Unique
among a growing number of Hispanic American religionists is Justo
L. Gonzalez, a Cuban exile who is a Protestant rather than a
Catholic theologian, belonging to the United Methodist
denomination. His published works include nearly seventy books and
about four hundred articles and bible lessons, which can be found
in the Dictionary of Bible
and Religion,
Church
History,
Theology Today,
Encounter,
and other well-respected religious publications, including
Apuntes, a journal of Hispanic theology, of which he is the editor.
Rather than Marxist, his critical form of liberation theology is
strictly based on Scripture, in which the powerful is seen in
relation to the weak, the rich in relation to the poor, the
“high and mighty” in relation to the oppressed.
Similar
to Latin American theology, Gonzalez, however, does make use of
the social sciences to make critical statements about history,
social conditions, and political power and how these have had an
impact on the lives and perceptions of Hispanic Americans. For
these aspects of human endeavors, for him, are just as important
as the religious and the intellectual and cannot be tossed aside
as if they had no relevance to man’s religious and spiritual
life. In this approach, Hispanic theology is related to black
theology and feminist theology in the United States.
Gonzalez
considers the perspective of his people,
Mestizos
(a racial mixture of Indian and Spaniard), so significant and of
such importance that he dedicates four chapters of his short book
Manana:
Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective to such an
exposition. In Chapter 1, Gonzalez states forthrightly that his
theological task is not without bias and that he has little
confidence in the intellectual honesty of those theologians who
have pretense of neutrality. His task as he sees it is “to
discover the purposes of God, to read the ‘signs of the
times’, and to call the church to obedience in the present
situation” (22). In addition he outlines some of the topics he
will cover in later chapters which include the latent class,
cultural, and religious conflicts among Hispanics, the
relationship of the church and the world, the authority of
Scripture, and “the use of Bible to support repression and
injustice” (25).
Hispanic
Identity & A New Reformation
In
Chapter 2 of
Manana,
Gonzalez corrects the mistaken identity of Hispanic Americans and
emphasizes the repeated theme of the ignorance of members of the
majority culture of their own history as well as those of other
peoples. In that Hispanics are usually viewed as recent
immigrants, Gonzalez makes the point that his people are not
“newcomers” to the American landscape. Nineteen years before
Sir Water Raleigh and Virginia, the Spanish based in Cuba founded
St. Augustine (Florida) and “twelve years before the Pilgrims
landed on Plymouth Rock the Spanish founded the city of Santa Fe,
New Mexico” (31). Rather than “newcomers,” Hispanic
Americans have undergone an expansionist process in which they
have been “engulfed.” Their conquest by Anglo-Americans have
left them displaced, impoverished, uneducated, and culturally
repressed. Their condition is such that they can be rightly
considered a “people in exile.” This existential condition
causes his people to identify with Israel in Babylon. His song is
that of Micah 4:4: “The
Zion to which we sing, the Zion for which we hope, the Zion toward
which we live is the coming of God . . . while we wait for that
day, it may be that, as exiles, we have some insights into what it
means to be a pilgrim people of God, followers of One who had
nowhere to lay his head” (42).
The
third chapter of
Manana establishes Hispanic theology “in its proper context.”
In accomplishing this task he sketches out the
“macroevents” of world
history and the “macroformations” of the twentieth century
which he believes are as relevant and determining as the
Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. The first of the
macroevents occurred after the death of the Emperor Constantine.
Regrettably, Christianity allied itself with the existing
political and social order and profited from it. Some of that
power was eroded by the French (1848) and Russian (1917)
revolutions and by more recent developments in Latin America. The
second macroevent occurred in the hegemony of the North Atlantic
powers, namely, Great Britain, France, and the United States and
their failures in bearing the “white man’s burden.” The
masses of the world are tragically “the “failures of the
promises of the North.” Its neocolonialism rather than the
continuation of earlier injustice has increased the misery of the
masses by forced agricultural policies and the making the South a
battlefield for ideological wars (46). The failure of such
policies can be seen in the increased desire to immigrate to
America. The third macroevents is the “growing
self-consciousness” of the once silent masses.
The
Reformation of the twentieth century has manifested itself in the
altered viewed of the broad masses. Instead of the “three selfs”
of missionary theoreticians, e.g., self-support, self-government,
self-propagation, the people of the South have opted for
self-interpretation and self-theologizing. In the post-Constantinian
era, Hispanics are “seeking a deeper understanding of the
biblical message,” rather than a “theology of glory” they
are moving toward a “theology of the cross,” which “will
provide the church with greater opportunities of faithfulness”
(49). The third macroformation is a turning away from
“Eleatic-Platonic understanding of truth as that which is
changeless” and toward Scripture for truth and the nature of
truth “with an
emphasis on justice” (50). The fourth macroformation is a
“radical ecumenism,” a reaching out to “various
ecclesiastical communities that may not be in total agreement as
to the content of orthodoxy” (51).
Chapter
4 of
Manana exposes the
ecclesiastical roles the church has played in the history of
Hispanics in the Americas. Gonzalez concludes that there have been
two churches. That of the lords and bishops has been the “arm of
the powers of conquest, colonialism, and oppression” and it had
“little idea of the sufferings that the Indians were undergoing
in their process of Christianization.” This church only saw
“churches being built, tithes collected, schools founded,
civilization being brought to the savages” (57). The other
church was that represented mostly by friars—Franciscans,
Dominicans, Jesuits, Mercedarians—those who took vows of poverty
and obedience. They worked “in places and situations the secular
clergy would not work” so as “to witness and often share the
poverty and sufferings of their flocks” (57-58). These friars
who defended the Indians, protesting against their mistreatment
included Bartholome de la Casas, Antonio de Montesinos, St. Luis
Beltran. In his willingness to follow in the steps of Jesus, the
Catalonian Jesuit Pedro Claver “added a fourth vow to the
traditional three of poverty, chastity, and obedience—“forever
a slave to blacks” (59).
Initially,
in Latin America, Protestantism was viewed as a liberating force
because of its emphasis on education of the masses and its
emphasis on the Scripture. But it generated conflicts among
Hispanics and devalued the culture of Hispanic Americans while
elevating unconsciously the culture of the United States. But now
there is a new Protestantism and a new Catholicism in Latin
America that have a practical and political side, undoing the
prejudices of the past. Among Hispanic religionists there is a
“new ecumenism,” a new way of being Catholic and Protestant.
An example of this new ecumenism can be seen in the “Foreword”
of
Manana
when Virgilio
P. Elizondo, the Mexicano Catholic who founded in 1972 the Mexican
American Cultural Center in San Antonio, Texas, and friend of
Gonzalez. Elizondo declares that he views himself as a Catholic
Protestant and Gonzalez
as a Protestant Catholic.
Hispanic
History & Biblical Interpretation
After
creating this context for Hispanic theology, Gonzalez, in Chapter
5 of
Manana, entitled
“Reading the Bible in Spanish,” turns to how Hispanic theology
interprets Scripture. Two terms are used to explain the Hispanic
perspective of the Bible: “innocent history” and
“noninnocent history.” Anglo-Americana view their own history
naively. Theirs is a “selective forgetfulness, used precisely to
avoid the consequences of a more realistic memory” (79). This
same “guiltless reading,” they also apply to the New Testament, which is preferred over, what Gonzalez calls, the
“Older Testament” (78, 81). The writers of the Scripture,
including those of the Gospels, possessed, however, a noninnocent
view of history. In that history Abraham lies about Sarah to save
his own skin; Jacob steals his brother’s birthright; Joseph
suffers from the treachery of his brothers; Moses and his fellow
Israelites fear to take on the cause of Yahweh; David commits
adultery and murders his lover’s husband; and Solomon turns to
idolatry (75-76). In the New Testament genealogy of Jesus, his
skeletons are not concealed in his closet. We are reminded of the
incest of Tamar, the harlotry of Rahab, and of Ruth, the Gentile.
This
“history beyond innocence” is the history of Hispanics,
Gonzalez concludes. Hispanics were “born out of an act of
violence of cosmic proportions in which our Spanish forefathers
raped our Indian foremothers” (77). The cannibalism and the
bloody sacrifices of Native Americans are all too well-known.
Hispanics have “no skeletons in our closet.” Their skeletons
are the heart and reality of their history. They have identified
with the Israelites and read themselves into the history of
Scripture. Hispanic theology avoids the perspective of the
gnostics and Marcion in how its views the Older Testament, which
is still viewed by many as “obsolete,” a view which “tends
to support our present semi-Marcionite hersey” (81).
This
semi-Marcionism holds that since Jesus is the final and supreme
revelation of God, the whole of Scripture is to be read and
interpreted from the viewpoint of this message. This is true as
far as it goes. But it forgets that since the Old Testament is the
history of God’s revelation and action in preparation for the
coming of Christ, the message of Jesus must be interpreted in the
light of that revelation and action (81).
A
reading of the Bible in Spanish goes beyond a cultural and
linguistic enterprise. This reading is a realization that the
Bible is a “political book.”
Political
conservatives have placed an emphasis on the Newer Testament in
order to promote their “’apolitical brand’ of
Christianity.” But the Newer Testament, Gonzalez explains, was
written when Christians were dominated by the Greco-Roman world,
one in which “the people of God had little or no power, and
therefore the ordering of society was not an agenda on which they
could have the immediate and direct impact” (84). Hispanic
theology needs a “new reading of Scripture” and must develop
its own “grammar”:
When
we approach a text, we must ask first not the “spiritual”
questions or the “doctrinal” questions—the Bible is not
primarily a book about “spiritual” reality, except in its own
sense, nor is it a book about doctrines—but the political
questions: who in this text is in power? Who is powerless? What is
the nature of their relationship? Whose side does God take? In
this approach to Scripture lies the beginning of the new
reformation of the twentieth century (85).
The
Scripture is not about the individual merely; it is about a
community of believers. The singularly “you” can be found only
in Philemon, I and II Timothy, and Titus. The “good news” of
the Scripture is not merely “life after death,” and certainly
it is not the central message of the Scripture, argues Gonzalez.
“God’s salvation is not purely ‘spiritual’ in the common
sense of that term, but is also political and social” (83). The
Bible, according to Gonzalez, “is not its own end”; biblical
scholarship must return “from the written text to the context in
which we must live today” (86).
Who
Is the Christian God?
The
remaining chapters of Manana, six through eleven, turn primary to theology proper—to who
God is, his nature, the Trinity, God’s relationship with the
world. In so doing, Gonzalez also considers christology (the
person and work of Jesus Christ, soteriology (salvation and what
it means to be saved), theological anthropology (what it means to
be human, sin, and original sin). Gonzalez’s approach is
fundamental, for he investigates the sources and methods of
traditional Christian theology. As with biblical criticism,
Gonzalez exposes the hidden agendas of Christian traditions, its
doctrines and dogmas, and its heresies. He looks at all these in
their social and political context.
Gonzalez
begins chapter six with the warning that we should not be too
anxious to condemn the “God is dead” movement of the 1960s.
For some of the “intellectual images” that have been created
and raised “to the level of the divine” are idolatrous and
they are deserving of death (95). “Christian idols resulted from
the encounter between early Christians and the Greco-Roman
world” (96). This type of inculturation had occurred early in
Judaism with Philo of Alexandria who tried to make the God of
Abraham more palatable to the Gentile world. "Christian
theologians,” Gonzalez points out, “came to the conclusion
that Scripture is best interpreted in the light of Greek
philosophy—more specifically, Platonic philosophy” (96).
Clement of Alexandria felt the Greek language was more precise.
Such a turn was not a “sociopolitical neutral idea.”
The
use of such terms as “omnipotent,” “omnipresent,”
“omniscient,” and, in negative terms, “impassible,”
“immutable,” “infinite,” and “uncreated” made God more
“aristocratic.” This transformation was done in order “to
support the privilege of the higher classes by sacralizing
changelessness as a divine characteristic” (98). All such
characterization of the divine, according to Gonzalez, are
unbiblical. The Bible does not “speak of God in Godself,” but
rather always “speaks of God in relation to his creation and a
people” (92) The God of the Scripture is “the active and
sovereign ruler of history”; he “suffers with the oppressed,
suffers oppressions and injustice.” In this sense, if that is
the condition of being a minority, “God is a minority” (93).
This characterization reminds one of James Cone’s argument that
“God is black.”
In
Chapter 7, Gonzalez presents the Trinity from a Hispanic
perspective, which in Church doctrine has been described in such
Greek terms as ousia,
homoousios,
hypostasis, and the like—none of which can be found in Scripture
“in its way of speaking of God” (102). Such references to
“three” can be found at Matthew 28:19 and I John 5:7. The
early church, according to Paul, did hold “faith in three.” In
accepting the Greek characterization of the divine as
“immutable,” Christian theologians were led to “the question
of how such a God can relate to a mutable world” (103). For
Justin Martyr, the doctrine of the logos served as a link between
God and the world, the immutable and the mutable,
“a bridge between Christian revelation and classical
philosophy” (104). As a parenthesis, Gonzalez points out how the
logos has been abused in
post-Constantinian missionary work with those whom the West was
unable to conquer. In that the “logos” was the source of all
knowledge, all that was known was known through the “logos.”
Some nations of the South were visited by the “logos,” such as
China and India, but not so of those in Africa and the New World
whose people were perceived as “savages.”
For
Justin, “in part,” “Plato and Socrates were Christians”
(104). The Nicean Creed of 325 CE rejected such formulations,
including the Arian heresy, which argued that God did not relate
to the world because of his immutability. But the Council of Nicea,
according to Gonzalez was an “imperial affair” and had
sociopolitical implications. What was concluded at Nicea and
argued by Athanasius, the leader of the Nicene party, was that the
Jewish carpenter of Galilee, convicted and executed as a criminal
by the Roman empire, was God. Such a notion did not stand well
with Constantine, who ended up silencing the Nicene party and
supporting the Arian party. Constantine on his death bed was
baptized by Eusebius, a leader of the Arian party and “one of
the emperors most trusted advisers in religious matters” (113).
Patripassianism and Adoptionism were other attempts to reconcile
the notion of God’s immutability and his humanity. For Gonzalez,
the Trinity is not a puzzle to be solved, rather an example to be
followed. His “’economic’ doctrine” of the Trinity is
community, “commonality”; it is “a life of sharing,” in
contradistinction to one of greed, which was denounced by such
proponents of the Trinity as Ambrose, Jerome, Basil the Great, and
Gregory Nazianzen.
Christian
Anthropology
In
Chapter 8 Gonzalez reaffirms the “goodness of creation, ” in
which he includes both heaven and earth. Like man, both are
temporal, resulting from the will of God. The prevalent view
perceives God’s creation in an hierarchical order, partially as
a result of Pseudo-Dionysius, in which creation is viewed as
emanations from God. The result of such a perspective some are
considered closer to God than others. In his teaching, “the last
shall be first,” Jesus took an “anti-hierarchical stance.”
In one view, heaven is “spiritualized”; it is a “place up
there,” and earth is “the physical place we live in bodies,
and where events occur that have significance only insomuch as
they open or close the way to heaven” (120).
This is the “escapist, spiritualizing position.” In the
second view, there exists only the physical, the empirical, the
measurable world. For Hispanic theology both positions are
unsatisfactory.
For
Gonzalez, heaven is “a hidden order of reality that reminds us
that the empirical, predictable, measurable earth is not the
totality of creation” (120). The use of so called “pure
reason” to get at universal truth is a ruse, for by such methods
truth is unattainable; it is a myth, “a means to discourage
those whose strength comes from the hope of divine intervention”
(121). Creation in Hispanic theology is not “a statement of
origins” but about the continuous creation and creating of God,
“a statement about present reality and present responsibility”
(123). The problem of the theory of evolution, with respect to
creation, is its doctrine of the “survival of the
fittest,” whereas “the
rule of creation is the victory of love” (123).
In
Chapter 9, Gonzalez takes a closer look at Christian anthropology.
He critiques again the hierarchically ordering of humanity found
in Christian doctrines and defines more concretely the notion of
sin than that which usually occurs in traditional or classical
theology. Though Scripture sustains “the dichotomist” (body
and soul) and “the trichotomist” (body, soul and, spirit)
perspectives of man, Gonzalez discounts both as irrelevant and
considers both as potential tools for the dehumanization of man.
For the “Bible” in general, according to Gonzalez, “does not
speak of human beings as divided into two ‘parts’ or
‘substances’; rather it speaks of a “single entity” (127).
These concepts were derived from Plato, and from Socrates, who
confidently goes to his death, with faith in the “immortality of
the soul.” In the Bible, according to Gonzalez, “body” and
“soul” are used interchangeably.
From
the perspective of Hispanic theology, the “doctrine of the
immortality of the soul, which passes for Christian orthodoxy, is
no more biblical than the doctrines of the preexistence and
transfiguration of the soul.” All three notions have their
origins in Greek philosophy and all three have sociopolitical
implications and have been used “to justify oppression.”
Once making the division of man into two parts of physical
and psychical, it becomes an easy matter, according to Gonzalez,
for the “hierarchization of those [two] substances,” in which
the body is subordinated and the soul or intellect is elevated. It
was on this basis that the church argued that it had a higher
authority than the state. It is on this basis that intellectual
work is valued over physical work; and it is on this basis that
the theologian at the university or the seminary feels justified
in receiving a greater pay than those who cook his food or pick up
his garbage. Gonzalez concludes, “it may well be that theology
is best done with dirt under one’s fingernails” (129).
Hispanic
theology views the notion of sin in a manner similar to that of
Dietrich Bonhoeffer as expressed in his
Letters
and Papers from Prison (1967), in which he expressed an
unimportant and nonexistent concern for personal sin and soul
saving. For Gonzalez, the body , though made of dirt, is not a
curse. Sin is not always a crime, and crime is not always a sin,
and the socialized conscience is not the best judge of sin. Moses,
early Christians, and Martin Luther King were declared criminals,
yet they were “outlaws for God.” Greed is not a crime, but the
Scripture does condemn it as
sin. In our society sin, in common parlance, is “almost
equated with sexual activity.” According to Gonzalez, the
“God of the Bible is concerned with the misuse of property at
least as much as with the misuse of sex” (135). The
“sexualization of sin,” Gonzalez believes, is “closely
connected with the hierarchical understanding of soul and body”
(136).
This
“privatization of sin,” according to Gonzalez, developed out
of the Greek philosophical tradition that promoted the idea that
“the goal of wisdom was to have the mind be totally in control
of the body,” as those who rule, viewed often as the mind of
society, should have control over the masses, who are body and
lacking in intellect.
Such
privatization of sin contradicts the very nature of our humanity.
It is “not good” for us to be alone. An individual alone is
not the person God intended. We are created in for-otherness. It
is only when that for-otherness takes place that we are the human
beings God intends. This for-otherness is for God as well as for
creation and for other human beings. We stand amid God’s
creation, as part of it and responsible to it and to others as the
concrete expression of our responsibility towards God (136).
From
the perspective of Hispanic theology, the primal sin was not too
much pride, rather too much humility in the face of the tempter,
and the refusal to stand up against a violation of for-otherness.
The
Greek God of Escapism
In
chapter ten of
Manana,
Gonzalez makes a direct attack against the “Hellenization of
God” or the “Constantinization of God,” which in effect is a
static characterization of God.. He affirms again that the God of
Scripture is a living God. Along with the use of the Greek notion
of being, Christian theologians have allegorized the Scriptures so
as to “dishistoricized the Bible” and make themselves
“exponents of the theology of the status quo” (139). Gonzalez
goes on to make attacks against gnosticism and docetism, both of
which devalue the body and earthly existence. The gnostic view of
salvation “consists of being able to flee this material world,
usually by means of a secret knowledge”; for the docetists,
“our suffering and death, as well as all the injustice and evil
that exist in this world are not important. Our bodies are prisons
holding our souls in the material world and clouding our visions
of spiritual realities’ (141). They both offer “salvation out
of this world, without having to confront its present evil”
(143). Too often this is the preaching and teaching religionists
hear: forget about this life and think about the one to come. The
Lordship of Jesus, however, consists in his being for-otherness.
God is, for Gonzalez, being-for-otherness. That is his glory and
that of Jesus (153).
The
concluding chapter 11 of
Manana concerns itself with Christian spirituality, which Gonzalez
believes, cannot be spoken of apart from the Holy Spirit. In Acts
2:17, we are told that the Spirit is pored out on all flesh.”
Man is not above nature but a part of it. As part of created
reality it is the nature of man to sin; the “Spirit is the power
that intervenes to make things become what they are not” (160).
That Spirit exists in community, in love of neighbor, in acts of
sharing possessions, in reaching out to others, practicing the
love of God’s reign, rather than the rule of the powerful which
is for profit and profit primarily and foremost. Gonzalez
concludes his exposition with this thought. “One’s investment
in the present order makes it very difficult to live in
expectation of a different order” (163).
I
find no fault in Justo L. Gonzalez’s
Manana:
Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective. Though brief
in its 167 pages of text, it is powerful, informative, and
insightful, a work deserving of a greater audience and broader
dissemination. His narration is such that it is an easy read. All
can profit from his wisdom and scholarship. I have found a few
minor flaws in how the book was constructed. In that the book is
densely packed with unfamiliar names and concepts, footnotes rather
than endnotes would have facilitated a quicker read, than having
continually to flip to the back of the book. I also have problems
with books without an index. In future editions, such a courtesy
would make it easy for quick references and cross referencing of
concepts and names.
Because
of the nature of the subject, Christian history and theology,
Gonzalez was not able to go into extraordinary detail on all the
social, historical, political, and philosophical aspects of the
material he presents in
Manana. This, of course, is not a real flaw.
Manana is best seen as an introduction to Hispanic theology. Because
of his easy narration and clarity, one will be thus be encouraged
to read and explore his many other works, including
Faith and Wealth (1990),
Christian
Thought Revisited: Three Types of Theology (1999), and his
three-volume A History of
Christian Thought (1987). I would consider myself blessed, if
I had any or all of his books on my library shelf.
Manana:
Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective. By Justo L.
Gonzalez. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990, 184 pp. $17.00* * *
* *
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|
The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
 |
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 |
Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
|
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