The Theology of Mission among Protestants in the Twentieth Century

The Theology of Mission among Protestants in the Twentieth Century

by Gerald H. Anderson

3In his book What Present-Day Theologians Are Thinking Daniel Day Williams suggests that one of the major issues which “may well dominate much of theological thought as we move into the second half of the twentieth century” is the relation of Christianity to culture and other religions.? The reasons for this are well known. The resurgence of non-Christian religions, the shift of cultural and political power in the world, and the rise of an indigenous ecumenical church have so transformed the setting for Christian missions as to cause confusion among Christians concerning their proper attitude and approach to men of other faiths. The underlying principles and theological presuppositions for the Christian mission have been called into question and Christians are challenged to rethink the motives, message, methods, and goals of their mission.

In face of this confusion there is surprisingly little creative theological endeavor available for guidance. As recently as 1951, in a confidential report to a group of American theological scholars, a missionary leader said, “When we turn to mission and theological libraries in search of material on the theology of missions, we almost draw a blank.” This situation is not new. Wilhelm Pauck, the church historian, has pointed out that “with the possible exception 4of the early Church, whose theology was decisively shaped by the missionary spirit, no part of Christendom has produced major theological responsibility and creativeness in connection with evangelistic endeavors.”³ Christian theological endeavor has been more concerned with introspection, with intra-Christian relations, than with the interrelation of Christianity and other faiths. Too often those most interested in the nature of the Christian faith have been those least interested in its relation to men of other faiths. The result, in the words of an astute observer, is that “the Christian community is at the moment theologically unequipped for living in the twentieth century, with its pluralistic mankind.”⁴ The fundamental task, therefore, of the missionary enterprise today is to clarify the nature and meaning of its being. This must be done in the realm of theological thought, not only to increase effectiveness in presenting the Gospel to the world, but also to give Christians a deeper understanding of what their task is in the world.

I

In approaching this important undertaking it is helpful to begin by surveying some of the trends and factors in the development of the theology of mission thus far in the twentieth century. One is that there has been a progressively deepening thrust, despite brief

of recession, toward a fundamental reformulation of the

theology of mission. This may be seen, to some extent, in two ways: (1) by the progressively deepening confrontation of Church and mission with theology, which may be discerned most clearly, in the Protestant tradition, by the questions dealt with in the series of great international missionary gatherings; (2) by the progressive narrowing of the gulf between Church and mission, from 1900, when the missionary enterprise was considered by many to be primarily the responsibility of missionary societies rather than the churches, until the present-day integration of Church and mission, as seen in the proposed integration of the World Council of Churches and the International Missionary Council.⁵

5This first trend may be illustrated with an analogy in which the progressive historical development of the theology of mission thus far in the twentieth century may be thought of in terms of a spiral staircase in a seven-story building, with a landing at each floor level between flights of stairs. Each landing represents one of the major international missionary gatherings, with the steps between landings indicating the important events and publications which occurred between meetings. These meetings served to stimulate interest, to sharpen the issues, to focus world attention on the developments which occurred in the intervening years, and to indicate the way forward to further possible lines of development in the discussion.

With this analogy in mind one can follow the developments in the theology of mission by descending the staircase, beginning from the landing on the seventh floor. On this landing, which represents the Edinburgh Conference of 1910, the first truly world missionary conference, the major question being put to the missionary enterprise was simply “How missions?” Edinburgh was primarily concerned with strategy, and most participants seemed to take for granted that the Great Commission of Christ (Mt. 28:19) was the only basis needed for the missionary enterprise.⁶ It came at a time when missionary endeavor was at a high point of enthusiasm, and the missionary obligation was considered a self-evident axiom to be obeyed, not to be questioned.

The second in the descent of the staircase represents the Jerusalem Conference of 1928, where the issues and discussion might be summarized with the question “Wherefore missions?” At this international missionary gathering the theology of mission was given primary consideration under the title “The Christian Life and Message in Relation to Non-Christian Systems of Thought and 6Life.” Secularism and syncretism were seen as the two major threats to Christian missions, and discussion was oriented around a consideration of goals toward which the missionary enterprise should be directed. But, while the Jerusalem Conference did bring the whole question of theological presuppositions to the fore, it did not penetrate the issue to any significant degree.

The third landing in the descent toward a deeper understanding of the Christian mission represents the Tambaram, Madras, meeting of 1938, where the major question was “Whence missions?” At Madras the missionary enterprise realized that it must reconsider its roots. This led to a discussion of the nature of revelation, its locus and authority, as the key issue in determining the relationship and approach of Christianity to non-Christian religions. This discussion was cut short by the outbreak of the Second World War.

By the time the fourth landing is reached, the Whitby meeting of 1947, the question being asked is “Whither missions?” The Christian mission at Whitby was defined in terms of evangelism and was seen by members of an indigenous world church as “Partners in Obedience.” There was little advance at Whitby beyond what had already been achieved at Madras toward a deeper understanding of the basis and nature of the Christian mission, but Whitby was an advance in that it recognized the urgent need for a deeper study of this whole complex of issues and took the first step toward launching a major ecumenical of “The Missionary Obligation of the Church.”

Discussion of this topic takes = reader down the steps to the fifth landing, to the Willingen meeting of 1952. There the issues were seen at the level of “Why missions?” And although Willingen was unable to adopt an agreed statement on “The Missionary Obligation of the Church,” it did have immeasurable significance for the theology of mission in that it considered the theological presuppositions for missions at a deeper level and within a broader context than had been the case at any previous meeting. The thoroughgoing nature of the discussion at Willingen, together with the inability to arrive at an agreed point of conviction, caused the missionary movement further to realize that the theology of mission required high priority for depth study. This conclusion was seconded by the World Council of Churches in the years immediately following Willingen, and by the time one descends to the sixth landing, to the Ghana Assembly of 1957-58, he finds the mis7sionary enterprise asking itself the most radical question in its history, “What is the Christian mission?”

In an effort to answer this question one descends to the main floor of the theology of mission, which should be reached at the Delhi Joint Assemblies of the International Missionary Council and the World Council of Churches in 1961, where it is expected that these two great bodies will be integrated and give major attention to the nature of the Christian mission.

There is an additional factor, however, needing to be recognized and dealt with before the missionary enterprise can have a clear understanding of its task. The Christian mission is so inextricably related to the nature of the Christian Gospel that it is necessary to go even deeper in this building, into the basement and to the foundations, to a deeper understanding of the Gospel itself, before the theology of mission can be adequately formulated. There are indications that there may be many stories beneath the ground floor, dealing with the nature and meaning of the Christian Gospel, and needing equally careful examination in order to secure the proper foundation support for the surface structure.

II

A second factor in the development of the theology of mission during the twentieth century has been the diversity of Protestant attitudes toward men of other faiths.

At the beginning of this century a large part of the missionary movement, influenced by the spirit of Dwight L. Moody’s revivalism, had a passion for souls that stemmed from an emphasis upon the rapidly approaching judgment day and a strong sense of obligation to save the heathen from eternal damnation. Yet at the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference in 1910 agreement was reached on “two very notable points”:

The first of these is the practically universal testimony that the true

attitude of the Christian missionary to the non-Christian religions should be one of true understanding and, as far as possible, of sympathy,… that the missionary should seek for the nobler elements in the non-Christian religions and use them as steps to higher things, that in fact all these religions without exception disclose elemental needs of the human soul which Christianity alone can satisfy, and that in their higher 8in these religions, there goes also the universal and emphatic witness to the absoluteness of the Christian faith.”

The threat of materialistic secularism to all religions in the years following Edinburgh, 1910, brought about a strengthened reaffirmation of the Edinburgh position at the Jerusalem Meeting of the International Missionary Council in 1928.⁸ The Jerusalem Statement on the Christian Message began with the Christocentric affirmation:

Our message is Jesus Christ. He is the revelation of what God is and of what man through Him may become. In Him we come face to face with the Ultimate Reality of the universe; He makes known to us God as our Father, perfect and infinite in love and in righteousness; for in Him we find God incarnate, the final, yet ever-unfolding, revelation of the God in whom we live and move and have our being.⁹

The Statement continued, with regard to the Christian attitude to non-Christian systems of thought and life:

We rejoice to think that just because in Jesus Christ the light that lighteth every man shone forth in its full splendor, we find rays of that same light where He is unknown or even is rejected. We welcome every noble quality in non-Christian persons or systems as further proof that the Father, who sent His Son into the world, has nowhere left Himself without witness.¹⁰

The attitude expressed at Jerusalem, however, did not go unquestioned. Considerable misgiving was expressed by European missionary leaders at the meeting concerning what they believed to be a tendency toward a syncretistic approach to the non-Christian religions. Dr. Karl Hartenstein, the noted Missions Director from 9Basel, later dealt with the subject from the perspective of the continental “Theology of the Word,” giving special emphasis to the eschatological attitude, in his study of the Christian mission as a theological

In 1932 the discussion was stimulated and the issues were sharpened when the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry issued Re-Thinking Missions, the Report of its Commission of Appraisal, which William Ernest Hocking served as chairman. This valuable Report suggested that the aim of missions is “to seek with people of other lands a true knowledge and love of God, expressing in life and word what we have learned through Jesus Christ”; 12 that “the Christian will regard himself as a co-worker with the forces which are making for righteousness within every religious system”;! that “‘the relation between religions must take increasingly hereafter the form of a common search for truth”; ** and that the missionary “will look forward, not to the destruction of these [non-Christian] religions, but to their continued co-existence with Christianity, each stimulating the other in growth toward the ultimate goal, unity in the completest religious truth.” 1° This approach departed sharply from the more traditionally held concept of missions, the role of the missionary, and the relation of Christianity to other religions. As such, the Report stimulated recognition of the missionary problem as a theological problem and provoked basic rethinking of the issues involved, but was itself widely criticized for its tone of optimism and relativism. -

A more radical departure came in 1934 with the publication of Christian Missions and a New World Culture by Archibald G. Baker, Professor of Missions at the University of Chicago. Baker took a culture-centered approach and suggested that the function of missions is to serve as the agent for a cultural synthesis by means of the interpenetration or cross-fertilization of cultures. He maintained that all religions “emerge in the same process which has been working through the ages,” the only differences in them being 10differences in accomplishment and character.!® The center of reference for missions, according to Baker, should be Jesus Christ, but the process for fulfillment is joint deliberation and cooperation with non-Christians, abandoning all claims to absolutism and finality. This approach was not representative of any large group within the missionary enterprise, but it was a thoughtful presentation that must be given recognition.

Hugh Vernon White, Secretary for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, presented a position corresponding to Re-Thinking Missions in his book A Theology for Christian Missions which appeared in 1937. White said that the service of man should be the regulative aim of missions, and that it should be carried out through witness and friendship, through the conquest of selfishness, and reverence for “the sanctity of human personality.” 17 He believed that Christianity was the best religion in the world, but did not deny that there are truths and values in other religions.

Professor Hendrik Kraemer, in his book The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World, introduced a new dimension to the discussion and provided a reply to the position represented in Re-Thinking Missions. Written at the request of the International Missionary Council for its meeting at Tambaram, Madras, in 1938, this classic study stressed the idea of a radical discontinuity between the realm of “Biblical realism” and the whole range of non-Christian religious experience. Dr. Kraemer took the position that all non-Christian religions, philosophies, and world views.are “the various efforts of man to apprehend the totality of existence,” whereas the Christian revelation, which is absolutely sui generis and remains hidden except to the eye of faith,

asserts itself as the record of God’s self-disclosing and re-creating revela-

tion in Jesus Christ, as an apprehension of existence that revolves around the poles of divine judgment and divine salvation, giving the divine answer to this demonic and guilty disharmony of man and the world.¹⁸

11Allowing that God does shine through the works of His creation and through the conscience of man, Dr. Kraemer emphasized that “this “general revelation’ can only be effectually discovered in the light of the ‘special revelation,’” and therefore is itself an object of faith.! The only basic point of contact with the non-Christian religions, he said, is the missionary worker.”

The Tambaram, Madras Meeting of the International Missionary Council in 1938 issued a Statement on “The Faith by Which the Church Lives” that declared unequivocally:

We believe that Christ is the Way for all, that He alone is adequate for the world’s need…. We are bold enough to call men out from them [other religions] to the feet of Christ. We do so because we believe that in Him alone is the full salvation which man needs.?!

The Statement acknowledged also, however, the good in other religions:

We see and readily recognize that in them are to be found values of deep religious experiences and great moral achievements…. We do not think that God has left Himself without witness in the world at any time. Men have been seeking Him all through the ages. Often this seeking and longing have been misdirected. But we see glimpses of God's light in the world of religions, showing that His yearning after His erring children has not been without

There was again, and even stronger than at Jerusalem, a feeling of misgiving on the part of some delegates, mostly among those from the Continent, concerning what they felt to be the neglect of some vital principles of the Gospel. These members submitted a separate statement to the meeting, expressing their concern and emphasizing the importance of maintaining a sense of discontinuity together with an eschatological attitude when considering the Christian approach to other religions.

Following the Madras meeting, this discussion, centering around 12the two concepts of “Biblical realism” and “discontinuity,” was carried on to a further stage in Volume I, a symposium entitled The Authority of the Faith, of The Tambaram Madras Series. Professor Kraemer, supported by an essay from Karl Hartenstein, restated the case, clearly and succinctly, for “Biblical realism” and “discontinuity.” Other views were presented by T. C. Chao, David G. Moses, A. G. Hogg and Karl Ludvig Reichelt, with Walter Marshall Horton and H. H. Farmer taking a mediating position.

During the Second World War important contributions came from Godfrey E. Phillips and Edmund Davison Soper. Phillips, who was Professor of Missions at Selly Oak College in Birmingham, England, said that the view which suggests that non-Christian religions are merely the product of human striving and in no way an answer to divine inspiration and initiative

seems to lack sympathy, as if we were to rebuke some terrified lost child looking for its mother for pride in the assumption that it can find her. Probably the child was naughty to get lost, but its present attempt to find her is due not to naughtiness but to something within which it has from its mother. The note in many a non-Christian prayer is not of self-confidence but of wistful yearning for what it is intuitively felt

that only divine grace can grant.²³

Soper, in his book, The Philosophy of the Christian World Mission (1943), described Kraemer’s position as “uniqueness without continuity,” and Hocking’s position as “continuity with doubtful uniqueness,” while his own position he gave as uniqueness with continuity.²⁴ This book remains as a representative exposition of the viewpoint held by a large segment of American Protestantism.

Since the war there has been increasing participation in this discussion by scholars from the so-called younger churches, and a renewal of interest on the part of scholars in the West. Also there has been a resurgence of the orthodox or conservative evangelical tradition, which is commonly, though not always correctly, referred to as “Fundamentalism.” Christians in this tradition argue for the plenary inspiration of Scripture and limit the ground of religious authority to the Bible. They recognize no real values in 13other religions, and are apt to believe in a literal hell to which men without Christ, both those who have rejected him and those who have never heard of him, are doomed. The evangelicals have been a constant source of missionary effort in the twentieth century, and today approximately one third of the total Protestant missionary endeavor is administered by agencies that are rooted in this tradition and do not cooperate with either the World Council of Churches or the International Missionary Council.

The situation today, in the words of Victor E. W. Hayward, Research Secretary of the International Missionary Council, is that “the great debate as to the way in which Christians ought to regard the great non-Christian faiths has reached stalemate rather than agreement.” 2° The major issues, despite a renewal of interest and discussion, have not been resolved. If anything, they have become more crucial.

The most promising developments for a breakthrough to a new

understanding of the relationship of Christianity and the non-Christian religions have come from the ecumenical study projects launched since 1954 by the International Missionary Council in cooperation with the World Council of Churches. One has been the establishment of a number of “Centers for the Study of Non-Christian Religions” in various parts of the world.?® The purpose of these “Centers” is to make “on the spot” studies of the actual religions in their contemporary forms and expressions, and to try to understand them as the living faiths of men who are struggling against the tensions and temptations of life in the modern world. The “Centers” also want to assist the churches in working and witnessing relevantly in their own situations.

Working in close cooperation with the “Centers” is a study known, s “The Word of God and the Living Faiths of Men.” This is a study of:

14—the nature of the living faiths of men and the elements in them

of appeal and power;

—the nature of the Word of God which is addressed to men

who live by these faiths;

—the nature of the relation between the Christian message and

these faiths;

—the way in which the Church may be enabled to communicate

this Word to those who live by these faiths.

A significant development in this study is that it has differed from the earlier discussions of Christianity and the non-Christian religions in that it has not opposed Christianity and the other religions as such to one another. Instead, it has

made a basic distinction between the Gospel and all religions. This distinction presupposed that the important point of concern is not with religious systems as such but with religious man and especially with men under the proclamation of the Gospel. The important result of this distinction is that the starting point is anthropological, that is with man—however conditioned by his religion and history and environment. Thus, in the first instance at any rate, the problems of the comparison of truths of one system with truths of another are transcended because the center of attention is not these truths but the human being himself.²⁶

A third study that should contribute to a new understanding of the relationship between the Gospel and the religions is the study of “The Theology of Mission.”²⁷ The central focus of this study is: “What does it mean in theological terms and in practice in this ecumenical era, for the Church to discharge its mission to all the nations?” This study includes the Biblical and theological basis and goal of mission, together with a theological evaluation of the existing structures expressing the missionary responsibility of the churches and of those which are emerging.”²⁸ More specifically, the 15study is concerned with such questions as:²⁹ (1) What is the Biblical meaning of “the nations,” and the theological significance of “the ends of the earth”? (2) What are the meaning and practical implications of the Christian claim that there is salvation “in no other name”? (3) What is the relation between history and “salvation-history”? (4) What is the relation between the Gospel and human cultures?

The basic issues for consideration in all these studies are: (1) How should we understand the urgency of mission in terms of theology today? (2) How should we understand the uniqueness and ultimacy of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ? (3) How can we in the presentation of the Gospel relate it dynamically to the cultural life of a nation without compromising the essential nature of the Christian faith?

It is hoped that out of these studies and a renewal of the missionary confrontation in theology there might come not only a deeper understanding of the relationship between the Gospel and the religions, but also a more adequate theological perspective for the Christian mission today.

III

A third trend that is discernible as the theology of mission has developed in the twentieth century is that the direction of orientation is leading toward a theocentric point of view in thoroughgoing trinitarian perspective. A major cause for confusion in missions today has come from the inadequacy of the various attempts to formulate the theology of mission in recent years. There have been attempts from the culture-centered, man-centered, revelationcentered, eschatology-centered, kingdom-centered, Bible-centered, Church-centered and Christ-centered points of view. While all of these attempts have stressed various aspects of Christian doctrine that are essential for the missionary enterprise, it seems that when any one of them has been made the central point of focus and orientation for the theology of mission, it has proven inadequate for the task, tending to narrow the scope of the mission and causing it to go astray. It remains now for a major attempt to be made at formulating the theology of mission from the view of radical trinitarian theocentrism.³⁰ When it comes, this approach may plant 16the seed—but only God gives the a new flowering of missionary endeavor in our time.

It is hoped that the essays which follow, coming as they do from a wide range of scholars who differ in many respects, may help to bring into focus a more catholic and well-rounded trinitarian point of view that will increase our understanding of the Christian mission today.

Einfiihrung in eine Theologie der Mission (Miinchen: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1958).

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