Indigenous Inculturation: A Hermeneutics of Serendipity

In the postcolonial aftermath, Filipinos endeavored to uphold their cultural identity and historical agency while seeking religious synthesis with Iberian Catholicism. Beyond inherited ways of understanding inculturation as a Western, uni-directional missionary strategy, this chapter sheds light on how unanticipated turns of history kindled opportune moments that allowed for the flourishing of Indigenous culture’s creative genius notwithstanding the cruel sentence of Spanish colonization. Proposing “serendipity”—a fortuitous “conspiracy of grace” between human and divine agency—as a hermeneutical lens to examine the devotion to the Quiapo Black Nazarene, this study argues that an epiphany of “Indigenous inculturation” is brought to bear when “surprising mystery and audacious creativity kiss one another.” Thus, in a creative dialectic, Filipino primal religion remains extant as a form of crypto-resistance that continues to find mutual assimilation with Christianity in folk Catholic piety.