600 - A Theology of Reconstruction: Nation-Building and Human Rights

A Theology of Reconstruction: Nation-Building and Human Rights
By Charles Villa-Vicencio
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992. 300 pp. $59.95, $18.95 (pb).

South Africa-born Charles Villa-Vicencio has earned a reputation as one of the sharp, incisive critics of the apartheid regime that has dominated his country during all of his adult life. Professor of Religion and Society at the University of Cape Town, he has written books and taken stands in church and secular political life that long ago accustomed him to the system-opposing role familiar in the biblical prophetic tradition and in the thrust of liberation theology.

Suddenly now, the world of South Africa is changing. It is changing because one great prop of its regime-fears of Soviet-based world communism-collapsed, and because one year later legal apartheid collapsed, too. This double change puts the political activist and academic critics of that land in a very new position: Now they have an opportunity to join in the law-making, constitution-writing, and restructuring of a new society.

How will liberation theologians respond to such an opportunity? Villa-Vicencio's new book is a timely early answer to the question. Central to the work is his definition of "a theology of reconstruction" as one that is...

...both contextually responsible, seeking to define the next logical step society is required to take at a given point in time, and socially transcendent in the sense of challenging society to reach forward to the social goals which form part of the social vision incorporated in the biblical metaphor of the reign of God.

In his outline and elaboration of such a theology, this South African walks some fine lines: between "the next logical step" for South Africa and next steps for very different societies like Eastern Europe; between new legal thinking as an outgrowth of mere logic and its rootage in historical regional tradition; among "first generation" civil rights dear to liberal democracy, "second generation" social rights equally dear to socialists, and new "third generation" ecological rights not yet very dear to either liberal or social democrats. Nonetheless the book is anything but a bewildered walk among all these claimants for a place in societies seeking humane renewal into the twenty-first century. Villa-Vicencio's economic vision, for example, calls for a transcending of "both the uncompromising greed-centered individualism

601 - A Theology of Reconstruction: Nation-Building and Human Rights

of free-market capitalism and the loss of individual worth associated with Eastern bloc statism." He believes that, these days, capitalists and socialists, ideologues and pragmatists, are all are having to learn from each other's successes and failures. In particular, he believes that South Africa must learn from its own unique history while listening to the evolving new politics of other "developing" nations. In his theological perspective, every nation on earth is still developing, including the United States.

Its inclusive purview makes this book as pertinent to American readers as to South Africans. A short review can hardly do it justice. It is exhaustively researched, densely written, and empowered with passion for the rescue of the world's human majority from the inhumanity of the social structures to which it has been subjected. Any reader of these pages will learn much about the state of worldwide debates on human rights, philosophies of law, the rights and wrongs of all current economic systems, and the potential service of theology to the building of societies that are just, compassionate, free, and life-sustaining.

Having benefitted from reading this author's books on the agonies of a church and a society caught in the iron cages of apartheid, I believe that A Theology of Reconstruction is Charles Villa-Vicencio at his best, responding with positive proposals for what a society should think and do when its cages begin to crumble. South African in viewpoint, the book invites us to think about human history, politics, and culture as the stuff of an emerging global, ecumenical conversation. It is a superb contribution to that conversation.

Donald W. Shriver, Jr.

Union Theological Seminary
New York, NY