Heinrich Dussel (Institut für Europäische Geschichte, Mainz, Germany) poses the interesting proposition that the history of the Church in Latin America remains to be written. So far the works that have appeared in great volume dating back to the early colonial period, and represented as church history, should be called only the “corporalidad” or objective facts of church history.
It is now necessary, says Dussel, to proceed from synthesis to historical analysis and interpretation, seeking the theological meaning of those events and their evolution. The time has come to distinguish clearly the difference between true church history and merely profane history. The history of the Church in Latin America, he maintains, needs not only historians but theologians, if “Church” is to be regarded not only as an empirical fact determinable by historical science, but as a sacred, transcendental, theological fact. Insofar as the Church belongs to time and history it is the object of historical science, but the Church transcending time and history is explicable only in theological terms. This is the “hypothesis” posed by Dussel. The fault of past pseudohistories of the Church is that there was never devised a methodology of equating historical science with theology. It is the author’s purpose to achieve this very objective by stimulating “dialogue” concerning his novel “hypothesis.”
To open the discussion Dussel proposes a periodized plan for the whole history of the Church in Latin America, discussing briefly the central elements of each period and indicating thus the format for an eventual authoritative historical treatise. These survey discussions really offer little that is helpful to an understanding of the author’s novel hypothesis. In fact, if these preliminary comments are to be accepted as guides, we can anticipate that the historical product will be little different from the kind of Church history that has been produced in the past.
Apart from obvious doubts concerning Dussel’s hypothesis, the present reviewer is impressed by his broad acquaintance with the historiography of the Latin American Church. His discussion of the meaning and results of missionary activities in the colonial period is thought provoking. Also, little fault can be found with his explanation for the decline of the Church after independence. This decline has resulted in the dechristianization of the continent. No longer can Latin America be regarded as Roman Catholic; it is an open mission field. The volume contains in its appendix interesting charts illustrating the “crisis” of the Church in Latin America.
