Divine Revolution: Salvation and Liberation in Catholic Thought.

Dean Brackley is one of the Jesuits who went to El Salvador to replace the Jesuit professors who had been murdered in 1989 at the Universidad CentroAmerica. An American trained at the University of Chicago, he had worked in the Bronx as an organizer and pastoral worker. This book, reflecting the author's background Divine Revolution: Salvation & Liberation in Catholic Thought as both a Jesuit activist and an academic, investigates a straightforward but very complex issue: What is the intimate relationship between salvation and liberation? To put the issue in other terms: Is there a continuity between transcendent salvation and immanent liberation? Are those terms discrete or badly posed or in dialectical relationship?

Brackley chose three thinkers who constructed classic paradigms to relate Christian faith to contemporary social life. Jacques Maritain's "integral humanism" was a sophisticated scholastic model of the relationship between the temporal order (the world of time, politics, society, the perishable) and the spiritual order whose end is the contemplation of the truth which is God. The right ordering of the former is understood to lead us to an appreciation of the latter. These realms are inseparable but also distinct.

Karl Rahner, by contrast, argued forcefully that the order of redemption is within the order of creation. The "supernatural existential" (Rahner's famous neologism) means that, in Brackley's words, "the offer of salvation stamps every aspect of human existence, not from without but from within." The common critique of Rahner is that he is insufficiently political (Metz) or that his rather optimistic view of the world does not take seriously enough the fallen nature of humankind, both individual and social (Moltmann).

Gustavo Gutierrez, aware of those criticisms, knew that to create a fully adequate theology one had to ask: What is the relationship between salvation and the historical process of human liberation? Gutierrez understood liberation to be a triad: political, human liberation allows for human freedom and solidarity and, finally, liberation from sin, so that one might enjoy communion with God and with others. That latter form of liberation has mostly preoccupied Gutierrez in his later books, including his great meditation on the Book of Job and his classic work on spirituality, We Drink from Our Own Wells (1983).

After an analysis of these three seminal thinkers, Brackley adds some further reflections taken from feminist thinkers and from the Basque Jesuit, Ignacio Ellacuria, his martyred colleague, as well as from Ellacuria's mentor, the philosopher Xavier Zubiri. All of their work was oriented toward overcoming dualisms between nature/grace or transcendence/immanence or history/eternity. Brackley himself is much taken by the notion of "transcendence in history" - an idea that Ellacuria gets from Zubiri.

Brackley concludes with a meditation on Jesus and the reign of God. For my taste, it was an extremely satisfying but all-too brief reflection on the New Testament teaching about Jesus' preaching of the kingdom. Especially provocative is Brackley's analysis of the Beatitudes, drawing on the exhaustive research of Jacques Dupont, and concluding, in a wonderful phrase, that God "does not take the side of the poor because they are good but because God is good and compassionate to those who suffer."

Drawing on a number of fine studies, Brackley makes some fine points. Let me cite one example. Jesus, according to a oft-cited passage in Mark (14:7), says that the "poor you will have with you always." Brackley notes that this is a very inadequate translation of the Greek, which uses the present, not the future tense. Hence, the sense is something like: "The poor you have around you all the time." This can be read as, "Whatever you will, you can do good to them, but you do not always have Me." What Brackley says on this issue complements materials in Osborne and Richard.

I suspect that the earlier, more academic part of Brackley's book derives from dissertation work. It is not without interest and it is certainly fair and balanced, if somewhat dated. Brackley does not dismiss Maritain, nor does he accept the early Gutierrez without comment on his weaknesses. But the best part of the book, in my estimation, is Brackley's own passionate commitment to the New Testament message of Jesus. Indeed, I wanted more along these lines. Perhaps the author, refined by his experiences North and South of the border, will take up his pen again. As Jon Sobrino says in the foreword to this book, what is at stake is not a theoretical debate but the very credibility of Christian belief itself.

Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame.