The question then is not so much: “Can providence be liberative?” but rather, “How might liberation be understood as God’s providence?”
Liberation, caught between queer nihilism and eschatological certainty, must seek an third way beyond the binary of hopefulness and hopelessness through the negation of both. It must transpose itself into an apophatic register as the experience of continual failure, an uncertain endless becoming, that might be called simple hope.
Fifty years after the publication of Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation, what, if any, relevance does Christian liberation theology and Gutiérrez’s work have for our present moment? Do we still have a memory of a liberating God? And if not, is there a liberative power in grappling with the absence of this memory?
In the Book of Job, the question of how we speak of God in the midst of suffering is at the forefront, which is where its significance for liberation theology is particularly found.
