This dissertation examines local congregations in Puerto Rico to help articulate a theology of sustainable hope revealed through their outreach practices and ecclesiologies of public and political participation. Nurtured by qualitative research with six Christian congregations in Puerto Rico, the work moves from an articulation of context, hope, practice, and future to reveal its aim of liberation through sustainable hope. Puerto Rico’s continuous colonial history, and most recently its devastation during and after Hurricane María, heightened the socio-economic crisis that continues to hinder the hope of Puerto Ricans inside and outside the island. In this dissertation, I analyze the operations of political systems that suppress hope in Puerto Rico. I weave the theme of a theology of hope, with the fields of ecclesiology, memory studies, postcolonial and decolonial theory, liberation theology, and the study of social movements to build a model that puts hope at the center of our practices and moves toward a recipe for a hope that is sustainable in practice. Along with many other theologians and theorists, I converse with the work of theologians Rubem Alves and Ellen Ott Marshall. Alves shapes the definition of hope in this dissertation by challenging how society is organized and revealing how this organization oppresses imagination and people’s liberative agency. Marshall describes hope as elastic, making room for the expectation of a hopeful future that coexists in tension with the challenges of our daily lives. My writing is framed by an ecclesiological context; an articulation of a hope that does not remain static and responds to the challenges of colonialism, the erasure of memory, and oppression; and a liberation theology of creation. I present a way to articulate a hope that is able to sustain the people of Puerto Rico through their practices of hope. / 2021-07-23T00:00:00Z

Christ can be understood as a mirror, connecting humanity and God in his image into a hybrid entity, without eliminating the difference. The complex reality is mirrored through Christ transcending the border between subjectivity and objectivity, human and God, ourselves and others. This study is a form of constructive theology that aims to construct a transformative christological conceptual model, which can contribute to theology as a power critical epistemological deconstruction. It does this through the method of critical and comparative text analysis.  The study consists of two main sections, analysis and the discussion. The analysis section seeks to develop a theoretical frame, in which to generate a conversation between critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Gloria Anzaldúa on their view on epistemological oppression and liberation. The result is the development of an analytical concept called dialectics of the borders that exposes epistemological oppression as understood through the critical terms of oppression of objectivism and the suppressed gap. As an answer to the dialectics of border the analysis section develops the phrase dialectics of the gap, as an expression of epistemological liberation, which relies on such concepts as the shape of the gap, epistemological deconstruction, the hybrid entity, and transformative hybridity. The discussion section applies this theoretical frame to various christological concepts in order to create a new useful conceptual model. The constructed conceptual model is called incarnational epistemology and expresses an empowering critical epistemological reconstruction in Christ. The cross is understood as the explicit border between God and humanity, which is expressed by man's colonialization of dialectics. In Christ God transcends these epistemological borders and embodies the gap, as an expression for dialectics of the gap. For example it is demonstrated with the understanding of the body of Christ as the hybridization between subjectivity and objectivity and the sanctification as a reversed incarnation by the collective reconstruction of Christ in the border between subjectivity and objectivity. Hence, humanity as the body of Christ through sanctification can be understood as the mirrored image of Christ incarnating this epistemological reconstruction.