ABSTRACT
The author was born and reared in a poor, not extremely, but still quite poor, home in Quito, Ecuador. Most of author's peers were nominal non-practicing-Roman Catholics, and during the time that we were together as classmates several of them became atheists, some of them Marxists. The author's deep desire was to study the Bible and theology, but at the same time also to get the training in a profession, perhaps in Medicine. The idea of studying Medicine or a similar career did not last very long. The author had to help Christian university students relate biblical teaching to human life in all its dimensions. Necessarily, that meant going beyond the historical-grammatical approach to Bible study; it implied a rather different view of the hermeneutical task, an expanded view that in the interpretive process would keep the inextricable link between Scripture and the present-day context and between theology and social ethics.
