Dr. Justo L. González

Justo Luis González was born in August 1937 in Havana, Cuba. In his formative years, his parents would lay the groundwork for his career that has spanned more than 60 years. His mother, Luisa Garcia Acosta, was an educator, professor of Spanish literature, and author of numerous books on Spanish grammar. His father, Justo González Carrasco, was a novelist, a newspaper editor, and an employee of Cuba’s department of agriculture, where his main job was to take articles that scientists had written on such subjects as agriculture, hygiene, and herbal medicine and rewrite them in such a way that persons with scant formal education could understand them and apply what they had read. Justo’s father would often say that if one could not explain a difficult idea in simple terms, then one did not really understand it.

That truth was borne home to Justo when in the third grade he showed his father an essay that the little boy’s teacher had praised. After reading it over, his father asked his son, “What did you want to say?” The young Justo explained; his father asked him one further question, “Then why didn’t you say it?”

Justo has carried that lesson with him in everything he writes, taking difficult concepts and explaining them in terms that anyone, regardless of that person’s educational background, can understand. It is a hallmark of his more than a hundred and fifty books, which include The Story of Christianity (2 vols.), A History of Christian Thought (3 vols.), and Acts: The Gospel of the Spirit, that have been published in ten languages.

After obtaining his divinity degree from the Seminario Evangélico de Teología in Matanzas, Cuba in 1957, being ordained as a Methodist minister that same year, and completing his PhD in historical theology at Yale University in 1961–at the age of 23–, he went to Puerto Rico, where he taught church history at the Evangelical Seminary of Puerto Rico for eight years. He then taught at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, leaving there in 1977. For more than forty-five years Justo has focused on developing programs for the theological education of Hispanics, resulting in the founding of the Hispanic Summer Program (HSP), the Asociación para la Educación Teológica Hispana (AETH), and the Hispanic Theological Initiative (HTI). The significance of his work has been acknowledged by numerous awards and recognitions, including seven honorary doctorates, the “Lifetime Achievement Award” from the Association of Theological Schools, and above all, by a world-wide readership.

In his “retirement,” Justo continues to write, lecture, and inspire generations of church leaders, particularly Hispanics.