Mission Agenda
Mission Agenda
A paper delivered in Dublin, November 1992, during the celebrations to mark the centenary of the Dublin University Mission.
am grateful for the invitation to be associated with the celebration of this centenary, especially at a time when the enterprise of foreign missions is widely regarded even by Christians as something that belongs to the past, and by others as a matter for ridicule or for downright condemnation. It is no exaggeration to say that among the general public, at least in England, the reigning stereotype of the foreign missionary is of an arrogant intruder who talks but does not listen, a destroyer of precious cultures, a stooge of the imperialists. Shortly after my return from India in 1974 I was informed by a clergyman in Birmingham that he regarded foreign missions as simply the theological form of racism. But there is also irony in the situation, for there is much celebration of the fact that there are flourishing churches in Asia and Africa and the Pacific Islands, that Christianity now encircles the world, that we can rejoice in what William Temple, in his enthronement sermon at Canterbury during the darkest days of the war (1942), called "the great new fact of our time" - the fact that for the first time in its long history the Church embraces the whole globe.' There is irony because while we celebrate the fact, we are apologetic about the activities that brought it about. A recent and much admired history of nineteenth-century English Christianity makes no mention of foreign missions. Yet it is certain that any church historian writing a hundred years from now will see the global expansion of Christianity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as one of the most remarkable chapters in the whole long story.
Those who founded the Dublin University Mission a hundred years ago belonged to that adventurous student generation that adopted as their slogan "The Evangelization of the World in This Generation." It was an amazingly daring watchword.2 They did not mean, of course, the conversion of the world in their generation. They looked to bringing about a situation in which the whole world would be within earshot of the gospel. As we look back now, we can see that - if not in one generation, at least in one century-they came amazingly close to reaching their target. We do well to celebrate their vision and their daring.
But the irony goes deeper than the perception of missions and missionaries. In spite of the enormous and unprecedented explosion of the world's population in the past hundred years, the proportion of the world's people who confess Jesus as Lord remains roughly what it was one hundred years ago. But there has been a vast shift in the center of gravity. While churches in what we call the third world grow rapidly, sometimes spectacularly, the churches in the old Christendom decline or are on the defensive. Christians coming to Europe from Asia and Africa are amazed and shocked to find Christians in the old Christendom so apologetic about their faith, so timid, so anxious to assure everyone that they do not want to impose their faith on anyone else. This was what struck me the most forcibly when I returned from India to England. Indian Christians are a small minor ity of the population, but they are quite unembarrassed about commending their faith to their friends, and the church continues to grow. In England I found a great anxiety lest it might appear that Christians had something to tell other people that they did not already know. It was the world that should teach the Church, not vice versa. Intra Ecclesiam nulla salus est. Even the great missionary societies that had been, under God, the bearers of the gospel to every corner of the world were now anxious to speak only of interchange, of global sharing, and of course this is right. Mission can never again be seen as a one-way traffic from north to south. It is the shared business and the shared joy of the whole global family. Its heart is and must always be evangelism - the telling of the story that is the true story of God's dealing with the world, the only story by which people and nations can find and fulfill God's purpose for them.
And this telling of the story has to continue not only within each human culture, but cross-culturally. Foreign missions cannot be sent into retirement just because the Church is present in all parts of the world. Foreign missions are an abiding part of the responsibility of the Church everywhere, and for a reason that needs to be clearly stated. In missionary circles we have talked much about the problem of inculturation, but not enough about the problem of domestication. In every society that has received the gospel, there is a strong tendency to domesticate the gospel within the thought-forms of that society in such a way that it ceases to challenge the assumptions that govern the society's life and becomes simply part of the culture. The tension that must exist in every society between the gospel and the culture is slackened. Or, to put it in another way, the gospel is heard only as grace and not as judgment, as affirmation and not as challenge. If this domestication is to be avoided, every society needs the witness of those who confess Christ in the idiom of another culture. By the same token, the integrity of our confession of Jesus as cosmic Lord requires that we test this confession in every human situation, in relation to every human claim, and in every human culture. As the late Dr. Visser't Hooft wrote, "Missions are the test of faith."
This brief reference to the problem of domestication will serve, I think, to introduce an examination of the factors that have led us into the situation I have described, where European Christians have lost their confidence in the validity of the foreign missionary enter prise. It can be described as the convergence of two movements of thought.
First, we need to bear in mind that the great missionary expansion of Christianity in the last two hundred years went along with and was intimately bound up with global expansion of European political, economic, and cultural power, which was itself an outcome of the profound shift in European consciousness that those who shared in it called "Enlightenment." Enlightenment is a conversion word. It is the word used of the decisive spiritual experience of the Buddha. And the intellectual leadership of Europe did go through a profound conversion. They saw themselves and their history in a new light. It was no longer the Bible that interpreted the human story and therefore provided the locus of truth. Rather truth was to be found by the exercise of the autonomous reason. Its ideal form was provided by mathematics. Newton's cosmology had provided the new paradigm of truth, what Lessing called the eternal truths of reason that are independent of any particular history. These truths were accessible to every rational human being and could therefore form the ground for human unity. The long period of the Christianization of Europe was now seen as the dark ages or, at best, the middle ages between two periods when reason reigned-the ancient classical world and the present.
It was in the power of this vision that European nations began to carry their beliefs, their science and technology, their commerce, their political institutions - in short, their civilization - to the ends of the earth. And Christian missionaries were part of this expansion. They were confident that Christianity and civilization went together. Unlike some earlier missionaries (Robert de Nobili, Ziegenbalg, William Carey) and certainly unlike St. Paul, they saw it as an intrinsic part of their task to start schools, hospitals, agencies of what we now call "development," in which peoples were invited to accept European ideas and institutions along with the gospel. They did not see human society as multicultural. The use of the word culture in the plural belongs only to this century. There were not many cultures; there was, if you like, one ladder called "civilization," and people were on different rungs of the ladder: they were either more or less civilized.
The use of the word culture in its anthropological sense is also recent. Its first recorded use is in 1867, and it was then a translation of the German word Kultur. That German use, two decades or so before, was part of the romantic reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment. It was brought from its horticultural to its anthropological usage to convey the point that there is more in human life than can be measured on the grid of eighteenth-century rationalism: the traditions of a people, their art and music, their myths and folktales, their ways of doing things that are lost if everything has to go through the sieve of a mathematical rationality. So the concept of culture in its modern anthropological sense was born. And Europe was a sufficiently heterogeneous society to enable the rational and the romantic perceptions of human affairs to coexist in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
What we have witnessed in the twentieth century is the replay on a much larger and more diverse stage of the reaction against Enlightenment rationalism. The impact of European ideas, science, technology, political systems, and economic and military power on the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific has produced a similar but much more powerful reaction in the name of culture. Just because European Christendom had allowed the gospel to be so thoroughly domesticated within the post-Enlightenment world of thought and practice, the reaction from what we call the third world has been directed against the whole European package, including its Christian elements. The situation is, in fact, full of still more ironies. The nations of the third world, released from imperial control, are seeking at the same time to affirm their cultural integrity over and against westernization and also to acquire the technology that has given the West its power. The slogan everywhere is "modernization," which is, of course, the replacement of traditional ways of thinking, organizing, and managing with ways developed in Europe. And with an even sharper irony, Christians in the West who have become embarrassed about sending evangelistic missionaries because this would be a form of cultural imperialism are enthusiastic about what is called development, which is precisely the export of European ideas and technology to the societies of Asia and Africa. This history alone would not suffice to explain the contemporary Western embarrassment about foreign missions if it had not been for another part of the story to which I now turn.
The second part of the story relates to internal developments within European Christendom. At the heart of the great burst of confidence in European civilization during the last two centuries was belief in the power of reason both to understand the human situation and to provide the techniques for production, control, and management of human affairs. Reason, in contrast to faith, was the avenue to reliable knowledge. Faith, in the classic definition of John Locke, was a persuasion that fell short of certainty. The roots of this go, of course, far back into European history, into the classical world of Greece and Rome, and into the medieval synthesis of Aristotelian and biblical thought. This synthesis made a sharp division between what can be certainly known by reason and what has to be accepted by faith on the authority of the Church. In the seminal work of Descartes there was offered the paradigm of certain knowledge achieved by developing clear and distinct ideas from indubitable grounds. The model was that of mathematics. Whatever lay outside of this paradigm was not certain knowledge, but a matter of faith. The way to certain knowledge was therefore by the critical principle: everything that cannot be shown to be certain is to be doubted. A Chinese Christian philosopher has contrasted this with the traditional Chinese view that the way to knowledge begins with awe, with opening the mind and soul to the vast mystery of existence.3 But it is not too much to say that the critical principle has been seen during the past two hundred years as the great glory of European culture, the means by which it has achieved mastery in science, technology, and political organization .4
What has happened in the present century is what Nietzsche foresaw -namely, that the critical principle must necessarily, in the end, destroy itself. For if we make a critical examination of the critical principle itself, it is obvious that no critical activity is possible except on the basis of something that, at that moment, is believed to be true. All rational thought and speech necessarily rely on language, which itself embodies a way of understanding things that is developed through a tradition, and on models and concepts that have similarly developed. One cannot make any statement at all without (for the moment at least) relying on these words, models, concepts. One can, of course, criticize these models, but only by an acritical acceptance of other models.
One cannot rationally doubt all one's beliefs at the same time. If the critical principle is accepted as the primary tool of knowledge, and not (as it should be) a necessary but secondary tool - if, in other words, we cannot know anything without believing something- then the method of Descartes must lead to the conclusion that Nietzsche drew, and that is now drawn daily in our society, which is going through a profound loss of faith in the possibility of knowing truth. That conclusion is that what is true for you may not be true for me. Truth statements are all culturally conditioned (which is true), and therefore none of them are reliable (which is false). We do not ask, "What is true?" but "What is meaningful for me?" The self becomes the only knowable reality, and even the self is elusive. "Who am I?" becomes a question that people in more stable societies never dream of formulating. Words no longer refer to a reality beyond the mind of the person who uses them. No one, in this scenario, has the right to say to someone else, "This is true, true not only for me but also for you." There is no absolute truth, true for all; each of us must create his or her own truth.
At this point the two stories that I have tried to tell converge. The powerful reaction of non-Western cultures against the arrogance and dominance of European power over the past two centuries hits us just at the moment when the intellectual core of that confidence is collapsing from within. It is not surprising that there is a profound loss of nerve, and that Christian missions are among the casualties. It is not surprising that many contemporary Christians (at least of my acquaintance) are eager to repent of the arrogance of their missionary grandfathers, and reluctant to use the confident language their forebears used about the evangelization of the world. I have taken part in a great many ecumenical missionary gatherings, and I have had the impression during the last twenty years or so that at these gatherings the only contribution many of the European participants could make was the repetition in one form or another of "Nostra culpa; nostra maxima culpa." The West African scholar Lamin Sanneh of Yale has written incisively on what he called the Western guilt complex and its effects on the Christian mission.5 It is good to repent of one's sins, and perhaps even of the sins of one's grandparents, but unabsolved guilt by itself is not creative. It only paralyzes. It is only as forgiven sinners that we can engage in mission, and part of the way to do that is to accept correction and rebuke from those who have been injured. But it is an unacceptable form of paternalism to think that we are responsible for all the wrong in the world.
What now, in this global perspective, is the agenda for mission? Let me put down a few markers that I think must guide us. The human agency of mission is the global Church that is now present, even if in numerical weakness, in every nation. And let us always remember that precisely where it is small and vulnerable, as for example in Afghanistan today, it is often the most vibrant, full of life and growing. If we are asked today, as some have asked, "What is your strategy for world evangelization?" the answer must be that it is to help and empower every local congregation of Christians to be a true and living part of the body of Christ, that is to say, to be the place where the reign of God, the kingship of God, is both embodied and proclaimed. And, as I have argued, this must mean also the sending and receiving of Christians to and from other places so that the local church is both saved from domestication and also enabled to learn, with all the saints, more of the length and breadth and height and depth of the love of God than it could learn if it was confined in its mission to its own locality. The global mission of the Church is from every place to every place.
The context of this global mission is what we must now call the global city, for we are now in a situation where the development of rapid travel and instant communication has bound us all together more and more tightly into a single economic and financial unit. Three years ago one could not have said this, for the world was divided between two power blocks based on rival ideologies, both products of the Enlightenment. Today one of these ideologies is overwhelmingly dominant. It is locking even the smallest communities into a more and more tightly knit fabric of economic and financial relations. After the collapse of Marxist communism as a world power, the only effective challenge to this global system comes from Islam, which rejects both ideologies and seeks to create a world order based on the revealed will of God as interpreted by the prophet. As the capitalist free-market system runs into deeper crisis, I think that Islam will be, in the twenty-first century, perhaps the major contender for global power. Whether or not this proves to be so, we have to recognize that the process called "modernization" is continuing and accelerating throughout the world. In Europe this process has had the effect of neutering the Church, leaving it on the margins of society.
We rightly rejoice at the wonderful growth of the churches of the south and the east, at their vitality and infectious faith. But we would be deluding ourselves if we did not recognize that the same acids of modernity (to use Walter Lippmann's phrase of sixty years ago) are bound to have the same effects in the third world as they have had in Europe. Christians are not exempt from the process of modernization, and indeed missionary societies are devoting considerable resources to accelerating this process by enabling Christian leaders from all parts of the world to undergo the kind of training that is offered in European universities and colleges. While the grassroots memberships of these churches remain to a large extent part of their traditional culture, the leadership is increasingly shaped by the worldview that prevails in the West.
This globalization of human society has, very naturally and properly, led missionary societies to move away from the onedirectional model of mission to a model that emphasizes sharing, listening, and dialogue. My own lifetime as a missionary has been in the context of this shift, and I have shared in it to the full. It would be perverse to want to go back to the earlier model. And yet I think there is a danger in the present model that often goes unrecognized. It is this: practically all of this interchange and dialogue takes place in one of the languages of Europe - English, German, or Spanish. It takes place among those who share the common background of an education in one of these languages. There is therefore a great danger that the assumptions that underlie the use of these European languages are not questioned. I can only speak from personal experience, but I know, for example, that there is a wide gap between the way interfaith conversation happens when it is conducted in Tamil among people who have never been through an English educational process, and the way it is conducted among those, Indian and European, who share the same kind of academic formation.
But this means that the most difficult and important missionary frontier is not crossed. If one is looking at the total situation of Christianity in the contemporary world, addressing European culture is the most urgent question, and for two reasons: first because it is modern, post-Enlightenment Western culture that, in the guise of "modernization," is replacing more traditional cultures all over the world, and second because, as we have seen, this culture has a unique power to erode and neutralize the Christian faith. It is the most powerful, the most pervasive and (with the possible exception of Islam) the most resistant to the gospel of all the cultures that compete for power in our global city. My concern, therefore, is that the contemporary emphasis on sharing and dialogue, right and proper as it is, may lead to an evasion of this most urgent and most difficult task - namely, the development of an effective missionary engagement with modernity.
The development of the intellectual and spiritual equipment for such an encounter must be an ecumenical task, calling for the wisdom and experience of Christians from all the cultures that now have their voice in the family of churches throughout the world, but I think that we in Europe who have been responsible for creating this phenomenon that we call modernity must accept a large measure of responsibility for the task. It is a matter for thankfulness that an international body of missiologists have committed themselves for a ten-year period to work together on the development of a missiology for Western culture.6 During the past two or three decades missionaries, with the help of cultural anthropologists, have done much work in clarifying the issues involved in bringing the gospel to people of many cultures in what we have been calling the third world. No similar intellectual effort has been devoted to the much more urgent and more difficult task of developing a missiology for what we have called the First World. It is beginning.
The final point I would make is that everything depends on a recovery of confidence in the gospel. I spoke earlier of the loss of nerve that is apparent in Western culture. It was Gilbert Murray, I believe, who said that Greek civilization collapsed through loss of nerve. I think the same danger faces the culture that we call modern scientific culture. It has prided itself on possessing the tools by which reliable knowledge can be had about our world and ourselves. This knowledge was ideally embodied in laws that had the precision, the certainty, and the timelessness of mathematical equations. This certainty was supposedly based on pure reason and did not depend on any tradition, or on the uncertain records of the past. In one of the most famous sayings of the age of reason, Lessing said that accidental happenings of history cannot prove eternal truths of reason. That effectively removed the Bible from its traditional place as the locus of reliable truth. What is happening now is that Lessing is being stood on his head. Beginning from Nietzsche, the postmodernists are telling us that the so-called eternal truths are simply products of particular histories. There are no absolute eternal truths, there are only stories - metanarratives that make rival claims to authority in human affairs. The European narrative is only one among many, and as the recent responses to the five hundredth anniversary of the painful discovery of Christopher Columbus by the peoples of the Americas have reminded us, this narrative is now widely contested.
Surely this reversal of Lessing's dictum is justified. There is no exercise of human reason that is not socially embodied, rooted in a tradition that is carried by a language. The gospel is not a statement of eternal truths in the style of mathematics; it is the story of what God has done. It is contested in the name of other stories. We have no suprahistorical standpoint from which we can demonstrate with any kind of infallibility that it, and not others, is the true story. Our role is more humble. We stand among all other human beings with their different stories to bear witness to what God has done. We do so because we have been laid hold of and commissioned to do so. Our telling of the story is an act of gratitude and faithfulness towards God. Our telling of the story is authentic when, as the risen Jesus reminded his disciples, our corporate life is marked by the scars of the conflict with the powers of evil. "He showed them his hands and his side." It is not in our power to convert men and women to faith in Christ. That can only be the work of the Holy Spirit. But when we are faithfully following Jesus both in living the story and in telling it (and we must never put these over against each other), then the Church can become the place where the Holy Spirit does his work of conversion.
Because the Western Church has been so long and so deeply domesticated within Western culture, when this culture loses its nerve we are in danger of losing ours. We may rightly be apologetic about the arrogance that has sometimes marked Christian missions in the past, but we have no call to be apologetic about the gospel. If God indeed has done what in all our liturgies we affirm that he has done, then it is a most tremendous fact that must be told as public truth in every culture and in every generation. To think otherwise is implicitly to deny its truth. But our telling of it is corrupted when we think in terms of our success rather than in terms of the glory of God. Too much missionary talking has been fundamentally Pelagian, as if it were our enterprise. We tell the story as an act of love and gratitude to God, that our blessed Lord may see the travail of his soul and be satisfied. So I come back at the end to those thousands of local congregations, communities of worship where God is glorified and the love of God flows out in spontaneous service and witness to the community. Recent surveys in England about how people in contemporary society come to faith in Christ have shown that the overwhelming proportion come through the witness of a local congregation. And we can never forget that during the seventy years in which the churches in the Soviet Union were denied all possibilities of witness and service outside the walls of the church, it was the witness of authentic worship that drew to Christ men and women who had been shaped and formed from cradle to university by an atheist ideology. In those years there was little possibility for the Church to be domesticated in the culture. The contrast was too sharp. Perhaps we can learn from their experience how to live and tell the story in the midst of our modern, scientific, liberal, free-market culture in such a way that the story recovers its sharp cutting edge. If we can do that, we shall perhaps render the greatest service that we can to the total mission of Christ in this global city.