Within just a couple of hours of being in Puerto Rico, I had the opportunity to sit with Professor Agustina Luvis in her office at the Seminario Evangelico de Puerto Rico.  Dr. Luvis teaches a broad range of courses, including Systematic Theology, courses on Pentecostalism, Feminist Theology, and Caribbean Theology.  I learned a lot in my brief time with her, and left with a lot more questions than I had gone into our meeting with – which is usually a very good sign.

I asked her about some of the distinctive elements between Caribbean Theology and other Latin American theologies.  She has written an article about this in the Global Dictionary of Theology.  She told me that in Caribbean Theology, there is a stronger focus on the impacts of colonialism than in other Latin American theologies.  When she teaches her class on this topic, she helps her students methodically deconstruct the legacy of Christianity being brought in at the same time as (and as a tool of) outside empires.  How does it continue to shape the way churches worship, the assumptions that are made about church and state, and on theology itself?  While she believes that this is a critical element of understanding Christianity in this context, what she regularly finds is that Christians don’t tend to question how things got the way they are – they just know they believe it.

This, of course, has a lot of overlap with the Christendom/Post-Christendom realities in the Western world.  Many people in the so-called emerging church have gone through the deconstruction process, trying to understand why church looks the way it does, and why things function the way they do.  They are questioning things that their ecclesiastical predecessors had rarely challenged.  At times, this questioning can be very disruptive, especially when done within highly structured, hierarchical contexts.  And yet, there is tremendous value there.

What assumptions do you make about church?  About theology?  About social justice?  Where did those assumptions get started?  These are difficult questions to ask – in part because asking them requires some discomfort, and in part because it’s so hard to know what assumptions you make, because you make assumptions about your assumptions.  Uncovering them requires patience, and a high tolerance for the “why?” question.

What the students in Dr. Luvis’ classes discover, though, is that owning their theological histories allows them to more genuinely embrace their theological present.  It gives them freedom to set aside some of the elements of practice that might have outlived their usefulness, and consider other forms that might be of better service.