Worlds in dialogue:

...From North America came James Cone, the leading black theologian, and such well-known feminist theologians as Rosemary Radford Ruether, Letty Russell, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, and Sheila Collins...

...journalist living in Dublin...

...For he was opening the first dialogue between theologians from the first world and third world, bringing together leading Catholic and Protestant liberation theologians from Latin America, Africa, and Asia with their counterparts in Western Europe and North America...

...The bishop's words were far from rhetorical...

...From Africa the challenge was equally radical...

...It was Hugo Assmann of Brazil who applied this in a particularly striking way to our situation when he said: "Idolatry is always related to oppression and mechanisms of domination...

...This rich interchange of the experiences of different continents, which is the primary context for the doing of theology today, complemented and enriched but also challenged the participants...

...BUT IF THE GENEVA meeting already began to forge some of this more comprehensive social analysis, it was also very valuable for allowing participants to share their different experiences of doing theology among the oppressed...

...Pablo Richard of Costa Rica spoke of the basic division at the heart of spirituality today which, he said, is not 11 March 1983: 135 that of body and soul as formerly but is the division between the God of life and the idols of death...

...But if such a challenge must await another dialogue, the Geneva meeting did pose many other equally "significant challenges...

...In choosing to invite first-world theologians who seek to relate their theology to the struggles of the oppressed in their countries, the EATWOT organizers by-passed most of the major academic theologians from Western Europe and North America...

...Therefore, even though almost every Western European country had two representatives present, most of them were working at grass-roots level and were not major names in academic theology...

...Neither did these all originate from the third-world theologians, many of whom were forced to acknowledge the existence of very sizable pockets of oppression within first-world countries...

...It is this irruption of the oppressed and of the poor that constitutes an exciting challenge to committed Christians, to theology...

...For so many Christians in the first world whose faith has been profoundly touched by this "spirituality of capitalism" such a remark is a sobering reminder of the rich new insights offered to us by the third world...

...This was most notably true on the feminist issue...

...WHILE SEXISM was the main challenge posed by the first-world group, the theologians from Africa and Asia had their own challenges to offer to what is still the dominant group within EATWOT, the Latin Americans...

...What we in the anti-capitalist struggle need is a profound spirituality to counteract this...

...This has led to a radical questioning of the whole hellenized tradition," he said, adding that for some it even called into question the very centrality of Christ and norma-tiveness of the Bible...

...For a week in early January on the outskirts of Geneva they shared their different perceptions of oppression and its causes, shared their theological methods arising from their attempts to understand the biblical message from the standpoint of the oppressed, and sought a closer coordination of their efforts to fashion a church more at the service of liberation...

...While many of the North American and Latin American theologians present had met each other at the Theology in the Americas dialogues and while EATWOT itself has hosted five different exchanges between third-world theologians since it was founded in 1976, the Geneva dialogue was the most comprehensive meeting yet organized...

...This they defined as not just a material poverty but "one which reaches people at the heart of their being: without culture or religion, without fundamental rights or the institutions and civilizations that belong to them...

...It is not just the issue of middle-class and first-world women though it may have been dealt with up to now by these women," she said...

...Radford Ruether's appeal by the dialogue was reflected in the treatment of sexism in the final message issued at the close...

...The spirituality which underlies this growth of a new form of church was also emphasized at many points during the dialogue...

...For Dr...

...Many of the African delegates referred to what they called "anthropological poverty," the defining legacy that European colonialism had left their continent, races, and cultures...

...Some third-world theologians were said to have been disappointed that the dialogue did not provide them with the opportunity to challenge directly leading European and North American theologians whom they feel have never accepted liberation theology as fully valid theology...

...A poverty which denies their right to exist, to love, to experience.'' That such a radical impoverishment had been brought about very often with the active help of Christian churches made the very doing of theology at all very problematical in the African situation...

...PEADAR KIRBY (Peadar Kirby, a previous contributor, is an Irish journalist living in Dublin...

...Acknowledging readily that Asian theology had learnt a lot from the liberative force of the class analysis which underlies Latin American theology, some of the Asians present cautioned the Latin Americans not to allow issues of race and culture to become subsidiary to those of class...

...The existence of such a church confirmed in practice what the one leading academic Western European theologian present, Johann Baptist Metz of West Germany, said in his ad-dresss...

...This is a simply written letter addressed to "our sisters and brothers living their faith in Christian communities," and it calls sexism, which heads its section on different forms of oppression, "a sign of death for half of humanity...

...Also Jim Wallis of the Sojourners community in Washington D.C...

...This acknowledgment, coupled with the decision to hold a separate dialogue between first- and third-world women at some future date, did not eradicate all the tensions on the issue however...

...This second Reformation, he went on, is coming "not from Wittenburg or Geneva, nor from Rome, but from the poor churches...

...and Don Prange, a Lutheran pastor working in the Appalachian mountains, represented the more grass-roots elements in the U.S...

...As Father Sergio Torres, the Chilean executive secretary of EATWOT, commented, it showed the need for a more comprehensive social analysis which could incorporate all of these different experiences and relate them one to the other...

...In her address to the dialogue, Rosemary Radford Ruether had appealed that it not be treated as a trivial issue...

...This development, he said, will "interrupt the development of Christianity as a bourgeois religion...

...The issue will automatically not be taken care of by the nationalist or socialist movements until they address it specifically.' ' The acceptance of Dr...

...As Bishop Lakshman Wickremesinghe of Kurunagala in Sri Lanka described the attempts being made in his diocese not just to adapt Christianity to a situation of rich and highly developed non-Christian faiths but to re-interpret the whole Christian message from the standpoint of local thought-patterns and symbol systems, it emerged that he was speaking of a far more profound challenge to Christianity than anything posed by the Latin Americans...

...Schussler Fiorenza the root cause was patriarchy of which capitalism was a qualifier, she said...

...Some third-world women resented remarks made by delegates who said that they sensed a divided loyalty among these women, divided between their commitment to the liberation struggles in their own countries and to the struggle for women's rights throughout the world...

...Organized by EATWOT, the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians, the dialogue marked a new stage in consolidating the growing impact of liberation theology not only throughout the third world but in sectors of the first world also...

...Elisabeth Schiissler Fiorenza of the theology department of the University of Notre Dame was the only participant to disagree publicly with the general question posed to all as to whether there was a consensus that the root cause of oppression lay in a world system which could be called "capitalist imperialism that is inherently sexist and racist and that is extending its dominating power throughout the world...

...The signs of the times are calling for a theology from the oppressed, not removed from the people's struggles...

...In organizing the Geneva dialogue EATWOT sought to bring their particular theological method and commitment to bear more coherently on Western European and North American theology...

...If you touch that you are touching the idols...

...Whether it was working with basic Christian communities among the strong and militant workers' movement in Italy, helping inner-city people in London to uncover and express their religious experience, working for women's rights in the Dutch Catholic church, or relating to the peace movement in West Germany, what the Geneva dialogue uncovered was the existence of a grass-roots church in Western Europe and North America using similar methods and approaches to those being used in the third world...

...but behind all these there is the spirit of the system...

...The spirituality of capitalism is idolatry...

...It may in time be seen to mark the point when the third-world theologians found not just listeners among first-world theologians but active partners in the struggle to fashion a new church at the service of a new world...

...Speaking on "The End of the Eurocentric Era of Christianity," he asked: "Could there perhaps now be something like a new Reformation-situation in which Catholicism learns to invoke grace as liberation and thus learns to live...

...As one theologian said of apartheid in South Africa: "It is a theological ideology which in a sense was born in the church so that theology itself in the apartheid situation has become problematic...