BOOK REVIEW

Robert J. Schreiter, The New Catholicity: Theology between the Global and the Local (New York: Orbis Book, 2000), pp. 140.

Book review by M. Ndomba Ngoma


The aim of Robert Schreiter’s book (New Catholicity: Theology between the global and the local) is to suggest a theological response to the change of context and circumstances inherent in the phenomenon of globalization. For him the concept of new catholicity is the appropriate paradigm or framework of which the Church might understand itself and its mission at the age of globalization. Any theology needs to attend both its contextual and its universalizing dimensions. Attending the new context of globalization gives a new shape to theology.

Robert Schreiter starts his reflection by analyzing the meaning of globalization and the context of theology. For him globalization is about the “increasingly interconnected character of the political, economic, and social life of the peoples on this planet” (p.5). Three processes have shaped the globalization phenomenon: political (with the fall of communism in 1989, the world has moved from a bipolar to a multipolar world), economical (the world-wide expansion of market capitalism as a single world economy), and technological (especially with the new communications technologies). Globalization is the convergence of these three aspects. In fact it is on the one hand an extension throughout the entire world of positive and negative effects of modernity; and on the other hand, it is the compression of the world. With means of communications (Television, internet…), we participate in world history simultaneously. The flow of information and capital does not consider the boundaries between States. However the intercultural encounter between the global and the local (also called glocalization) is conflictual.

If there are global systems in economics, science, medicine, and education, religion does not function as global systems. So the role of religion in the globalized world is only a powerful and unified force in smaller scale levels such as a nation or a region. It can mobilize antisystemic feelings in cultures, and can provide answers to problems created by global system. It can shape the vision of coherence and order that the global system lacks.

There are in fact four global theological flows addressing the contradictions or failures of global systems: liberation theology, feminist theology, ecology theology, and human rights theology. These theological flows are so ubiquitous that they can be considered as universal theologies. They do not go without the “cultural logics” coming from the local situations. There are three cultural logics animating theology today: first, antiglobalism (manifest in fundamentalist forms of conservative responses to modernity and to globalization) and revanchism (attempt to regain territory where it has been lost); Second, ethnification (the process of rediscovering a forgotten identity based on one’s cultural ties); Third, primitivism (attempt to go back to an earlier, premodern period to find a frame of reference and meaning in order to give focus and direction to the present).

Globalization has changed the context of theology. This new context is characterized by three elements. The first element is deterritorialization. With the compression of space, there are no boundaries of territory any more, rather boundaries of difference which highlight issues of difference rather than elements of commonality as the basis for identity. The second is hyperdifferentiation. It is the multiculturalism in which people struggle to find a “way of dealing with a variety of cultures, or fragments of cultures, occupying the same space” (p.26). The third element is hybridization which makes the purity of culture an untenable concept.

This situation of multiculturalism stresses the importance of intercultural communication shaping the intercultural hermeneutics. Intercultural communication might be defined as the ability to speak and to understand across cultural boundaries. The epistemology of the intercultural hermeneutics has four characteristics. First, the meaning, which comes from the social judgment of those involved in the intercultural communication event. Social judgment entails the interaction of all parties in establishing meaning. Second, truth is embedded in the narratives of living communities. Third, intercultural hermeneutics balances differences and sameness. It is wary of homogenization and resists easy absorption or assimilations. “Balancing difference and sameness has ethical as well as epistemological significance. Denial of difference can lead to the colonization of a culture and its imagination. Denial of similarities promotes and anomic situation where no dialogue appears possible and only power will prevail” (p.43). Fourth, intercultural hermeneutics emphasizes the importance of the agency. “There can be no passive or inert players in the intercultural communication event, no subjects robbed of their subjectivity” (p. 43).

The concept of culture itself is also undergoing changes. Two sets of concepts of culture can be identified. First, integrated concepts of culture depict culture as “patterned systems in which the various elements are coordinated in such a fashion as to create a unified whole. The patterned nature provides a sense of recurrence and sameness that gives to those who participate in the culture a certain identity (the etymological root of which is “same”). The familiarity of the patterns offers a sense of security and of being “at home” (pp. 48-49.) Second, globalized concepts of culture reflect the tensions and pressures arising out of the globalization process. They are found first in postcolonial theory where culture is “not understood in terms of ideas and objects, but principally as a ground of contest in relations”. Culture here is something to be constructed rather than discovered, and it is mapped out on the axes of sameness and difference, comparability and incommensurability, cohesion and dispersion, collaboration and resistance. “Diversity is prized, but difference is valued even more highly.” Globalized concepts of culture are also found in the globalization process made of networks of communication, symbols and patterns circulating through various regions. “Global culture in this sense is a hyperculture or a cultural flow that moves in and out of local cultures, but is constituted as a culture itself only in the mind or in fantasy” (p. 55). The two sets of concepts of culture have strengths and weaknesses which influence theology.

The cultural flow raises the issue of religious identity which, in this situation, can only be defined between synthesis and syncretism.

These different changes in social and cultural context show that contextual theology in Europe as well as in the Third World should take new directions. In Europe there are three elements which will constitute the focus of contextual theology: secularization, dechristianisation, and the reality of a multicultural society. In the Third World, liberation theology should also operate a shift. In fact though there still is the situation of the poor, there has been, since the end of socialism, the loss of a horizon of utopia and prophecy which constituted the basis of the theology of liberation. Liberation theology should imagine an alternative utopian horizon. Charles Villa-Vicencio’s theology of reconstruction may be one of the new directions of the theology of liberation. The theological task of the theology of liberation in consideration of the changes of circumstances is (i) to determine the mode of response which is most appropriate and most effective in its setting, (ii) to explore the Scriptures and subsequent tradition, and to find the images and narratives that give rise to utopian vision and hope, (iii) to seek for provisional definitions of human and of a just society to which the message of the Gospel can contribute, and (iv) to elaborate an interdisciplinary approach of liberation theology especially in situations of reconstruction.

Now the work ahead is the one of bringing globalization theory into closer dialogue with theology. This work can only be done by finding concepts in theology that globalization can inform but not determine. The most appropriate concept is the one of new catholicity. New Catholicity means new wholeness, fullness of faith and exchange and intercultural communication. “New Catholicity is marked by a wholeness of inclusion and fullness of faith in a pattern of intercultural exchange and communication. To the extent that this catholicity can be realized, it may provide a paradigm for what a universal theology might look like today, able to encompass both sameness and difference, rooted in an orthopraxis, providing teloi for a globalized society”(pp.132-133).

This book is highly commended for applying the subject of a previous book of Robert Schreiter on constructing local theologies.[1] The importance of this book comes therefore from the importance of contextual theologies in the Church. Contextual theologies update the understanding of faith and keep it alive. The book seems then to answer the question of how to keep alive faith at the age of globalization. Thus the importance of this book lies more on the new horizon of theology it is pointing to, than on the concept of new catholicity it has coined. Its importance lies not only on defining a new paradigm for contextual theology but also in giving a push for new horizons in theology.

[1] Robert J. Schreiter, Constructing Local Theologies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1985).