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Mestizaje and Marginality: A Hispanic American Theology

By John P. Rossing

"Christianity is best understood when it is viewed at its intersections.... Because the Christian gospel of salvation is universal, it must necessarily cross national and cultural boundaries and unite different people under a common identity. Thus, Christian proclamation constantly initiates a new mixing-a new mestizaje."

THE NUMBER of Hispanics in the United States is growing five times faster than the population as a whole, and is now estimated at nearly eight percent of the nation's total population.¹ Recognizing the importance of this group of Americans, political parties and social organizations have tried to broaden their constituencies to include Hispanics, and many American denominations have developed specific ministries to serve Hispanics.²

But until recently, Hispanic experience has not been reflected in North American theology. Orlando Costas, a missiologist and theological educator who was born in Puerto Rico, commented in 1982 on the

John P. Rossing is a pastor in the Southwestern Texas Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. A graduate of St. Olaf College and Luther Northwestern Theological Seminary, he is presently a doctoral student in the history of American Christianity at Emory University.

¹The Hispanic population of the fifty states and the District of Columbia increased by 30% in the last seven years to 18.8 million. The Hispanic population of the United States also includes 2.3 million residents of Puerto Rico. 1987 Census Bureau figures, cited by Melinda Machado (Hispanic Link News Service), "Comentario: Hispanos crecen en EUA, poder y conflictos también," Mundo Hispánico (Atlanta), October 15, 1987, p. 7.

The terms "Hispanics" and "Hispanic Americans" designate a diverse group of United States residents who were born in, or whose forebears were born in, Spanish-speaking nations, or "whose cultural formation is in some fundamentally significant way shaped by Hispanic traditions." See Antonio M. Stevens Arroyo, Prophets Denied Honor: An Anthology on the Hispanic Church in the Unites States (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1980), p. 1; Edwin E. Sylvest, Jr., "The Hispanic American Church: Contextual Considerations," Perkins Journal of Theology 29 (Fall, 197 5), p. 23.

²"American" in this discussion refers to the United States. This usage, though ethnocentric and geographically imprecise, is unavoidable, since no other suitable adjective exists. "North American" refers-as does norteamericano in Spanish-to English-speaking America as distinguished from Latin America, and to the United States in particular.

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low visibility of Hispanic theologians:

Hispanics, like blacks, are a very religious people.... Nonetheless, the Hispanic church does not surface in North American religious consciousness.... [Hispanics] do not seem to count very much when it comes to the interpretation of North American religious experience.³

While other groups that were long ignored--blacks and women--were finding a voice in American theology, and while Latin American liberation theology was exerting worldwide influence, no theological proposals seemed to emerge from Hispanic religious life in the United States. Now that is changing.

I

Before 1970, Hispanic Christians were expected to assimilate themselves into the "mainstream" of American religion. But in the last twenty years, Hispanics have developed greater self-consciousness, cohesiveness, and cultural identity.⁴ Hispanic theologians, recognizing this new cultural self-awareness, have called for theological interpretations from the Hispanic perspective. For example, Virgilio Elizondo, the president of the Mexican American Cultural Center in San Antonio, has written: "The philosophers, ideologues, and theologians must now begin to extract the deeper meaning of the new expressions that are coming to light."⁵

In response to such appeals, Hispanic American religious thinkers have begun to formulate theological proposals that arise from their experience as a people. Apuntes, a bilingual journal of "theological reflections from the Hispanic margin," began publication in 1981, inviting its contributors to engage in a "total rethinking of the entire corpus of Christian theology."⁶ Its writers-and others-have presented views of pastoral care, missiology, social ethics, and historical theology that are shaped by the experience of Hispanics in the Unites States.

Three writers must be included on any list of the most important and original of these theologians. Virgilio Elizondo is a native of San Antonio and rector of San Fernando Cathedral, in that city. He studied at the East Asian Pastoral Institute in Manila and received his doctorate from the Institut Catholique in Paris in 1978. In 1972, he helped found the Mexican American Cultural Center, a center for language studies and theological and pastoral education. Orlando Costas wrote extensively on missiology and Third World theology while serving as a pastor and teacher in Puerto Rico and Costa Rica and as the director of the Hispanic program of Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Costas was

³Orlando Costas, "The Hispanics Next Door," The Christian Century 99 (August 18-25,1982), p. 856.

⁴Stevens Arroyo, Prophets Denied Honor, pp. 97-99.

⁵Virgilio Elizondo, Galilean Journey: The Mexican-American Promise (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1983), pp. 28-29.

⁶Justo L. Gonzales, "Prophets in the King's Sanctuary," Apuntes: Reflexiones teologicas desde el margen hispano 1 (Spring, 1981), p. 3.

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the dean of Andover Newton Theological School from 1984 until November 1987, when his death saddened the theological community. Justo González is a Cuban-born historian who now lives in Decatur, Georgia. González is well-known for his History of Christian Thought, as well as for other works on church history and theology, and he has been the editor of Apuntes since its inception.

The theologians who articulate this Hispanic perspective come from as wide a range of backgrounds as do Hispanic American Christians in general. They have roots in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and other Latin American nations; they speak from Catholic, evangelical, and "mainline" Protestant traditions.⁷ But their views embody a common understanding of Hispanic life, which deeply informs and distinguishes their theology. A helpful spatial image for this understanding is that of adjacent circles or spheres, viewed from the point at which they intersect. One key to the emerging Hispanic theology is the significance of the intersection, the point at which conflict and paradox are both created and overcome.

II

Theologians interpret Hispanic life as the experience of racial and cultural intersections. Such an interpretation is also expressed by Mexican American poet Rodolfo González

Yo soy Joaquin,
Perdido en un mundo de confusion.
...............
Yo soy el bulto de mi gente y
Yo renuncio ser absorbido
...............
Soy principe Azteca y Cristo Cristiano.

[I am Joaquin,
Lost in a world of confusion.
...............
I am the masses of my people and
I refuse to be absorbed.

............
I am Aztec prince and Christian Christ.]⁸

Racially and culturally, Hispanic people are the product of mestizaje (hybridization; mixed blood), "the birth of a new people from two

⁷Though Pentecostals make up a major segment of Hispanic Christianity, North American Hispanic Pentecostals have not yet articulated distinctive theological interpretations. Pentecostals as a whole have only recently begun to formulate systematic theologies, a move that many Pentecostals long resisted because of their twofold insistence on the adequacy of traditional Christian theology and on the unrestricted activity of the Holy Spirit. See Mark D. McLean, "Toward a Pentecostal Hermeneutic," and David R. Nichols, "The Search for a Pentecostal Structure in Systematic Theology," both in Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies (Fall, 1984) 2; and William W. Menzies, "Synoptic Theology: An Essay on Pentecostal Hermeneutics," Paraclete 13 (Winter, 1979), pp. 14-21.

⁸See Rodolfo González, I Am Joaquin (New York: Bantam Books, 1972).

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preexistent peoples."⁹ Even before Columbus "discovered" the New World, Iberian culture was a blend of Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Arabic peoples. In the formation of Spanish culture, combining the different ethnic lineages became a "vital imperative.¹⁰ In the Americas, Spanish and American Indian bloodlines mingled as the two peoples battled for control of the land. This violent birth of a mestizo (mixed) race "is deeply ingrained in the self-understanding of many a Hispanic."¹¹ Hispanics in the United States, moreover, have experienced an additional mestizaje as they immigrated into North American culture or saw their homelands taken over by the United States as a result of the Mexican-American and Spanish-American Wars.

Both instances of mestizaje cause mestizo people to express profound racial and cultural ambivalence. Edwin A. Sylvest, Jr., a professor of the history of Christianity and a participant in the Mexican-American Program of Perkins School of Theology, writes that, as descendants of both Spanish invaders and Native American defenders, "we feel the pain of being born in a situation of violence. Discovery became conquest, and we ourselves at once discoverers and discovered, conquerors and conquered."¹² And Jorge Lara-Braud, professor of theology and culture at San Francisco Theological Seminary, insists that as members of a minority group in the United States, Hispanic Americans must work to form new habits and loyalties while still culturally and emotionally attached to older traditions.

Psychologically and spiritually, we immigrants are like converts. We must legitimize our abandonment of the past [by considering our past] bad, and we must legitimize the present and the future as good and promising.¹³

The point at which adjacent spheres intersect is on the surface of both spheres but contained within neither, and the same is true of the identity of a people who live at the intersection of cultures. Though generations may have passed since the families of today's Hispanic Americans crossed borders to reach the United States, or were overtaken by the advancing border of the United States, they still feel as though they live at the border, the place where two cultures meet, which is not contained within either culture. Elizondo claims that "the mestizo is not allowed to feel at home anywhere."¹⁴

Mestizos are treated as outsiders by both parental cultures. MexicanAmericans, for example, are not accepted in Mexico as Mexicans. They

⁹Elizondo, p. 10.

¹⁰David Cardus, A Hispanic Look at the Bicentennial (Houston: Institute of Hispanic Culture of Houston, 1978), p. 2.

¹¹Justo L. González, "Toward a New Reading of History," Apuntes I (Autumn, 1981), p. 4.

¹²Edwin E. Sylvest, Jr., "Rethinking the 'Discovery' of the Americas: A Provisional Historico-Theological Reflection," Apuntes 7 (Spring, 1987), p. 4.

¹³Jorge Lara-Braud, "Reflexiones teolögicas sobre la migraciön," Apuntes 2 (Spring, 1982), p. 4.

¹⁴Elizondo, p. 99.

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are called pochos ("hollow and puffed up, like overripe fruit") and agringados ("gringo-ized"); their Spanish is ridiculed. Yet neither have they been accepted in North American society. They are considered second-class citizens; their English is ridiculed.¹⁵ Hispanic Americans are marginal people in the fundamental sense of the term: people "in a dilemma, or state of mental conflict, by reason of [their] participation in two different, distinct, cultural groups"; they are not exclusively loyal or committed to either, nor fully acceptable to either.¹⁶

The intersection of two spheres defines a unique point, common to both spheres yet not contained within either. And the mestizaje and marginality of Hispanic Americans define a unique cultural identity; bearing characteristics of each of its parental cultures, it remains distinct from each. Joel Martinez of Dallas, a former district superintendent in the Rio Grande Conference of the United Methodist Church, argues that the ambiguity of life at the intersection makes possible a new synthesis: it is the "prelude to the questioning of the border itself."¹⁷ The bilingual, bicultural identity weaves Latin American and North American cultural traditions together into a new fabric.

III

Hispanic theology begins where Hispanic self-perception begins: at the intersection. Elizondo argues that the same mixing of Spanish and Native American peoples that gave birth to a new race also produced a new Latin American Christianity.

The new people of the land would now be the pueblo mestizo, la raza mestiza. And the new Christianity would be neither a cultural expression of Iberian Catholicism nor a mere continuation of the preconquest religions of the indigenous people, but a new incarnation of Christianity in the Americas.¹⁸

Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, a doctoral student at Union Theological Seminary in New York, has written that "the Hispanic understandings of the divine, the human, the meaning of life, emerge from this mestizaje."¹⁹ But mestizaje is more than the cultural memory of a specific Christian history. It is also a metaphor by which Hispanic American theologians interpret Christianity as a whole.

Christianity, they claim, is best understood when it is viewed at its intersections. The church is the mestizo par excellence, because it emerges from the intersection of the earthly and the heavenly. The first Christians lived at the intersection of the Jewish and gentile worlds. Christian doctrine developed at the intersection of biblical traditions and philosophical speculation. Because the Christian gospel of salvation

¹⁵Ibid., pp. 21-22.

¹⁶George A. Theodorson and Achilles G. Theodorson, A Modern Dictionary of Sociology (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1969), p. 243.

¹⁷Joel N. Martinez, "Surviving: The Prelude," Apuntes 1(Summer, 1981), p. 12.

¹⁸Elizondo, p. 12.

¹⁹Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, "'Apuntes' for a Hispanic Women's Theology of Liberation," Apuntes 6 (Fall, 1986), p. 66.

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is universal, it must necessarily cross national and cultural borders and unite different peoples under a common identity. Thus, Christian proclamation constantly initiates a new mixing-a new mestizaje.²⁰

The essential point of reference for a theology of the intersection is the ultimate intersection, the Incarnation. Hispanic American theology is, above all, incarnational. Justo González clarifies this foundation:

God's supreme self-disclosure has come to us in a human being, Jesus of Nazareth. The Incarnation must be the basis, not only for our doctrine of redemption, but also and above all for our doctrine of God. The Incarnation is not, as we often suppose, a last minute remedy for human sin. As Irenaeus and other early Christian theologians would say, it is the very goal of creation.²¹

The Incarnation is the intersection of God and humankind; of Creator and creation; of the eternal and the temporal; of the past, the present, and the future. As Costas explained, the Incarnation is God's entry into a particular human context, God present in history.²²

That God entered into a particular history and culture compels us to proclaim God's presence in the history and culture of every people in the world. Thus, the Incarnation makes a contextual theology imperative; it provides the rationale for a theology from the Hispanic perspective. Because of the Incarnation, writes Elizondo, "the cultural conditioning of the individual [is] not to be thought of as just an aid to proclaim the gospel, but as the medium through which God chose to reveal himself."²³ The gospel itself must be made incarnate within the distinctive forms of each culture.

Hispanic writers have interpreted Christian mission, liturgy, and history in these incarnational terms. According to Costas, contextualization and incarnation lie at the heart of Christian mission. The world mission of Christians is to interpret the gospel appropriately in each context, Costas wrote, because "revelation comes to specific peoples -in concrete situations by means of particular cultural symbols and categories."²⁴ Costas's theology of mission involves both the intersection of different cultural spheres and the intersection of the gospel with all human experience. Missiology, he wrote, is a "theology of the crossroads" that emerges "at the point where cultures, ideologies, religious traditions, and social, economic, and political systems confront each other, and where the gospel seeks to cross the frontier of unbelief."²⁵

A similar understanding informs Hispanic liturgical theology. Ricardo Ramirez, a former executive of the Mexican American Cultural Center who in 1982 became the first Bishop of Las Cruces, New

²⁰Elizondo, pp. 106, 107; Justo L. González, A History of Christian Thought, 3 vols., revised ed. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1987), 1:381-82.

²¹Justo L. González "Let the Dead Gods Bury their Dead," Apuntes 4 (Winter 1984), p. 93.

²²Orlando E. Costas, Christ Outside the Gate: Mission Beyond Christendom (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1982), pp. 6, 12.

²³Elizondo, p. 3.

²⁴Costas, Christ Outside the Gate, p. 5.

²⁵Ibid., p. xiv.

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Mexico, argues that the incorporation of Hispanic cultural expressions into the liturgy is not an adaptation so much as an incarnation.²⁶ The church must be willing to see traditional expressions of Hispanic popular piety not as a threat to the traditional liturgy, but as a place where liturgy can penetrate the lives of people. Fiestas, for example, answer a "pressing demand for the affirmation of faith in life."²⁷ Participants in the posada (a procession depicting Mary and Joseph in search of lodging) and the quince años celebration (on the coming of age of a fifteen-year-old woman) bring their faith to life in their dramatic actions and in the important events of their lives.

Incarnation has also served as a model for understanding Christian history. González identifies the doctrine of the Incarnation as the theological basis for his history of Christian thought. "The truth," he writes, "is given precisely there where the eternal unites with the historical; where God becomes flesh, where a specific man, in a specific situation, is able to say: 'I am the truth,"²⁸ Therefore, he interprets the Hellenization of Christian thought as an incarnation, which not only ensured the survival of Christianity in the Greek world but also reflected the deepest truth of the Christian message.²⁹ Christian doctrine is only articulated when the truth becomes enfleshed in the words and wisdom of a particular people.

All these elements of theology-the Incarnation, first, along with the church and its mission, liturgy, and history-are described by Hispanic theologians as intersections. And since the Incarnation is the ultimate intersection, the supreme mestizaje, it is the lens through which they most often view the other intersections between Christianity and the world.

IV

The emphasis Hispanic theologians give to the Incarnation is matched by their emphasis on Jesus, in whom that intersection occurred. God became incarnate in a particular person: in the life of Jesus human beings of all times and places meet God. The historical and cultural situation in which Jesus lived shows striking parallels to the situation in which Hispanic Americans live, and those likenesses give Hispanic theology a distinctive interest in the figure of Jesus.

Jesus was a migrant. Hugo L. Löpez, a parish pastor and formerly the Director for the Development of Hispanic Resources of the United Methodist Church's Board of Discipline, explores the implications of that image. He suggests that, in the Incarnation, the Son of God left behind his "country of origin" and came to live in a new country,

²⁶Ricardo Ramirez, "Liturgy from the Mexican American Prespective," Worship 51 (July, 1977), p. 294.

²⁷Ibid., p. 298.

²⁸González, History of Christian Thought, 1:25-26.

²⁹Ibid., pp. 381-82.

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assuming the same risks and enduring the same rejection that earthly immigrants do.

Jesus el Cristo paid a dear fee for his passport: the negation of all his powers and the renunciation of all his authority for the duration of his absence. The only power he used in accomplishing his mission was precisely the same as that which moved him to accomplish it: love.³⁰

At the time of Jesus' birth, his parents were also migrants, sojourners in Bethlehem with nowhere to stay. Thus, the posada celebrates an especially pertinent intersection of the story of Jesus with the lives of those Hispanics who have themselves been sojourners, wandering in search of work and shelter. "What they found instead was rejection after rejection," writes Elizondo. "But, like Joseph and Mary, they did not give up; they followed their star."³¹ Jesus, the Divine Migrant, was born to a family that many Hispanics recognize as their own or their neighbors'.

Elizondo has made the Galilean setting his key to understanding the gospel. Galilee, the land in which Jesus lived and ministered, was a land of mestizaje and marginality. It had suffered invasions and cultural hybridization. Jewish exclusiveness had been weakened there, and intermarriage with non-Jews was common. Galilean Jews were scorned by cultured pagans and Jerusalem Jews alike. They were part of, yet despised by, both the Jewish and the Greco-Roman worlds.³²

When God chose to enter human history in Galilee, God chose to be an outsider. Throughout his life, Jesus identified with the most rejected members of society, and he loved them. His own genealogy included harlots, converted pagans, foreigners, adulterers, and lowly shepherds. "When God entered human history," writes Elizondo, "he took it as it was. Neither racism, nor purity of blood, nor purity of morals, nor social class was respected in the incarnation."³³ Costas also emphasized this divine identification with outsiders:

If Christian mission means encountering the crucified Christ in the world of the outsiders and sharing in his suffering for the rejects and the outcasts, then it follows that all its traditional aspects must be interpreted from the perspective of the periphery.³⁴

Because Jesus chose to locate his activity at the margin of society, the margin must be the point of view from which his mission is interpreted.

To accomplish the salvation of humanity, Jesus had to go from Galilee to Jerusalem, from the margin to the center of power. His journey to the capital city was not an assault on Jerusalem, argues Elizondo, but on the forces that estranged Galilee from Jerusalem. He went to Jerusalem to overthrow the religious, political, and intellectual absolutism that draws

³⁰Hugo L. Lopéz, "El Divino Migrante," Apuntes 4 (Spring, 1984), p. 16.

³¹Elizondo, p. 38.

³²Ibid., pp. 51-52.

³³Ibid., p. 55.

³⁴Costas, Christ Outside the Gate, p. 192.

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boundaries between insiders and outsiders. Jesus had to destroy the barriers between people as well as those between people and God.³⁵

At his crucifixion, Jesus became the focus of the world's forces of rejection. And the tearing of the temple curtain at his death symbolized the end of all exclusiveness and of all distinctions between clean and unclean, insider and outsider.³⁶ The cross remains as scandalous today as it was for its original witnesses, Elizondo writes,

because the cross continues to reveal the impurity of the pure and the purity of the impure, the innocence of criminals and the crimes of the innocent, the righteousness of sinners and the sin of the righteous, the wisdom of the foolish and the foolishness of the wise.³⁷

The confrontation between the oppressed and what is oppressive is not destructive, but liberating. It erases the borders that divide human beings. So also, the crucifixion of Jesus overcomes the estrangement of human beings from God and from each other. What was once divided is brought together in a new intersection.

In their view of Jesus as the liberator, Hispanic theologians in the United States share a common perspective with Latin American liberation theologians. But the centrality of the Incarnation in North American Hispanic Christology is distinctive, as is the understanding of liberation as reconciliation. Hispanic American and Latin American theologies both portray Christ as a deliverer and an ethical critic of society, and seek liberation from oppressive political and economic power.³⁸ But North American Hispanic theology sees Christ also as a reconciler, and seeks liberation from oppressive boundaries and divisions which prevent mutuality and acceptance at the intersections between social groups.

The reconciliation that becomes possible because of Jesus' crucifixion is completed by his resurrection: a new creation, the entry into new life "beyond all borders."³⁹ It opens the Kingdom of God to all people, without discriminating against anyone who stands outside the human categories of acceptability. In the new life that Christians share through Christ's resurrection, there is no "we versus they, [but a] new us; a universal fellowship under God-abba."⁴⁰

Edwin Sylvest draws a parallel between the discovery of the New World and the new life in the resurrection. Both created a new humanity through a mestizaje, an intersection. But in the new world that is created in the resurrection, our encounter with the other leads to completion and inclusion, rather than to conquest and oppression.⁴¹

Because of their heritage of mestizaje and marginality, Hispanic

³⁵Elizondo, pp. 69-70.

³⁶Ibid., p. 78.

³⁷Ibid., p. 41.

³⁸Claus Bussmann, Who Do You Say?--Jesus Christ in Latin American Theology, trans. Robert R. Barr (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1985), pp. 47-48.

³⁹Elizondo, p. 79.

⁴⁰Ibid., pp. 62-64.

⁴¹Sylvest, "Rethinking the 'Discovery,"' pp. 12-13.

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Americans claim a particular role in proclaiming God's new creation. Their own marginal status makes them aware of the need for reconciliation and liberation; their history of suffering enables them to took compassionately on the suffering of others. Their marginality, the experience that defines their often uncomfortable identity as a people, also makes them a potential force for redemption in society. "It is consistently in the frontier regions of human belonging that God begins the new creation. Established centers seek stability; frontier regions can risk to be pioneers."⁴²

"Como hispanos, somos un pueblo puente," writes González "As Hispanics, we are a bridge-people."⁴³ Their position on the border between North and South, between English-speaking and Spanishspeaking America, between First World and Third, makes Hispanic Americans a bridge across which communication and exchange can be established. They are uniquely able to call the attention of North Americans to their poor and oppressed neighbors, and to economic practices in the United States that contribute to Latin American injustice. The people at the intersection must be instrumental in bringing about reform and reconciliation across the Rio Grande and the Caribbean.

David Abalos, who teaches religion and sociology at Seton Hall University, has used a "theory of transformation" to analyze the entry of Hispanics into new social and political roles. For Abalos, liberating transformation includes people's reconciliation to the sacred, which is accomplished through a three-stage "journey with the transforming God." At the first stage, a person experiences himself or herself as simply an emanation of the sacred, and is thus unable to enter any relationship with the sacred as an Other. At the second stage, the stage of incoherence, one experiences a "disconnectedness from the transpersonal," in which the self is isolated and estranged from all others. The third stage, the stage of transformation, allows "a mutual interpenetration of the human and the divine," a new link to the sacred. In social experience, the first stage is submission to another and acceptance of oppression; the second is conflict, polarization, and the struggle for power; and the third stage transforms conflict into mutuality, and leads to true liberation. The intersection of the self with the Divine Other through the transforming power of Jesus leads to salvation of the self and reconciliation between the self and all others.⁴⁴

V

A theology that bridges borders also eliminates dualism. Hispanic theologians uniformly reject theological and hermeneutical dichotomies.

⁴²Elizondo, pp. 100-101.

⁴³Justo L. González, "Hacia un redescubrimiento de nuestra misiön," Apuntes 7 (Autumn, 1987), p. 53.

⁴⁴David T. Abalos, Latinos in the United States: The Sacred and the Political (Notre Dame, Ind.: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1986), pp. 117-33.

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For example, Guillermo Ramirez, a Mennonite pastor from Puerto Rico and doctoral student in Old Testament at Emory University, has argued that a Hispanic biblical hermeneutic must neither isolate a text from its historical context nor fail to connect it to the situation of its reader. More importantly, the interpreters must apply their insights to all creation, not just to human beings, and must also contribute to a single worldview in which the sacred and the secular are united.⁴⁵

The Hispanic perspective, according to González also requires a non-dualistic anthropology.⁴⁶ Such a view of human nature would not divorce people's spiritual from their material well-being. It would see sin as a relational term, describing a whole person alienated from God and other people. Salvation from sin can only mean sanctification of the whole person and all the person's relationships.

A non-dualistic anthropology is also realistic in its judgments about human beings; it does not see people as entirely good or entirely evil. "One of the characteristics of the Hispanic point of view is its profound humanistic realism ."⁴⁷ Because Hispanics are descendants of both the Spanish conquerors and the Native American defenders, and since they have had to form new allegiances in the United States, they do not subscribe to any national myths about the righteousness of their own forebears or their causes.⁴⁸ Nor are they blind to the faults of their heroes, including the heroes of biblical stories. They recognize both good and evil in all persons and in all societies.

This non-dualistic theology, claims González is able to address spiritual and social-political issues with equal seriousness.

One of the reproaches most often made of the new theologies that are interested in political and social questions is that they are not spiritual enough.... Therefore, it is time that we begin to investigate what can be a Hispanic theology of spirituality.⁴⁹

González finds no opposition between spiritual and material concerns; both, he argues, are properly Christian. Guillermo Ramirez, too, explains: "We hold to the hope that God's purpose-liberation-is achieved not only in the 'spiritual' plane, but in all spheres of life."⁵⁰ Because spiritual and material concerns intersect, Christian spirituality embraces movements for political and economic liberation. According to Fernando Santillana, a United Methodist Church pastor in California,

⁴⁵Guillermo Ramirez, "Perspectivas apocalipticas: reto para hoy," Apuntus 3 (Fall, 1983), p. 57.

⁴⁶Justo L. González "On Being Human," Apuntes 3 (Fall, 1983), p. 58-68.

⁴⁷Cardus, p. 2.

⁴⁸Gonzales, calls this a "non-innocent" concept of history, which rules out the naive use of history in support of the political status quo ("Mañana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective," unpublished MS, pp. 87-101.). I am grateful to Mr. González for allowing me to read his manuscript, and for his comments in several conversations.

⁴⁹Justo L. González "Espiritualidad Pólitica," Apuntes 3 (Spring, 1983), p. 3.

⁵⁰G. Ramirez, p. 57.

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the sanctuary movement and other pursuits of justice are not separable from spirituality, but are based on spirituality.⁵¹

González returns to the Incarnation as the model for a non-dualistic spirituality. God's entry into human flesh assures us that God cares as much about people's physical lives, sufferings, and deaths as about their spiritual condition. The tendency to divide political matters from spiritual, writes the historian, is the same as the Marcionite heresy, which separated the God of creation from the God of redemption, and denied that Christ was truly human. We battle the present heresy the same way earlier Christians battled Marcionism, by confessing the Apostles' Creed: if God is truly Creator of heaven and earth, then "there are no borders to God's power and concern."⁵²

VI

Hispanic theologians write about a broader range of subjects than Incarnation, the life of Christ, resurrection and liberation, and a holistic spirituality. And they develop the implications of their theology for church and society beyond the scope of this discussion. But the recurrence of those themes, and of a particular way of treating them, suggest an emerging pattern in Hispanic theology.

Marginality and mestizaje define Hispanic self-understanding and the theology arising from that understanding. Marginality, because Hispanics view their lives and their theology as complexes of intersections, of borders to straddle. And mestizaje, because each of those intersections makes possible a synthesis, a new creation.

Hispanic theology is itself an intersection. It fuses the Christian message and the experience of Hispanic Americans into an original statement of faith. It makes the gospel incarnate again in the particular situation of a particular community at a particular moment in history. And it shows the necessity and the possibility of reconciliation to God and to humanity: the possibility of life "beyond all borders."

If North American religious life is to become fully inclusive of Hispanic Americans-an intention declared by virtually all denominations in this country-the ecumenical theological community must become aware of the cultural and theological perspectives of Hispanic people. Simply translating existing English-language theological statements and worship practices into Spanish is not enough. If North American Christians listen to the voices of Hispanic Christians speaking from the intersections in our society, we can learn to see the entire church as a mestizo community, in which people from all nations and cultures are reconciled to God and to each other.

⁵¹Fernando, Santillana, "La experiencia espiritual en el trabajo de santuario," Apuntes 5 (Fall, 1985), p. 70.

⁵²Justo L. Gonzales, "The Apostles' Creed and the Sanctuary Movement," Apuntes 6 (Spring, 1986), pp. 13, 15.