Decolonizing Intercultural Encounters in Theological Education

I was once invited to share my experience as a theologian with a group of students in a seminary in an Andean country. The group combined Christians from various indigenous groups. They had heard a talk by me on Public Theology from the work of Martin Luther. The exercise proposed by the professor that invited me was to share my personal experiences against the background of what took me to those kinds of approaches.

Among the various questions I was asked, one struck me powerfully, and in fact it left me for a moment in silence since I did not know well how to react immediately. The question was: “How is it possible to share the Good News of the Gospel, when Christian theology and the church itself have done so much damage to our peoples, especially our ancient traditions?” If I was to accept the first impression in the face of this question, one might think that it was a rejection of Christianity itself. But this was far from the intention of this student's question. Rather, the inquiry gives an account of the testimony of a believer who does not recognize himself only as a Christian in terms of religious affiliation, but also as a subject who is crossed by various elements that make up his identity: an indigenous belonging, a spiritual tradition, a family history, an historical conflict (in fact, originated from internal ethnic struggles), the socio-cultural tensions between Christianity and his ancestral knowledge, and, above all, the bearing of the contradiction of a faith that is, at the same time, his framework of meaning, and and an inevitable part within the history of the open wound that Christianity left with its participation in the colonial enterprise in Abya Yala.

All identity is built at the intersection of diverse genealogies, which are in constant overlap. This is, in a way, what this question was intended to make clear. It reflected a critique of the Christian experience, situated in a set of historical, social, cultural, and political precedents, which have their origin in the devastating place played by the church in relation to the exclusion, exploitation, and marginalization of indigenous peoples in Latin America. But, on the other hand, it called for a reappropriation of that same Christianity, from a faith placed in another epistemic location, which makes it possible not only to critically reread the history of Christian identity itself, but also to find an alternative place from which not only to question but also to rebuild. The interrogation itself expresses a search and at the same time an open possibility to think differently towards a new horizon. Paradoxically, Christianity itself imprints an instance of oppression, and at the same time of liberation and re-imagination, as well as a catalytic space for the historical tensions within the church, with all its beauties and contradictions.

In other words, this question represents precisely what an intercultural encounter means, especially within an educational exercise. There is an appeal to a fact that accounts for a cultural conflict, where the same framework of meaning (Christianity and the church) is questioned not only as the origin of this engagement, but also as the place from which to go beyond its consequences. This question not only accounts for the locus that cultural differences have in a political reading, but also for the diversity of possible reappropriations of a worldview and theory or belief, depending on the context.

This is precisely what the so-called decolonial approach to cultural encounters evoked. It establishes that encounters between cultures not only inscribe differences in terms of distinguishing customs or forms, but very diverse ways of seeing the world, the social and the political, for which our theories and frameworks of meaning must not only “adapt”—as if these structures of meaning were an external contextual object—but also respond to their own logics, which involves identifying and deconstructing the cultural scaffolds that are part of what we believe to be “common sense.” ¹ On the other hand, it is proposed that cultural encounters not only establish a confrontation of perspectives, but also possible hybrids that make any point of interpretation a range of many possible paths. ²

This involves asking ourselves several questions regarding intercultural experiences of theological education. Are we aware of the cultural foundations that inhabit our religious and theological discourses and positions? In what way does theological formation serve not only the encounter between different people but also the possibility that the positions at stake promote other possible readings that go beyond them, based on their intercultural relationship? Does intercultural theological formation entail a political dialogue? Moreover, are we aware of the political background in our own theological presuppositions and the impact that they have on the intercultural formative spaces that we create?

On the Politicization of Culture

All of this leads us to understand that the dilemma of interculturality is today an imperative for all types of teaching. Many theoretical frameworks tend to speak of culture as a homogeneous whole, where socio-political tensions are sheltered “internally,” based on a set of codes that are specific to a particular group. Border and postcolonial theories propose, rather, the need to understand the cultural (as a different category of “culture”) from the sense of the border, relationship and dialogue, and from the interpretative fissures that are played in the clashes that are gestated from the encounters. ³

One of the central topics in the redefinition of the cultural has been the re-comprehension of its borders. Border thinking is an epistemic approach that articulates and crosses different theoretical frameworks. It arises from the need to critically re-signify hegemonic modern-centric visions—both within critical theories and traditional sociopolitical perspectives—centered on overemphasizing the structural dimension of power dynamics, on a limited vision of resistance strategies, and on a passive view of social actors. ⁴

To speak of borders means to think about the phenomena that happen in the interstices of the structures of meaning and power, whether they are called colonial, capitalist, racial, or sexual, and their means of legitimization, namely discourses, symbols, institutions, among others. Borders are alternative places of movement, which allow us to find new paths, voices, places, and practices from within the systems we inhabit. Borders thinking relates to the well-known Foucauldian axiom that states that power does not fall from the top to the bottom but also circulates, and therefore, where power intends to impose itself, there will always be resistance. ⁵

Border thinking, in analytical terms, means:

– That the capacity for movement, mutation, flow, and transformation are not secondary contingencies but a constitutive ethos of sociopolitical phenomena.

As Gloria Andalzúa, one of the representative thinkers of cultural borders, concludes:

A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. The penetrations live there: the squint-eye, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the standard. ⁶

Borders do not represent delimitations of a homogeneous body, but rather porous guidelines that give an account of a plurality of subjects that transition between them on the basis of diverse narratives that they assume as their own. Herein lies the problem of the polysemy of borders: they not only create differentiations between nations or particular identifications but also modes of interculturality within them. ⁷

From this we can infer four characteristics about borders, understood no longer as territorial delimitations but as symbolic guidelines from which identity and culture are constantly redefined: 1) they are fields of possibility, 2) they determine a logic of interaction between the parties, 3) they interweave symbolic plots, and 4) they demarcate shared cultural aspects. Beyond this, it should not be forgotten that borders also have an institutional and geopolitical definition, where they continue to be understood as tariff, migratory, perceptive, and classificatory barriers, where practices and discourses are segmented to influence and determine modes of being and circulation.

This constitutive tension of the cultural makes its political dimension. The political, in this sense, is defined from the instituting antagonism of human societies. ⁸ In words of Jacques Rancière, “there is general politics, as long as there exists a proper way of subjectivation of this controversial institution in the community.” ⁹ This can be translated in two ways. On the one hand, politics is linked to the construction of meaning. On the other, such construction occurs within a space of tension, conflict, antagonism. In summary, we can say that the cultural represents a space of conflict for the significance of social and material practices, that is, a space of political redefinition. ¹⁰

There are two caveats that must be considered. First, it is necessary to remember that these disputes of power do not occur in a symmetrical way. ¹¹ Not all the subjects or groups possess the same position within the social matrix, for which their possibility of maneuvering, legitimization, and influence can become limited. This indicates that the socio-cultural processes must always be inscribed in a framework of competences and power tensions, which make these routes instances where the triad power–identity–meaning go hand in hand. But secondly, it is also necessary to warn of the extreme of certain multiculturalist or postmodern currents, which emphasize the self-determination of particularities instead of the socio-cultural processes that mark the differential borders of all identity, as much towards itself as between other identities. ¹²

Finally, this dynamic recognizes the pluralization of the socio-cultural space in the emergence of diverse subjects that claim their particularity. An elemental category in this sense is that of otherness, which represents both the processes of differentiation and of significance among the particularities that compose a space, not only emphasizing the differential characteristics but, primarily, the processes that are gestated in their interaction. ¹³

On Interculturality

The term interculturality often reacts as a corrective to three historical conceptions of culture. First, the modern sense of “culture,” which is based on essentialist, homogenizing, and even racist vision. Culture, from a traditional point of view, appears as an accumulation of almost immovable identity elements. The relationship between cultures must overcome the presence of great differences. Within the history of modernity, which is linked to the history of coloniality—as proposed by the theory of decolonization—cultures are inscribed in hierarchical dynamics, with the Euro-Western culture being the most privileged. ¹⁴

Interculturality also responds to the idea of “inculturation”—which brings with it the idea of “integration” or “assimilation.” “Inculturation” is of modern and colonial origin, which sees culture as a translating “container,” as if there were elements that are not necessarily cultural and that can be “adapted.” This conception runs through many classical missiological approaches in Latin America. The idea of inculturation has greatly impacted the definition of mission as an exercise, which, in some of its practices, does not recognize that what is presented as “non-cultural” (be it progress, development, culture, religion, or gospel), contains and responds to cultural elements, so that the inculturation exercise can be transformed into a practice of imposition.

Finally, interculturality reacts to the idea of multiculturalism, a term very much in vogue in contemporary politics. Although the idea of multiculturalism has a positive vision on particular cultural expressions and the very notion of cultural plurality, it continues to support the idea of “the multiple” as a dispersed set of identifications, as if each particularity were closed in of itself, without intervention of any kind. For this reason, the diversity that multiculturalism appeals to is often borne more from an idea of tolerance than from a real approach to the other. ¹⁵

Interculturality, then, criticizes the idea that naturalizes cultures as bounded and hierarchical, as proposed in modernity, arguing rather that they are always multiple, dynamic, and changing spaces in history. In the face of inculturation, interculturality proposes that there are no “pure” elements that can be brought together and that cultures must readapt to each other through dialogue. In the face of multiculturalism, interculturalism sees the political dimension of cultural plurality in an even more radical way: the challenge is not only to live together in peace, but to learn from each other.

As a definition, then, we could say that interculturality represents the exercise of communication and relationship between diverse groups and cultural visions, which are born not only from the recognition of the other but also in an attitude of openness, dialogue, and mutual learning, from the affirmation that every culture and every group is never autonomous but is energized from the intercultural encounter and co-depends on that relationship. This relationship not only represents a practice of communication but an ontological locus that inscribes diversity as a constitutive element of every identity and cultural space. This exercise aims to collectively build common horizons to strengthen exchange, promoting the value of plurality and difference, and questioning any practice, worldview, institutionalism, and ideology that hinders this equitable place of interaction. In this sense, interculturality not only deconstructs the notions of culture in its colonial, modern, and Eurocentric vision, but also represents a critical framework on the ways in which intercultural relations are established.

This is what philosopher Catherine Walsh ¹⁶ calls critical interculturality, which suggests interculturality not only raises the inherent linkage and co-dependence between cultural groups, but also entails a critical dimension with respect to the elements that we understand as our own from the encounter with the other, and also with the forms and structures involved in the linkage between groups (colonial views, economic systems, political models, etc.).

Taking this element as a starting point, to speak of interculturality implies a set of fundamental critical sensitivities:

A self-critical attitude with respect to what defines our identity, to the recognition of the plurality that inhabits us, of the ways in which I link myself with others and the matrices that circumscribe the types of relationship.

In summary, we can say that interculturality is far from proposing a politically correct attitude of simple tolerant recognition of the other, a superficial approach. Rather, it offers an active gesture of commitment and openness, where the links transform the particular place of each one from the exchange, from common places that allow us to transform the identity of all of us who are part of this process. It is what Anzaldúa calls mestizaje as critical dispositive:

The work of the mestizo consciousness consists in breaking the duality between subject and object that keeps it prisoner and to show in flesh and blood and through the images in her work how this duality is transcended. The problem between the white race and the colored race, between men and women, lies in healing the rupture that originates in the very foundations of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts. A huge displacement of dualistic thinking in individual or collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but it is a struggle that could, according to our best hopes, lead us to the end of rape, of violence, of war. ¹⁷

(De)Colonize Epistemology to an Ecology of Knowledges

A complex and politized notion of culture should lead to a complex understanding of education, or more specifically of the ways in which knowledge is constructed. In this sense, the cultural acts as a space of building knowledge, at the same time of circulation and criticism of diverse social, historical, and cultural knowledges. From the intercultural dynamics in which we live in the contemporary global world, we can see not only the reality of tensions but also of profound inequalities, as well as open historical wounds, such as those we saw in the testimony at the beginning of this article. Of all the elements that we could identify to understand these factors, in this case we want to highlight the colonial dimension that we see in many of our intercultural encounters from an educational perspective.

Decolonial studies has shown that colonial dynamics remain, particularly as modes of knowledge construction (epistemology) and social senses (power dynamics). It is what is known as coloniality of knowledge. ¹⁸ This entails recognizing three elements. ¹⁹ First, that sciences have always been associated with power dynamics. Particularly in Latin America, the construction of knowledge is historically related to the legitimization of situations of injustice and inequality. ²⁰ Second, the justification of such power dynamics has provided a way to understand the social onthos through the naturalization of relationships, dynamics, and social stratifications. ²¹ Here, the sense of cultural homogeneity and social hierarchy not only engages with the formation of nations, groups, or ideologies in hegemonic positions, but also becomes the socio-political lens at all socio-cultural levels. That is why homogenizing notions of cultural or deductive and positivistic modes of social inquiry through the search for laws are positioned as absolute modes of analysis.

Finally, from a broader perspective, this approach entails recognizing the complexity of the dynamics of power and its necessary deconstruction from inconsistencies and contingencies inherent to them. ²² As well as the surreptitious or microphysical facets of powers are recognized, at the same time, heterogeneous alternative ways of resistance and counter-power starting from new constructions of sense and knowledge that become manifest between the cracks of the same “system.” This is what Walter Mignolo calls border thinking: the emergence of new knowledges and practices emerging from the fractures of hegemonic practices and thoughts that falsely arrogate to themselves homogeneity and closeness. ²³

De Sousa Santos states that today we move from an abyssal thinking (where the modern Western knowledge system makes a distinction between the visible and invisible, excluding the latter as a possible basis of knowledge because of the impossibility of the simultaneous presence of both elements) to a post-abysmal thinking understood as an ecology of knowledges, where the epistemological processes are as varied as the plurality of historical and cultural experiences. ²⁴ The corporeal, aesthetic, symbolic, complex, literary and poetic, the experiential and relational, are all recognized not only as a bridge but also as a locus with its own legitimacy for the emergence of new ways of seeing, feeling, constructing and describing reality.

This emerging epistemology involves not only the question of essentialism within traditional models and the recognition of a plurality of epistemologies but also a juncture and interrelationship where the borders of specificity in disciplines recognize their porosity, with the purpose of seeing and encouraging the profound interrelationship they have among themselves. The ecology of knowledges appeals to knowledge as inter-knowledge.

Decolonial theory speaks of the need for decolonial transdisciplinarity ²⁵ where the presence of other voices is not instituted as the recognition of exogenous objects and subjects—like the external “others,” the different—or as islets isolated from each other, as some multicultural or intercultural studies tend to do. Instead, the plurality of epistemologies challenges and deconstructs the homogeneity of my own location, and projects me into new directions and interactions.

Here we can bring up the proposal of Homi Bhabha on the meaning of the third space. ²⁶ This concept comes from various experiences with ways of interpreting meanings and words during translation practices, where gestures, words, and objects challenge the given meanings and possible synthesis, allowing new ones. It represents a dialogical locus, an intercultural space of enunciation, where the senses are relativized through a face-to-face encounter. The opening of this third epistemological space has an inherently ethical-political dimension. It implies a critical attitude towards all closed ways of seeing the world, and the recognition and empowerment of alternative ways to construct knowledge. ²⁷

The Bolivian philosopher Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui critically deepens Bhabha’s approach with the concept of ch’ixi. The constitution of a ch’ixi world represents a world marked by “the parallel coexistence of multiple cultural differences that do not extinguish but instead antagonize and complement each other.” ²⁸ The Aymara word ch’ixi refers to a type of tonality that at a distance is recognized as gray, but upon approaching one notices a surface composed of an infinite combination and interweaving of black and white dots. Thus, ch’ixi epistemology entails a break with historicism and colonial binaries, since it appeals to a prismatic temporality, of a future–past that resists the continuous present of what the author understands as the four hegemonic horizons imposed by modern thought—pre-Hispanic, colonial, liberal, and populist—as “stages” of a lineal causality. Each of these stages—or even their juxtaposition—entails the establishment of a linearity that becomes habitus and everyday life, which does not consider the processes of constellation and multi-temporality.

Ch’ixi implies, above all, a mimetic anthropological understanding in the field of postcolonial processes. Cusicanqui speaks of the identity of indigenous and mestizo populations as a Ch’ixi identity; that is, identity as a “zone of uncertainty,” as a spatiality of frictions and even contradictions. The idea here concerns a being that is “ni chicha ni limoná” (“neither this, nor that”): “The notion of ch’ixi, like many others (allqa, ayni), reflects the Aymara idea of something that is and is not at the same time. It is the logic of the included third. A ch’ixi color gray is white but is not white at the same time; it is both white and its opposite, black.” ²⁹

From here, Silvia Cusicanqui wonders why contradictions should be understood as paralyzing disjunctions or irreducible oppositions. Ch’ixi epistemology means inhabiting colonial difference within the framework of a “‘political economy’ of knowledge” ³⁰ that is also an economy of aesthetics and of ethics. In Cusicanqui's terms:

The idea is then not to seek the tranquility of the One, because it is precisely a Manichean anguish; it is necessary to work within the contradiction, making of its polarization the space for the creation of an intermediate fabric (taypi), a weft that is neither one nor the other, but quite the contrary, it is both at the same time. ³¹

Decolonizing Intercultural Encounters in Theological Education

In the previous sections we have tried to summarize extremely complex issues, which also show the complexity inherent in the very meaning of theological education in an intercultural and decolonial key. Bringing this to the field of theological education, there are three main areas that we need to review: the theological conceptions that underlie our educational proposals, the intercultural sensitivity that frames our pedagogies, and the epistemologies that shape our teaching practices. The first element is extremely complex, and this article is not the appropriate space to address it with the extension it deserves. It is simply worth emphasizing that in all transcultural formation, theological discourses must not only be adapted or contextualized, but also be borne from specific cultural enterprises. For a long time, the transcultural approaches of missiology and theology were focused on processes of inculturation or contextualization. If we start from the fact that all theological discourse inevitably starts from a cultural outline, then theological production must take into account two elements: on the one hand, to put our own discourses in “cultural brackets,” and on the other hand, to create a methodology, not simply of adaptation but of discernment of our own cultural forms.

To speak, then, of a theology in a decolonial key, is to pursue a theological task that projects interculturality as a theo-political act, where openness to the Other is understood not only from a framework of ethical responsibility but also as the inscription of a locus where difference, diversity, and otherness constitute the inauguration of a hermeneutic field where the colonial discourses that still inhabit our theological and religious perspectives are disputed by that “third space” or ch’ixi irruption inscribed in the value of intercultural encounter that confronts oneness. For that “third space” is opened up by the manifestation of the God who is always transcendent to our cultural images and borders.

God god-self enables the space of intercultural encounter, since it represents the difference, the frontier, in its radicality. God is the presence that moves in the midst of the instituted borders, seeking to emerge from the cracks present in every space of meaning, to give an account that what is said to be established as true and certain (hierarchies, worldviews, delimitations, practices) and imposed through instituted powers, can never fully contain the excess that constitutes its transcendence. A transcendence that is intrinsically political as it acts as a critical process in front of the monopolized senses and an inaugurator of new social expressions. ³²

It is a call to a task that radicalizes the link between theology and culture, where the latter is not simply a scenario delimited by borders but a plane with infinite lines that intertwine in a constant movement between paths and decentralizations. As Catherine Keller states, “if the theological discourse wants to live, it must speak between the interstices of the historical densities of the text and its creative hopes.” ³³ The intercultural dimension of theology, then, has a direct relationship with a decolonizing reading, since it appeals to spatiality from the “internal frontier” that enables new practices and appeals to an agonistic condition of the political, namely, where the parts that make up the public do not adhere to a friend–enemy logic, but to that of adversaries who are part of the same status of ontological difference. ³⁴

A postcolonial theology has as its central task to deconstruct the dichotomies that reign both in Christian theology and in society in general (in a Western archetypal). The dichotomies served to institute spheres of dominance through the delimitation of categorizations around social dynamics. As Franz Hinkelammert says, we need to de-westernize Christian theology. ³⁵ The colonial enterprise as an epistemic worldview built a basis for the circumscription of socio-cultural hierarchies, exclusionary political practices, processes of racialization, among others. For this reason, an intercultural theology challenges a theological imagination as a critical irruption ³⁶ that is always present in all cultural and political constructions, seeks a constant critical attitude, but not with the objective of questioning as an end in itself, but rather as a radicalization of plural coexistence, where all parties are included in an open dialogue. ³⁷

The second element I want to highlight is related to building an intercultural and decolonial educational model, which reaches not only rhetoric and discourses, but also educational processes, pedagogical proposals, and didactic practices. We can consider the following elements:

Deconstructing the Western and modern ontology that weighs on the theological task in general as well as on its educational dynamics in particular. More specifically, it means leaving the dependence on Western models and discourses, not to discard them but to enter into dialogue with them from a construction of new places that emerges from intercultural encounters; questioning and redefining Western epistemological frameworks that see the divine from an essentialist perspective—of his person and economy—as well as a pragmatic vision of social dynamics, within cultures as well as religious frameworks. Finally, it implies a recognition of the still existing colonial power dynamics, not so much in a coercive way but mainly in terms of identity, political, and epistemological understandings.

All of this implies undertaking a process of critical self-evaluation and re-planning. Beyond the diversity of tools that have been created for the implementation of these processes, the commitment to a re-foundation of intercultural theological formation starts from a “hermeneutic circle” ³⁸ based on four central elements for any educational project: the context (and the origins of identity), the institutional processes, the actors in play, and the educational project. It is not our aim to deal in depth with this circularity. ³⁹ Rather, we wish to point out the need for a revision and, in turn, a projection from its relationship.

To begin with, a theological education is required to revise its understandings of the context in several ways: a complexization of socio-political, economic, religious, and cultural dynamics (which overcome the structuralist, dialectic, and functionalist Manichaeism so present in many perspectives), the place of the churches and denominational dynamics, and in the link with the public space, especially civil society and governmental institutions (especially the challenges presented by the relationship with educational ministries and the formalization of higher education).

This element also brings with it a historical dimension, which entails revising the identarian origins of our theological and institutional expressions in the light of new scenarios. This in turn implies changes in institutional dynamics, namely, ecclesial and denominational belonging, identity figures to be assumed (seminar? faculty? university?), and formal processes to respond to the objectives of the context, which, in turn, emerge from missionary and cosmovision intentionalities. ⁴⁰

The place of the actors is central in this process, especially from two dimensions. First, who are the ones who will carry out these actions? A question that seems simple, in reality its answer contains elementary worldviews, especially within the dimension of dynamics of power. That is to say, in what way does the educational community as a whole participate in the processes of revising their own pedagogical and even theological practices? Second, this element not only involves the actors who will execute the process but also from whom the changes will be formulated. Will the actors be only the churches? The denomination? A specific social group? Or agents present in the public space? As we can see, the diversity of the educational project will depend on the subjects considered.

All of this culminates in an educational project. This framework is far from being a simple proposal or guide document, but rather the expression of a theological and political logic. Why do we say this? Because concentrating on the development of an educational project means taking seriously the consideration of all the elements that come into play in order to construct a pertinent educational proposal, in terms of revising history, analyzing context, and being sensible to social demands (rather than giving answers that are not requested!). In other words, an intercultural educational project will prioritize a sensibility to the diversity of perspectives present in the educational context and its social, cultural, religious, and political requests. An institution or project that does not take this step as something elementary—a fact that, as we have been able to verify many times, happens in a great majority of educational spaces—means that it is a proposal marked by stagnation and lack of relevance. This even involves a theological dimension, since a serious educational project starts from a re-signification of the scope of theological work, of its contexts and subjects.

Finally, we need to review our teaching practices from an intercultural perspective. And here we can return to the experience mentioned at the beginning, which is related to everything that has been said so far. We need to create an intercultural sensitivity, where difference does not stop us, nor does it imply imposition, but rather a space of mutual learning, which not only establishes a field of knowledge but also of construction of new knowledges, based on a revision of history, of contexts, of wounds.

An intercultural theological formation means assuming the power of otherness, from two directions. In the first place, from a fully cultural sense, where the spaces of encounter are not only a place that evidence the distances we need to shorten, but also the frontier that calls us to a dynamic of dialogue and transformation from encounter. A meeting that acquires an incomparable political potential by allowing us to re-imagine our history and our place. A difference that invites us, that allows us to see beyond our place, and that opens up a fully pastoral place of encounter, of healing, of reconciliation, and of eschatological construction. Secondly, intercultural theological formation responds in a fully theological sense, where, as the theologian Juan Luis Segundo said, we see revelation as a “learning to learn” and where history is transformed by God into a place for “divine pedagogy.” ⁴¹ The revelation of God is in itself an intercultural act, where it calls us to meet at the frontier, of what we know and still have to know. For this reason, intercultural encounters can be understood as theological encounters from its own bone, where the novelty of the encounter is itself a theological novelty, given by God's grace to manifest his transforming presence through dialogue.