ABSTRACT
Chapters 4 and 5 address the articulation of Las Casas’s juridical voice in four major contemporaneous debates. This chapter presents the trajectory of the debate about the ontological status of the Indigenous people as fully human, which was sparked by Montesinos’s 1511 sermon, affirmed by the 1512/13 Laws of Burgos, and explicated in Las Casas’s 1516 Memorial that Indigenous persons were by nature free, rational, and social, and later in 1519 that all nations and persons were equal. As the debate raged in church, academia, and courts, Las Casas upheld their full humanity in his missiological treatise The Only Way, which informed the encyclical Sublimis Deus in 1537, his 1550–51 debate with Sepúlveda, and his juristic writings in the Apología and Apologética historia sumaria. This chapter also explicates the debate about Indigenous people’s religious capacity to receive the faith and attain salvation. Las Casas’s three missiological premises about this capacity are elucidated: first, that evangelization was the primary justification of the Spaniards’ presence in the Indies; second, that peaceful methods were required to attain the ultimate goal of the Indigenous people’s salvation; third, that ignorance, goal reversal, and defective evangelizing methods obfuscated conversion.
