Latin American religious and political life experienced monumental change in the postwar period. Rapidly shifting demographics, especially through rural-urban migration, reshaped the structures across denominations, coalitions, and traditions. Protestants, long a tiny and marginalized religious minority community, began to grow and flourish at the margins of a new urban environment. Protestant evangelicals, and particularly Pentecostals, leveraged their own flexible polities to expand in places Roman Catholicism often struggled to reach. In a political sense, an entire generation of theologians, Catholic and Protestant, was shaped by the Cuban Revolution, Cold War tensions, and proximity to U.S. interventionism. Samuel Escobar, a longtime staff member with the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, and later Thornley Wood Professor of Missions at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary (now Palmer Seminary), writes from within these crucial intersections—a lifetime of close proximity to missionaries, revolutionaries, and his own religious minority community in Peru.

In Search of Christ in Latin America is a book formed from the margins of Latin American life. It is a work of constructive theology with particular focus on Christology, but the end product is an intriguing monograph that interweaves theology, literature, and religious history. Escobar, who holds a PhD in Latin American literature from Complutense University (Madrid, Spain), moves seamlessly across fields to fashion a book for which I know very little comparison.

Escobar's interdisciplinary contribution fills various scholarly lacunae. The early years of Latin American Protestantism, particularly the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, stand out as one of these embarrassing gaps in the literature. Escobar, in his early chapter “The Christ in Early Protestant Preaching,” highlights pathbreaking Bible society colporteurs as well as influential early missionaries from Britain, the United States, and elsewhere from the Global North. Herein lies one of the particular strengths of Escobar's book: careful attention to the transnational nature of Latin American Protestantism without overlooking local Catholic and Protestant constructions. As such, the book provides a strong introduction to Protestant Christian thought in Latin America without shortchanging Catholic contributions.

Latin American Protestant evangelicals, in particular, have long been criticized for operating ahistorically and producing little of their own thinking. Even the intellectual contributions of Escobar's own “Latin American Evangelical Left,” as I call them, have often been labeled a “response” to theologies of liberation rather than a shared response to social and political stimuli from their Cold War context. If credited with intellectual contributions, scholars often date them to later periods well into the postwar period. Escobar returns to this theme throughout the book: Latin American evangelicals enjoy their own intellectual tradition, one with rich resources. In particular, Escobar provides a key intervention in his chapter “The Beginnings of a Latin American Christology,” where he discusses the “founders of Latin American evangelical thought.” These include the Oaxacan writer Gonzalo Báez-Camargo (1899–1983), Alberto Rembao (1895–1962), and other key Spanish publications. Rembao's 1949 Discurso a la nación evangélica and Báez-Camargo's early analysis on Protestant communities during the Spanish Inquisition are key highlights. These thinkers deserve more attention than they currently receive in the English-speaking world, and Escobar contributes toward this end.

Finally, many are aware of influential Catholic social traditions, with monumental documents such as Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, Gaudium et Spes, and CELAM documents from Medellín. Escobar argues that evangelical Protestants have a similar tradition, doing the work of Vatican II in the first half of the twentieth century. In making this argument, he focuses on the Scottish Presbyterian John Mackay (who would later become president of Princeton Theological Seminary), the Latin American Theological Fellowship, and ecumenical thinkers such as José Míguez Bonino. Mackay's influence on later generations might surprise many observers given a resistance to exporting credit from Latin American intellectual work. Mackay's encounter with Latin American culture and literature, however, convinced him that Christianity in the region was anything but indigenous. The Christian message had a foreign accent, and this disfigured the image of Christ. Mackay wrote his most influential book, The Other Spanish Christ, in 1932 as an attempt to diagnose these problems within Latin American Christianity and provide a way forward to an authentically “Latin Christ.” Escobar finds in Mackay a careful balance of Latin American and global Christology alongside evidence of the tilled ground of Latin American Protestantism. This attention to and praise for Mackay also displays one of Escobar's strengths: his willingness to give credit where credit is due, even if it cuts across political narratives or appears to export agency to northern thinkers. The Latin American Protestant intellectual tradition, particularly within the theme of Christology, is a transnational space filled with diverse materials.

Overall, this book displays impressive breadth as an introductory sweep of Latin American Christology. While Escobar pays careful attention to a broad spectrum of literature, his work should dispel at least one surprisingly persistent myth: Latin American Protestants lack their own intellectual tradition. Escobar paints a detailed picture of a global and Latin American Christology with materials from a long twentieth century. Escobar's inclusion of Spanish-language religious literature, in particular, contributes to scholarly and public lacunae across multiple fields as well. Toward this end, In Search of Christ in Latin America is a fascinating book with rich resources for the historian and theologian.