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When I was in seminary, I took a required class on church history with an assigned two-volume text called, The Story of Christianity by Justo Gonzáles. Upon receiving the tomes in the mail, I can remember staring at the cover as I realized I had never read a theology book by someone with a name like his.
As an English major, I had of course read wonderful writers from the Central and Southern American hemispheres: Junot Díaz, Richard Rodriguez, and Julia Alvarez, just to name a few. But theology was — is — always different. There seems to be (specifically for white people) difficulty in finding a commentary or systematic theology that is not by someone of European decent. Pastors like me are simply supplied with what my friend and fellow pastor Felicia Larson calls, “a homogeneous hermeneutic.” Unless you consciously work against it, the white pastor in America will unconsciously inherit an entirely white bookshelf: white scholars, white pastors, white theologians dominate most ministers’ offices, and thereby their minds. Of course the primary reason it took me so long to notice my white bookshelf is, well, because I’m white.
And it must be noted that this is the history of our country, even our world. As Felicia has also said to me: “you gotta understand the power dynamics.” These white theologians did not come from thin air. We cannot…
