Customer Reviews

Raising Abel: The Recovery of Eschatological Imagination

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I teach eschatology and was attracted by the subtitle of this book, the first by James Alison that I read. It led me to all of his other books. The experience was electrifying and life-changing! To use the language of St. Luke, my heart burned within me (Luke 24:32) and the scales came off my eyes (Acts 9:18). I saw so many troubling passages in the scriptures, especially the New Testament, with new eyes. I have given away at least 20 copies.

J. Alison offers the view of faith from the side of the victims. He guides us through a tour of our preconceptions an all other ideas we take for granted, without even analizing them to see if they are contradictory. It is critical of violence, not only the one we recognize as such, but also the violence of our high and mighty motality, and of our socially accepted ways of excluding those we fail to understand.

I knew I was in trouble when I read the second sentence of Chp. 1. "Theology is perhaps for those of us who can't find an obvious sense in what may be very simple perceptions, ones which are understood intuitively by better Christians than ourselves; theology would be for those of us who are obliged to the hard labor of dragging our obstinate intellects through the spines and thistles of our own self-deciet so as to bring each thought, each remnant of intellectual pride, captive before Christ, ploughing out meaning from arid and sterile soil." This book is filled with tortured syntax and run-on sentences. The author himself tells us that the book is his own translation of lectures he gave at a theological institute in Chile. Too bad, I think he has forgotten how to communicate in English.

All of this is unfortunate, because the author seems to have something important to say. He teaches the meaning of eschatology within the context of resurrection and the life of the 'victim' Jesus. This is an important corrective to the wild eschatologies so popular not only among some in Latin America but also deeply influential to most American Christians, too. We all need to hear Allison's important reminder that God is not out to do violence against us. God loves us. A patient editor could have helped him to make this point more effectively.