Justo’s Legacy to the Church at Large

Stephen Bevans, SVD

Catholic Theological Union, Chicago

I remember very clearly the first time I met Justo González. It was in the dining room of Catholic Theological Union during a conference for Hispanic/Latino/a theologians that my friend and then-colleague Ana María Pineda had organized. I was thrilled to meet Justo, and he was as gracious as usual as I have since discovered, but he challenged my placing him within the “transcendental model” in my book Models of Contextual Theology that had been published a year or so before.[1]

Justo, strongly committed to liberation theology in books like Faith and Wealth (1990),[2] Mañana (1990b),[3] and Liberation Preaching (1980),[4] suggested that I should have rather placed his work within what I called the “praxis model.” This model begins with an action or experience and moves through a re-reading of the Scriptures and the Tradition to a new, more faithful and more effective action. While my understanding of the models of contextual theology was clearly an inclusive one, it was clear that the theme of liberation played a key part in Justo’s work. My own reading of his work was somewhat different, and in this I think I already intuited the truth of the thesis of this lecture: that Justo González’s work had implications far beyond the Hispanic/Latino/a community in which and out of which he did theology.

As a white, middle-class theologian outside the Hispanic/Latino/a community, read Justo’s work, I was struck by his amazing grasp of Christian tradition and message; and equally by his passionate embrace of his Cuban/Latino identity. Especially when reading Mañana, I was struck by the fact that here was a deeply authentic Christian trying to make sense of his faith so that he could live as well as an authentic Hispanic. As I wrote in 1992, González proceeds “not by starting with scripture and tradition and translating the message into Hispanic culture; nor does he start with culture and show how it dovetails with the gospel. Rather, the biblical message and theological tradition are explained by a Hispanic person who points to the relevance of the traditional doctrines for his Hispanic community.”[5]

Justo González’s work, in other words, to paraphrase Virgilio Elizondo in the “Foreword” to Mañana, is that of a scholar among scholars, and a Hispanic among Hispanics—and hence the title of this lecture. In this sense, while Justo is a richly contextual theologian, his contextual theology has implications for a wider theology, or I should say, implications for other contextual theologies. While every theology is contextual, as Justo says clearly in a number of places,[6] contextual theology cannot stop there. For its own enrichment, and for the enrichment of other contextual theologies, for the good of the church catholic, a local theology needs to be in dialogue with other local theologies. Theology, in other words, besides being contextual, needs to be inter-contextual, inter-cultural, or done—as I myself have argued—from a global perspective.[7]

It is Justo González’s importance for such an inter-contextual, global theology that I would like to explore in this presentation. I would like to undertake this exploration in three moves or in three parts—the first two general, the third more personal. In the first part, I would like to explore what Justo González offers to the church at large as a theologian and historian. Second, I’d like to explore what Justo González offers to the church at large as a contextual theologian and historian. Then, in a third part, I’d like to explore what Justo González offers to the church at large by sharing with you some of the ways that his theology has influenced and enriched my own White Anglo attempts of doing theology and history.

Part I: What Justo González Offers to the Church at Large as a Theologian and Historian

Several months ago now, when I was re-reading a lot of Justo’s work in preparation for this paper, I went out to lunch with a great mentor of mine, Fr. Larry Nemer. Larry was my church history teacher in seminary, and my colleague at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago where he taught church history for many years. Larry had moved to Australia twenty-five years ago to teach in Melbourne, and was back in the States for a few weeks. During lunch I mentioned to Larry that I was working on a paper that would talk about Justo González’s importance as a historian and a theologian beyond the Hispanic/Latino/a community, and how much I was enjoying reading his work. Larry’s reply, I think, frames what I want to say in this first part of my presentation this evening. He said something like “I don’t know Justo González’s theological work or his work as a Hispanic/Latino/a theologian. All I know is that he is a very good, very accurate historian.”

For many historians and theologians, I suspect, Justo is simply a fine theologian and historian. Period. And while I acknowledge with him that no one does theology or history in a vacuum, and while I see subtle hints of Justo’s Cuban American context in what we might call his more general works, these are chock full of insights that would be valuable to theologians, students, and pastors of any contextual background. Let me name a few of these in this first section of my paper.

We might look first, and in a more general way, at Justo’s two major multi-volume works, his The Story of Christianity, originally written in 1984 but revised and updated in 2010[8] and A History of Christian Thought, revised in 1987 from the original published from 1970 to 1975. [9] These works are simply classics in the field, and contain immense amounts of information that are not only helpful for beginning students—for which they were written. They are also fine guides for pastors and professors. Justo says in the Preface to The Story of Christianity that the work is strongly autobiographical because it “deals with friends and companions with whom I have spent the last three decades,”[10] and this is how reading him feels. It is his intimacy with the likes of Origen, Justin, Eusebius, Athanasius, and especially Irenaeus—to mention only a few—that offers a clear, sure, and for the most part unbiased guide to the theology and history of the church. The fact that The Story of Christianity has been translated into such languages as Chinese and Korean is ample testimony that Justo’s work is appreciated and helpful to a much wider audience than United States and Latin American students.

Let me offer some concrete examples, however, from some of Justo’s other theological and historical works. One of my favorites is his explanation of the nature of doctrine as the foul lines of a baseball diamond. There is no doubt that his explanation is influenced by George Lindbeck’s classic work on the topic, The Nature of Doctrine (Lindbeck 1984), and it may be that Justo’s analogy is colored by a love of baseball that is perhaps part of his Cuban DNA. Nevertheless, his explanation is brilliant and memorable. There are no rules that tell infielders or outfielders where to stand on the field; there are no rules that say that a particular batter must hit the ball to a particular place. But all play must be within the foul lines. Within those boundaries there is an amazing amount of freedom, however, and there are seemingly infinite ways that the game can be played: a single to right field, an astounding catch at the center field wall, a stolen base off an less-than-alert pitcher, a smoking curve ball that closes out an inning—to name a few. Nevertheless, “you may hit a ball as hard as you wish; but if it is foul it is not a home run. . . . to try to play without any sense of limits, without any foul lines, would also destroy the game.”[11]

A second example is one that I had not noticed until I re-read both Justo’s and Zaida Maldonado Pérez’ Introduction to Christian Theology and Justo’s Mañana. Speaking about the fact that human beings are part of creation, these texts reflect on the passage in Genesis 2 in which the creation of the woman is narrated. Usually this passage is interpreted “as affirming that the woman’s purpose in life is to be a ‘helper’ to the man, who is her lord.”[12]. However the word “helper” is the same word that the Hebrew Scriptures use to describe God as the helper of Israel, and the Hebrew word that is translated as “adequate” or “appropriate” means literally “as in front of him” or a kind of “mirror image.” Later, the King James Version translates these words by the one word “helpmeet,” and then “on the notion of ‘helpmeet’ society . . . poured all its preconceived ideas about relationships between a man and a woman.”[13] But that is not what the words mean. They mean that only the woman is the proper companion of the man and point to the woman’s equality rather than her subordination. The woman, in other words, according to the Genesis text, is every bit equal to the man—the word for woman is in fact the very same word in Hebrew but with a feminine ending.[14] Ultimately, the resulting domination of male over female is not the original intent of the creator, but the result of sin. In fact, González says insightfully, God’s remark that “it is not good for the man to be alone” does not just refer to the fact that he needs a wife, what it means is that, for a human being, being alone is not good. In and by himself or herself, a human being is not good. He or she is good only if he or she is in relation.[15]

I could offer many more examples, and in fact an earlier version of this paper did just that. But I’m sure you get the point. Let’s move on to our second part.

Part II: What Justo González Offers to the Church at Large as a Contextual Theologian and Historian

I mentioned above in passing that in reading Justo’s more general works we might see subtle hints of his Cuban American heritage even though these works appeal to a more general readership. What this points to is that, like every other theologian, Justo does not ever do theology or history in a vacuum. Even when he aims at a more general readership, he is a contextual theologian, and as a contextual theologian his purpose is to enrich readers from contexts other than his own.

Let me offer two examples. First, in the Preface to the Second English edition of A History of Christian Thought, Justo writes about how he has become more aware, since writing the first edition of the book, of studies on the social and economic context of theology. This is no doubt due to his study and involvement in liberation theology, in particular his books Faith and Wealth and Christian Thought Revisited, both written out of his Hispanic/Latino/a context. But since this more general work is an introduction for students, he says, he only refers to economic matters in a few places in the new edition.[16]

Second, I found it quite refreshing that in Justo’s rather general A Concise History of Christian Doctrine (2005) he has an entire chapter on culture. This is usually not listed as a “doctrine” in such histories, and yet, as developed by Justo it emerges as something immensely important for Christian theology in the past (e.g. the apologists in the second and third century, or de Nobili and Ricci in the sixteenth), as well as crucial for the present, with the shift in the center of gravity of Christianity from the West/North to the East/South.

In several other works, Justo writes as an unabashedly contextual theologian, rooted particularly in his Protestant, Cuban-American context. “What follows,” Justo writes in the very first lines of Mañana, “is not an unbiased theological treatise. It does not even seek to be unbiased.”[17] His perspective, he writes, is the perspective of a minority, of someone on the margins, and such a theology is important to establish one’s Christian identity as a member of such a marginal minority. However, Justo talks about how his minority, marginal perspective offers more than that. It will also help not only other theologies articulated by marginalized minorities, but also theologies articulated by majorities—showing them that their theology also is a contextual theology, and a product of their own biases. All theologies, Justo argues, are biased. They “involved a prejudice that is difficult for us to see, and that a seemingly more biased view will help us discover that prejudice. This is probably one of the most significant contributions that a minority perspective can make to the church at large.”[18]

But Justo’s theology from his Cuban-American context does more than that. His theology, as I believe does any genuine contextual theology, offers an enrichment to other contextual theologies when those theologies enter into dialogue with one another. Let me give several examples of how that enrichment could take place as Justo’s contextual theology meets other contextual theologies. I have in mind here especially the enrichment that his theology can offer to Western contextual theologies such as Anglo-American or White-European theological efforts.

First, Western theologies have a lot to learn from Justo’s insistence on the communal nature of Hispanic/Latino/a theology—what some have called pastoral de conjunto or teología de conjunto, or what Justo has called Fuenteovejuna theology. The image is based upon Lope de Vega’s seventeenth century play, in which an entire village takes responsibility for executing a tyrannical comendador, and Justo suggests that such common responsibility is not only the way Hispanic/Latino/as do theology, but the way that theology should indeed always be done. In one of my favorite passages, Justo writes that doing theology communally

Is a contribution that Hispanics can bring to theology. Western theology—especially that which takes place in academic circles—has long suffered from an exaggerated invidivualism. Theologians, like medieval knights, joust with one another, while their peers cheer from the stands where they occupy places of honor and the plebes look at the context from a distance—if they look at all. The methodology of Hispanic “Fuenteovejuna” theology will contrast with this.  . . . It will not be a theology of theologians but a theology of the believing and practicing community.[19]

This communal nature of theology, and indeed of Christian life, is a theme that appears in much of what Justo writes. Summarizing a new approach to biblical hermenuetics that emerged from several years of talks at the “ethnic round table,” Justo suggests that such interpretation, besides being aware of oppressive interpretations in the past and interpreting the Bible through non-Western cultures, needs a thoroughly communal approach.[20] Later in the same work, in the context of reflections on eschatology, Justo emphasizes that salvation is not something individual, but communal, and this emphasis is important in order to combat the Western “excessive emphasis on the individual.”[21] The only thing “not good” about “the man” in Genesis, to repeat what I referred to earlier, is that he was alone.[22]

Faith, too, insists Justo, is something communal. Without the church there really can be no faith. “. . . just as someone who insists in having only eggs, and has no interest in chickens, will eventually end up without chickens or eggs, thus any who claim to believe, but not in the church, will end up without church and without faith.”[23]

Second, Western contextual theology can learn from Justo’s rather constant insistence that theology is political, whether theologians are aware of it or not. In Christian Thought Revisited, Justo shows how Eusebius’s great history of the church was an attempt to align Christianity with the empire, insisting—as did much subsequent theology and history—that the empire’s persecution of Christianity was a mistake, based on false information.[24] But was this really the case? Several emperors who persecuted Christianity, Justo says, were some of the wisest and best in Rome’s history. Perhaps they saw the true implications of a carpenter who was unjustly condemned to death, of his vision of the Reign of God, of his siding with the poor. Perhaps they saw the threat of Christians who were pacifists and refused military service, and obeyed laws that they believed were higher than those of the Roman state.[25] (González 1999: 81-82). Justo quotes Robert Wilken: “The Christian movement was revolutionary not because it had the men and resources to mount a war against the laws of the Roman Empire, but because it created a social group that promoted its own laws and its own patterns of behavior.”[26]

This political, even revolutionary, perspective lies at the base of one of Justo’s most important methodological insights: the Bible (and I would say theology as well) needs to be read “in Spanish.” What this means is much more than reading the Bible or the Tradition from a Hispanic perspective. It means above all to read these sources politically, to read them “in the ‘vernacular,’ not only in the cultural, linguistic sense but also in the socio-political sense.”[27] It means to do theology “beyond innocence,” recognizing the violent history within the Bible itself, within Hispanic/Latino/a history, and within European and American history. It is “part of our responsibility as Hispanics,” Justo writes, “not only for our sake but also for the sake of other minorities as well as for the sake of the dominant group,” to “constantly remind that group” of the many “guilty items that one may be inclined to forget in an innocent reading of history.”[28] Christian faith, in sum, is political faith. Even such a seemingly abstract act as having faith in God as Trinity is a commitment to action. “. . . we would do well to set aside interpretations that see it in purely speculative or metaphysical terms and seek to discover, to imitate, and to apply to our societal and ecclesiastical life the love of the Triune God.”[29] These convictions, coming from deep within Justo’s own context, need to speak to other contexts as well.

Third, let me touch briefly on Justo’s understanding of sin and its importance for theology beyond his own Cuban-American context. In the first place, insists Justo, we must not confuse sin with crime, even though the interests of the state try to invest civil laws with religious authority. According to the Law, Jesus was justly condemned, as were Christians who disobeyed Roman laws, and Martin Luther King, Jr. broke many laws.[30] Secondly, we need to be wary of an “over sexualization” of sin. There are at least as many laws in the Bible about property rights as there are about sexual transgressions, “and yet we hear very little in the church about the misuse of property.”[31] Moreover, such “sexualization” of sin leads to its privatization, resulting in the fallacy that sin is something between the individual and God, rather than a violation of our “for-otherness,” dominating and oppressing others.[32] In the third place, we must be aware that sin is allowing others to dominate—“a temptation,” Justo says, “for all oppressed groups,”[33] including women and Hispanics. In this sense, sin is a refusal of people to be “others”—“by not demanding the for-otherness of those who are in positions of power and privilege.”[34]

Such an understanding of sin, it seems to me, is a rich and fresh one, a powerful restatement of the tradition out of a context that has experienced oppression in many subtle and not so subtle ways. Once more, its importance goes beyond the Hispanic/Latino/a community.

Part III: What Justo González Has Contributed to the Church at Large through My own Theological Work

I have greatly profited from Justo’s historical and theological writings in my own historical and theological work. Without his wisdom, my own relatively small contribution to history and theology would be very small indeed. In this final part, let me lift up three particular contributions that Justo has made to my own thinking.

Perhaps I have profited greatest from Justo’s great insight that there are three basic “types” of theology in the church’s history: a more legal approach that he calls Type A, a more abstract and academic approach that he calls Type B, and a more pastoral approach that he calls Type C. I have assigned Christian Thought Revisited in my classes of introduction to theology, and the students have raved about it. These three types were also incredibly helpful in Roger Schroder’s and my book Constants in Context,[35] in which we applied Justo’s categories to six basic “constants”—Christology, ecclesiology, eschatology, salvation, human nature, and culture—in the history of the church’s mission. Justo was gracious enough to write a Foreword for the book and explained in more detail the genesis of the types from his own teaching experience.

Secondly, in writing a short history of theology in global perspective as part of a larger introduction to theology, Justo’s work has been absolutely invaluable. Especially his History of Christian Thought has been a sure guide to primary documents as well as a clear explanation of complicated controversies and developments. Like many other scholars, as I’ve said above, I have profited from Justo’s wisdom, wit, and wonderful familiarity with the great theological figures of the past.

Finally, ever since I attended two of Justo’s three Zenos Lectures many years ago at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago I have been clued into what I’ve called the “New Church History” that he and several other scholars—like Dale Irvin, Scott Sunquist, Lamin Sanneh, Andrew Walls, and Wilbert Shenk—have advocated. Justo’s wonderful description of contemporary church history as using a new cartography (including Latin America, Africa, and Asia), a new topography (moving away from an exclusive “orography” of big events and powerful people), and a new understanding of “continental shifts” (recognizing that the evangelization of the Americas might ultimately be more important for Christianity than the Reformation) has truly revolutionized my thinking and writing.

Conclusion

In preparing this paper I re-read a good number of Justo’s works and filled a good number of pages with notes and quotations from them. Were I to do full justice to my topic, those notes would have been the basis for a much longer and therefore richer reflection than I have been able to present here. I marvel at Justo’s ability to connect heresies like Gnosticism and Marcionism with issues in the Hispanic/Latino/a community and the contemporary wider church (see e.g. González 1990b: 80-83). I love the way he is able to help Hispanics and others expose what happened in 1492 as the beginning of Western domination and expansion, and yet call people beyond that “false” discovery to a “true” discovery of the essential catholicity of the church.[36] Virgilio Elizondo described Justo so well: he is truly a scholar among scholars, and a Hispanic among Hispanics.[37] His work indeed provides a great legacy to the church at large.

WORKS CITED

Bevans, Stephen. “A Theology for the Ephesian Moment.” Anvil 27. 2 (November 2011): http://anviljournal.org/174.

______, An Introduction to Theology in Global Perspective. Maryknoll. NY: Orbis Books, 2009.

______, Models of Contextual Theology. Maryknoll. NY: Orbis Books. (Revised and Expanded version, 2002).

Bevans, Stephen and Roger Schroeder. Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission for Today. Maryknoll. NY: Orbis Books, 2004.

González, Justo L. The Story of Christianity. Two Volumes. New York: HarperOne, 2010.

______, A Concise History of Christian Doctrine. Nashville. TN: Abingdon Press, 2005.

______, The Changing Shape of Church History. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2002.

______, Christian Thought Revisited: Three Types of Theology. Revised Edition. Maryknoll. NY: Orbis, 1999.

______, Out of Every Tribe and Nation: Christian Theology at the Ethnic Roundtable. Nashville. TN: Abingdon Press, 1992.

______, Faith and Wealth: A History of Early Christian Ideas on the Origin. Use. and Significance of Money. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990.

______, Mañana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective. Nashville. TN: Abingdon Press, 1990.

________, A History of Christian Thought. Three Volumes. Nashville. TN: Abingdon, 1987.

González, Justo L. and Zaida Maldonado Pérez. An Introduction to Christian Theology. Nashville. TN: Abingdon, 2002.

González, Justo L. and Catherine Gonsalus González. Liberation Preaching: The Pulpit and the Oppressed. Nashville. TN: Abingdon, 1980.

Lindbeck, George. The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Post-Liberal Age. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984.

Wilken, Robert L. The Christians as the Romans Saw Them. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.