307 - Mission Between The Times: Essays on the Kingdom

Mission Between The Times: Essays on the Kingdom
By C. Rene Padilla
Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1985. 199 pp. $10.95.

As pastor of a Baptist church in Buenos Aires and General Secretary of the Latin American Theological Fraternity, C. Rene Padilla writes from the perspective of a Third World evangelical who recognizes both the strengths and the weaknesses of liberation theology. In the Preface to Mission Between The Times, the author describes the context for each of the nine essays that comprise his book. Together, they present a holistic and balanced view of the nature and purpose of the church's mission, based on a solid biblical theology of the Kingdom of God.

Rejecting universalism while affirming the universality of the gospel, Padilla appeals for an evangelism that takes seriously the distinction between the church and the world and for a gospel that does not become an expression of the church's enslavement to the world. Consistent with this premise, he rejects any secular or culture Christianity that absolutizes a particular way of life, as exemplified by the success-oriented TV evangelists in America, who appeal to those looking for salvation without repentance. That is cheap grace, says Padilla, for without a call to repentance there is no gospel, and without ethics, there is no repentance.

Padilla sees the current obsession with numerical growth as a reflection of cultural consumerism and completely antithetical to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Notwithstanding the provisional validity and temporary necessity of ethnic churches, he finds no biblical support whatsoever for the so-called homogeneous unit principle, whose advocates have turned a sociological observation into a missionary strategy.

308 - Mission Between The Times: Essays on the Kingdom

While not denying the existence of an implicit theology, Padilla refers to the church in Latin America as a church without a theology. He calls for a contextualized gospel and an evangelical theology, whose basis is the Word of God, whose context is the concrete historical situation, and whose purpose is obedience to Christ, Such a theology will proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God fulfilled in Jesus Christ, who is the content, model, and goal of the proclamation. A theology of the kingdom must include a call to repentance and faith, issuing in good works. Evangelism and social responsibility, therefore, are inseparable, and both are essential to mission.

This is a well-written book. Despite the fact that the nine essays were presented at various conferences over a period of about ten years, there is a thematic unity to their contents, the central focus being, as the sub-title indicates, the kingdom of God. Each essay is itself a valuable contribution to the on-going dialogue on the nature of the church's mission in today's world, and together they offer a rich treasure of prophetic wisdom and quotable insights for anyone interested in a Latin American theologian's perspective on world mission and evangelization.

Richard Stoll Armstrong
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, N.J.