Living in the Margins: Intentional Communities and the Art of Interpretation.

by Terry A. Veling Crossroad, $19.95, 244 pp.

On New Year's Day in 1994 the Zapatistas mounted an armed rebellion in the Southern Mexican state of Chiapas. Their grievances derived from a long history of federal neglect; the historic contempt for the region's largely non-Spanish-speaking indigenous population; the social consequences of NAFTA; the ruthless exploitation of the natural resources of Chiapas for the enrichment of the few; and the dry rot of Mexican politicians and the judiciary.

The dispute between the Chiapas revolutionaries and the Mexican government was eventually mediated by the local bishop, a Rome-trained Scripture scholar, Don Samuel Ruiz. Ruiz, in fact, is at the center of this book by the highly respected commentator on matters Central and Latin American, Gary MacEoin. What this journalist has to say is of intrinsic interest to anyone who would like to get a fix on the social and political realities of that part of the world.

As a theologian I was particularly intrigued by MacEoin's well-told story of how Don Ruiz, inspired by the reforms of Vatican II and the Latin American liberation theologians, had devoted his entire episcopal life to the service of the natives of Chiapas, who among them spoke five Mayan languages. Ruiz's vision of a church being built from the ground up has come into conflict with the restorationist winds blowing from Rome. Those restorationist impulses were given much intensity through the apostolic delegate in Mexico who, as MacEoin describes him, is not a nice person (to put it generously).

The larger issue that MacEoin's quite informative work raises, of course, is the health of liberation theology. The pope has recently pronounced it a passing phase which is now dying. My own instinct is to say that, however useful it may or may not be in any given social setting, its angle of vision, its way of reading the Bible, its focus on experience, has impacted theology in a fundamental way. In that sense, at least, it is far from dead. On the contrary, liberation theology has entered into, and gives sustenance to, all theology. More importantly, the insights of liberation theology are crucial for the process of inculturation. Bishop Ruiz understands that with clarity. He is also undoubtedly inspired by a man who was his predecessor as bishop of San Cristobal in Chiapas: Bartolome de Las Casas (1474-1566), the great protector of the native peoples of the Americas.

The papers collected by William Cenkner, first delivered at The Catholic University of America in 1993, are very much concerned with inculturation. A gathering of theologians focused its attention on the fact of the American church's increasing ethnic, linguistic, and racial diversity. Such diversity has been a hallmark of American Catholicism but the new "minorities" are, in fact, becoming visible majorities.

The theologians represented in these pages write both from the perspective of such minority churches (for example, Shawn Copeland on the African-American church and Orlando Espin from the Hispanic) and, more urgently, about the issues raised by such diverse communities. The late Pope Paul VI (in Evangelii nuntiandi) said that the problem of gospel and culture is the "drama of our age." Each of the essayists is acutely aware of that problem. The question of the meaning of culture runs like a basso continuo through these pages. Furthermore, the very diversity of these communities (when we speak of the "black church" do we mean African-American? West Indian? Haitian?) demands extended reflection on the local church and its relationship to the Great Church and vice versa; the issue of local autonomy and the temptation to sectarianism; and the overarching problem of how the gospel finds a local home and a habitation.

All of these questions get taken up in one form or another. One theme that seems particularly pertinent is the need to understand catholicity not as a sociological description or as a reified "mark" of the church but as a spiritual aspiration. Joseph Komonchak rightly highlights the renewed interest of understanding catholicity as "unity in diversity," and Roberto Gouizeta warns his fellow Hispanic theologians not to romanticize any bucolic retrospective vision of a simple Hispanic faith of popular religion; a warning not dissimilar to one raised by Orlando Espin in this volume.

What the participants really desire is what the Taiwanese theologian Choan-Seng Song calls, borrowing from the Buddhist lexicon, "third-eye theology," that is, that inner vision which permits us to see what has hitherto been hidden because of our own ignorance. It is precisely the merit of some of these writers to help us focus our "third eye" and allow us, however dimly, to see what the gospel looks like when it is seen and experienced by the Other.

Cenkner, in the introduction, announces that this is a first step into what he hopes will be a continuing conversation and an ongoing study. As these stimulating essays make clear, this is a worthwhile path to take. David Power, in a wonderful phrase in his essay, says that we have already experienced in theology the "turn to the subject." What Power warns against is the "loss of the subject." It is part of the project of these writers to see that the subjects of our many communities do not, in fact, become lost to a church which wishes to be truly catholic.

Veling is not interested primarily in the diverse ecclesial communities discussed in Cenkner's volume. In his opening pages Veling distinguishes between small groups (for example, Bible study circles, prayer meetings, etc. in parishes) and marginal communities which maintain a "critical distance from mainline churches (feminist groups; house churches, etc.). Among these marginal groups would be the base communities described by MacEoin but not the ethnic-based church communities which are the focus of Cenkner's volume.

In his concluding reflection, the author asserts that intentional communities maintain an educational and hermeneutical preference for openness, generativity, being on the way, and so on. More precisely, he demonstrates that such groups live in tension and dialogue with the larger tradition in a prophetic and critical manner. Hermeneutical theory is employed to demonstrate this.

Nevertheless, at one level the topic of intentional communities is largely submerged under a long discussion of hermeneutical theory. Veling's desire is to mediate between H. G. Gadamer's notion that hermeneutics should hold us somehow within the bonds of tradition and the critique of Habermas and company which is far more suspicious of an inherited tradition. In the argument laid out by Veling, one learns (or relearns) a good deal about contemporary critical debates but, alas, very little in the concrete about intentional communities. Veling never draws on empirical examples of specific communities like those studied by the Princeton sociologist of religion, Robert Wuthnow. As a consequence, intentional communities in this book exist only as a Weberian "ideal type."

The abstract quality of this work is a pity since, at least for the Catholic tradition, intentional communities have been a hallmark of its catholicity, and historico-social contextualization would have added weight to the argument. One could argue, for example, that the founding of both religious orders and "schools" of spirituality are, and continue to be, historical analogues (at least in their origins) to intentional communities and, further, that in many cases they existed in tension with the mainstream church as a prophetic, educational, and hermeneutical force. One might benefit, to cite an instance, on seeing liberation theology not as a theoretical construct but as a school of spirituality. Gustavo Gutierrez has done this in his seminal work, We Drink from Our Own Wells (1983).

I did learn a good deal from this book, especially from the discussion of the poet Edmond Jabes as well as from the author's capacity to find the mot juste (I like his observation that such groups can be thought of as "scribbling on the margins of tradition"). Furthermore, Veling's book can teach a good deal of hermeneutical theory. Its weakness, however, rests in the unremitting focus on methodology. One is reminded of Karl Rahner's observation about theoreticians of methodology: they are always sharpening the knife but they rarely cut the roast.

No contemporary theologian has more assiduously sharpened the methodological knife than the University of Chicago's David Tracy. In this collection of recent essays, however, Tracy says that modern theology has become obsessed with the "right method" and, while this obsession has yielded its own insights, there now comes a time when theology must move from the framework of logos to the central issue, which is Theos.

Indeed, as a number of his essays attest, it is the question of God in contemporary culture which is at the center of Tracy's current reflections. Indeed, not a few of these pieces could be seen as preliminary skirmishes for the major work which he has now undertaken.

It would be premature to say how Tracy intends to proceed, but certain things seem obvious. Good Catholic theologian that he is, he wishes both to retrieve the tradition and take account of the situation in which we now find ourselves. It is not simply a matter of proclaiming the truth in some Barthian fashion (although Tracy acknowledges the neoconservative demand for attention to tradition, authority, and continuity), nor of submitting to the critical acids of modernity. Tracy argues that in a pluralist, post-Holocaust, world it is the apophatic and prophetic impulses of our present condition that offer us the largest opportunity to rediscover God, "not as an 'ism' but as an awesome, often terrifying hope against hope." It is for these reasons, that Tracy postulates a need for a closer correlation between theology and spirituality (something already well begun by Gustavo Gutierrez) as well as a willingness to keep alive the "dangerous memory" of Jesus (J.B. Metz). It should not surprise those who have followed his work that Tracy sees God as essentially relational and, indeed, Trinitarian.

The "God essays" in this book were of most interest to me. But what Tracy has to say about how he views Catholicism in relation to the ecumenical enterprise is also quite valuable, as are his reflections on the universality of the Christian message (he makes the wonderful point that particularity does not erase universality; using, as an example, the particular day of Bloom in order to create a universal mythos in Joyce's Ulysses) and his observations about the plurality of readers and the need for a shared vision when reading the Bible.

In short: These essays provide us with brief entry into the thinking of a major Catholic theological voice and make us impatient for the major theological work which he has promised.

The essays in Kaplan's volume are very uneven contributions made at a conference held nearly ten years ago at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The focus was on how Christian missions were received from the perspective of indigenous people. As various of these essays demonstrate, not only did the missionaries have to accommodate their message to diverse kinds of milieu but, in some instances, the native culture also might restructure itself to meet the missionary challenge. Tamil-speaking Hindus responded in this way to largely Protestant evangelization. Other scenarios include the indigenization of the Christian message in those countries, such as Buddhist Thailand, that had a highly developed theology and praxis.

These and similar case studies (for example, of Pentecostal Christians in China or of messianic movements of Indians in nineteenth-century Mexico) make up the bulk of this book. The case studies are prefaced, however, by the editor's methodological essay setting out a menu of possible responses when missionary Christianity meets an unchristianized culture. These Christian responses ranged from mere (and grudging) toleration of the indigenous mores of the culture to a complete incorporation of the culture into the Christian life. This particular essay and the one following do sharpen up less precise descriptions of inculturation found in some Catholic literature.

I did pronounce this volume "uneven." First of all, the essays were written mainly by social scientists and historians who have read very little in the massive theological and missiological literature that has dealt with these issues. It also strikes me that save for the essays dealing with Latin America and Mexico, Catholics are more or less offstage and when they do appear some of the authors exhibit little knowledge of Catholicism, as well as a tin ear for Catholic praxis. My favorite example is the observation that the Thai sign of respect has substituted in Catholic churches "for the traditional Catholic curtsy."

All may genuflect now.

The methodological remarks may well interest the missiologist and/or theologian and the other essays are valuable as limited explorations of the topic at hand. Some light is shed on a few of the studies reviewed above as well. But given its price, this is probably a book best borrowed from the library.

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