Abstract:
This paper analyzes the influence of culture on the Evangelical Christian practice in the context of the city of Laguna. The first chapter deals with culture in its various facets. It reveals the difficulty in defining the term and establishes a dialog with theoreticians so as to find a path to better understand and study culture. Faced with many possibilities of definition, the thought of Rubem Alves was adopted which defines culture as an object of desire of something which the human being had in some other time but lost and now has become an object of desire. Culture seeks to fill this lack of this object of desire, to fulfill the absence, however it is incapable of doing it. This is where religion comes in that which culture cannot do, religion intends to do. That is why religion is treated in this chapter as the epitome of culture. This chapter ends showing how religion shapes the cosmovision and culture of a people and sustains customs and values. The second chapter presents a panorama of the ethnic, cultural and religious composition of Laguna. From the beginning there was a people here with its culture and religion. But then, the Portuguese and Azorean colonizers arrived, the immigrants, the adventurers and the slaves. And there was a fusion which produced a new cultural and religious configuration. The third and last chapter deals with the complex relation of culture with the Gospel: the main religious manifestations of the city and their relation with culture and with the Gospel, the tension with enculturation, the divergent and convergent points between culture and the Gospel. It ends suggesting that, since the Gospel is transcendent, in the process of enculturation, it should exercise its supremacy as judge of the culture. Otherwise, one runs the risk of losing both.
