Abstract
Contextual Theology and Revolutionary Transformation in Latin America: The Missiology of M. Richard Shaull
Ángel D. Santiago-Vendrell
Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2010. 198 pp. $23.00
This book on the missiology of M. Richard Shaull makes a definite contribution to both the history of Christianity and missiology in Latin America and the Caribbean. The story of Millard Richard Shaull, a missionary from the United States who was transformed by historical praxis and pastoral ministry in Latin America, is worth telling.
M. Richard Shaull was a pioneering voice in the movement called liberation theology in Latin America and the Caribbean. His solid theological background in the Reformed tradition, his attentive and open mind, and his prophetic vocation and vision discerned in the midst of suffering and hope provide for the development of a relevant theology of mission. John A. Mackay, a towering figure in the ecumenical movement, and Shaull’s mentor at Princeton Theological Seminary, became his main source of inspiration and theological advice.
It was in the 1950s that M. Richard Shaull started to reflect and write on the church and its mission in the sociopolitical turmoil taking place in countries like Colombia and Brazil. His active involvement over the years in the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) and his influence in the founding of Church and Society in Latin America, an avant-garde ecumenical organization in the early 1960s, place him both in the larger map of the ecumenical movement, particularly the World Council of Churches, and in the ecumenical movement in Latin America and the Caribbean. Shaull influenced the lives of theologians like Rubem Alves, his student in Brazil and at Princeton Theological Seminary, whose own work as a liberation theologian made a profound impact in the initial development of liberation theology in Latin America with his book, A Theology of Human Hope (Corpus Books, 1969).
Dr. Ángel Santiago-Vendrell, Assistant Professor of Evangelism at Asbury Theological Seminary (Florida Dunnam Campus), has gathered an impressive amount of information, which he diligently organized. He has selected important primary sources, analyzed the correspondence, and placed documents in their historical dimension (some of them unpublished and known to the general public for the first time). He has also traced books and essays forgotten or lost in missionary archives and personal collections of missionary executives.
This book is a long-awaited contribution to the history of mission in Latin America and the Caribbean and a valuable addition to a new perspective and appreciation of the lives of missionaries that decided to incarnate with their own lives the liberating dimension of the Gospel. M. Richard Shaull is one of those committed servants of God’s reign. And Ángel Santiago-Vendrell should be praised for this intellectual and pastoral effort. This volume is indeed a theological biography. The passion demonstrated in each chapter of this book adds to its already historical place in the bibliography of Latin American and Caribbean theology of mission. From now on any attempt to interpret the role played by U.S. missionaries in Latin America and the Caribbean cannot avoid this indispensable resource.
The book is highly recommended to scholars, pastors, seminarians, and lay people who want to know of the contextual, transforming and revolutionary thinking embodied in the life and ministry of M. Richard Shaull.