Sri Lankan Jesuit Aloysius Pieris has published a significant text of importance to scholars interested in interfaith dialogue and liberation theology. The book is a collection of addresses and essays previously published in various journals during the late 1970s and 80s. Each chapter is a historical representative of critical discussions of missiology, Third World poverty, Buddhist-Christian dialogue, and liberation. The central thesis is that Asian liberation theology must focus on both Asian poverty and Asia religions in order to be adequate. Pieris expands the program of liberation beyond the predominant Christian liberation theologies to a religiously pluralistic enterprise. He emphasizes that the poor in Asia are not Christian and live out the spiritualities of various Asian religions, especially Buddhism and Hinduism.

Pieris dares scholars of interfaith dialogue to leave the security of God-talk and the comfort of abstraction. He suggests that in the Third World, the universally valid starting point for interfaith dialogue or the basis of interreligious collaboration is liberation. His view of religions is “that the religious instinct should be defined as a revolutionary urge, a psychosocial impulse, to generate a new humanity” (p .107). Like Teilhard de Chardin, Pieris sees the revolutionary instinct as the evolutionary rise of self-consciousness analogous to nature’s emergence into higher forms of life.

Blending liberation and interfaith dialogue, Pieris has moved from theology merely as God-talk to God-experience as the focal point of interfaith dialogue. This is fundamental to an Asian style of doing theology. Pieris criticizes the Christian mission as having remained “the Church in Asia” rather than becoming “the Church of Asia.” Pieris suggests that the monastic paradigm of inculturation from the early Christian tradition most nearly approximates the Asian context. What the Asian context needs from the Christian monastic tradition is the addition of an agapeic involvement with the poor, a concern for social emancipation, to complement the interior liberation of spiritual enlightenment.

The Christian Church can be mutually transformed by the Asian monastic tradition. Western Christians can be reminded that they share with Asian religions a rejection of mammon, understood as acquisitiveness and greed. In the Asian context, wealth serves poverty. The sharing of wealth according to need makes wealth sacramental. The impoverished condition of the sangha (the Buddhist monastic community) entails communal sharing of goods and dependence on the wealthy for support. Poverty and wealth are not perceived as opposites in this context since wealth sustains the monastic quest to be free of acquisitiveness and to attain salvific knowledge. The opposite of wealth is mammon, the greed that makes wealth antireligious. The spiritual connection of the poor monastic community and the wealthy is the common struggle against mammon.

The common struggle of the poor and the wealthy against mammon instructs the Christian Church in Asia to redirect its wealth in solidarity with the poor. The poor, in this sense, are the “forced poor.” The “forced poor” are those whose poverty is a result of the antireligious accumulation of wealth by others. These are the poor with whom Christian “churches of Asia” build solidarity and for whom the Christian community seeks liberation. How can the wealthy Christian church create solidarity with the poor? Solidarity is built by Christian “voluntary poverty.” “Voluntary poverty” is the option to be poor, just as Christ chose poverty in rejection of mammon. “Voluntary poverty” is a movement toward a just order and the elimination of “forced poverty.” Like other liberation christologies, christology in the Asian context reminds us that Christ’s identity with the poor was a product of Jesus’ birth and the result of Jesus’ consistent choices to identify with the poor. What marks Pieris’ christology as unique is the identification of Christ with soteriological idioms, symbols, and languages existent in “non-Christian” religions.

In the Asian paradigm, Asian Christianity is “baptized in the Jordan of Asian religiousness” and “the Calvary of Asian poverty.” Just as Jesus experienced humiliation among the poor in his baptism in the Jordan by John the Baptist, Jesus also enacted a self-authenticating moment that gave authority to his ministry for and among the poor. Analogously, the Church of Asia humbles itself by being “baptized” in the Asian religiousness of the poor, only to find that it gains authority as a learning church. The trajectory to poverty must be central to the analogy between Christ and the Asian church. The Calvary of Jesus was a prophetic moment of humiliation and exaltation, linking religion and politics. The Calvary of the church of Asia is the prophetic commitment to the poverty of religious Asians. Pieris sees this paradigm emerging in “basic human communities” (rather than basic Christian communities) of Christian and non-Christian members, where “the authentically local churches of Asia and the valid Asian theologies of liberation have already been conceived as twins in the same womb of praxis” (p. 112).

The preceding themes recur in Pieris’ essays, and the chapters cohere nicely to advance the liberating potential of interfaith dialogue and the interreligious possibilities for liberation theology.

The book is challenging and serves to raise many questions in the mind of the reader.