HOPE IN AN AGE OF DESPAIR
by Albert Nolan (Orbis Books)
Since the end of the 1960s one of the clearest, most reasoned and most passionate voices in what was then called liberation theology and is now called public theology has been a Cape Town-born Catholic priest of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans), Albert Nolan.
This volume is a collection of some of his most representative — and influential — essays, edited by one of his younger confreres, Stan Muyebe.
Although he has always written his work from the changing South African context, Nolan is one of the most popular, most widely read theologians of the last 40 years: his first book, Jesus Before Christianity (1976), is second only to Gustavo Gutierrez’s A Theology of Liberation (1969/1972, English edition) in the liberation theology bestseller league tables.
Having completed his doctorate in Rome, Nolan returned to South Africa in the late 1960s to combine work as a student chaplain with lecturing.
Very quickly he became part of the “church struggle” against apartheid — a struggle that informed almost all his work until 1994, including being one of the theological advisers behind the 1985 Kairos Document, issued by a group of black South African theologians, which challenged the churches’ response to the policies of the apartheid state under the state of emergency declared on July 21 that year.
In 1982 he was elected general of the Dominican friars worldwide, but turned it down to continue the theological dimension of the struggle in South Africa.
In 1988, while in hiding from the regime, he published God in South Africa, a landmark theological reflection on why the Christian presence in the struggle was essential for faith. In 2006 he produced his third book, Jesus Today: A Spirituality of Radical Freedom, a book that addressed the meaning of Christianity in a post-apartheid, globalised world.
In 2008 his order awarded him their highest accolade, the STM (Master in Sacred Theology) — the equivalent of a university’s honorary doctorate. On that occasion he gave a lecture, “Hope in an Age of Despair”, the title and first essay of this collection.
Looking at the present, he sees a world where the dream of human progress has become a nightmare, and a church racked by division and scandal. Modernity has not been what it was cracked up to be.
Yet, despite this, Nolan sees reason for hope, hope rooted in faith in a God in solidarity with humanity and in the many human efforts (within and outside Christianity/religion) to struggle for a more humane world. Hope is not optimism, but that God is somehow working — through people — in the mess.
This is a theme that resonates throughout the book, throughout the many essays written from the late 1970s through the 1980s into the present.
In a deceptively simple style — one does not have to be a doctor of divinity or even theologically well versed to understand him — each essay is a work of critical engagement of faith with society, theological criticism of social injustice, still fresh and relevant to the present day. Racism, after all, still exists. And though apartheid as racial segregation is gone, the apartheid of wealth remains.
The latter for Nolan has always been the true root of apartheid, the real cause of racism. Nolan’s specifically theological judgments are, interestingly, rooted in scripture — the prophets and the preaching and praxis of Jesus — which makes his insights ecumenical rather than of interest to Catholics alone.
Some of his later writings show a widening of his concerns, most notably in the need for broader and deeper theological education to help people (and not only clergy) to engage theologically with contemporary issues: ecology, economic inequality, corruption.
Some of these writings are sermons delivered at ecumenical occasions. One of them, “Who is My Neighbour?”, is a little classic in its simplicity, concluding with the line: “My neighbour is everyone, all human beings — without exception” — a powerful challenge to a society prone to xenophobia.
If Nolan is to be criticised in this collection, it is that he seems at times to be less familiar with some of the newer developments in theological scholarship, particularly in the area of scripture studies.
He seems to rely heavily on classical exegetes, such as the Old Testament scholar Gerhard von Rad, and less on what one might be called the newer “postmodern” biblical critics — even though his own approach in his later writings is often close to them, particularly in his theological concern for toleration and social pluralism.
This should not deter anyone from reading this fine book. It is a superb distillation of the work of one of our greatest public theologians and certainly one who can be understood by the public rather than a small circle of academics and priests.