The Rise of Protestant Missionary Concern, 1517-1914

The Rise of Protestant Missionary Concern, 1517-1914

by William Richey Hogg

95The Reformers evidenced no concern for overseas missions to non- ~ Christians. Indeed, three centuries elapsed before Protestantism at large even began such outreach. Why? This and related questions _ here claim our attention.

Our approach relates to “foreign missions,” not because these alone define the mission entrusted by God to his covenanted people, but because in the main through them Protestantism discovered the full missionary dimension of the Church. To attempt to examine this multiform and much-debated development briefly is both presumptuous and frustrating. Necessary generalizations require detailed qualification that is here impossible. Adequate documentation would triple the pages allotted. Yet the task requires doing.

The rise of Protestant missionary concern must be seen against the background of Christendom, the corpus Christianum, the ideal of a vast, unified, transnational Christian society. Many profess to see the corpus Christianum most fully realized under Pope Innocent III (d. 1216). Yet even in the thirteenth century the notion of Christendom was specious. The forces that shattered the idea and disclosed its unreality were growing long before the Reformation, gained major strength in the nineteenth century, and by the end of 1914-1945 were everywhere acknowledged—but not by all. 96The impossibility of any longer assuming that missions proceed from a Christian West and take the Gospel and benefits of “Christian civilization” to the non-Western, non-Christian world is a major key to the crisis of the Christian mission in mid-twentieth

century. The main stages in the struggle for religious liberty provide this

chapter’s chronological divisions. The periods involved also coincide with major epochs in Protestant thought and missionary development. Increasingly after 1789, freedom of religion came to be understood by many as freedom from religion. This has contributed to acceptance of a “post-Christendom” age and major reshaping of contemporary thought on the Christian mission.

Roman Catholic Missions at the Time of the Reformation

For a thousand years prior to the Reformation the Roman Catholic Church through its monastic orders had conducted missions. In 1305, writing to Rome from Peking, the Franciscan John of Montecorvino declared that the apostles had never visited these regions. In 1492 Columbus reached America, the Spaniards completed the expulsion from their homeland of the Moors, and discovery via the sea lanes, already well begun, was launched on a global scale. By 1555 the Society of Jesus, the greatest missionary order of all, was fifteen years old, Xavier was already dead, and Roman missionaries labored in North and South America, Africa, Asia, and the islands of the seas.

Three great forces account for this missionary vigor.

First—the papacy. As Vicar of Christ, the pope represented universal authority and symbolized the universality of the Church. Innocent III had declared that Christ “left to Peter [and thus to the popes] the governance not of the Church only but of the whole world.” Boniface VIH in 1302 in the bull Unam Sanctam Ecclesiam set forth the highest claim made for papal power. On the eve of the Protestant Reformation, in transnational outlook, universal authority, and exercise of effective dominion, the pope stood unique. Thus, in 1493 Alexander VI in his bull Inter Cetera could divide the world between Spain and Portugal for both trade and missions and require the Catholic monarchs to bring the people of the newly discovered lands to the Catholic faith. In 1537 Paul III in the bull Sublimis Deus emphasized that part of the meaning of the Great 97Commission in relation to non-Westerners is that “all are capable of receiving the doctrines of faith.” A few years later Rome began the experiments, lasting for more than a half century, that led in

1622 to the founding of the Propaganda? with its supervision of all Roman missions.

Second—monasticism. The orders were the missionary agencies of the Roman Catholic Church. The monks were its missionaries.

Third—the monarch. For hundreds of years Christian rulers had provided the financial means and protection for missions in their territories. They understood this to be their Christian duty, and their contribution had been a major factor in Christianity’s spread through Northern Europe. As one result, people had been brought to the faith en masse as the monarch’s subjects rather than as individually responsible persons.

The Period of the Reformation, 1517-1555

In 1555, thirty-eight stormy years after Luther (d. 1546) posted his famous “Ninety-five Theses,” the Peace of Augsburg was drawn, incorporating the principle of cuius regio, eius religio (“whose region, his religion”). The ruler of a territory determined its religion. For the first time in Western Christendom a church—the Lutheran—other than the Roman Catholic was given equal recognition in law. By 1555, Calvin (d. 1564) had gained complete mastery in theocratic Geneva.

Luther—To document in detail the Reformers’ amazing lack of a theology of missions would require a small book, but to this problem considerable attention already has been given.”

98Here the briefest summary is in order. Some have charged that all the Reformers assumed the Great Commission had been fulfilled by the apostles. Luther knew that the Gospel had not been spread through the whole world in the first generation of the Church, yet this seemed to mean little to him. His part of the world had received the Gospel. For all practical purposes, the Great Commission had been fulfilled. After the apostles, says Luther, “no one has any longer such a universal apostolic command, but each bishop or pastor has his appointed diocese or parish.” *

Luther knew well the presence of the Moslem Turks in Hungary. He refused the approach of the Crusades, but he urged Christian rulers to fight the Moslem advance. Yet it seems not to have occurred to him that any Christian in positive witness should reach out to these Moslems. The Turks’ Christian prisoners should bear witness to their captors, but this exhausts Luther’s concern for a Christian approach to the Moslems.*

One searches in vain in the Works of Martin Luther ® for any exposition of Matthew 28:19~20 or Mark 16:15 that would hint at the Church’s responsibility to move beyond Christendom. This silence is in notable contrast to expressed papal understanding of the Great Commission. Even more striking is the contrast between ~ Luther and the Anabaptists, who made the Great Commission binding upon every baptized Christian and who were choosing and sending missionaries as they Warneck sees Luther’s understanding of election and eschatology making impossible any concern for missions Van den Berg not altogether convincingly. disagrees. -

The Other Reformers.—Similarly, one searches John Calvin’s Institutes and commentaries without finding any positive recognition of a theology of missions. Examination of Zwingli, Bucer, John Knox, and Melanchthon produces the same negative report. To be 99sure, doctrine of salvation and of the priesthood of all believers, and Calvin’s theology with its inherent activism, concern for the extension of the kingdom, and emphasis upon the responsibility of the elect for humanity and society, have missionary implications (and were later appealed to), but the Reformers did not link these with missionary obligation. Here a prayer for the heathen’s conversion, there an interest in a handful of Christians outside Christendom—but the overwhelming and well-nigh unanimous evidence points in the Reformers to no recognition of the missionary dimension of the Church.

Why the Lack?—Latourette lists six causes contributing to this absence of missionary concern. Protestantism’s struggle to establish itself, its involvement in the wars of religion, the Reformers’ eschatology, the indifference of Protestant rulers to spreading the faith, the absence of Protestant missionary machinery, and the relative lack of contact with non-Christian peoples by predominantly Protestant countries until the latter part of the seventeenth century.’ Important as these are in the total picture, they do not altogether account for a theological deficiency. The Reformers provide scant explicit evidence for an answer. Yet one ventures to suggest several reasons.

First, the Reformers completely rejected the papacy, not least because to them it represented the height of sinful human pretension. They denied its universal claim and all that flowed from it. In so doing, they eliminated a major sixteenth-century missionary motivation and produced skepticism concerning Roman missions themselves. They disowned the methodology of “papal missions” with mass admissions to the faith all too frequently forced by the conqueror’s armed power. That the Reformers’ treatment of Anabaptists and others is equally damning does not diminish the force of their rejection. Moreover, no small factor in the Reformation’s accomplishment was the surging dynamic of nationalism. This provided widespread popular support for the Reformers’ renunciation of the papacy. Restive under papal dominion, new nationalism, when freed from that control, focused powerfully upon the internal needs of the native land.

Second, the Reformers repudiated monasticism. The Catholic parishes had no developed sense of missionary responsibility, but the elite in the monasteries understood and responded to the mis100sionary implications of the papacy. The Reformers disavowed the double standard of Christian life implied in the distinction between parish Christian and monk and also monasticism’s “works-righteousness.” Theologically and practically for the Reformers this meant denying anything comparable to Roman missions.

Moreover, the Reformers (and the papacy) thoroughly rejected the Anabaptists, their enthusiasms, their views on church and state, their attempt to “restore” the New Testament church, and their insistence that the Great Commission is binding upon each Christian. So great was the “danger” the Anabaptists seemed to pose that they were nearly wiped out.

Each of these repudiations involved denying a missionary ideal viewed either as false or as seriously defective. Moreover, with parishes devoid of missionary responsibility, attitudes congenial to the notion that the Great Commission had been fulfilled by the apostles, and “corrective” theologies emphasizing God’s sover-

wen eignty, election and man’s inability to shape his salvation, the

Reformers, perhaps understandably, may have been incapable of seeing or espousing a theology of missions.

Allied with the above, there is also a more positive factor that helps to explain the Reformation’s myopia toward missions. Emphasis upon the Bible, the priesthood of all believers, the full responsibility of each Christian under the Gospel, and fulfillment of one’s Christian calling where he is placed, meant a recovery of meaning for local congregational life. Later these concerns led to new forms of response to the Gospel’s universal claim and the Church’s unity,⁶ but initially, from the standpoint of mission and unity, they seemed to be severely limiting.

The Age of Protestant Scholasticism, 1555-1689

In Britain the Toleration Act of 1689 allowed Dissenters personal religious liberty. The battle was far from won, but the essential principle of religious freedom was established. In the years between the Peace of Augsburg and the Toleration Act, Protestant scholasticism and orthodoxy prevailed. Protestant theologians re101fused to recognize the new thought currents swirling about them and sought only through medieval methodology to elaborate sound doctrine. This sterile period eventually produced two strong reactions.

Theological Developments.—Meanwhile, two developments in Calvinism emerged that in quite different ways influenced the rise of Protestant missionary concern. First, the Synod of Dort in 1619 marked the triumph over Arminianism of an extreme Calvinism that prevailed widely and worked effectively to throttle missionary endeavor. Second, the Westminster Confession of 1647, a major restatement of Reformed doctrine, in its Articles I and IV makes clear that “the holy Scripture…is the Word of God.” The Bible was no longer the vehicle of the Word, but was equated with the Word itself. As one result, one hundred fifty years later men could point to the Great Commission and call for missionary obedience precisely because God’s Word says, “Go.”

Missions Pro and Con.—In this period several men saw and advocated the Christian’s responsibility for foreign missions. The English Puritan Thomas Sibbs (d. 1635) sounded an early call.⁷ Hadrian Saravia (d. 1613), a Dutchman who turned Anglican and died while Dean of Westminster, maintained the continuing validity of Matthew 28:19 and applied it to the whole Church. From Geneva in 1592, Theodore Beza (d. 1605) sharply attacked and denied Saravia’s interpretation. Johannes Gerhard of Jena (d. 1637) later attacked Saravia and “proved” that through the apostles the Gospel had been conveyed to all and that the Great Commission had been fulfilled and was no longer binding.

In 1651 Count Truchsess challenged the Wittenberg theological faculty to acknowledge that Matthew 28:19 still required obedience. The Faculty refuted the judgment and insisted that the apostles had taken the Gospel to the world. If any race had forgotten or failed to respond, it deserved eternal punishment. Christian laymen and pastors were not called to be missionaries!

From 1664 Baron von Weltz urged his fellow Lutherans to carry the Gospel to unbelieving nations and proposed forming a missionary society. Von Weltz died as a missionary in Dutch Guiana, but in Germany he was widely attacked. Von Weltz was the first of many who came to acknowledge Roman Catholic criti102cisms of Protestantism’s lack of missions. But this recognition simply inspired Protestant theologians further to justify and proclaim their negative attitude.1? Meanwhile, Oliver Cromwell and John Comenius, the also proposed launching missions, but there was no response.

The Age of the Enlightenment, Pietism and the Awakenings, 1689-1789

Drafted in 1789, the first article of the Bill of Rights of the United States’ Constitution sets forth equal freedom for all religions. The same ideal was caught up in the French Revolution of 1789 and thenceforward became the policy in most European nations and in the so-called “secular states’ among today’s new nations. In the years between the drafting of the Toleration Act and the Bill of Rights a decisively new climate was created for Protestant missionary thought.

A Mechanistic Universe.—Introverted Protestant scholasticism

was cut off from the world. Mere mention of the names of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Harvey, and Newton reminds one that there were those in the preceding age who by their knowledge of astronomy, physics, and medicine made possible a mechanistic understanding of the universe that brought much in the Bible into serious question. Reflecting philosophy’s accommodation to the new knowledge were Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza. Revelation scarcely seemed tenable. At the same time Northern Europe’s Protestant nations had just begun their imperial encirclement of the globe.

Protestant Rationalism.—Within Protestantism the results of all that had transpired in geographical discovery, science, philosophy, and theology since the Reformation were twofold. The first was the emergence of a strong rationalistic strain within Protestantism. In Germany this was designated the Enlightenment (Aufklérung). It began with Leibniz (d. 1716), interestingly an advocate of missions in part because of his knowledge of Jesuit work in China. The Aufkldrung culminated in Kant (d. 1804). He provided the transition to the liberal theology of the nineteenth century. In England a major outgrowth of this rationalism was Deism, or “natural 103religion,” best expressed in Tindal’s Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730). Tindal held that Christianity’s principles can be duced by any reasonable people anywhere.

Pietism.—The second result was the development in the eighteenth century of Evangelical piety. Emerging almost simultaneously in Germany, Britain, and the Thirteen Colonies, and reflecting Lutheran, Anglican, and Calvinistic backgrounds, these pietistic movements were of similar temper. In striking fashion they interacted and influenced one another. They made possible the burgeoning of Protestant missions in the nineteenth century.

(A) Germany. Pietism in Germany began with P. J. Spener (d. 1705), who from 1670, in reaction against the sterility of prevailing Lutheran Orthodoxy, began founding cell groups and emphasizing Bible study, fellowship, and Christian experience. Thus emerged the little church within the Church (ecclesiola in ecclesia). On Spener’s death, his close friend A. H. Francke (d. 1727) succeeded him. This Pietism of Halle did not become a sect, but remained a movement within Lutheranism and attracted many educated and influential people.

A teacher at the University of Halle and a close friend of Leibniz, Francke set forth a world view and missionary concern quite new in Lutheranism. At the suggestion of a Halle-trained adviser, Frederick IV of Denmark sought missionaries for his Danish colonies and found his only volunteers at Halle. Thus began the Danish-Halle Mission in 1705, which in 1706 sent out Ziegenbalg and Pliitshau as the first Lutheran missionaries to India. Francke stood solidly behind the mission. His great dream was a Universal Seminary in which Lutherans, Eastern Orthodox, and others could be trained for missions throughout the world.'*

Count N. L. von Zinzendorf (d. 1760) gained his missionary zeal from Francke. Some years later remnants of the old Moravians settled on Zinzendorf’s estates in Saxony and there in 1722 built their village, Herrnhut. Zinzendorf’s missionary vision and German Pietism deeply influenced the Herrnhutters. Within five years the Moravians reconstituted their church, with the entire community accepting missionary responsibility. Whole families went overseas as self-supporting missionary units. Within several decades Moravian missions were at work in Russia, Southern Asia, Africa, the Caribbean lands, North America, Greenland, and Labrador. A 104whole church in mission with warmhearted zeal was something new in Christian history.

(B) The Thirteen Colonies. John Eliot (d. 1690), a Puritan pastor in Massachusetts, conducted a major mission among the Indians in New England. He learned the Indians’ language and translated the Bible into their tongue. As some hundreds of Indians were converted, Eliot formed them into communities exemplifying the Calvinistic-Puritan theocratic ideal. Directly confronting “savages” ignorant of the Gospel, Eliot, with a Calvinist’s concern for men’s souls, became a vigorous and thoughtful missionary. He appears to have been the first to refocus the various elements in Calvinism so that that theology’s inherent missionary power, hitherto thwarted and obscured, could emerge. His work inspired financial support in Britain and began to open men’s eyes to Christian missionary Eliot’s biographer, Cotton Mather (d. 1725) engaged in considerable and significant correspondence with the Halle Pietists, whose influence was also felt in New England.1*

The Great Awakening arose in the Thirteen Colonies in the 1720s and had as its outstanding native-born leader, Jonathan Edwards (d. 1758). A theologian, philosopher, and pulpit orator, Edwards against the indifference of his day reinterpreted Calvin and sought for evangelical conversion among his hearers. Like Eliot, Edwards had worked among the Indians. Moreover, David Brainerd (d. 1748), a young protégé of Edwards, had burned himself out in five years as a missionary among the Indians. Engaged to Edwards’ daughter, Brainerd died at the age of thirty in Edwards’ home. Edwards’ biography of Brainerd (1749) influenced Carey, Martyn, and others. Among the several results of the Great Awakening and related revivals were missions to Negroes and Indians and the considerable development of Christian higher education.

A young friend and student of Edwards, Samuel Hopkins (d. 1803), pursued and modified his mentor’s thought. He was spokesman for the New England theology that had developed with full awareness of the American aborigines and that modified a widely 105restrictive understanding of Calvinism so as to free it to make an appeal for conversion to all men. Hopkins’ “disinterested benevolence,” encouraging sacrifice of self for the greater glory of God, placed missionary motivation in a new context and enabled its author to look forward to the time when Christianity would spread throughout the world.1®

In the Thirteen Colonies for the first time Calvinists in large numbers encountered non-Christian “natives.” This then unique American experience caused them to re-examine their theology. Indeed, Calvinism’s transplantation to American soil brought striking change. Among Calvinism’s Icading interpreters were those who had perforce been missionaries among the Indians. Their theological presuppositions led them to see that Christians must proclaim the Gospel among all men so that the elect from every nation can respond and show forth their election to the greater glory of God.

(C) Britain. In the eighteenth century the Evangelical Awakening became the most potent force in Britain’s religious life. The majority of the predominant figures in the Awakening were Anglican, chief among them John Wesley (d. 1791). The Awakening issued in Anglicanism’s Evangelical wing and through the Wesleys in Methodism. It also influenced other churches. Wesley’s Arminian theology emphasized that Christ had died for all and that men everywhere could respond and receive the gift of life. From the deadness of Deism, Britain’s people were brought by the Evangelical Awakening to a mighty spiritual quickening..

This much-described Awakening transformed England religiously and then socially. For nearly a century it influenced and was influenced by developments in Germany and America. John Wesley,'® George Whitefield, and J onathan Edwards symbolize this amazing interpenetration. Evangelical piety, concerned for men’s souls and for those without the Gospel, through the entire eight106eenth century was conditioning a people. On the eve of the nineteenth century, when the missionary seed was planted in this wellprepared soil, it brought forth abundant fruit.

Colonial Missions.—In the period just surveyed several missionary ventures emerged. The Danish-Halle Mission and the missions conducted by the Dutch East India Company reflected the pre-Reformation idea that the ruler is responsible for Christianity in his territory. Two Anglican agencies, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (1699) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG; 1701), arose in part from the impulses of German Pietism, but operated within a colonial context and thus reflected pre-Reformation conceptions. Although these Anglican societies were primarily for British colonists, from the outset they reached to Negroes and Indians (American and Asian). These several ventures attracted little enthusiasm and by the century’s close were considerably less than vigorous. Interestingly, one notes, the only element in sixteenth-century Roman Catholic missions not rejected by the Reformers was the monarch’s responsibility for Christianity and missions in his territories. On this foundation were built most of the missionary agencies before Carey.

Eruption of the Protestant Missionary Idea, 1789-1815

The above dates encompass the French Revolution’s beginning and Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. The sharply contrasting social and political emergents in France and in Britain in these two and a half decades were the natural issue of forces that had been mounting in the preceding century. Britain’s Evangelical Awakening provided the crucial difference.

That Awakening also decisively influenced the course of the Christian mission. '

William Carey—William Carey, the British Baptist cobbler, stands as the pioneer and great symbolic figure of the beginning of modern Protestant missions. There were Protestant missions and missionaries before Carey’s time; but, with the Moravians a major exception, these were colonial, were sometimes state-supported, and in large part reflected Augsburg’s cuius regio principle. The Moravians’ challenge to mission went unheeded, for the Herrnhutters addressed the Enlightenment’s spiritual coldness. But sixty107five years later, when Carey summoned Christians to missionary obedience, he spoke to hearts stirred by the Evangelical Awakening. The response that issued then has continued to grow.

“The examples of Eliot, Brainerd, the Moravians, and the Roman Catholics, Jonathan Edwards’ An Humble Attempt to Promote an Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God’s People Through the World, in Extraordinary Prayer, for the Revival of Religion, and the Advancement of Christ's Kingdom on Earth," Captain James Cook’s Voyages, the influence of the Anglican Thomas Scott, Bible study, geographical and ethnographical research, his own evangelical concern, the weight in his heart produced by the unconverted near at hand—these coalesced in Carey to make him a man of unshakable and zealous missionary conviction. All this found expression in his An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens—the “charter of modern missions.” 18

Among a group of strict Calvinistic Baptists, some of whom had been reading Edwards and found their Calvinism thereby modified, and at Carey’s urging, in 1792 there was formed The Particular Baptist Society for the Propagation of the Gospel amongst the Heathen. The title honored the older Anglican body but significantly added “‘amongst the Heathen.” Its purview was universal, not colonial. Supported by church members, the society made its first grants to the Moravians and in 1793 sent Carey and the physician John Thomas to India. The rest is history.

Carey supported himself in Bengal. There he cared for his insane wife twelve years before death released her from her suffering. A self-taught linguist and scientist, Carey translated the Bible into several Indian tongues, launched training for Indian ministers, stimulated social reforms, and through his botanical research gained a Europe-wide reputation.;

Carey did not use the term “foreign missions.” knew only one

mission to be carried out on ail fronts. He knew there should be only one missionary agency for all, but recognized the practical and denominational difficulties in his day. He urged a decennial 108world missionary conference to encourage unity and to encourage an over-all, coordinated approach to the Christian mission.

Founding of Missions.—Carey’s first letter from India stimulated the formation of the interdenominational London Missionary Society (LMS) in 1795. Edwards’ influence and that of an Anglican chaplain in Sierra Leone—this colony for freed slaves was itself an outgrowth of Evangelical concern—also played a part. In 1799, Anglican Evangelicals loyal to “the church principle” founded what became the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and thus drew Anglican participation away from the LMS. Also in 1799 the Religious Tract Society was formed, and five years later the British and Foreign Bible Society began its work. In 1817-1818 the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society took shape.

The impulses thus released quickly spread. In 1798 the Netherlands’ Missionary Society was begun. New missionary societies grew up in Scotland. In New England, influenced by the theology of Edwards and Hopkins, Samuel J. Mills, Adoniram Judson, and other students were responsible for the emergence of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1812. Judson went to India and en route his study caused him to accept the Baptist view on believers’ baptism by immersion. He and several others were baptized by Carey in Calcutta. To support these new Baptist missionaries, the American Baptists in 1814 began their society. By 1821, American Methodists and Episcopalians had established their mission boards. The cumulative effect of these events encouraged the formation of regional missionary societies in Germany, and by mid-century there were nine, all sprung from Pietism. Other societies arose in Scandinavia. Protestant Missions Cover the Earth, 1815-1914

In the years between Waterloo and Sarajevo, Protestant missions, in Latourette’s phrase, experienced their “Great Century.” Theologically, that century began with F. D. Schleiermacher (d. 1834) who, influenced both by Pietism and Kant, was optimistic about man and rejected Biblical literalism. The century also saw the rise of Biblical criticism. Albrecht Ritschl (d. 1889) marked the century’s close. Distrusting metaphysics, rejecting Schleiermacher’s foundation of “religious feeling,” and starting with the Gospel as determined by “scientific history,” he saw Christianity primarily as ethics. Faith leads to realization of the kingdom—humanity at its 109highest bound together by loving action. Thus, by the century’s end optimism about man’s capabilities for progress was influencing wide segments of Protestantism, including some in its foreign missionary outreach.]®

Missionary Motivation.—Yet one must guard against assuming that a prominent motif in nineteenth-century theology was alldeterminative for missions in this period. The Protestant world did look to Germany for leadership in theology, history, and Biblical studies, and German scholarship exercised real influence. But there were several schools of theological thought in Germany, some very conservative. Significantly, Germany’s missionary outreach came mainly from those of conservative background.

Nineteenth-century Protestant missionary motivation is a vast and complex subject.?° Although motives and understanding were modified from decade to decade, a strong and recurring eschatological strain among the Germans viewed foreign missions as the fulfillment of a condition needed for the Lord’s return. Although both men were British Evangelical Christians, contemporaries, and worked in China, Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission (the first great “faith mission”), was from a different background and differed sharply in theology from the Baptist Timothy Richard, who had strong social concern. Those of the SPG and of the missionary bodies out of the Oxford Movement and Anglo-Catholic revivals had a different motivation from either Taylor and Richards or the German Lutherans.

Wide acceptance in many denominations of the Westminster Confession’s interpretation of the Scriptures often gave appeal to the Great Commission’s unchallengeable authority. The Moody revivals in the United States and Britain, the Student Christian Movement, the Student Volunteer Movement with its frequently misunderstood watchword, “The Evangelization of the World in This Generation” 2!1—all of which are intimately related—had enormous influence in the final quarter of the century. These produced an unprecedented outpouring of lives from universities for service over110seas. Between 1887 and 1900, for example, the number of missionaries under the CMS tripled.

Colonial Expansion.—One must also record the considerable importance for missions of the high-water marks of Western European colonial expansion. In mid-century, China and Japan were opened to the West. In the final quarter the European powers divided Africa among themselves. At the same time, Korea was opened, and a few years later the Philippines came under American control. Here was the peak of Western impact upon the non-Western world.

Anglican missions flourished in British colonies, Reformed missions in Dutch colonies, Lutheran missions in German territories, and Roman missions in the possessions of Latin European countries. Yet, as Latourette has shown, Protestant missions in this period were more independent of governments—and more critical of colonial policies—than in any century since the fourth. Indeed, by 1910 probably a majority of the Protestant missionaries were at work in lands in which their home governments had no control. This was new in Christian history.

Other Factors.—When the Great Century began (1815), several hundred persons would amply have accounted for the total Protestant missionary force. When it ended (1914), there were some 22,000 missionaries—half of them women. Single women comprised more than one-fourth of all missionaries. Moreover, the emergence of the unmarried women missionaries occurred mainly within the century’s final three decades.

By 1900 almost every church recognized that missions are the responsibility of the churches and of all Christian people—a remarkable transformation within a century’s time. In the process, Protestantism de novo built up its missionary agencies. (In a notable parallel development voluntary societies for the support of Roman missions also emerged.) One outstanding result of this was the planting of Protestant churches among almost every people.

Missionary evangelism includes the spoken and the written word. Yet many peoples among whom missionaries labored had no written language. Accordingly, to help men read the Bible, missionaries reduced hundreds of languages to writing (in Romanized script), taught people how to read, and by 1910 had translated the Scriptures into more than five hundred tongues. This process went on vigorously in the twentieth century. The first literature for 111newly literate peoples has been the Gospels. The full meaning of this one fruit of modern Protestant missions may be much clearer three centuries hence.

Education and medicine provided the two major forms of Christian missionary service. By 1910 Protestant missionary secondary and higher educational institutions enrolled 180,000 students in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Of the 86 institutions of college or university grade, enrolling some 8,600 students, India and China together had the majority, with India alone providing 58 per cent of the students. Medical missions appeared in the second half of the century. They sometimes provided the only Christian witness allowed or possible. By 1910 more than one thousand missionary doctors served overseas—one third of them women. The large majority of hospitals and dispensaries were in China and India, which lands also had the outstanding medical-training institutions.

Denominationalism and a variety of interpretations of the Gospel were part of this outreach. There was growth in nondenominational and “faith missions.” Yet in remarkable fashion there was widespread and growing cooperation among Christians “on the mission field.” There was new concern for the Church, its nature, its ministry, and its unity. Moreover, missionary conferences were establishing a pattern of cooperation that helped to shape “Edinburgh, 1910,” and contributed to the of national Christian councils a few years later.

On the eve of World War I, when mankind passed from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910 symbolized Carey’s hope and reflected the most dynamic and creative forces in a century of missionary endeavor. Moreover, “Edinburgh, 1910” stands as the root symbol of the Ecumenical Movement in the twentieth century. The crucial significance of these two inseparable facts will become increasingly clear in future generations.

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