Growing out of a series of public lectures presented to a large audience of non-theologians, this book is one of the most attractive introductions to theology to appear in recent years. Perhaps, as the author herself indicates, introduction is not the best word to describe the book. For above all, the book is an invitation to share Dorothee Solle s enthusiasm for theology, and her delight in the beauty and the power of religious and theological language and the themes it expresses. Thinking about God covers all of the major areas of modern theology. After discussing the nature of systematic theology and comparing orthodox, liberal, and radical approaches, it looks at the use of the Bible in theology. Then follow chapters on creation, sin, feminist liberation theology, the understanding of grace, black theology, Jesus, cross and resurrection, the kingdom of God and the church, the theology of peace, the end of theism, and the question of God. A bibliography is provided at the end of each chapter, and Dorothee Solle, who is familiar with theology on both sides of the Atlantic, has herself revised the entries for the English-language edition. Dorothee Solle has taught philosophy, literature, and theology at several German universities, and has been on the faculty of Union Theological Seminary, New York.
Dorothee presents a beautiful introduction to liberation theology. By showing readers how to move past an authoritarian orthodox theology that dogmatizes mysteries and a relativizing liberal theology that strips context for transcendental truths, she paints a method of liberation theology which dives into the social, economic, and political context of the Bible to understand it as a message for the poor by the poor to liberate the poor. This movement is best seen in her discussion of the virgin birth: for the orthodox it is a somewhat arbitrary belief that you must hold, for the liberal it is a relic of pre-scientific thought, but for the liberation theologian the picture of the poor, unmarried, young Mary who is pregnant with the Saviour becomes a source of hope to those who find themselves in the same situation. Christians cannot be found merely holding to beliefs, but true political action with and on behalf of those who have been victimized by the systems of power we live in.
“One of the catastrophic consequences of capitalism is what it does to rich people at the heart of this economic system by reducing humanity to the individual. One can see how American commercialism presents all items as being ‘quite personal to you’, even if it millions of them exist. Your initials must be in your t-shirt, on your ball-point pen, on your bag - and on your Jesus. He too is quite personal to you. The spirit of commercial culture is also alive in this religion: for fundamentalism, which is massively effective, Jesus is ‘my quite personal Saviour’, and really no more can be said than that. The confession of ‘Jesus Christ - my personal Saviour’ brings no hope to those whom our system condemns to die of famine. It is a pious statement which is quite indifferent to the poor and completely lacking in hope for all of us.”
“In that case what we call ‘God’ appears in our everyday affairs. The compassionate man from Samaria finds God and is found by God on the road. So, too, the truth, love, beauty of God can shine forth in our everyday life. The mystics have always said that God is as it were lying on the streets, if only we could learn to see.”
This book contains quite a bit of provocative wisdom. Despite its rather bland title, which ostensibly connotes a simple introduction to God-talk (albeit in relation to Christianity alone, which is not abundantly clear), Dorothee Soelle’s collection of lectures and essays reflects her own radical and often controversial position in Christian circles and her commitment to a liberation Christianity inspired by Gustavo Gutierrez and feminist philosophy. While not discussed in this text, Soelle first introduced the term “Christofascism” to describe fundamentalist Christianity and its tendency to embrace the status quo in our current sociopolitical context; she rejected Christian triumphalism, imperialism, and militarism, and openly identified as a political leftist. Soelle also worked extensively in a South American Christian context, and her face-to-face encounters with South American workers coupled with her familiarity with the Christian liberation tradition there inflects many of her claims in these essays. Thus, while Soelle is not necessarily an “objective” writer with whom to think about Christianity, she provides a much-needed, and wonderfully modern, framework with which to approach orthodox Christian ideas. Moreover, she consistently presents orthodox, liberal, and liberation perspectives in relation to each of the concepts she discusses, which include creation, sin, peace, resurrection, the use of Scripture, Christ, and even theism itself. Finally, Soelle is charitable to each of these traditions, even when she objects to some of their core assumptions. Her admiration extends to orthodox thinkers such as Karl Barth and liberal writers such as Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Ultimately, however, Soelle finds the simple, social justice-oriented ideas of Peruvian or Guatemalan workers and priests most instructive in her attempt to reframe and revise tired and misunderstood Christian doctrines.
The easiest and perhaps most accurate way to summarize Soelle’s views is to say that she believes that God is on the side of the poor, that Christianity concerns God’s liberation, and that most modern iterations of Christianity in the developed world are inadequate to address systemic oppression and injustice. Soelle also firmly believes in the circular movement from praxis to theoretical reflection then back to praxis—that is, the notion that action inspires reflection which then modifies our future action, and helps repel an ossified Christian intellectualism that seldom touches real people’s lives. While Soelle’s commitment to a liberation framework is manifest from the outset, her belief in the power of that framework develops over the course of the book. In the first few chapters, she therefore traces historical movements from orthodoxy, with its insistence on correct belief and faith in revealed truth, toward liberalism, with its tendencies toward the historicization and contextualization of Scripture and its commitment to the validity of science, toward liberation ideas, wherein Christians are collaborators in God’s work of liberation and which prioritizes the perspectives of the poor, women, and victims of oppression. She uses this same method in relation to each of these three discourses to address each tradition’s use of the Bible, creation, and sin. Other chapters explore feminist and black liberation perspectives, and in the final chapters, Soelle takes seriously questions about theism and the nature of God (God as omnipotent ruler, God as relation, or God as the expression and source of shared, liberatory power, for example). The scope of this short book is therefore extremely impressive. It is both a helpful primer and a fecund source of important questions and ideas for students and new researchers.
Given this scope, I will include here just a few quotes I found especially incisive and useful to keep in mind. On Christianity and politics, Soelle writes: “The separation of church and state has not functioned either in a positive way, for the landless peasants or for the industrial proletariat . . . or even in a conservative way,” as it has not protected the poorest in society. On the end of theism: “The ‘abolition of the necessity of God’ can only relate to a God who is [conceived] in Greek terms.” On sin: “Sin is injustice, and God is understood as justice within the biblical tradition.” On work and alienation: “Work makes us less than we really should be. It destroys us, alienates us from ourselves. Paul says of the power of sin that I am ‘sold under it.’ ‘For what I would I do not, but what I hate, that I do’ (Romans 7:14) . . . This is the most everyday experience of the majority of people.” On Scripture and feminism: “We see that the Bible is an androcentric and patriarchal document, but at the same time we discover in it a fundamental opposition to these traditions; we read it as a book of justice, aimed at liberation from all the bonds that enslave us.” On literalism and the word of God: “In [the Bible] speak people who have responded to the call of God but who—as males of their time—have missed, denied or perverted the call of God to justice.” On Jesus and what it means to accept Christ as the redeemer of the world: “My personal tie to Christ is bound up with my economic, political and sexual life. . . . The acceptance of Jesus binds me to others, and the ‘for me’ become ‘for us.’” On the symbolism of the cross: “Such are the different ways in which the cross can be understood: as a symbol of desperation, humiliation and torment, and as an instrument of domination. . . . In our creed we have, ‘He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified.’ That is historical, political information.” On the resurrection of Christ and that Jesus’s death on the cross “was not the end of his career”: “For me it is still the simplest, non-miraculous formulation of the resurrection to say that they could not do away with him. . . . What his life meant, what his spirit was, what his disciples did, this ‘yes’ to God’s will lived, and lives today, and this life appears in the cross.” On the connection between Christianity and resistance: “Christians in the Nazi period conformed with the Nazis, and Christians today are economic conformists, even if this conformity involves the destruction of God’s creation.”
As is evident, I hope, from this selection of quotes, Soelle is an bold, provocative thinker untethered to the claims of authority in the vein of Bonhoeffer, Tillich, Delores Williams, James Cone, Cornel West, and Walter Rauschenbusch. This is a text I intend to keep at hand, whenever I may need to rethink a difficult Christian idea, the role of the modern Church, or my own faith. Soelle’s wisdom is what I believe middle class Christians in Europe and North America most need to hear, especially at this perilous social, political, and environmental moment.
THE GERMAN THEOLOGIAN INTERPRETS GOD AND CHRISTIAN FAITH
Dorothee Steffensky-Sölle [Soelle] (1929-2003) was a German liberation theologian who taught systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary from 1975 to 1987. She wrote many books, such as Against the Wind: Memoir of a Radical Christian; Thinking About God: An Introduction to Theology; The Strength of the Weak: Toward a Christian Feminist Identity; On Earth as in Heaven: A Liberation Spirituality of Sharing; Celebrating Resistance: The Way of the Cross in Latin America; Political Theology, etc.
She wrote in the Preface to this 1990 book, “This book developed out of several classes I taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York City… In revising the text I have largely kept the lecture form and also incorporated questions and contributions from the audience and those many fellow teachers to whom I express my gratitude.”
She observes, “Theology has the task of interpreting scripture and tradition in a particular historical situation for the community of believers… There is no one theology, but extremely different theologies, even in one and the same historical situation… I would like to distinguish in a paradigmatic way three different forms of theology which seem to me to be relevant today… I know the three present basic frameworks of orthodox, liberal and radical theology, and understand them as three houses build in different periods of faith. I would like to invite you to enter them and look around. How are the basic concepts of Christian faith interpreted within these different paradigms?... How are creation, sin, grace, resurrection, church interpreted in these theological paradigms?” (Pg. 7)
She notes, “God is always greater than any talk of God. I think that it is immediately evident that God must be more than all our words, that God always means something more behind them, something that we perhaps have not formulated at all, that God ‘is’ essentially, ontologically, something ‘other’ than a table, if one is going to use the verb to ‘be’ here at all… Symbolic language is language which must remain aware of its own limitations. Dogma is then symbolic God-talk from a paradigm which is now finished and has become largely incomprehensible.” (Pg. 37)
She acknowledges, “Sometimes I hear the objection that my theology paints Christianity in too beautiful colours, and does not bring out its anti-human and destructive features clearly enough. It is certainly true that my interest is not so much in the tolling bells which ring out in the centres of power… I think that in the liberation theologies and base movements that are coming into being all over the world we have begun a new chapter of church history. It is indeed the shamed, those deprived of their rights, who… understand religion as their cause and not only make God their sanctuary and refuge but also proclaim God as their liberator… Of course I am ashamed of the stories of terror within the history of Christianity. But it is necessary to read history other than through the eyes of the rulers. There is a criticism of Christianity which is so fixated on authority that the oppressed history of the Christian masses, the poor, the women, cannot be seen at all and history as the negative counterpart triumphs once again over her-story, which is put to silence.” (Pg. 95-96)
She explains, “Here I just want to add a few personal comments, speaking for myself, on why I need this Jesus. Sharing in his dream, I call myself a Christian. My understanding of reality is shaped by the Jewish Christian tradition… This character of life as relationship also means that we always already live with, and under ‘images,’ former pictures of life or pictures handed on to us by others… The question is really only what comfort, what promise, these pictures offer us… The images of our advertising are icons of the religion of consumerism. The image of Christ is also an icon, but of quite a different life.” (Pg. 117-118)
She states, “It may surprise some people that in the sequence of these lectures God, the foundation of all theological reflection, becomes a theme only at the end… two reasons for this shift in construction should have become clear. One is the principle of contextuality, to which I am attempting to remain true; this makes it impossible for me to take God for granted without asking questions… it makes no sense to begin with God as a starting point if one wants to make oneself understood in context… The other reason why God becomes a theme only here, at the end, is connected with the hesitation, the restraint, over possessing a Logos about God which Martin Buber implanted on me. To pose the question of God then means asking how we can speak of God in such a way that God remains a ‘You’ and not in some sense… an ‘It.’ I shall begin with the end of theism. The conception of a supreme Being at the topo of the pyramid of being, which brought all orders into existence and sustains them, is no longer thinkable… theism as the natural assumption of God is incapable of communicating the experiences with God that people have today. And yet it is important to do that… Christians today experience an irreconcilable contradiction between the normal atheism of their world on the one hand and the real experiences of God on the other---and in these I include the suffering caused by the absence of God.” (Pg. 171-172)
She suggests, “And that brings me back to the beginning of this book, where I spoke of the experiences of God which… people have in the midst of this-worldlinesss. Theology is often the desperate attempt to make these experiences communicable, to hand on to others the bread of life which I eat with others, including the spiritually hungry by whom I am surrounded. Is it possible to communicate the certainty of God? I have great doubts about reflective theological language. I can relate my experiences of the presence of God in the same way as the friends of Jesus, women and men, told miracle stories. Reflection, analysis of reality, criticism of the world of death with which we are surrounded---in theory I can mention all that in the language of science. But theology requires more; it really calls for the impossible. As a handmaid of faith is should be helping to articulate the certainty of God.” (Pg. 193)
This book will be of keen interest to those studying Liberation Theology, as well as other Contemporary/Progressive forms of Christian theology.
Revisiting this book. I still think it is the best overview of contemporary theology out there. Soelle’s insight is really astounding and her organization is so neat and fair. She does, however, operate on a very high level of technical language, so this book is probably inaccessible for a lot of people, which is a shame. Although Soelle clearly (and explicitly) favors the liberationist theologies, her analysis is invaluable for anyone who wants to think critically about theology.
This was my first Dorothee Solle book, and I bought two more... I’m a fan.
In this book, she compares fundamental, liberal, and liberation theology in a number of different categories. Then she makes some really remarkable, insightful thoughts at the end about how our purpose is to bring the peace of God to earth- but not in an individual “I feel at peace” sense but rather that we can’t have peace until there is no more starvation and war, etc.
“Even today, many Christians think that one can live by bearing inwardly in one’s heart the peace of Christ which comforts us as individuals and relying outwardly on the Pax Romana and the order which it imposes by force... So we must understand the Pax Christi which comes into the world with the birth of Jesus as a history of peace making, a history of the interruption of violence.” (pg 160)