Spirit Outside the Gate - (Missiological Engagements) by Oscar García-Johnson (Paperback)

About the Book

Oscar García-Johnson explores a new grammar for the study of theology and mission in global Christianity, especially in Latin America. Moving to recover important elements in ancestral traditions of the Americas, he discerns pneumatological continuity between the pre-Columbian and post-Columbian communities. With an interdisciplinary, narrative approach, this work offers a constructive theology of mission for the church in global contexts.

Book Synopsis

Throughout the history of the Christian church, two narratives have constantly clashed: the imperial logic of Babel that builds towers and borders to seize control, versus the logic of Pentecost that empowers "glocal" missionaries of the kingdom life. To what extent are Westernized Christians today ready for the church of the Pentecost narrative? Are they equipped to do ministry in different cultural modes and to handle disruption and perplexity? What are Christians to make of the Holy Spirit's occasional encounters with cultures and religions of the Americas before the European conquest?

Oscar García-Johnson explores a new grammar for the study of theology and mission in global Christianity, especially in Latin America and the Latinx "third spaces" in North America. With an interdisciplinary, "transoccidental," and narrative approach, Spirit Outside the Gate offers a constructive theology of mission for the church in global contexts.

Building on the familiar missiological metaphor of "outside the gate" established by Orlando Costas, García-Johnson moves to recover important elements in ancestral traditions of the Americas, with an eye to discerning pneumatological continuity between the pre-Columbian and post-Columbian communities. He calls for a "rerouting of theology"--a realization that theology cannot make its home in Christendom but is a global creation that must come home to a church without borders.

In this volume García-Johnson

• considers pneumatological insights into de/postcolonial studies
• traces independent epistemic contributions of the American Global South
• shows how American indigenous, Afro-Latinx, and immigrant communities provide resources for a decolonial pneumatology
• describes four transformations the American church must undergo to break free from colonial, modernist, and monocultural structures

Spirit Outside the Gate opens a path for a pneumatological missiology that can help the church act as a witness to the gospel message in a postmodern, postcolonial, and post-Christendom world.

Missiological Engagements charts interdisciplinary and innovative trajectories in the history, theology, and practice of Christian mission, featuring contributions by leading thinkers from both the Euro-American West and the majority world whose missiological scholarship bridges church, academy, and society.

Review Quotes

"Spirit Outside the Gate is an excellent interrogation of the geopolitical dead-ends of theological inquiry, employing the most cutting-edge resources from decolonial thought. With his long-standing engagement among evangelical racialized communities, Oscar García-Johnson successfully excavates histories that have been made invisible, epistemologies that have been veiled, and struggles that have been eclipsed, in order to offer alternative paths for a just future. This book is a necessary contribution and a must-read for people interested in decolonial theologies; religion in the Americas; evangelical minoritized communities; and religion, race, and politics."

--Santiago Slabodsky, Florence and Robert Kaufman Chair in Jewish Studies, Hofstra University, author of Decolonial Judaism

"García-Johnson's Spirit Outside the Gate practices 'epistemic healing' because it provides a challenging, interdisciplinary bridge between Christian theology/pneumatology and Latin(o/a) American decolonial thought. This is an essential text for thinking theologically beyond the gates of the Occident."

--Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, associate professor of Latina/o studies and religion, Williams College

"The Euro-American theology of the Spirit has become far too complacent. Theologians think that a quick nod to the iniquities of the conquest will liberate them to brandish their current epistemologies without interrogating the marriage of postcolonial reason and conquering spirit they are designed to conceal. Oscar García-Johnson takes contemporary theologians outside the gate to the place where the Spirit resurrected Jesus. It is a journey beyond the tightly guarded gate of Occidental belief, US hegemony and the caudillo, and even concepts of time and history that have been blind to the cosmovision of the indigenous. As a Roman Catholic I find much to applaud in this decolonial theology of the Spirit proposed by my Baptecostal hermano. He asks questions about the 'white Western' university and the reproductive power of whiteness that few Latinx thinkers have dared to raise. If you follow him to the peripheries and through the gate to a new Pentecost, you will be joining a throng of decolonial disciples, undocumented border crossers, and abuelitas on fire with the Spirit. You may not agree with all of his conclusions, but you will definitely be provoked by a polyphonous crowd of witnesses to the Spirit like no other one that you have ever experienced."

--Peter Casarella, associate professor, University of Notre Dame

About the Author

Oscar García-Johnson is associate professor of theology and Latino/a studies and assistant provost for the Center for the Study of Hispanic Church and Community at Fuller Theological Seminary. An ordained Baptist minister, he has also served as a regional minister with the American Baptist Churches of Los Angeles, and his books include Conversaciones Teológicas del Sur Global Americano, coedited;Theology Without Borders, coauthored with William Dyrness; and The Mestizo/a Community of the Spirit.