C. René Padilla

C. René Padilla (born 1932) is an Ecuadorian evangelical theologian and missiologist known for coining the term "integral mission" (Spanish: misión integral) in the 1970s to articulate Christianity's dual priority in evangelism and social activism. He would popularize this term in global evangelicalism through the Lausanne Conference of 1974.

Padilla was born into a poor family in Quito, Ecuador in 1932. Due to the Great Depression, his family would move when he was two years old to Colombia, where he would grow up. He would later pursue a BA in philosophy and a MA in theology at Wheaton College, before continuing on to complete a PhD in the New Testament from the University of Manchester, under F. F. Bruce.

His education and experiences with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship underscored Padilla's evangelical foundations and the priority he would place on the historical-critical approach to hermeneutics. However, in 1959, Padilla was appointed a traveling secretary in Latin America for International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. In his work with universities throughout Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador, Padilla would be faced with a tense sociopolitical context. Students were immersed in Marxist writings and grappled with the possibility of revolution. This would be the context which produced not only Catholic liberation theology, but also challenged Padilla to develop a new evangelical social theology which he would later term "integral mission."

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