Revelation, the Religions, and Violence

Revelation, the Religions, and Violence. By Leo D. Lefebure. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2000. xvii + 244 pp. $20.00 (paper).

Leo Lefebure's book arrived at my office just in time. The bookstore was forcing me to decide what books I wanted to teach for the next semester long before I was ready. Ambitious and comprehensive, this book perfectly fits the goals of our senior seminar on the nature of religion. The title of the book says it all. Lefebure covers nearly everything, and his clarity and depth are impressive. The book does not answer all of the questions it raises, but it might teach as much through its failures as its successes.

A veteran of religious dialogue, Lefebure is especially concerned about the violence that he sees as an integral part of Christian history. To understand this violence, he both appropriates and criticizes the work of Rene Girard. Lefebure does not like the way Girard privileges biblical revelation or insists on the foundational role of scapegoating. One is tempted to ask why Lefebure uses Girard at all, since he strips him of much that makes him so fascinating. Moreover, Girard tends to drop out of Lefebure's book as it progress, making only brief appearances in a discussion of John the Baptist and Buddhism.

Lefebure's real focus is the wisdom tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures. He presents the wisdom literature as the universal dimension to the particular revelation at Sinai. He thus places the history of Israel in the cosmic context of wisdom, rather than showing how wisdom functions as a way of making sense of God's choice of Israel. Lefebure then argues that Jesus too was a wisdom teacher who called into question any final comprehension of God. Biblical revelation is thus open to learning about God from other sources.

Lefebure does not try to harmonize the Bible's views on violence. Instead, he basically contrasts the divine warrior of the Old Testament with the Gospel of the Crucified God, while being sensitive to the violent language of the New Testament concerning the Jews. He then surveys how these mixed notions of violence and revelation guided the Church's interpretation of other religions. This is a balanced and sensitive treatment that covers the early history of the Church as well as church relations with nearly every world religion.

Christianity is essentially divided, Lefebure argues, between the love ethic of Jesus and the violent language that pervades both testaments. Lefebure, a Roman Catholic theologian, resists reducing all religions to the same basic message. Despairing of any theoretical solution to the problem of religious pluralism, he trusts in the intimacy and exchange of personal dialogue. Combining wisdom theology with scientific chaos theory, he suggests that we cannot control or predict the outcomes of religious dialogue.

To illustrate his thesis, Lefebure stages a paradigmatic dialogue between Karl Rahner and Masao Abe. Both thinkers privilege a prethematic understanding of the ultimate horizon that shapes all meaning and discourse, so it is relatively easy to see how they could agree on so much. It would be more difficult to stage a dialogue between thinkers who do not share their transcendental idealism. Lefebure is surely too utopian about the transformative potential of personal contact, and he comes close to portraying religious dialogue itself as a source of salvation. The meeting of religions should not be equated with the encounter with God. Nonetheless, there is much wisdom in this book, and it covers so much ground with so much grace, that I am betting that it will prove a very useful tool in the classroom.

STEPHEN H. WEBB

Wabash College Crawfordsville, Indiana

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Fall 2001
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