Books, Volume 14 #3

Roberta Imboden, The Church: A Demon Lover. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1995. xiv + 152 pp. $22.95.

This book has an intriguing title, has been published by a university press, and hopes to address a serious issue--the present state of the Roman Catholic Church. Unfortunately, all of these assets are not indications of its success, for The Church: A Demon Lover is a deeply muddled book.

As Aristotle remarked long ago, errors in the beginning are the worst since they infect the whole of an argument. Imboden makes several presuppositions and moves within her introduction that give a cautious reader serious doubts. First, is the message of Jesus simply "the images and concepts of love"? The cautious reader would immediately wonder whether the preaching of the kingdom of God is resolvable into "images and concepts," and what ambiguities might await in the somewhat unnuanced choice of "love."

Second, in identifying the cause of the church's problems, is there a simple opposition between structural faults we can change and an unchangeable "fallen world"? Our cautious reader would reflect that structures are a part of the fallen sinful world and that they can sometimes surpass individual human blame and even individual human powers of change.

Third, it is truly remarkable that the final goal of the book is to show compatibility between the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, as presented by Leonardo Boff, and Jean-Paul Sartre's notion of dialectical reason and love. The cautious reader, while intrigued by any promise of bringing together radically opposed systems of thought, might want to read further to see just how this seemingly impossible task will be accomplished--quite honestly without much hope of success.

As the argument proceeds, Imboden constructs something of a straw institution, choosing the worst possible instances of what she considers unacceptable behaviour. They are all grouped under the term "sadism"--an equally difficult choice of summarizing concept. Any history is selective, but judgements passed on the basis of excessively selective histories tell us more about the person choosing and the principle of choice than about the reality whose history is being written.

Finally, when the cautious reader arrives at the practical conclusion, leaving aside the unlikely fusion of Sartre and Boff, the same muddled character of the argument returns. Taking the example of organizational structures in the church, to suggest that "a fully meaningful multi-dimensionality that is truly representative of the objective world" requires that members of all religions (or none) have " voting rights" in determining intra-Christian affairs begs enough questions to require another book to answer them. Unfortunately, Imboden misses perhaps her best chance at making some use of Sartre by not furthering her discussion of the "group in fusion." Reform in the church will no doubt be accomplished more by prayer and fasting than by Sartrean dialectical reason.