Melanesian Journal of Theology 3-2 (1987)
BOFF, Leonardo, Ecclesiogenesis: The Base Communities Reinvent the Church, Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 1986, US$9.95. Ecclesiogenesis is an exciting, but ultimately unsatisfying, book. It is exciting, because it tells of the new understanding of the church that lies behind the birth of base Christian communities in Brazil, and elsewhere in South America, but it is unsatisfying because it fails to consider objections to this new vision of the church, or to give a systematic reflection on the theological issues at stake. Like too many contemporary publications, the volume under review is a collection of papers originally written separately. It is far from being a fully-developed ecclesiology. Boff argues that the universal church is rendered visible in the local ecclesial community. As a community of faith, united to Christ, believers are the presence of universal church. In other words, the base communities of South America can claim to be the church in its fullness. Ministry does not give the right to rule over the church. It is not the bishops and priests who call the church into being, but the Holy Spirit, who gives each person gifts to use in building up the common life of the body of Christ. There is equality between all Christians, with the ordained ministers having the function of serving their brothers and sisters and of preserving the church’s unity. The advantage of Boff’s model of the church is that it understands the importance of lay participation, and gets away from the old division between clerical producers and lay consumers. The weakness is that it all too easily leads to parochialism, or to control over the local Christian community by certain dominating personalities, who lack an adequate theological formation. The base community needs to be linked to the wider body of Christ. How does Boff envisage this relationship? The discussion of the political aspects of the gospel follows a pattern familiar from the works of other South American theologians of liberation. Capitalism is criticised (with good reason, given the suffering it has brought to countries like Chile), but there is no assessment of the weaknesses of Marxism. What would Boff say to the people of Ethiopia, who were forced to starve as a result of their Marxist government’s land reform and resettlement programme from 1984-1985? In many parts of Africa, so-called socialist governments are forcing down agricultural prices 87