From the Ends of the Earth: Dr. Justo Gonzalez on Missions
From The Forum Magazine, Fall 2014 - view the full issue here
"The United States is now a mission field just as much as China or Angola.”
Thus spoke Justo González, the noted CubanAmerican church historian and theologian, during a Calvin Theological Seminary-sponsored lecture this autumn. Gonzales, who authored the two-volume Story of Christianity and the three-volume History of Christian Thought, addressed the sweeping shifts taking place in Christendom and the impact on Christian ministry and mission in the world today.
“Mission is not—or should not be—a one-way enterprise,” he declared. “It is not just a matter of Christians telling, giving, teaching, and others hearing, receiving, learning. When Christians tell, they must also hear; when they give, they must also receive; when they teach, they must also learn. Otherwise, mission runs the risk of becoming just another form of imperialism under the guise of faith.”
In his presentation, González not only provided a broad overview of the history of missionary work but he also delved into a deeper examination of the Great Commission and the development of a theology of mission.
“Mission is both the announcement of what God has done and is doing in us,” he said, “and the discovery of what God is doing in others. And in that very discovery God often tells us something we need to know.”
González’s appeal for a spirit of humility and mutuality in mission is rooted in his understanding of the “sign of Jonah” in the gospel accounts, including Luke’s assertion that “for as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so will the Son of Man be to this generation … . The people of Nineveh will arise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it: for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.”
He asserted that the sign of Jonah today is “ever present” among us—“but it is not directly present in the good, religious people who follow our traditions and our customs. It is present in the new world that we are unable to understand, but where all authority has been given to Jesus.”
González acknowledged that current trends prompt many to “try to live in closed communities where we seek to keep this new world from impinging on our lives. We may try to close our borders to any who are not quite like us—in culture, in color, in education and in social standing.”
What’s more, he continued, “we may even use the church as the last stronghold of the world we knew, under the pretext of doing everything ‘decently and in good order,’ or...that we must defend the Reformed tradition in its pristine purity.”
But followers of Christ, González said, “have to remember that we don’t own the church. We are just stewards. It’s the Lord’s church. We can’t keep people out becomes we don’t like them or don’t understand them ... . The local church has to learn it is part of the great church universal—not only through all the world, but through all the centuries.”
Born in Havana, Cuba, in 1937, González was educated in his home country and then immigrated to the U.S. to earn both his master’s and doctoral degrees at Yale University. Ordained in the United Methodist Church, he taught at the Evangelical Seminary in Puerto Rico and at Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta.
In addition to his epic treatises on church history and theology, González has written more than 100 academic books and 1,300 journal articles. He is married to Catherine Gunsalus González, an ordained Presbyterian minister and expert in church history and liturgy who is a professor emeritus at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia.
(Bruce Buursma, contributor)
