Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ

Theology Today, Oct 2000 by Brueggemann, Walter

I found this a hard read, but breath-taking. I have not read anything in a long time that so moved, so disturbed, and so educated. The author is not at all concerned to teach North American readers any direct lessons, beyond a passing allusion to "The School of the Americas." Nonetheless, the book is a powerful invitation for the church in the United States-Protestant as well as Catholic-to rethink its role and vocation in a society not reduced to barbarity but surely reduced to commodity. It is not the state but the corporate economy in our society that preempts the body politic and the bodies of both those who have money to spend and those who are left out by lacking such money. Like the state, the corporate economy makes community impossible, and we end with a privatized collection of consumers. For the most part, so it seems to me, the eucharist in much of Protestantism has been trivialized in a therapeutic mode without the marks of discipline that belong to a community of praise and obedience.

Such transposition of the argument from Chile to the United States is beyond the work of the book. Such questions are, however, inescapable for a reader of this book in the United States, and surely very close to the intent of Cavanaugh. It makes one wonder, in the United States context, how close the church is to "disappearing" in a mass of consumer goods and whether the reemergence of a "community of thanks" is now possible. The book stops short of such an implication. Nonetheless this book is a manifesto that is just short of agenda-setting. Let the reader beware.

WALTER BRUEGGEMANN

Columbia Theological Seminary Decatur, GA