VULNERABLE MISSION

VULNERABLE MISSION: QUESTIONS FROM A LATIN AMERICAN CONTEXT
why not equally seek the perspectives of Majority World people whose intentional contact
with the West defines their reality in terms of interculturality and hybridity? The
mestizo voice should not be marginalized here as well. 37 It calls out a challenge to the
notion of local culture as static and closed. It asks missiology to consider new, dynamic
configurations that are oral and analytical, narrative and propositional. It seeks dialogue,
discernment, compromise, and provisional decisions appropriate to contexts that are in
flux.
What About Theological Education?
With the mestizo voice in my ears, then, I want to discuss the question of what language
and thinking style to use from within the concrete (though diverse) situation of theological
education. There are three principal issues that shape the conversation: (1) the nature
of theology, (2) the extant voice of Latin American theological scholarship, and (3) the
inevitability of cross-cultural interactions in the globalized world.
The Nature of Theology
There is no doubt that the dominant current of theological reflection in Christian history
is part and parcel of the various Western church traditions. The recent overhaul
of church history mentioned by Dyron Daughrity in the present issue implies a recovery
of previously subdued non-Western theologies as well. Backing away from this development
for a wider perspective, Western theology has already been in a long process
of self-criticism, intensified by postmodernism, in which the idiosyncrasies, foibles, and
blatant deficiencies of Enlightenment streams of Christianity have been laid bare. To
some degree, Christianity finds itself in a theological malaise induced by an uncertainty
about what to do after the assertion that theology is culturally conditioned. The instruments
of communication that might potentially span the gap are themselves subject to
the deconstruction of Western imperialism: rational discourse that assumes a particular
rationality; communication media embedded in globalization; the practical need for
linguae francae that finds a path of least resistance in formerly colonial languages; the
written word, which excludes a variety of oral and grassroots theologies—not to mention
academic standards such as peer review that further delimit publication. Paralysis results
in theological ghettoization.
Personally, I hail from a theological tradition that drank deeply from the Enlightenment
well and developed a hermeneutic that programmatically denied the possibility of theological
pluralism, cultural or otherwise. Thus, along with the rest of Western Christianity,
sectors of the Churches of Christ have been in a period of profound introspection,
after which we see clearly that our culturally conditioned ways of talking about God are
not universal and definitive. For all that, I maintain a commitment to the primacy of
Scripture that must, for the Churches of Christ, be the point of departure for a discussion
about the nature of theology.
37 I am using the term mestizo in the sense of cultural hybridity. See Diccionario de la Lengua Espanola de la Real
Academia Espanola, 22nd ed., s.v. “mestizo, za,” http://lema.rae.es/drae/?val=mestizo: “Regarding culture,
spiritual matters, etc.: Resulting from the mixture of different cultures.” (author’s translation).
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