Inculturating Theology in the Indigenous Categories: The Quest for Filipino Cultural Identity

Abstract

Giving importance to indigenous categories is becoming more and more a must for Filipino theological articulators. It is through the utilization of indigenous categories that we could shape and develop the emerging Filipino consciousness and to express the gospel within the context of the people’s own culture to effectively bring across it and identify it with the culture of the people; more so, for Christianity to become a folk Christianity, that is, Christianity expressed in the indigenous cultural way. However, there is a need to examine and analyze the methodology used by our Filipino theologians in articulating faith in the indigenous categories so as to determine the difficulty that confronts the process of inculturation.