Santa Biblia. Justo L. Gonzalez

young man with the tape recorder asked me about Lope de Vega, I probably would have responded along the lines of these two poles of any dialogue with a text. First of all, I would have said that the question is not one of inerrancy, but rather one of authority. Texts do not err. It is writers and readers who err. But texts do have authority, and therefore the question is: How is the authority of the Bible different from that of Lope de Vega’s plays? Obviously, at an initial level, their authority differs in that it refers to different matters. Only a very confused person would go to the Bible in preference to Lope de Vega in order to learn about Spanish life at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth. But the difference is much greater than that. The authority of the Bible is grounded on both ends of our dialogue with the biblical text. The Bible is authoritative both because we, its interlocutors, grant it authority, and because throughout the life of the church it has proven itself worthy of that authority—in other words, because when we enter into a dialogue with it, it responds with authority. This authority is not “objective” in the sense that it can be proven to all comers, no matter what their religious or philosophical stance. Nor is it “subjective” in the sense that it depends upon my granting it authority. It is rather dialogical. The Bible is authoritative because, when the church addresses it, it addresses the church with authority.

      In the foregoing, I have often referred to the perspective of the interpreter. The question of perspective is important for two complementary reasons: first, because it cannot be avoided; second, because it should not be avoided.

      First, perspective cannot be avoided. If there is anything we have learned during these last decades of modernity, it is that knowledge is always perspectival. We probably would have learned it much sooner had we really listened to Immanuel Kant, who showed that objective knowledge is a contradiction in terms. But the modern age was so enamored with the dream of objectivity that it has taken us two centuries to begin to understand the implications of what Kant was telling us. Kicking and screaming, shaken and poked by the likes of Freud and Marx, modernity has finally begun to awaken from its dream of objectivity, and the result has been the birth of postmodernity. (In a way, much of what I say here is based on the postmodern critique of modernity’s false sense of objectivity—or, in more technical terms, of the great modern metanarrative—for it is precisely that critique that leads to an insistence on the importance of perspective in any claim to knowledge. Yet, in some ways what I say here, rather than “postmodern,” hopes to express some of the “extramodern” experience of a community that was largely excluded from modernity—or rather, that was included as an object rather than as a subject.)²

      Precisely because perspective cannot be avoided, when it is not explicitly acknowledged the result is that a particular perspective takes on an aura of universality. Thus it happens that theology from a male perspective claims to be generally human, and that North Atlantic white theology believes itself to be “normal,” while theologies from the so-called Third World or from ethnic minorities in the North Atlantic are taken to be contextual or perspectival.

      Just as important for our purposes is the second point, namely, that the matter of perspective should not be avoided. The reason for this is not simply that we delude ourselves when we believe that ours is not a particular perspective. The reason is rather that, unless the text addresses us where we are, it does not really address us. If a black woman in Africa reads a biblical text in exactly the same way in which she was taught to read it by a white man from Nebraska, the text will most likely be addressing issues that were important for her teacher and for other white men in Nebraska, but will not be addressing other issues that relate more directly to that woman’s life. If I do not speak to the text, asking of it questions that are genuinely my own, the text will not really speak to me, and the dialogue will be undercut.

      Perspective, however, does not mean fragmentation. Whenever one speaks of theology being contextual, there are those who raise the question of the possibility that the contextualization of theology may lead to the fragmentation of the church. This is a legitimate concern, and one that must be addressed, for history shows that contextualization may indeed lead to divisiveness. Such was, for instance, the principal root of the long-standing schism between the Latin West and the Greek East. Over the centuries, each of these two branches of the church contextualized the gospel in its own culture, and the time came when each accused the other of heresy. To say, however, that contextualization is what led to schism is to miss an important distinction. What led to schism was not contextualization itself, but unconscious contextualization. The inculturation of the gospel in the Greek-speaking East was a positive and necessary result of the evangelization of the East. And the inculturation of the gospel in the Latin-speaking West was also a positive and necessary result of the evangelization of the West. The problem lay in that neither the Greek-speaking East nor the Latin-speaking West was willing or able to acknowledge that its own understanding and expression of the gospel were contextual. On the contrary, each of them insisted that its own theology was nothing but “the faith once delivered to the apostles.” On that basis, there was no option left but to reject and condemn all different understandings of any aspects of the faith, as well as any practice of the faith that did not agree with one’s own. Precisely because contextualization had taken place, but was not acknowledged, contextualization resulted in schism.

      The same is true today. Contextualization may certainly lead to fragmentation; but that is not necessarily its result. Unconscious contextualization, on the other hand, will certainly lead to fragmentation, because it is by nature sectarian, not recognizing that it is but part of the whole. What leads to fragmentation is not the existence of a black theology, a Hispanic³ theology, or theologies that explicitly take into account the theologian’s gender. What leads to fragmentation is the lack of recognition that all these theologies, as well as all expressions of traditional theology, are contextual, and therefore express the gospel as seen from a particular perspective. None of them can claim to speak for the whole. Any theology that claims universality is by definition sectarian and divisive—even if it is what the church has traditionally taken as normative and universal.

      It is for these reasons that I prefer to speak of “perspectives” in theology. It is not a matter of each particular group having its own truth, quite apart from all the rest. On that basis, since any group can be further subdivided, we would come to the conclusion that truth in theology is a purely individual matter, and would thus fall into a radical solipsism in which no dialogue is possible.

      To speak of “perspectives” is to imagine that we are all looking at a landscape. The landscape itself is the same for all of us. Yet each one sees it from a different perspective, and will thus describe it differently. Since we are dealing with the interpretation of the Scripture, it may be well to spell out some of the implications of this image of a landscape with a multitude of observers.

      First of all, it is important to remember that we are all looking at the same landscape. We may certainly see it in myriad different ways; but we still are all speaking of a single landscape, of a common text. This is part of what binds us together. The primary subject of our conversation is not our varying perspectives, important as they are. Our conversation is about the landscape, and how it is illumined from each of our various vantage points. This means that, although what we seek here is an interpretation of the Bible as seen through Hispanic eyes, it is still an interpretation of the Bible, and not simply of our experiences, good or bad.

      Second, although we are speaking primarily of the landscape, we do not stand as outsiders to it. We are not outside observers, as if we were watching a movie. We stand within the landscape. We are affected by the landscape. Since we are people of faith, we can even say that we are defined by the landscape. We are also part of the view that other observers see, from their own perspective. And they too are part of the total landscape that we see. Part of the beauty of a landscape is that it draws me, the observer, into it, so that I am engulfed and in a way defined by its greatness. In the case of biblical interpretation, we are people who stand in faith, who believe that the Bible speaks to us, and who therefore are quite conscious that what we are describing is not simply a landscape “out there,” but rather something that is at the very heart of our lives. We are not speaking of the biblical text as if it were dead letter, ancient history, distant memories. We are speaking of a text in which we find ourselves, our very lives.