261 - To Work and To Love: A Theology of Creation

To Work and To Love: A Theology of Creation
By Dorothee Soelle with Shirley A. Cloyes
Philadelphia, Fortress, 1984. 165 pp. $7.95.

This book was born in a lecture series by Dorothee Soelle at Union Theological Seminary, New York, and she gives gracious credit to the collegial work of Shirley Cloyes on the lecture manuscripts. The book emerged, says Soelle, "out of my own struggle to agree with God and to learn to praise creation" (p. 1). "This book," she writes, "is an attempt to affirm our being created and becoming creators, being liberated and becoming agents of liberation, being loved and becoming lovers" (p. 157). It is not only an attempt. It is a resounding and compelling affirmation.

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Soelle is Harry Emerson Fosdick Visiting Professor at Union and regularly teaches also in her native Germany. As part of the European peace movement, she has marched in the streets to oppose "exterminism"-the rape of the earth, the war against the poor, and the nuclear threat. That is one major motivation for the book. The other is found in her own theological journey from the secular city to the search for holy ground, a journey captured in one of her haunting sentences: "It may be that I am homesick for God and have been for a long time" (p. 5).

Soelle's themes come from Freud's notable definition of the sane person as one who is able to work and to love. Her social analysis is strongly Marxist. Contrary to interpretations of Marx that would find him reductionistic, atheistic, and merely economistic, she locates him solidly in the prophetic biblical tradition, wherein the criterion of faith is human empowerment to love and to do justice.

With Marx, then, she is committed to a socio-economic analysis which both uncovers the inherent contradictions in the historical situation and also identifies the agents of change. The contradictions in today's work in North America and Europe are that it alienates workers from both the product and meaning of their work, a prostitution which identifies their labors (and hence workers themselves) simply with the exchange value-money. Correspondingly, sexuality is reduced from its created intent (fulfilling the human need for interrelatedness and communion) to a genital, orgasmic commodity of sexual objects that leave us unfulfilled. Both work and sexuality are thus experienced under the biblical curse.

To this social analysis, Soelle brings her strongly liberationist, incarnational, relational theology. She envisions work not in essence as God's curse, but rather as God's intent for human liberation. Liberating work has three basic dimensions: self-expression (as in Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement), social relatedness (a spiritual relationship of the worker to community), and reconciliation with nature (as opposed to the distorted masculinism which would dominate the earth, and with it the poor).

Soelle argues for a radical vision of sexuality, a vision that goes beyond the liberal's advocacy of private, interpersonal freedom for adults. A redeemed, liberating sexuality is marked by genuine mutuality (not simply genitality). ft is an erotic connection with the world (not simply a private contract). It is an expression of ecstasy and trust, a bonding of persons in solidarity with creation's oneness.

As in her previous books, Dorothee Soelle is compelling, both in description of our sin and of the liberating gospel. She never succumbs to the privatism and individualism of so much theological reflection. My only postscript to her trenchant analysis is this: While it is surely true that alienated work often drives us toward sexuality-as-commodity, it can also drive us to depend too much upon a privatized sexual communion for our meaning. This latter dynamic surely fits with the author's general analysis and perhaps deserves emphasis as well as the former.

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For it is such an idolatry of privatized sexuality that itself also encourages the sexual alienation which Soelle so keenly portrays.

Freud, Soelle, and the Scriptures are right: To work and to love are, indeed, central to our humanization. The genius of this book is its fresh insight into their interrelation, both in our estrangement and in our reconciliation. In reconciled work and sexuality, we become quite literally co-creators with God. Soelle's final lines sum it up: " 'Lover of the living' is an old name for God (Wis. of Sol. 11:26). So shall it be our name for evermore" (p. 165). Her book contributes significantly to that very possibility.

James B. Nelson
United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities
New Brighton, Minnesota