Atando Cabos

Latinx Contributions to Theological Education

Elizabeth Conde-Frazier

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781467462785
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Educazione religiosa

Decolonizing theological education and restoring agency to the people

Latinx Protestantism is a rapidly growing element of American Christianity. How should institutions of theological education in the United States welcome and incorporate the gifts of these populations into their work? This is an especially difficult question considering the painful history of colonization in Latin America and the Caribbean, an agenda in which theological education was long complicit.

In this book, Elizabeth Conde-Frazier takes stock of the cabos sueltos —loose ends—left over from the history of Latinx Christianity, including the ways the rise of Pentecostalism disrupted existing power structures and opened up new ways for Latinx people to assert agency. Then, atando cabos —tying these loose ends together—she reflects on how a new paradigm, centered on the work of the Holy Spirit, can serve to decolonize theological education going forward, bringing about an in-breaking of the kingdom of God. Conde-Frazier illustrates how this in-breaking would bring changes in epistemology, curriculum, pedagogy, and models for financial sustainability. Atando Cabos explores each of these topics and proposes a collaborative ecology that stresses the connections between theological education and wider communities of faith and practice. Far from taking a position of insularity, Atando Cabos works from the particularities of the Latinx Protestant context outward to other communities that are wrestling with similar issues so that, by the end, it is a call for transformation—a new reformation—for the entire Christian church.

1

De Dónde Vienes y a Dónde Vas?

Roots of Latin@ Theological Education

On the main plaza of the University of Puerto Rico is a monument in honor of the Puerto Rican teacher. It features a man, a woman, and two children sharing a book. Close by is a bust of Eugenio Maria de Hostos, a master teacher and pedagogue famed throughout the Caribbean. These monuments speak to the importance of education and therefore to the way in which teachers are honored on the island. Education is not only about instruction or obtaining a degree. In Latina cultures, “an educated person” (una persona educada) is “a person who has a capacity for judgment, a training that allows him to know how to act in situations that arise.… A well-educated person must also have a set of ethical criteria and attitudes that make them apply them for justice and good work.”¹ Teaching is more than a profession. It is a vocation and a very important part of the shaping of society, since it entails a calling to the art and science of forming persons with values that inform how they also carry out their purpose in the world such that they benefit and work toward the dignity of all created life. To be una persona educada is to treat others in a way that they can tell we are educated by our refined and humble bearing.

Whenever a new church, or a group that seeks to respond to a spiritual hunger in a particular area, is about to start, it begins with a Bible study or with a vacation Bible school for children rather than with a space for worship. The same holds true for laypersons or pastors who come to the United States from Puerto Rico. Why is this? The missionaries who first came to Puerto Rico started their work in the same manner. The first persons who connected the missionaries to the “pueblo” to which they came were teachers, and the first pastors were teachers. How did this come about?

The purpose of this chapter is to present the origins of theological education in the Latin@ community by tracing the historical roots of the missionary work and the political, economic, and theological context from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. It presents only a general overview of some of the defining movements and theologies that influenced the beginnings of the Protestant church and theological education, which in turn have shaped what theological education is for the Latin@ church today. The complexity of these movements and theologies continues to create differences among us and oppression that keeps us from defining a theological education that could be more relevant for our contexts. It also offers the blessing of a strong foundation for equipping persons in traditional ministry. As you read, you may want to ask yourself how this legacy influences your thinking and how it might limit the ways that theological education may need to respond to the equipping of the many who are called into a diversity of ministries for our times.

The Political, Economic, and Theological Context of Missionary Work

Protestantism came to Latin America and to the Caribbean as part of a colonizing agenda as much as an evangelizing one. The creation of institutions to embed the Protestant expression of Christianity also had this dual purpose. Along with the church, one of the most important institutions is education in its different forms and levels: primary, secondary, vocational, university, and theological. To understand how these educational institutions develop, one needs at least a basic understanding of the political and economic framework in which events of the missionary endeavor from the United States to Latin America took place. In the documents of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the United States is referred to as North America. Therefore, throughout this chapter, I use this term too.

From the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, the United States expanded its economic interests abroad, as industry and commerce needed places for both production and consumption. The United States robbed or usurped the resources of other countries for its own production and merchandising. To defend its interests in these countries, the United States used a variety of policies such as the Monroe Doctrine, in which President James Monroe declared “America for the Americans” as a protection against the risk that the consolidated European countries of the 1814 restoration would seek to gain position in Latin America. This secured Latin America as a zone of political control and commercial hegemony for the United States.² The Monroe Doctrine was later amended by Theodore Roosevelt’s promise to wield a “big stick” in the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904. It called for the United States to “police” the Caribbean and Latin American countries by helping them to “do away with political instability and financial mismanagement that could invite European intervention that could undermine the independence of the republics within the hemisphere.”³ To implement this policy, the United States claimed the right to intervene with military force in any dispute between Latin American countries or against other world powers active in these countries, with the ostensible purpose of restoring order. This the local countries saw as high-handed, as it interfered with their self-determination. President Theodore Roosevelt rationalized his actions on the basis of Manifest Destiny, a philosophy with theological underpinnings that gave to the United States a civilizing role, allowing it to “coerce a nation which by selfish action stood in the way of measures that could benefit the world as a whole.”⁴

In this political climate, missionaries from North America and some European countries, as well as some Latin American delegates, came together in 1916 to discuss the missionary project in Latin America. This gathering was called the Panama Congress. The participants rejected armed intervention and the economic interests behind it. Latin American participants did not fail to mention during their discussions the “violent materialism and greed” of the Pan-American Railroad, one of the large companies expanding on the continent.⁵

The missionaries took a stance against armed interventionism in Latin America. Among them, individuals such as Guy Inman and Stanley Rycroft promoted a different Pan-Americanism, one that places itself at the service of a growing relationship between the United States and Latin America and addresses economic, socioeconomic, and educational matters between them.⁶ From a theological standpoint, while the missionaries denounced the corruption and injustices of the companies that exploited resources in Latin America, they did not critique the political structure of Pan-Americanism that opened the door to these injustices. The missionaries saw the oppressive policies only as a result of the individual moral defects of a few individuals.⁷

In the United States, different thinkers presented two democratic models. One, represented by C. B. Macpherson, was democracy as protection; the other was democracy as development. The first accepts a capitalist society ruled by the market. Undergirding it is the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, which seeks to maximize collective happiness. In practice, the most common quantitative measure for happiness was money. In this understanding, money is the instrument with which one measures pain or pleasure, and the function of the government is to protect the interests of capitalist society and present those interests as inherently fair (even when they are not).

Democracy as development emerged as a response to the toll that the greed of industrialization had taken on the working class. John Stuart Mill and John Dewey, among others, did not accept that industrial progress would automatically help workers in their struggle to “make it.” Instead, they proposed democracy as development, a view that sees each person as trying to “achieve betterment as a moral being … who seeks development.”⁸ Advancing toward this goal requires a greater distribution of resources to the poor and the working class. How this is done becomes the contentious point. For some of these thinkers, such as Mill, the vote is a way to secure equity. For Robert McIver, the way is for the people, not the state, to play a greater role in creating cooperatives and to engage in creating more representative political parties. Finally, for Dewey, “education is the way.”⁹ Dewey saw democracy as an ethical idea more than as a political system. As such, knowledge, skills, and character were to be nurtured by teachers.¹⁰ Dewey contributed the objective of “developing a better generation.” Míguez Bonino posits that Dewey’s is “the idea that predominates in Panama 1916.”¹¹ He claims that for the liberal Protestant missionary agenda, this concept of development brings together the social, religious, and political strands. The interpretation of the telos of this democratic vision is married to a liberal theology that integrates ethical concerns and personal development so that the motto for education becomes “education that builds character.”¹²

Therefore, those who met in New York to plan the Congress of Panama tasked one of their eight work commissions with a focus on education. The education commission provided important information about the different countries, in particular Chile. When the Panama Congress finally took place in 1916, its participants included teachers from educational institutions.

The documents of the Edinburgh conference in 1913 served as a model for the Panama Congress. They addressed the role of education in the evangelizing mission and suggested that education was important not only for socioeconomic reasons but also for discipleship. They proposed that attention be paid to the condition of the poor and especially of orphans, since education is the vehicle to train them for a better life, inculcate values, and keep them from the temptations that trap the poor and threaten their survival.¹³

A few dominant theological viewpoints influenced the missionaries. One was the Social Gospel, whose leading proponents included Walter Rauschenbusch, Washington Gladden, Lyman Abbott, and Charles Loring Brace. They sought to arouse the consciences of their parishioners and of society regarding the social concerns of an industrialized society. They addressed and advocated for issues such as ensuring workers’ rights to form unions, preventing child labor, earning a living wage, regulating factories, and providing housing for working people. Through their writing, preaching, and social activism—as in the case of Brace, who founded the Children’s Aid Society of New York City—they promulgated Social Gospel teachings and practices. In the missionary field in Latin America, one of the more prominent leaders was Samuel Guy Inman who expressed the Social Gospel through an educational agenda. His work is featured below.

Latin American theologians today critique the Social Gospel, and democracy as development, as incompatible with the expressions of the US version of Pan-Americanism in Latin America. Moreover, for the most part, these ideals did not find traction beyond the small church communities of liberal Protestants. Because they did not penetrate into the fundamentalist and Holiness churches, they ran counter to other missionary expressions brought to Latin America.¹⁴

During the 1840s, evangelical missionaries—who were mostly Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists—came to Latin America. Among the main points of their theology was absolute belief in the Bible as the Word of God, as “God-breathed [given by divine inspiration] and … profitable for instruction, for conviction [of sin], for correction [of error and restoration to obedience], for training in righteousness [learning to live in conformity to God’s will, both publicly and privately—behaving honorably with personal integrity and moral courage].”¹⁵ These evangelicals prioritized sharing the message of salvation of sinners through the death of Jesus on the cross, and were completely persuaded that acceptance of this message could change a person into a moral and virtuous individual capable of doing the will of God on earth and having eternal life with God after death. This theology and its proponents had emerged from the Second Great Awakening crusades of Charles Finney, Timothy Dwight, and others. These took place in burgeoning urban areas, in colleges and universities, and among the middle class. At first, the religious experience of conversion was connected with social reform, and therefore the evangelists of the awakening took on moral issues of their day such as slavery and poverty. Because religious awakening, social progress, and education were interwoven, these evangelicals believed they could create a society that could mirror the kingdom of God and would then inspire other nations in this direction. Evangelical missionaries brought this tradition to Latin America and the Caribbean.

Theological Positions among Missionaries in Latin America

This is not the place to discuss thoroughly the theological positions of the different missionary groups. Instead, I briefly present the positions that most influenced the Latin American church, and do so even to this day, and I discuss the ways in which these positions fashioned Christian education and the types of institutions that transmit the faith and prepare leadership for the church. In particular, I look at the beginnings of how fundamentalist and Pentecostal traditions shaped Protestant faith in Latin America.

In José Míguez Bonino’s analysis of the different theological forces that forged Protestantism in Latin America, he claims that “the development of evangelical piety is the real substratum of Latin American missionary Protestantism.”¹⁶ Therefore, the different theological camps come from movements influenced by the second awakening. Míguez Bonino agrees with Pablo Deiros and others that the three main strands of theological thought were liberationists, conservatives, and fundamentalists.¹⁷ Around 1916, evangelicalism was marked by individualism, a more subjective soteriology, and emphasis on sanctification. While these missionaries held liberal political viewpoints, the practice of faith and piety did not sustain or give full expression to these understandings.¹⁸ After 1930, the Protestantism that the Protestant missionary promulgated was represented by the Holiness movement as well as the millennial and fundamentalist streams. After World War II, the missionaries that had been forced to return to the United States from China, India, and Eastern European countries went to Latin America.¹⁹ This new wave of missionaries gave greater expression to an “otherworldly theology” that was influenced mainly by premillennial fundamentalism. It described a dualism between the world and the spirituality that Christians were to have. Practices included a series of legalisms and withdrawal from the world. Míguez Bonino observes that these practices cause significant doctrinal distortion, and that this paralyzes the people, keeping them from places of liberation while also dividing them from one another. The Social Gospel influence was also present among the earlier group of missionaries, and later we will see their influence in an educational agenda that included the different arenas of persons’ lives, including the political and economic.

As these different influences took hold in Latin America, the liberal understanding forged a Latin American Protestant worldview in which, by way of conversion, one could re-create one’s identity and have a self-consciousness that promoted becoming assertive and taking initiative (by making a decision for Christ beyond the cultural and family ties). This prepared one to participate in a more democratic and modern life. The iglesias históricas (mainline churches) became known for having an ethos of “bourgeois liberalism,” since the experience of conversion was connected to aspirations of upward mobility. They also had a sense of religious freedom and associated the way of the kingdom with human progress as seen in North America. Protestantism, therefore, leaned politically toward the parties that would grant it religious freedom. At that time in Latin America, these tended to be parties on the left.

After the...