Spirit Outside the Gate

Decolonial Pneumatologies of the American Global South

Oscar García-Johnson

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780830872541
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Throughout the history of the Christian church, two narratives have constantly clashed: the imperial logic of Babel that builds towers and borders to seize control, versus the logic of Pentecost that empowers "glocal" missionaries of the kingdom life. To what extent are Westernized Christians today ready for the church of the Pentecost narrative? Are they equipped to do ministry in different cultural modes and to handle disruption and perplexity? What are Christians to make of the Holy Spirit's occasional encounters with cultures and religions of the Americas before the European conquest?Oscar García-Johnson explores a new grammar for the study of theology and mission in global Christianity, especially in Latin America and the Latinx "third spaces" in North America. With an interdisciplinary, "transoccidental, " and narrative approach, Spirit Outside the Gate offers a constructive theology of mission for the church in global contexts.Building on the familiar missiological metaphor of "outside the gate" established by Orlando Costas, García-Johnson moves to recover important elements in ancestral traditions of the Americas, with an eye to discerning pneumatological continuity between the pre-Columbian and post-Columbian communities. He calls for a "rerouting of theology"—a realization that theology cannot make its home in Christendom but is a global creation that must come home to a church without borders.In this volume García-Johnson- considers pneumatological insights into de/postcolonial studies- traces independent epistemic contributions of the American Global South- shows how American indigenous, Afro-Latinx, and immigrant communities provide resources for a decolonial pneumatology- describes four transformations the American church must undergo to break free from colonial, modernist, and monocultural structuresSpirit Outside the Gate opens a path for a pneumatological missiology that can help the church act as a witness to the gospel message in a postmodern, postcolonial, and post-Christendom world.Missiological Engagements charts interdisciplinary and innovative trajectories in the history, theology, and practice of Christian mission, featuring contributions by leading thinkers from both the Euro-American West and the majority world whose missiological scholarship bridges church, academy, and society.

PART I

The Narrative

The American Global South:
Challenges and Visions

We are present at every cardinal point because our geography is the geography of injustice and oppression. We are not everyone; we are those who do not resign themselves to sacrifice and therefore resist. We have dignity. We are all indigenous peoples because we are where we have always been, before we had owners, masters, or bosses, or because we are where we were taken against our will and where owners, masters, or bosses were imposed on us. They want to impose on us the fear of having a boss and the fear of not having a boss, so that we may not imagine ourselves without fear. We resist. We are widely diverse human beings united by the idea that the understanding of the world is much larger than the Western understanding of the world. We believe that the transformation of the world may also occur in ways not foreseen by the global North. We are animals and plants, biodiversity and water, earth and Pachamama, ancestors and future generations—whose suffering appears less in the news than the suffering of humans but is closely linked to theirs, even though they may be unaware of it. . . .

Who are we? We are the global South, that large set of creations and creatures that has been sacrificed to the infinite voracity of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy.

BOAVENTURA DE SOUSA SANTOS, EPISTEMOLOGIES OF THE SOUTH:
JUSTICE AGAINST EPISTEMICIDE

When the Cuban American theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz thought of her home city, La Habana, Cuba, she described it as “a city that inhabits me,” in spite of the fact that she had lived in the United States of America most of her life.1 Some might think of this description as nostalgic and a sign of cultural inadaptability. To the diasporan citizen from the American Global South, however, this existential paradox is much more than mere nostalgia; it is a form of geopolitics of knowledge, a border geography for thinking, sensing, believing, imagining, and acting. A diasporan such as Isasi-Díaz lives in displacement, which is commonly experienced as an external exile (in relationship to her homeland) and an internal exile (in relationship to her home base, the place in which she has lived most of her life, yet which does not embrace her as a native).2

Let us make no mistake here, such exilic self-consciousness brings with it not just ambiguity and disorientation but also imaginaries and decolonial tropes with the potential to reframe world captivities that are not usually available to those living at the center of wealth, intellectual privilege, and racial hegemony. Exilic, diasporan, borderline narratologies can be used, Isasi-Díaz reminds us, as heuristic devices in our different disciplines.3 The epistemic advantage they enjoy as diasporan thinkers is that the very conditions making up their context are a constant reminder of the “dangerous memories” conveyed in life under the violent, unjust, and cruel regime of global marginalizing designs.

As does Isasi-Díaz, I too have biographies that interconnect with hemispheric histories and can be used as heuristic devices. By interlacing local narratives with a continental matrix of power, I intend to show an organic picture of how economics, politics, religion, subjectivity, and geography have had concrete manifestations in the lives of individuals, families, countries, continents, and Christian traditions in the American Global South. The three chapters in part one seek to narrate more than analyze problems and possible solutions in the American Global South. As I have suggested, narratives are good sources for developing a nomenclature for the realities of the worlds from which those narratives emerge. Hence, after generating a number of metaphors, categories, and framing venues in this part, I will, in chapters four and five, name and analyze the main epistemic problems in the American Global South—those of American Christendom.

1

A Child of the Occident

When . . . Jehovah distributed the world United Fruit Inc. reserved . . . America’s sweet waist. It rebaptized [them] The “Banana Republics.” PABLO NERUDA, “CANTO GENERAL” (1950)

A CHIQUITA BANANA KID

I am from the “sweet waist” of America: Honduras, a country marked in history as the quintessential expression of the banana republic. Its Atlantic alluvial coasts attracted lovers that made her land fit for kings for many years. Acres of humid and fertile land, dressed by hundreds of cabbages, in a young Central American republic, playing the home of kings—the North Carolina novelist O. Henry made a name for himself with this story, right at the crossing of the nineteenth century. O. Henry’s satirical narrative Cabbages and Kings, in whose pages Honduras is referred to as the Banana Republic, became a classic widely read in schools across the United States of America (and their international schools) in the twentieth century.1

“The 300 miles of adventurous coast has scarcely known for hundreds of years whom rightly to call its master,” relates O. Henry. “Gentleman adventurers throng the waiting rooms of its rulers with proposals for railroad and concessions.” A century after, we know who won the favor of Honduran rulers, the United Fruit Company, Inc., later known as Chiquita Banana.

Settled in a territory as vast as 650,000 acres of the most productive land along the Atlantic coast of Honduras by the first quarter of the twentieth century, the United Fruit Company began the process of building national “progress.” That is how we, most of the Honduran population, thought of the United Fruit Company for most of the twentieth century. The national craving for modernizing Honduras with the help of the Chiquita Banana became the project of a century. As the North American company applied its architectural and entrepreneurial geniuses to its key infrastructures—ports, railroads, state-of-the-art hotels, hospitals, administrative buildings, grocery stores, country clubs with golf courses, sport centers, cinemas, tennis courts, and the like—sparks of hope invaded the public imagination. Needless to say, the spacious and luxurious real estate, where middle- to upper-management employees lived, fueled the public appetite for “tomorrowland”; a living condition for the middle class second only to that of the architects of this society, the United States of America itself.

All commodities and living upgrades developed by the United Fruit Company were strategically located in specific geographical areas where its main operations took place. Given the splendor of progress in these regions in contrast to the average Honduran neighborhood, locals came to baptize these areas La Zona Americana (the American zone). Likewise, the United Fruit Company became nationally known as La Compañía (the Company). The political leverage that La Compañía enjoyed with the Honduran executive power and other public agencies was unprecedented.2 The United Fruit Company was given the opportunity to sport a new capitalistic economy, sustained by an upper-middle-class managerial society that correspondingly exemplified a particular US cultural and patriotic lifestyle.

I grew up in La Zona Americana for most of my early childhood and adolescence. My father worked for the United Fruit Company as middle management. My mother, a white lady of British American descent, kept our home in line with such status. Both of my parents played golf, but my mom was exceptional. She won several tournaments, both locally and nationally. Golf was the family sport, an extravagant pastime in a “Third World country.” Memories about life in La Zona Americana have made a significant impression on me—La Zona Americana, tomorrowland, in one of the most impoverished countries of the American continent; a geography of progress lived as the American dream, protecting me from the foes of national poverty and underdevelopment; a flare of success on my head among losers; as if Jehovah, in the words of Neruda, had distributed this piece of land, this juicy waist of my country, to La Compañía; a beautiful life, a good life, the ultimate truth.3 I grew up to be a Chiquita Banana kid.

A WESTERN CATHOLIC

Like most Latin Americans, I was raised Roman Catholic, the national religious identity of Honduras. During my youth I attended different Franciscan elementary schools. Though not very active in the church and its liturgical celebrations, “being Catholic” was how we identified as a family. School taught us well who our founders were. Roman Catholicism founded the Western religious imagination of the Americas at the time of the “discovery of the New World.”4 Such religious imagination cemented three centuries of colonial life and shaped what we know as Latin America and the Caribbean today. The mission of the Roman Catholic tradition has a deep, broad, and lasting history in the American continent. I practiced what the Cuban American Catholic theologian Orlando Espín calls “the daily religion of western Catholics.”5 Popularly speaking, I was a Roman Catholic in my own way, but a Catholic nonetheless.

THE PROTESTANT ENCHANTMENT

As a young man, I attended a Protestant junior high/high school by the name Instituto Departamental Evangelico Anna Dorothea Bechtold, locally known as la misión evangélica (the evangelical mission). The school was founded in 1939 by Miss Anna D. Bechtold, an Anglo-American missionary from the Reformed church. Part of its purpose was to evangelize children and youth in the community and provide them with what she thought to be a more holistic and modern education than that available in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. This, of course, acc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface - An Amorphous Journey in Transoccidental Studies
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I - The Narrative - The American Global South: Challenges and Visions
• Part II - The Gate - The Geopolitics of Western Theology and Mission
• Part III - Outside the Gate - In Search of Ungating Christian Logics in the American Global South
• Part IV - Theology Otherwise - Decolonial Pneumatologies in the American Global South
• Part V - Crossings - Perspectives on Theology, Whiteness, and Global Designs
• Epilogue - ¿Y Ahora Qué? - Can the “White Western” University Be Freed? (An Indiscreet Email)
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• Praise for Spirit Outside the Gate
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright