Reconciliation:  the Ubuntu Theology of Desmond Tutu By Michael Battle. Pilgrim, 272 pp., $19.95. Purchase this book

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As adjutant to Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu in 1993-94, Michael Battle participated with Tutu in both everyday and dramatic activities. He attended church and dignitary functions, took part in the bishop's rugby matches and walks, made pastoral calls, listened to telephoned death threats, witnessed Tutu cast his first ballot and attended Nelson Mandela's 1994 inauguration.

Battle does not call his book a systematic exposition of Tutu's theology but a "meditation" on Tutu's spirituality and theology in its cultural context. Actually, the book fits both descriptions. It provides a clear elucidation of Tutu's theology drawn from a variety of published and unpublished texts while also meditating upon the dynamic and compassionate aspects of that theology.

That cultural context is, of course, apartheid, formalized in South Africa in 1948 and deposed in 1990. The history of South African colonialism includes a Calvinist theology wherein God's sovereignty was interpreted racially: the divine judgment demands the division of persons into racial groups, with whites supreme and blacks subordinate. The heritage of the European Enlightenment, too, gave primacy to the thinking, self-determining subject, which in turn gave ideological grounding to the separation of persons into dominant and oppressed.

Against this background Tutu brings a theology that "seeks to restore the oppressor's humanity by releasing and enabling the oppressed to see their oppressors as peers under God." This is his ubuntu theology, so named after an African idea of community. Tutu shows that human beings are defined not by their race but by their createdness in God's image, which brings value and dignity to all people. That imago Dei thus breaks down racial barriers. Tutu declares "we can be human only in ... community, in koinonia, in peace."

Ubuntu theology sees community rather than self-determination as the essential aspect of personhood. People are distinctive beings, able to recognize and acknowledge one another through mutual encounter and cultural integration. African assertions about God's transcendence and immanence emphasize both God's creativeness (and separateness from creation) and God's encounter with human beings in the divine kenosis.

Anglican, Eastern Orthodox and liberation spirituality come together in Tutu's theology, a theology grounded in both prayer and social action. The result is what Battle calls "an African spirituality of passionate concern," which leads to a political involvement that does not compromise Christian values. Tutu's is a deeply liberating theology (more inclusive, according to Battle, than Western black theologies) because it is generous, embracing and conciliatory to people of all races and systems of belief and at the same time prophetic in the struggle against racism.

I found Battle's book a helpful source of reflection, showing how a deeply spiritual concept of Christian embracing. The community can be at once uncompromising, prophetic, open-hearted and embracing. The bibliography and notes provide a lengthy and helpful guide to Tutu's writings.

Reviewed by Paul E. Stroble, adjunct instructor at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.




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