In the opening chapter of this book it soon becomes clear that the Professor of Christian Ethics at the University of Edinburgh is not among those who hold that the Christian religion should keep out of politics, and that he is among those who believe that Christianity’s usual political stance should be a critical one. This he holds to be the witness of the OT and NT, and it inclines him to prefer the sectarian Tertullian to the establishmentarian Eusebius, but the more subtle and ambiguous Augustine to both of them.

It also leads him, in Chapter Two, to argue against any position that removes politics in principle from the reach of theological scrutiny—whether espoused by Luther, Enlightenment philosophers, the secular theologians of the 1960s, Edward Norman, H.M. Kuitert, John Habgood or Roger Scruton.

Liberation theology takes the stage in Chapter Three and never strays far from the footlights in the ensuing chapters on the Bible, Christology and the Church, since the author judges it ‘the liveliest and most challenging school of political theology today’ (pp. 150–151). Perhaps the major point where Forrester reckons liberation theology to tell against its Western political alternatives—e.g. Moltmann (pp. 60–61)—is in its insistence that theology should be done in the service of those who are poor in economic, social and political terms here and now. In other words, it must be committed to the cause of ‘liberation’ in the actual context in which it finds itself. One of the salient characteristics of a theology that is engaged in such praxis is the seriousness with which it takes the task of social analysis—both of society in general and of the Christian churches in particular—in order to identify the peculiar forms that oppression takes in its own context and so to specify the kinds of liberation to be pursued.

Evangelicals will be especially interested in Professor Forrester’s account of liberation theology’s use of the Bible, and in particular in his comparison of it with fundamentalism (pp. 84–85). Although he does not state his own opinion directly, he does imply approval of the liberation theologians’ conservative assumption that valid analogies can be drawn between the Bible and today’s politics—pace Dennis Nineham and Jack Sanders (pp. 90–91)—and of their radical proposition that only those with the right political commitments are in a position to interpret Scripture properly. He is less critical than this reviewer would have liked of liberation theology’s tendency to take political liberation as the hermeneutical criterion, and so to regard as authoritative only those parts of Scripture that accord with it. For, even granted the necessity of some (provisional) canon by which to interpret the Canon, can liberation theology really be said to have a ‘high doctrine of Scriptural authority’ (p. 83) when its presuppositions about what the text should say sometimes lead it to take as authoritative what the text allegedly tries hard not to say (p. 102)?

Still, if Duncan Forrester finds in liberation theology’s use of Scripture perhaps a little too much to admire, he is by no means unaware of its weaknesses and limitations in other respects. He is implicitly critical of some liberation theology, for example, when he insists that political theology should aspire to the reciprocalinterpretation of the classical theological tradition and the political context, and not to the reduction of the former to the latter (pp. 127, 150). Moreover, he is quite sure that, for all its exemplary virtues, liberation theology is not the only valid form of political theology; indeed, according to its own canons different political contexts require different theologies (pp. 150–151). Accordingly, he can envisage situations where the prophetic, Augustinian model of political theology—of which he reckons liberation theology a species (p. 168)—would have little to offer: for example, where the church has the opportunity to give what he nicely calls ‘disturbing support’ to those who wander up and down the perplexing corridors of power (pp. 43, 105). In other words, there is even a time and a place for a more Eusebian approach (pp. 160–163).

Duncan Forrester has given us a very readable, jargon-free, historically informed and well balanced account of a topic that pervades theological discussion today. Students of theology at all levels and of a variety of theological and political persuasions will learn from it.

---