Since I was never a fundamentalist, even when my reading of the Scripture was precritical, I have often argued that most Hispanic Protestants are not fundamentalists, even though from the perspective of those brought up in the liberal tradition and the historico-critical method they might seem to be such. Fundamentalism is a militant response to the challenges of modernity. My reading of the Scripture was—and for most Latino Protestants still is—precritical, and even naive, but not fundamentalist.
This is also the reason why I resonate to the words of the Rev. Edgar Avitia, one of the participants in our dialogue on the Bible, when he said, ¡Ha sido tan buena la Biblia con nosotros! (“The Bible has been so good to us!”) He said it with a tone of grateful tenderness that reminded me of a child speaking of its mother. He said it as someone who had lived through experiences similar to those I have just described. He said it as I too would wish to say it.
Then I went to seminary (still in Cuba), and immediately new vistas opened before me. I was introduced to the historico-critical method of Bible study. I learned to distinguish among different levels of redaction, and to place texts in their historical setting. It was a fascinating experience, for now I understood much in the Bible that I did not understand before. For a time, I was so fascinated with the new methods and vistas, that I was convinced that, by simply following those methods, the Bible would become much more relevant for my life and for the life of the church.
The result, however, was not as I had expected. By a process so subtle and so slow that I was not aware of it until long after it had taken place, I came to a point where I could understand the Bible much better than before, but no longer had any idea what to do with it. To teach the Bible became synonymous with explaining the historical setting of texts, and the process by which they had been redacted and transmitted. I remember a series of Bible studies on 1 Corinthians that I led in the church where I was working as a senior in seminary. It was an excellent course on the composition of the epistle, on where Paul was when he wrote it, and on its relationship to the rest of the Corinthian correspondence. I was able to impart much information, but was able to draw little wisdom from the epistle itself. Also, my Bible study lacked the engagement I had experienced in our Bible studies years earlier, when we read Paul, not primarily to learn about the life of the church in Corinth, but to learn what it meant to be the church in our own day. Even more tragically, I came to realize that my Bible study, far from making the Bible more accessible to the people, made it more distant, for now they could do nothing with it unless a more learned person told them all there was to know on issues of dating, authorship, and composition.
Years later, I discovered that many others, from different perspectives and life stories, were coming to similar conclusions. I was even pleased and encouraged to find similar sentiments in scholars who had been carefully trained in the historico-critical methods. Thus, I find myself agreeing with Sandra M. Schneiders, of the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley:
Against a background of profound respect, indeed, admiration, for the prodigious accomplishments of modern historical critical biblical scholarship, this conclusion is nevertheless critical, even harsh: contemporary New Testament scholarship actually lacks a developed hermeneutical theory. To that extent, it does not really “know what it is doing” in the theoretical sense of that expression. It knows how to do what it is doing, but has uncritically taken for granted that what it is doing is exactly and only what needs to be done in order for this text, which is probably still the most influential text in the Western world, to be truly understood.5
Something similar happened to my preaching. I knew how to do the exegesis of a text, but had no idea what to do with the exegesis itself. The most widely used commentary among my classmates, and the one that my professors recommended, was The Interpreter’s Bible, in which the exegesis of a text was done by one author, and the exposition by another, apparently without any relationship between the two. Therefore my preaching, often modeled after that commentary, and other times simply out of desperation, became moral exhortations in which the biblical text was at best a pretext for what I would have said anyhow.
Theologically, the seminary where I studied drew its inspiration mainly from Karl Barth and neo-orthodoxy. This was helpful, for Barth had much to say about the Word of God and its power and authority. In some ways, he seemed to be expressing a joy in the Word similar to what my classmates and I had in our earlier lives as Christians. Thus, I had no difficulty accepting that theology and making it mine. The problem was that those who taught me how to study the Bible drew their inspiration elsewhere, from the liberal tradition and from the historico-critical method, which moved along parallel lines like a team of yoked oxen. The result, again, was that I could preach excellent theological sermons, but had only a very vague idea how to relate them to the Scriptures that I myself declared to be authoritative.
This in turn had two other consequences. The first was that, just as my Bible studies, my preaching did not bring the Scripture closer to the people, but farther away. My preaching was generally biblical, in that it dealt with some of the basic teachings of the Scripture. But, since its real starting point was not the Bible, but theology, it taught by implication that the Bible is not really accessible to the people, who need to have a theological education before they can read it and understand its significance for their lives. My preaching, like my Bible study, while claiming to take the Bible to the people, actually built a fence around the Bible—a fence as high as any that existed in the worst times of the much-maligned Middle Ages.
The second consequence was that the whole issue of the authority of the Bible was a matter of much mystification for me, as well as for those whom I presumed to teach. I insisted on the authority of the Bible because that was one of the principles of the Reformation, because neo-orthodoxy also claimed it, and even in some vague way because in earlier years the Bible had been good to me. But it was really a nonfunctioning authority. In truth, authority lay in theology, in religious experience, and even in religious and moral platitudes, and the Bible functioned only insofar as what it said agreed with these other authorities.
In many ways, these were the dry years. They were productive in attainments and in scholarship. I devoted myself to the study of historical theology, received a doctorate in that field, and published extensively in it. I taught in prestigious seminaries, first in Puerto Rico, and then in the United States. Still, this was a time that St. John of the Cross would have called noche oscura del alma—the dark night of the soul. It was not a matter of an overwhelming sense of sin, as it had been for Augustine, for Luther, and for Ignatius. It was rather a matter of a dysfunction between theology and practice, between what I said and even believed regarding the authority of the Scripture, and the way the Scripture actually functioned in my life and in my teaching and theology. I kept on speaking and teaching as if the Bible had authority; but I did not see that authority functioning firsthand. At that point, my feelings were what I suppose must have been also Wesley’s as he followed Peter Böler’s advice: “Preach faith till you have it; and then, because you have it, you will preach faith.”
The way out did not come through an Aldersgate-like experience,6 although it did produce a strange warming of the heart. It came through a series of circumstances and encounters in the late sixties and throughout the seventies.
First among these was the new theology coming from Roman Catholics in Latin America. I was living in Puerto Rico, and traveling regularly throughout Central and South America, at the time of the Second Vatican Council, and had the opportunity to witness some of the significant changes that were taking place among those Roman Catholics whom as a youth I had discounted as idolaters. The mass was translated into the vernacular and set to native tunes and rhythms. There were ecumenical gatherings and conversations galore. Liberation theology became almost a household term, with books in Spanish and Portuguese becoming overnight theological bestsellers. Although I read and appreciated many of these books, and they certainly impacted my theological outlook, for me the most important development taking place in Latin America was that people began to gather in small groups to read and study the Bible. These were the same sort of people whom years earlier I had challenged