Option for the Poor

Option for the Poor

By A. Scott Moreau

While there has long been a recognition that the poor hold special attention and affection in God's eyes, the phrase "option for the poor" or "preferential option for the poor" is of relatively recent coinage. It was Roman Catholics who began to wrestle with issues related to poverty in Vatican II. Catholics in Latin America, who felt that the work at Vatican II did not go far enough, convened in Medellín, where the emphasis was changed from seeing the poor as the object of the mercy of the church to seeing them as the subjects of their own history (González, p. 19). The actual phrase "preferential option for the poor" did not appear until the 1970s, reportedly used by Gustavo Gutiérrez in a lecture given in Spain in 1972 (Ibid.). Since that time the term has been used primarily in liberation and conciliar theological circles but also increasingly in evangelical missiology.

The concept behind the term is one that demands a radical paradigm shift. The poor are not to be seen as objects of mercy, but as people who are particularly gifted by God to represent his justice to the rest of the world. The 'option' for the poor is not optional, but required by the very nature of God and the incarnation of Jesus. Because Jesus came to preach to the poor, they have an epistemological advantage in reading the Scripture. They are not weighted down with the presuppositions and agendas of the rich, and they are more free to read (and even interpret) the text as its primary audience. It requires the recognition of structural issues which create and perpetuate poverty and new tools of analysis to understand and change those structures.

Evangelical use of the term traces its roots to the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelism (1974) and the eventual wrestling of evangelicals over Evangelism and Social Responsibility (see Walker). A shift towards holism within the evangelical movement (see Holistic Mission), prompted in part by reflections from both non-Western evangelical theologians (e.g., Vinay Samuel, Rene Padilla, and Samuel Escobar) and Western evangelicals (e.g., Ron Sider and Jim Wallis), has resulted in greater empathy to the liberationist emphasis on the option for the poor (see also Liberation Theologies Missiology). It is now not uncommon to see the phrase "option for the poor" across the spectrum of missiology. Evangelicals who have committed themselves to this agenda have in the past been referred to as radical evangelicals, though the language of opting for the poor has been gaining momentum in mainstream evangelical missiological circles in recent years.

What is God's view of the poor? They are people and part of his creation. They have oppressors who keep them poor. While they are sinners, they are also in significant ways sinned against by those who oppress them subvert justice for them. God does "opt" for them in the sense of siding with them in demanding impartiality and justice. He cares for their spiritual and material needs. The same attitude should be found in the Church (e.g., Jas. 2:2-6). That the poor teach us of God or enjoy a special spiritual status is true in the sense that their humble circumstances force them to see more realistically their broken condition before God. That they are somehow automatically saved or members of God's church simply by virtue of their socio-economic status, however, cannot be sustained in light of the overall biblical evidence. The poor are in need of having the Good News preached to them and thus the thrust of Jesus statements about his ministry in Luke 4:18-20.

Bibliography. 

R. D. N. Dickinson, DEM, pp. 806-810; D. Dorr, Option for the Poor: A Hundred Years of Catholic Social Teaching; F. Herzog, DEM, pp. 804-805; J. L. González, Poverty and Ecclesiology, pp. 9-26; D. S. Walker, Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 79 (1992), pp. 53-62.

Source: Evangelical Dictionary of World Mission, Baker Book House Company, 2000.