Subversive Scriptures: Revolutionary Christian Readings of the Bible in Latin America

These studies originally appeared in Spanish and in Portuguese in the journal of biblical interpretation known as REBLA (Revista de Interpretacion Biblica Latinoamericana), a joint project of various publishing houses throughout Latin America. They are presented here for the first time in the English language with the enthusiastic support and permission of the RIBLA board.In Latin America, the Bible has always been a site of partisan debate about the legitimacy of prevailing cultural practices and a locus of enduring utopian demand for the proper, better construction of a new world order. The studies in this book represent a contemporary instance of the same insistence, on the basis of biblical reasoning, that a more satisfying social arrangement be developed in Latin America.The first set of studies deal with the problem of debt, specifically the foreign debt and, by extension, the fact of money itself as a source of social ill. A second set addresses the problem of sacrifice, specifically the unacceptable social costs of a sacrificial theology. The final set discusses the spirituality of resistance that the authors find manifest throughout the Bible.These unique and provocative studies plainly reflect the diverse and evolving tradition of critical social thought and ecclesial praxis known in Latin America as liberation theology. They also represent an effort to extend the textual basis, on which Latin American liberation theology has typically laid claim, to biblical testimony in the hope that Latin American liberation theology and, more importantly, the pastoral and political practices aligned with it might thereby be enriched, refined, and continually reformed.Leif E. Vaage teaches in Emmanuel College, Victoria University, and in the Toronto School of Theology, the University of Toronto. He is the author of GalileanUpstarts: Jesus’ First Followers According to Q, published by Trinity Press.