Abstract
Many Christians over the past fifty years have been drawn to the powerful witness to the Gospel found within the Salvadoran church: to Óscar Romero, Rutilio Grande, Dorothy Kazel, Ignacio Ellacuría, and others. Yet these figures (mostly men, clerics, or religious) often seem to rise up mythically above the Salvadoran people, reflecting a discourse of solidarity which stubbornly insists on “the privileged and powerful as the normative protagonists of Christian faith” (3). Re-Membering the Reign of God takes a decidedly different path by placing the witness of Salvadoran communidades ecclesiales de base (CEBs) at the center of what it means to be a church journeying towards the reign of God. What results is a powerful, insightful, and much-needed work in contemporary ecclesiology.
As the subtitle of the work suggests, this is a work in decolonial theology. The CEBs are presented as an embodiment of decolonial praxis, as offering us a concrete instantiation of a new way of knowing, being, and acting. Thus, the thesis of the book: “the Salvadoran CEBs, as a self-identified embodiment of the church of lxs pobres in El Salvador, are a decolonial sacrament of the reign of God in human history. As such, they can and should inform the way we think about and act upon what it means to be the church and journey toward God’s reign in a world of enduring coloniality” (19). Such a vision creates, as the authors recognize, two acute challenges. First, the very act of writing a book about the CEBs risks recentering the voices of two white, US theologians; and second, the discourse of decoloniality risks imposing a foreign analytical frame, for as G. and P. note, “the CEBs themselves do not use academic language to categorize their way of being church as explicitly ‘decolonial’ (they understand themselves first and foremost as Christian communities)” (8).
The first challenge is met well, and this is the real gift of the book: after the introduction, the authors devote 150 pages to a curated set of narratives, histories, songs, and poetry from the CEBs themselves. These texts offer a multivocal account of how the CEBs have remembered and responded to their history and how they tell their own stories as individuals and communities. One encounters here a sacred history of conversion to the reign of God, of mutual solidarity, of persecution from within and without the church, and of the journey to be a true church of lxs pobres. Many of these twenty-two entries could be used individually in a wide variety of courses, and, as a whole, they offer scholars a vivid and moving encounter with the witness of the CEBs of El Salvador. In the second part of the book—five traditional academic chapters—the voices of the CEBs remain central. Rather than becoming ornamental, the witness of the CEBs remain foundational for the authors’ theological arguments.
Evaluating how well the authors succeed in the face of the second challenge is more difficult (and will probably depend upon the one’s assessment of decolonial theory). Every set of framing concepts will illuminate some aspects of the reality under investigation and obscure others. Reading the CEBs as “a decolonial reality that resists and subverts the coloniality of the world as we know it,” as a “decolonial sacrament of God’s reign” is no different (189). On the one hand, G. and P. make a strong case for these CEBs as a site of true decolonial praxis and a source of wisdom for resisting the structures of coloniality in our world. The decolonial demand to oppose coloniality’s epistemological and ontological ambitions with new ways of knowing, being, and acting clarifies the witness of these CEBs themselves as well as what a decolonial path could look like more broadly.
On the other hand, the focus on the drawing out the “decolonial horizons” (20) risks an overly narrow (though still illuminating) reception of the witness of the CEBs. Among a diverse set of ecclesial positions within the world of lxs pobres (within the CEBs and beyond), the analytical impulse to sort people and structures into agents of either colonial domination or decolonial resistance significantly determines what is ultimately lifted up as serving God’s reign. The method makes it difficult to see and praise the ways the lives of lxs pobres cross and complicate decolonial categories (and how the witness of the CEBs may challenge assumptions in decolonial studies). For just one example, G. and P. more or less reject the usefulness of the concept of mestizaje because of the way it has been used to marginalize indigenous identity in El Salvador (279, n.7); however, without some alternative language like this, it becomes harder to illuminate and fully affirm the complex and diverse navigation of mixed worlds and mixed identities among lxs pobres.
These concerns aside, this book is one of the finest presentations of the witness of the Salvadoran church to date. It offers both an encounter with the theological depths of the CEBs and a model of a theology that genuinely affirms lxs pobres as the true protagonists of the reign of God. In this light, the text concludes with a powerful challenge to any theologian in the United States who seeks to counter the coloniality of our world: not what must we do, but “what must be done to us” (337, emphasis original).