Rough Transition

I just finished Nicholas Wolterstorff's Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks, which was quite good overall, although I had the same experience with this book that I have had with other Wolterstorff writings: the more specific he gets, the more disappointed I get. Wolterstorff is not what I would call a "first-order" mind; he is acute, incisive, provocative, but not earth-shaking. What I love about Wolterstorff is his minute precision, and also his insistence on the "messiness" of all conceptualizing, the way he explodes simplistic accounts of things, from epistemology to literary theory to theology. And I also appreciate the fact that he shies away from mathematical explanations. I don't have a mathematically wired brain, so Wolterstorff is easier for me to grasp than, say, his buddy Alvin Plantinga.

And so on my way into Manhattan this morning, I finished Divine Discourse and picked up an anthology of Gustavo Gutierrez's writings (the liberation theologian, for you fellow philistines). I read half the editor's introduction, then gave up, finding it unhelpful redundant adulation. I started the Gutierrez pieces with some anticipation: after all, this is the guy who has rocked the theological world in the last few decades. So far I am quite disappointed. After the calculating precision of Wolterstorff, Gutierrez seems an amateur. I couldn't help thinking of the poor marks this guy would get in any decent college: his definitions are confusing, contradictory, and sometimes utterly incomprehensible. (For example, theology and faith are interchangeable, they are prior to action, they are existential stances, and they are reflection on action, all in the same short paper.) So far, all I get is that Gutierrez is a South American Marxist who wanted to sprinkle his Communist revolution with holy water. And maybe he was into the hallucinogens of the counterculture too, because he sure seems confused.