122 - Liberating News: A Theology of Contextual Evangelization

Liberating News: A Theology of Contextual Evangelization

By Orlando E. Costas

Grand Rapids, Michigan, Eerdmans, 1989.182 Pp. $12.95.

This book is the last one written by Orlando E. Costas, corrected and redrafted during the last months of the terminal illness of the well-known Puerto Rican missiologist. His wife Rose, the faithful typist of all the written work of Costas, and the unfailing companion of his prodigious ministry as a pastor, evangelist, and missiologist, has mediated this posthumous work. She tells us that this volume was intended to be the first of a trilogy on Contextual Evangelization to be published both in English and in Spanish. Orlando's untimely death deprived us of that full project, but here we have the vintage of a quarter of a century of struggling with the proclamation of the gospel in its holistic integrity and in dynamic relationship with the realities of our contemporary context.

This book deals with both the content and the context of evangelization as well as with the practical and the theoretical functions of theology. It is one of the most serious and fruitful efforts in the field of the theology of evangelization to bridge between the personal and the social dimensions of the gospel, the communal and the institutional aspects of the church in mission, the confessional and the ideological, the traditional and the contemporary, and the ecumenical and the evangelical. It is truly a sample of a holistic vision of the gospel and evangelization.

Orlando Costas had come, through a strained spiritual pilgrimage, to the conviction that the gospel is truly and fully liberating, as indicated in the title of the book. He is speaking particularly from the experience of oppression-liberation among the racial minority Christians, both in Latin America and North America and other parts of the world. And he commends his understanding of the gospel as a re-enacting of the "radical evangelical" tradition. One of Costas' most visionary perceptions is that the original gospel was proclaimed and received at the peripheries of the world (initially developed in his book Christ outside the Gate) and that it is being perceived and proclaimed today "from the vantage point of the periphery of the Americas, and filtered through the radical evangelical tradition and the ecumenical process of traditioning." It is from there that evangelization becomes prophetic and apostolic at the same time. Contextual evangelization is not a well adjusted and watered-down version

123 - Liberating News: A Theology of Contextual Evangelization

of the gospel acceptable to all, but a liberating proclamation for sinners and for "the sinned-against."

Orlando Costas goes to the Old and New Testaments for models of mission today (Esther as the type of prophetic witness in the Jewish diaspora; the gospel of Jesus from the Galilean periphery). He also deals theologically with the relevance for evangelization of subjects such as the trinitarian community, the message of the cross (life through suffering and death), the call to conversion and the basic evangelistic community.

We agree with Gabriel Fackre when he says in the introduction, "We have in our hands a theology of evangelization that is destined to become a classic in the field."

Mortimer Arias, Iliff School of Theology, Denver, Colo.