The Underside of Reality. . - Books - book review

Joerge Rieger, Remember the Poor: The Challenge to Theology in the TwentyFirst Century. Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1998. 240pp. $19.00 (paper).

Joerge Rieger, God and the Excluded: Visions and Blindspots in Contemporary Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001. 310pp. $20.00 (paper).

Joerge Rieger is an impressive member of the rising new generation of U.S. theologians. In both of these two books he succeeds in binding together the impasse of current Western theology with the global crisis afflicting marginalized peoples of the Third and First Worlds. And he does so without resorting to simplistic versions of liberation theology, but by a careful framework that demonstrates the genuine commonalities of selfhood--commonalities shared by academic white theologians, Hispanic cleaning women, African-American sharecroppers, and Peruvian peasants. The framework is undergirded (and perhaps burdened) by the theories of the French postmodern philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

But in simplest terms his argument goes like this: Energized by a sense of the imperial self, Europeans have for centuries expanded across the seas, conquered colonies, and now through late capitalism they have brought virtually the whole globe under their domination. People of color, women, and all the marginalized and victimized have borne the weight of this oppression, and continue to do so to this day. Over the same span of centuries Western theology was also driven by a new sense of the entrepreneurial self, emerging from the older orthodoxies and trying to retain some traction within a society in the throes of modernizing. Both on the geo-political level and the conceptual level, the domineering self succeeded in these widening conquests. But it was only at the expense of dissociation and repression of aspects of the self deemed unacceptable -- namely, the oppressed classes of the world as well as the repressed unconscious of the Western mind. While for Christianity the process began as early as the Pro testant Reformation, it is Friedrich Schleiermacher who deserves his reputation as the father of modern theology. He was the first to make explicit this realignment of faith around the expansive self, so that all parts of church doctrine and practice come to be articulated from the self's feeling of absolute dependence. What could not be made explicit, however, since it was all the more deeply repressed into the unconscious, were the split-off fragments of the self. These splits paralleled nineteenth-century imperialism, the suppression of "the other," the colonized peoples of the world.

Liberal theology, then, expressed this turn to the self. For all its positive contributions, it also ended up sanctioning modernity's power struggles, the quest for globalization and unity (on European terms, of course). A new vision of authority resulted, now redefined as the ability to control, but with little regard for those peoples being subjected to such control, those who live on the underside.

Thus far, Rieger's two books overlap. But in addition to liberal Protestantism there are other ways of responding to the crisis of modernity. And it is at this point that the books diverge in their line of argument.

The earlier, Remember the Poor, focuses on comparing notions of authority and power in mainline Protestantism in North America with those of the Christendom model of Latin American Roman Catholic theology. In the latter, the power of the text (Thomistic theology allied with the political powers that be) offers the alternative to the turn to the self, although the modern self is still evident in colonial mentalities and the narcissistic and aggressive assimilation of native peoples. Rieger then supports his case with a chapter on the analytic framework offered by Jacques Lacan, who maintains that "the real" resists easy conceptualization and so we must seek the underside of reality by examining the repressions of the modern self. Next are helpful chapters on the most promising contemporary theologians of the two Americas who carry out that necessary task, Frederick Herzog and Gustavo Gutierrez. The remainder of the book, Part Three, is an exposition of the paradigm shift needed for meeting the theological cha llenge posed by the underside of history in the twenty-first century. The exposition, however, does not advance the argument much beyond the earlier two-thirds of the book or add much substance, but too often seems to wander inconclusively.

The subsequent book, God and the Excluded, is a stronger presentation, solid and with some interesting new lines of development. Instead of the comparison between North America and Latin America, leading to expositions of two featured theologians (Herzog and Gutierrez) as the antidotes, Rieger now confines himself to the Euro-American context and compares four modes of theology, both modern and postmodern. This is preceded by an initial chapter that succinctly sketches the widening gap between rich and poor around the world and links this to the impasse of recent Christian thought. "The crisis of theology is not primarily an intellectual crisis, as many theologians still think, but the fact that we have separated ourselves from most of humanity" (4). Inspired by "four discourses" posed by Lacan, Rieger then develops a nice comparison of the four (largely successive) types of theology. Especially the first three are built on generalizations about human nature that are actually not as universal as claimed, but which are class-based, reflecting the malaise of educated, middle-class Westerners.