librated so as to lend new avenues of exploration beyond their potential
conceptual entrenchment as opposites within past proposals.
This newfound set of possibilities can also be the case with debates sur-
rounding the interaction between Christianity and culture. With the way
the work of H. Richard Niebuhr has lodged itself, it is quite easy for many
to assume that “Christ” can be thought of at some distance from some-
thing deemed “culture,” even if the relationship is cast through an assort-
ment of prepositions and not simply a conjunction. 8 But the “anointed
One” was not simply an “everyman.” When one looks at Jesus-depictions
throughout the globe, they oftentimes refl ect the ethnic and racial fea-
tures of the cultures that render them. At one level, the logic at work in
this phenomenon is legitimate: Christ is for us humans as a human—that
is, as one of us. The diffi culty, of course, is that Jesus historically was not
Mexican, Japanese, or Sudanese: He was a Palestinian fi rst-century Jew.
His messiahship—his Spirit-anointing—was phenomenally available in
terms of this specifi c cultural and ethnic embeddedness. In a racially strati-
fi ed world such as ours, that embeddedness matters, for it suggests that
we who are “otherwise engaged in the Spirit” are such in the pluriform
features of our bodily and experiential conditionedness. 9
T HE SPIRIT OF LATINIDAD
Certain voices and contexts have attended to these matters more easily
than others, no doubt in part due to their location and role within wider
arrangements. Non-majority voices have a way of accounting for things
that majority voices would rather not or in some cases cannot. When
opportunities have been available, majority voices in the West have repeat-
edly failed to account for their own conditionedness and embeddedness.
Their persistent denial of alterity in the midst of colonizing tendencies
has resulted in over-intellectualized and excessively abstracted theologi-
cal accounts of the Christian faith. Put in the context of what has been
presented thus far, this claim would suggest that majority voices in the
West may not be the most helpful to illustrate a Theology of the Third
Article. At the hands of Western majority voices, the topics of relationality,
embeddedness, and contextualization have contributed to the trope “all
theology is contextual,” becoming an accurate admission with little to no
consequence in terms of either methodological form or content.
For this reason, it may prove helpful to look at non-majority voices for
ways that a Theology of the Third Article could be executed, and for this,
202 D. CASTELO