In Search of Christ in Latin America: From Colonial Image to Liberating Savior, by Samuel Escobar is fascinating and helpful. It takes a historical approach to Christology, surveying how ideas about Christ developed over time in Latin America. Particular attention is paid to the changing context: cultural, political, economic, and literary.
I found it striking and unusual that poetry features heavily. The book contains poems featuring Christ and written by a range of Latin American authors; and discussions of the influence of some of these poems. I found this surprising and fascinating. It highlights a significant cultural difference for me. I am not sure I have ever read a book about Western theology that discussed poetry, if at all. Furthermore, in wider Western society, beyond certain literary elites (cliques?), I do not think poetry has much influence, particularly at the level of politics or public intellectuals. In contrast, it seems that in Latin America, poets can be celebrities, public intellectuals, and have enough political influence that they can be perceived as a threat to governments, as was the case with Pablo Neruda.
Here are a few highlights from what I have read so far. In the era of colonial conquest,
[to the natives] Christ was presented as Lord and that acceptance of his lordship essentially meant submission to the church and the conquistadors...
the Catholic missionary effort during the sixteenth century was closely tied to the subjugation of the indigenous through military conquest.
...analysis of legislation imposed on the Indians shows that it juxtaposes civilisation and mission, a process based on the assumption that first, the Indian was to be civilized to become a "human", so that later he might become a "Christian." (page 35)
As the Catholic church became established there was significant syncretism, with Catholic rituals being combined with pagan ones.
Broadly, there have been two dominant images of Jesus, particularly through art. Jesus was a baby and Jesus died on a cross. His actual life and teaching received scant attention.
The Bible was banned by colonial and church authorities. But in the 1800s Bible distribution began through travelers and then foreign Protestant missionaries.
Argentinian theologian Jose Miguez Bonino describes the contours of the theology that emerged from that era in his book Faces of Latin American Protestantism. He describes the results of his research as a thesis statement
that toward 1916 American missionary Protestantism was basically "evangelical" according to the model of an American evangelicalism of the “second awakening": individualistic, Christological-soteriological in a basically subjective key, with emphasis on sanctification. It had a genuine social interest, expressed in charity and mutual aid, but did not have a structural and political perspective save as it touched on the defense of its own liberty and the struggle against all discrimination. Therefore it tended politically to be liberal and democratic, but without sustaining that option in its faith, nor making it an integral part of its piety. (page 57)
I found this particularly interesting because it has certain similarities to the contours of the theology of many Western "evangelical" churches today.
John Mackay (1889-1983) was a Scottish Presbyterian who worked from 1916 to 1936 in Latin America as a missionary, before becoming President of Princeton Theological Seminary. His book, The Other Spanish Christ, is still in print. He gave many lectures to university students, teaching on the parables of Jesus. Central themes were the kingdom of God, the love of God, and the ethical heart of Jesus's teaching. Commenting on the parable of the good Samaritan, Mackay concludes
Something more is needed for the spirit of the Good Samaritan to be translated into the philanthropy required in a time 20 centuries after Christ lived, sporadic charity is not sufficient, nor even systematic charity for the relief of suffering. The primary responsibility of Good Samaritans today is to show their passion for humanity in working toward the disappearance of the avoidable causes of suffering, this is much more difficult charity, more complicated and more prosaic than direct help to the needy. It will always be necessary to have oil and wine to dress the wounds and arms unfortunate travellers, but more necessary the charity that studies the problem caused by cruel, hands been in sensitivity of capable of witnessing human pain without feeling any responsibility. (page 62)
In 1929 the third continental congress of evangelicals was held in Havana. This was chronicled by Gonzalo Baez Camargo. It was noted that the Catholic church was marked by "dogmatism without space for individual thought" that impelled curious minds into agnosticism. Furthermore, the Catholic church had retreated "from the social and spiritual needs of our people." Escobar states "the diagnosis is direct and coincides made by Catholic theologians themselves decades later", quoting Baez-Camargo.
The church interpreted the kingdom of heaven as a state of blessing in the life to come and not as a kingdom of charity, fraternity, and justice in this earthly world that we live in. And while preaching resignation and hope to the unhappy and oppressed, they forgot to preach justice and love to the pitiless owners and capitalist slave traders. They did not do anything effective to improve social conditions and to guide a wise evolution towards the liberation of the enslaved masses. (page 65)
In his own writings, much of it in newspaper columns, Baez-Camargo emphasised the humanity of Jesus, a personal relationship with Christ as the starting point for the Christian life, appropriation of the redeeming death of Jesus, and a theology of experienced grace.
For in effect intellectual dogmatism, that is, a dominant preoccupation with mere orthodoxy, usurps the gospel at a deep level. It makes salvation consist not of the redemptive work of Christ, which believers accept for themselves, personally by faith, but rather of a comprehensive and sworn consent to a system of theological formulas. For the person of the living and cherished Christ it substitutes a beautiful, compact, consistent creed about Christ. And thus it proclaims that what saves is not to believe in Christ but to have orthodox beliefs about Christ. (page 75).
And that brings us back to poetry. In 1949, Baez-Camargo began to "the evangelical mark on Hispano-American poetry."
I am only one-third of the way into the book. So far it nicely highlights the interaction of culture, history, and theology. Each of us lives in a particular context and we can learn a lot from comparisons of how Christ is viewed in different contexts. What is universal? What is particular?
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