The Challenge of Liberation Theology: A First World Response ed. by Brian Mahan and L. Dale Richesin (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 317 order to allow our permissive, self-oriented society to continue. 'l'he appearance of this book causes us to believe that handicapped newborns will soon have to begin paying that price as well. Pope John Center St. Louis, Missouri St. Louis University Medical School St. Louis, Missouri ROBERT L. BARRY, O.P. AND KATHRYN L. MOSELEY, M.D. The Challenge of Liberation Theology: A First World Response. Edited By BRIAN MAHAN and L. DALE RICHESIN. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1981. Pp. viii + 147. $7.95. The Challenge of Liberation Theology is a collection of papers written for a conference at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago in 1979. It can be sub-titled A First Response not just because it responds to the critique of institutions and actions proclaimed by third.- world and especially Latin American theologians as implicated in a pattern of oppression , but, even more because it is a re-appropriation of many of the preoccupations and commitments marking liberation theology in its original Latin American form. Since we North Americans can evade these concerns only at our peril, we do well to give this book serious attention. Like any collection of work by people with diverse perspectives, it is difficult to summarize for a review. Some of the essays deal with problems of first world societies themselves. Thus Dorothee Soelle writes eloquently about the grotesque idolatry of a consumerist society in which LeviStrauss can proclaim: " Thou shalt have no other jeans before me." whereas Lee Cormie attacks the fundamental economic structures of capitalism. The global attack becomes particular and more strictly theological in the essays of James H. Cone and Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza on black and female liberation respectively. James Fowler highlights the varying directions of black liberation theology from the angle of his wellknown developmental theory of faith. The papers of Langdon Gilkey and Schubert M. Ogden address the broader theoretical issues raised by political and liberation theology. The two most provocative contributions, from my point of view, are those of Soelle and Schussler Fiorenza. On the one side, they are provocative quite simply because they are passionate denunciations of existing first world societies. In the case of Soelle, the focus is on the hedonist fascism which she sees reducing people to mindless pursuers of commercialized pleasure, and in Schussler Fiorenza's it is on the male domina- 318 BOOK REVIEWS tion of women through myths and institutions. Although their rhetorical edge is at times too mean to be liberating, I found myself, as a white, middle-class male reviewer, squirming as some probes came duly home. But, passion apart, these essays are provocative because they raise serious epistemological questions. For Soelle, theory and practice flow together so closely that she would have her "theology become a prayer." That seems to me a proper, even traditional, desire; but theoretical arguments do arise out of the most prayerful practice, and she gives little help in handling them. Schussler Fiorenza handles the epistemological questions directly in discussing liberation theology and biblical hermeneutics . She will accept neither the doctrinal paradigm of Jon Sobrino nor the objectivism of Juan Miranda nor the contextualism of Juan Segundo. Her way out of the hermeneutic circle is an " option for the oppressed " which allows her to fight all forms of male domination including the God presented in many parts of the biblical and theological tradition. One problem which Soelle and Schussler Fiorenza raise is that the " option for the oppressed " seems itself to stand almost beyond discussion, indeed beyond reflective discourse. How does one reflect on options and oppressions unless there is some purchase outside the option itself? How does Soelle read or converse with white males whose normal sentence comes to her as unintelligible? How does Schussler Fiorenza avoid the balkanization of theology and of religious life? Why should their options be mine? Or should they? As David Tracy points out in his valuable introduction, we are brought back to " the crisis of cognitive claims." It is a matter which Fowler approaches in his distinction between different types of black liberation theology, some of which, including Cone's, he regards as functioning at an ideological level and others...