Mission in the World Today
Mission in the World Today
s the Father sent me, so I send you." With these words the risen
.Christ sent his chosen disciples out into the world, a movement
launched into the public life of the world to continue what he had
begun to proclaim, and to embody the reality of God's reign, God's
fatherly rule over all things and all peoples. And with a gesture he
reminded them of the central sign of the presence of that reign: he
showed them his hands and his side. The body of the risen Lord is
recognizable by the scars of the Passion, and his disciples will be
corporately recognizable as his body when they bear the same scars.
They are to proclaim and to embody -in foretaste but in real foretaste -the reality of that kingly rule that was crucially revealed in a
cross and in the resurrection of the crucified one. The company thus
launched into the life of all history this secret that is now an open
secret, of a rule revealed to chosen witnesses now in the bearing of a
cross and to be finally manifest to all in the return of the risen Lord
to reign. History, cosmic history, now has a shape, a form that can be
grasped: the central clue is the crucified Lord, and the horizon for all
action in history is the advent of the One who is to come.
With this clue, and in the joyful expectation of this advent, the Church expanded in every direction - an explosion of joy that could not be contained but whose fallout, not lethal but life-giving, spread east and west and north and south. With our culture-bound minds we tend to think only of the expansion westwards. Church history seldom ventures eastwards beyond Antioch. For me, a journey through Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey in 1974 was a vivid reminder of the fact that Christianity spread eastwards into those lands very early. However, without question the most dramatic explosion of the Christian energy was the one that occurred in the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century, what Latourette calls "The Great Century," that carried the gospel into almost every part of the world and made possible what William Temple called "the great new fact of our time," namely the fact that the Christian Church is now a truly global society.'
An address given to the New College Missionary Society, New College, Edinburgh, as honorary president, 12 November 1987.
The odd thing is that, while most Anglo-Saxons are very happy about the great new fact, they are embarrassed about the thing that made it possible - namely, the missions of the preceding century. Even when we read the reports prepared for the Edinburgh Conference of 1910, representing as they did the most informed and sensitive missionary thinking of the time, we feel uncomfortable with their conviction that "Christian Civilization" held the key to the future of the world. A missionary in training told me the other day that he was getting "hair-shirt missiology" - so eager were his teachers to confess the sins of our missionary predecessors. Of course it is much more pleasant and relaxing to confess the sins of one's ancestors than to be made aware of one's own. Yet, equally of course, we cannot deny that there was arrogance and a degree of insensitivity mixed up with the splendid courage and enthusiasm that summoned a generation of students to the evangelization of the world in this generation and that sent thousands of them to a lifetime of missionary service.
How do we explain the shift of perception? Is it just that, by the grace of God, the WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) have acquired a new and uncharacteristic humility? I wish it were so, but I doubt it. I think the evidence shows that it is not an excess of humility but a shift of belief. We detect arrogance in the proposal to take the Christian message to every nation and proclaim it as the truth, but we are not embarrassed about taking Western science, technology, and political institutions into every part of the world under the name of "world development." That is not arrogance; it is the benevolent exercise of sharing our blessings with others who need them. We do so because we are sure that modern science gives us the truth about what is actually the case. To communicate it is not arrogance - it is simply our duty. But we see the preaching of the gospel as something different. It is not communicating knowledge of what is actually the case but rather the attempt to persuade other people to share our beliefs and our values -which is arrogance.
At a conference of clergy in which I shared recently, I was illustrating a point by referring to the experience of preaching in an Indian village. I was rebuked by a Roman Catholic priest, who told me I had no business to be preaching in an Indian village: I should have been sitting down and asking them to tell me what they believed. There is indeed a very right and proper place for that, and missionaries have been very much to the fore in listening to and interpreting the beliefs of other peoples. But that right and proper activity does not invalidate the other. We are not dealing with an excess of humility but with a shift in belief, in the public belief system that Peter Berger calls the "plausibility structure" of our culture. Teaching physics is not arrogance: it is communicating knowledge of what is the case. Preaching the gospel is seen as arrogance because it is imposing my beliefs on others. It is not arrogance to tell others what we know; it is arrogance to try to persuade others of what we believe. Knowledge is one thing; belief is another.
I have recently been studying the legal arguments and judgments in a whole series of cases that have been going through the U.S. courts about what may or may not be taught in the schools. They offer a fascinating insight into our contemporary cultural predicament. The Louisiana State Legislature passed an act called the "Balanced Treat ment Act" providing that "creation science" and "evolution science" should be taught together in the state schools. The children should be given both Darwin and the Bible and left to make up their own minds. The Supreme Court struck this down in a fifty-page majority judgment. The judgment makes no comment at all on the question of the truth or otherwise of Darwin and the Bible, on whether either or both of them give a reliable account of what is the case. The only issue to be settled was whether "creation science" is religion or science. If science, it may be taught; if religion, not. The question of truth does not arise.
Perhaps taking their cue from this argument, a group of Christians in Kentucky have taken their school board to court on the charge of teaching religion in the public schools and thus violating the First Amendment. The religion in question is "secular humanism." They argue that the school textbooks teach a certain view of what is the case, a view they call secular humanism. They call Paul Tillich as their witness to prove that whatever is one's ultimate concern is one's religion; that by carefully eliminating all references to God, or Christ, or Christian faith from the textbooks, the writers have shown their ultimate concern, which is their religion. The judge has found in favor of the plaintiffs. We shall see what happens when the case reaches the Supreme Court. In any case the legal arguments on both sides open up the profound dichotomy in our culture. Both science and religion profess to give a true account of what is the case: one is part of public truth, which every citizen must know and accept; the other is private opinion, which we have no right to impose on others.
I shall return at the end to a brief look at the sources of this dichotomy, but meanwhile its relevance to the issue of missions is obvious. It is a familiar and oft-repeated point that when Christendom was a compact geographical entity with minimum outside contacts, the Christian belief system could be accepted as public truth. The Shorter Catechism could be taught in the schools as part of what we ought to know. But now that we live in the global village with Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists as our immediate neighbors, the situation is radically different. We find that many of them are as good as or better, certainly more devout, than most Christians are. What right do we have to try to convert them to our way of thinking? (One might comment, if there were time, on the very odd idea that the truth of the Christian gospel stands or fails by the question whether Christians are better than other people; I refrain from doing so.)
At this point there comes into view what is sometimes called "the larger ecumenism." The argument goes like this: Christians have learned in the past seventy-five years to moderate their exclusive claims. Protestants and Catholics, Presbyterians and Episcopalians no longer pretend to have the absolute truth. They are learning to live as colleagues instead of rivals for people's allegiance. The time has come, it is said, to carry this movement further and apply it to the world religions. We should give up the idea of an exclusive Christian claim and acknowledge that we are all colleagues in the search for truth.
This rests on a complete misunderstanding of the ecumenical movement. Here in Edinburgh, if anywhere, we can never forget that the modern ecumenical movement was a child of foreign missions. It was because missionaries, especially in Asia, found themselves for the first time facing the stark contrast between Christ and no-Christ that they were led to relativize their own confessional positions in comparison with the absolute claim of Christ. The movement was not a carry-over of general relativism. The World Council of Churches could never have come into existence without its firm christological basis-"Jesus Christ, God and Savior." This was the absolute that relativized the claims of denominations, just as Paul's evocation of Christ and him crucified relativized the competing claims of the Corinthian factions.
The so-called "larger ecumenism" is not an extension of this but a reversal of it. It proposes to relativize the name of Jesus, and we therefore have to ask the sharp question: What is the absolute that relativizes the name of Jesus? Is it the absolute need for human unity? Then we have to ask: Unity on whose terms? As Andre Dumas has pointed out, every proposal for human unity that does not explicitly state the center around which such unity is conceived to be gathered always has the interest of the promoter as its hidden center. The history of the world is full of programs for human unity: we call them imperialism-at least when other people are their promoters. The Christian Church offers Jesus Christ and him crucified as the one who makes human unity possible because he is the one through whom we are reconciled to God and to one another.
But perhaps the absolute is the universal religious experience of humankind? Then we have to ask two questions. First, why religion among all the things human beings are concerned with? The Bible certainly suggests what my friend D. T. Niles was fond of saying, that God is not chiefly interested in religion. But, second, where in all the medley of conflicting religious ideas is the criterion of truth? One does not have to read many pages of a book on the comparative study of religions to find out where the author's criterion is to be found - whether it is acknowledged or not. Few are as frank as Paul Knitter, who makes it quite clear in his book None Other Name?that his criterion is simply the Zeitgeist.-we have to adjust our beliefs to what is generally acceptable to modern people.3 Most Christian writers make it clear that they draw their criteria from Christ. This is true even for such a pluralist as John Hick. Although he asks us to move by means of a Copernican revolution from the idea that Christ is central to the idea that God is central, it is clear to any reader that his vision of God is drawn from the Gospels. But if we confine our attention to those who explicitly take Jesus as their criterion, the question remains: If God is as he is revealed in Jesus, must he not will the salvation of all? And since the vast majority of humankind have lived and died without ever hearing the name of Jesus, must God not have some other way of saving men and women? If he doesn't, is he not cruel and arbitrary? If he does, why missions?
There is, of course, a vast literature in which this matter is argued. What is striking- among all the disagreements-is the matter on which nearly all are agreed. With a few exceptions, which I shall mention later, all the discussions assume that the one question is: "Can the good non-Christian be saved?" In a recent discussion Gavin D'Costa divides writers on the subject into three groups: pluralists, typified by John Hick, who speak of many ways of salvation; exclusivists, typified by Hendrik Kraemer, who affirm only one way - through Jesus Christ; and inclusivists, typified by Karl Rahner, who affirm that salvation is only through Christ but that the saving effects of his work extend beyond the boundaries of those who acknowledge him. I find myself in D'Costa's book bracketed with Kraemer, where I am delighted to be. I would want to be an exclusivist along with Kraemer in believing that God's work in Christ is (to use Kraemer's favorite phrase) sui generis; that there is nothing that can be put into the same category as the incarnation, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Kraemer affirmed this with passion and I would wish to do so too. But one should note that Kraemer never, as far as I know, said that all non-Christians were doomed eternally.4
Whence comes the misunderstanding? Surely by insisting only on one question-namely the question of the salvation of the individual soul after death. This is a proper question, but not in isolation. The Bible, in contrast to the Indian religions, does not speak of human life in these terms. It speaks of human life as part of a story, a story that is part of the whole story of the cosmos from creation to consummation. It is therefore, from a biblical point of view, equally important to ask about the meaning of the story as a whole, to ask where the clue to its meaning is, the clue by which all our lives as participants in the story are to be directed. I said that there were exceptions to the general rule that writers concentrate on the question of the destiny of the individual soul. I was thinking of my friend M. M T. Thomas, with whom I have had many arguments and still have, but who seems to me to be asking the right question when he persistently sets this discussion in the context of larger political and cultural concerns and asks, What faith enables us to make sense of the public history of nations and of the world? I do not say that that is the only question, but that it is a necessary question. In the context of the Bible as a whole, we cannot rightly interpret the work of Christ as exclusively concerned with the destiny of individual souls after death and apart from God's purpose for history as a whole. Otherwise how could we account for the fact that Paul, who certainly affirms the absolute centrality and finality of the work of Christ, also affirms that the Jews who have rejected Christ will be saved in the end?
As I read it, the Bible is not a set of separate stories of individual souls; it is the story of the cosmos, of the human family within the cosmos, and of every human soul within the story of the human family. Because it is a story and not philosophy or theosophy, particularity is its very stuff. The question that lies at the heart of the debate we are considering is the question about the relation of particularity to universality. How can God's universal love be tied down to a particular set of events in history, events in Palestine and not in Japan or India or Africa? That is the scandal, the stumbling block that those who question the propriety of missions stumble upon. Why should God not speak his own word to every soul and to every culture? But that is to do violence to the nature of human being as the Bible reveals it. We have to put the counterquestion: Is human being a set of separate stories, or are we - in some sense - part of one story? If the former, then we give up the hope of one world. If the latter, then we have to ask for the meaning of the story as a whole, and that means that we do not try to escape from the concrete particularities of history.
As we well know - or at least as we here in Presbyterian Scotland ought to know-the heart of the biblical story is in God's choosing, God's election of one people among all the peoples, and finally of one man among all people, to be the bearer of the secret of his saving purpose for all. It is a secret because it contradicts human ideas about world dominion. A man nailed to a cross does not look like the one to unify the world. But it is an open secret because it has been entrusted to a community chosen for the purpose of being witnesses. And their witness is a witness to the resurrection of the crucified, to the fact that the final victory of God's love lies beyond death and beyond the dissolution of the cosmos.
Those so chosen are not the good, the privileged, the exclusive beneficiaries of God's love. They are not those chosen for salvation as against the rest. The terrible warnings in the New Testament, much more severe than anything in the Old Testament, are directed to those who are within the company of the chosen. It is not the brambles that grow around the vine that are threatened with fire; it is the branches of the vine itself that do not bear fruit. One might almost reverse the Cyprian's old proverb and say, "Outside the Church no damnation." The secret is entrusted to the Church, and that is an awe-inspiring responsibility. But the final judgment is in the hands of God, and the elect are not given an advance copy of the judgment. There are many sayings of our Lord -not least the parable of the sheep and the goats - that suggest that there will be great surprise when it is published.
What, then, is the point of missions, if the non-Christian may be saved and the Christian may be lost? Have you thought what a Pelagian ring that question has? We want to be able to show that we accomplish something, produce results; that we have rescued some perishing souls. I don't read the New Testament that way. I think that the deepest motive for mission is simply the desire to be with Jesus where he is, on the frontier between the reign of God and the usurped dominion of the devil. We want his prayer to be answered: where I am there shall my servant be. We long that he shall see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied. That, I deeply believe, is the true motive.
The crucial question is one of truth. What is the true account of the story of which we are part? The reason for our embarrassment about missions is not an excess of humility. It is one expression of the pervasive relativism that dominates our culture. I have been reading the book called The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. It is a devastating analysis of the current academic science, dominated - as he sees it-by a total relativism. The central part of his large book traces the sources of the present situation through the last three centuries. Most of the threads, according to Bloom, go back to Nietzsche, who was the first to realize with terrible clarity that the movement of critical thought since the Enlightenment would make it finally impossible to say of anything: "This is true," or of any course of conduct, "That is right." Instead we have to speak of "values," "life-styles," "orientations," and so forth, because when the possibility of affirming truth is lost, the only thing left is the will -the will to power. The present debate about "values" in education illustrates his thesis. "Values" do not arise from a perception of what is the truth about the world, about the human story. They are an affair of the will. They are not an account of what is the case; they are what some people want because without them life is uncomfortable. And so we do not teach as a matter of fact, of how things actually are, that man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. We try to inculcate "values" - which is a totally different exercise, and rests on nothing except the will of those for whom it would be convenient if young people had those values.
If we believe that the Christian revelation gives us an interpretation of the human story that is true, then we will not be embarrassed about missions. But what about foreign missions? Are they not redundant now that the Church is planted in almost every nation? I do not think so. I think that cross-cultural mission is an enduring necessity, but in a context different from that of the nineteenth century. If the gospel is the clue to the meaning of the whole human story, then the bearer of that gospel must be the one ecumenical fellowship of churches embracing all cultures. But, and this is the crucial point, the gospel must never become domesticated within one culture. We know, or we ought to know, that this is a continuing danger. Missiologists have sometimes raised the cry of syncretism when they have seen churches in Asia or Africa trying to express the gospel in their own cultural forms. The most obvious examples of syncretism, however, are to be found in our Western churches, which have worked so hard to tailor the gospel to fit the so-called requirements of modern thought. Every church is tempted to do this in its own culture, tempted to become the domestic chaplain to the nation instead of being the troublesome, prophetic, missionary voice to the nation - challenging all syncretistic entanglements. Cross-cultural missions are needed even in places where the Church is already established -perhaps too established. They are the means by which the ecumenical family of churches can help each national church to maintain its distinctness and the authenticity as the bearer, not of that culture's self-image, but of the gospel of the crucified and risen Lord. I speak with knowledge, because I have as my colleague in the place where I work a missionary sent to us by the Church of North India, a Sikh convert, who is able to sharply challenge a great deal that we take for granted in our English Christianity.
We need cross-cultural missions to bear witness to that which is beyond every national and local culture, the story that is the real story of the human race in God's purpose. We bear witness to it because we believe that it is not just a symbolic way of expressing our values but the truth about human nature and destiny. Of course we know that this truth is contested. We do not pretend that it is public truth in the sense of not being contested. But we proclaim it as public truth in the sense that it is the truth by which all other claims to truth will finally be judged. The judgment is still ahead, and we are warned not to be judges in advance of that final judgment. We are witnesses - witnesses not of our religious experiences, but of Jesus, his incarnation, ministry, death, and resurrection. We cannot keep silent about this, because it is truth that concerns every human being. It is the truth about the human story. And so it must be told to every human being. That obligation remains till the end of time.