Reflection of Manana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective Essay Example

his aim in writing the book is to liberate the North Americans from the dominant culture of a “private theology” to one where all the Christians involved will be proud to call it “our theology.”

From reading this chapter, I have learned that poor interpretation of scriptures has caused the different versions and factions that we have in the church today. The man has failed to adequately translate the original gospel of love that Jesus Christ preached when He was on earth and actualize it to good news. There are several instances where the world rulers have repeatedly quoted the scriptures and used it to justify injustice and repression. In Latin America for example, biblical teachings were used to justify the Spanish conquest. The Bible has been used as the authority upon which some cultures and civilizations both in North and South America were destroyed. Paul’s writings have been used to support the idea that it is okay for one to have and keep slaves. Several women who grew and were raised in the Christian circles have come to an absurd conclusion that the Bible is a sexist book and have even gone ahead to disassociate themselves from it. Additionally, there are some Native Americans who prefer the religion their ancestors preached to the modern Christianity since they have felt to find an identity, acceptance, and love in this new Christianity. All these secularizations have come as a result of man have been born from man’s poor interpretation of the Bible, mostly because of wrong teaching or reading out of context.

I have observed that the experience that one undergoes when they are a member of a

religious minority group is the determinant factor in whether they will hold fast to what their faith as a minority group, shift over to the majority religious group or wholly denounce their faith. The writer allows us to relive his experiences as a young man in Latin America where Protestant Christians were barely a handful as the larger part of the population is composed of Roman Catholics. He explains how the fierce arguments and debates he had with his classmates while still in school would latter ground him in his evangelical faith and lead him into affirming the scripture as the sole authority of what he believed as opposed to “common sense” which is in most cases subjective.

In this hostile environment where almost everyone had beliefs that entirely differed from his, there was nowhere else that he could find the evidence to spot the errors in their belief systems apart from the Bible. He attributes his present neutral but objective stance on theological perspectives as having been shaped by his early life in the Latin America. It is also the early life he lived that would later help him to properly separate Christianity from the culture of the people not just in North America but also in the world over, and demystify the traditional thought of Christians living a particular life pattern.

Work Cited

1. Gonzalez, Justo L. Manana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990. Print.