God and the Excluded: Visions and Blind Spots in Contemporary Theology

God and Excluded: Visions and Blind Spots in Contemporary Theology. ByJoergRieger. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2001. 241 pp. $21.00 (paper). Joerg Rieger, Professor of Systematic at Perkins School of at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, acknowledges that his perspectives are biased by privilege. My position as a tenured theologian at a major theological school, as well as fact that I am male, white, middle class, and from a European background, seems to ensure that I can avoid seeing - let alone being among - excluded. It also seems to entitle me to continue to do theology as (p. ix). But like Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall, Rieger does not do theology as usual and for that we in America can be grateful. Hall and Rieger take very seriously context of their work, situated as they are in relative affluence of North America. That they make frequent and trenchant use of this context as foil and as illustration enhances value of their perspectives to those of us who share this context and are called to minister within it. God and Excluded is ambiguously titled; at first glance it could be mistaken for any number of books addressing theological perspectives of any number of people who count themselves as disenfranchised by reason of race, gender, sexuality, economics, or social or religious politics. Rieger does not disregard these particularities; he transcends them. so doing, he pushes reader into a thoughtful critique of contemporary theological scene. At beginning of twenty-first century, he writes, more so than ever before, it seems that we have managed to render invisible both people at margins and powers that hold them there. Although boom of economy and other recent success stories may have passed many of us by, most mainline theologians and church people are not forced to face recesses of suffering at margins of global economy and in ghettos of our cities (p. ix). And though his reference here is specifically to poverty, I suspect Rieger would accept that even that reference is too narrow, that marginality and power are at heart of his project. Central to that project is Rieger's premise that a blindness to other induces a blindness to The Other, that if one is truly to discern work and will of God, one must engage other. This notion is well illustrated in story of Jesus and Canaanite woman (Matt. 15:21-28), wherein Jesus engages one doubly marginalized by gender and culture, and in that encounter discovers breadth and breath of God in ways that expand and animate Jesus' own mission and ministry. Conditioned by his culture to pay litde attention to women and to shun Canaanites in particular, and actively reinforced in those strictures by his own disciples in story, Jesus is perilously close to Rieger's description of our own cultural milieu: In its eagerness to shape world for better, middle class does not realize that it is perpetuating structures of exclusion which leave out large parts of humanity (p. 36). Ignoring both his cultural conditioning and his disciples' urgings, Jesus engages woman, grants her request for healing of her child, subsequently and subversively transforming woman, her daughter, and himself. Rieger examines three familiar strands of extant theology: a Theology of Identity informed by work of Schleiermacher and preoccupation with self; a Theology of Difference shaped by neo-orthodoxy and Barth in particular, and emphasis upon God as Wholly Other; and a third category genetically identified as Theology and Postmodernity, in which work of Lindbeck illustrates dominance of language and text. each instance, Rieger examines the traditional guideposts of theological thought, such as questions of authority, critical reflection, and matters of doctrine (p. …

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