisms arising from contemporary experience. Specifically, the dissertation argues that the God who opts for the poor is an apt, if not wholly adequate, symbol for representing the engagement with the divine ground of being that eventuates for those persons and groups who themselves make an option for the poor. Recent Latin American discussions of the option for the poor indicate that liberation theologians fervently defend the claim that the option for the poor is, first and foremost, the revealed expression of the divine character. Chapter two indicates the increased urgency of this affirmation at the beginning of the twenty-first century but admits concerns about the metaphysical intelligibility of the claim. A close study of the fundamental theological work of Juan Luis Segundo, Gustavo Gutiérrez, and Enrique Dussel, in chapter three, discloses metaphysical resources within liberation theology, as well as an important critique of the ideological potential of metaphysical speculation. Chapter four offers an alternative fundamental theology: God is understood as the ground of being, and revelation is construed as the process of symbolic praxis constitutive of human being, which engages human beings with the divine ground. This alternative draws on the thought of Robert Cummings Neville and Ray L. Hart. The dissertation concludes that God's preferential option for the poor symbolizes the radical freedom of the poor to strike out in pursuit of their own liberation, free of the ideological strictures that would close the world to their hopes for a better life. That freedom participates in the divine ground, finitely and ambiguously, to be sure, but truly nonetheless.