Critical Readings in the History of Christian Mission [2] 900439544X, 9789004395442

Table of contents :
Contents
Approaches
Part 2: Approaches
18 Eusebius Tries Again: Reconceiving the Study of Christian History • Andrew F. Walls
19 From Missions to Mission to Beyond Missions: The Historiography of American Protestant Foreign Missions Since World War II • Dana L. Robert
20 The Overly Candid Missionary Historian: C. G. A. Oldendorp’s Theological Ambivalence over Slavery in the Danish West Indies • Anders Ahlbäck
21 The Colonization of Consciousness • John and Jean Comaroff
22 Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Cultural Theory, Christian Missions, and Global Modernity • Ryan Dunch
23 The Culture Concept and the Mission of the Roman Catholic Church • Michael V. Angrosino
24 The Problem of Colonialism in the Western Historiography of Christian Missions • Jane Samson
25 Theology and Mission between Neocolonialism and Postcolonialism • Joerg Rieger
26 Translating the Word: Dialogism and Debate in Two Gikuyu Dictionaries • Derek Peterson
27 The Gospel, Language and Culture: The Theological Method in Cultural Analysis • Lamin Sanneh
28 Women and Cultural Exchanges • Patricia Grimshaw and Peter Sherlock
29 Understanding the World-Christian Turn in the History of Christianity and Theology • Paul Kollman
30 Transcontinental Links, Enlarged Maps, and Polycentric Structures in the History of World Christianity • Klaus Koschorke
31 World Christianity as a Theological Approach: A Reflection on Central and Eastern Europe • Dorottya Nagy

Citation preview

Critical Readings in the History of Christian Mission Volume 2

Critical Readings in the History of Christian Mission volume 2

Edited by

Martha Frederiks Dorottya Nagy

LEIDEN | BOSTON

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2021937176

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. isbn 978-90-04-39552-7 (hardback, set) isbn 978-90-04-39543-5 (hardback, vol. 1) isbn 978-90-04-39544-2 (hardback, vol. 2) isbn 978-90-04-39545-9 (hardback, vol. 3) isbn 978-90-04-39546-6 (hardback, vol. 4) isbn 978-90-04-39958-7 (e-book, vol. 1) isbn 978-90-04-39959-4 (e-book, vol. 2) isbn 978-90-04-39960-0 (e-book, vol. 3) isbn 978-90-04-39961-7 (e-book, vol. 4) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents VOLUME 1 Introduction 1 Dorottya Nagy and Martha Frederiks

Methods 1

Recent Trends in the Historiography of Christianity in Southern Africa 39 Norman Etherington

2

Writing of Past Times: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Mission History 67 Andrea Schultze

3

‘Trained to Tell the Truth’: Missionaries, Converts, and Narration 76 Gareth Griffiths

4

The Quest for Muted Black Voices in History: Some Pertinent Issues in (South) African Mission Historiography 95 Tinyiko Sam Maluleke

5

Sources in Mission Archives 116 Adam Jones

6

The Midwest China Oral History Collection 127 Jane Baker Koons

7 From Beyond Alpine Snow and Homes of the East—A Journey Through Missionary Periodicals: The Missionary Periodicals Database Project 134 Terry Barringer

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Missionaries as Social Commentators: The Indian Case 145 Geoffrey A. Oddie

9

Thinking Missiologically about the History of Mission 159 Stanley H. Skreslet

10

Jesuit Scientific Activity in the Overseas Missions, 1540–1773 174 Steven J. Harris

11

The Global ‘Bookkeeping’ of Souls: Quantification and Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Missions 186 Martin Petzke

12

The Visual Embodiment of Women in the Korea Mission Field 222 Hyaeweol Choi

13

On Using Historical Missionary Photographs in Modern Discussion 255 Paul Jenkins

14

The Anthropology of Christianity: Unity, Diversity, New Directions. An Introduction to Supplement 10 270 Joel Robbins

15

Expanding Mission Archaeology: A Landscape Approach to Indigenous Autonomy in Colonial California 302 Lee M. Panich and Tsim D. Schneider

16

Schooling on the Missionary Frontier: The Hohi Mission Station, New Zealand 330 Ian W. G. Smith

17

Objects of Expert Knowledge: On Time and the Materialities of Conversion to Christianity in the Southern New Hebrides 352 Jean Mitchell

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VOLUME 2 Approaches 18

Eusebius Tries Again: Reconceiving the Study of Christian History 375 Andrew F. Walls

19

From Missions to Mission to Beyond Missions: The Historiography of American Protestant Foreign Missions Since World War II 388 Dana L. Robert

20 The Overly Candid Missionary Historian: C. G. A. Oldendorp’s Theological Ambivalence over Slavery in the Danish West Indies 421 Anders Ahlbäck 21

The Colonization of Consciousness 447 John and Jean Comaroff

22

Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Cultural Theory, Christian Missions, and Global Modernity 469 Ryan Dunch

23

The Culture Concept and the Mission of the Roman Catholic Church 499 Michael V. Angrosino

24 The Problem of Colonialism in the Western Historiography of Christian Missions 511 Jane Samson 25

Theology and Mission between Neocolonialism and Postcolonialism 531 Joerg Rieger

26 Translating the Word: Dialogism and Debate in Two Gikuyu Dictionaries 555 Derek Peterson

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Contents

The Gospel, Language and Culture: The Theological Method in Cultural Analysis 579 Lamin Sanneh

28 Women and Cultural Exchanges 600 Patricia Grimshaw and Peter Sherlock 29 Understanding the World-Christian Turn in the History of Christianity and Theology 620 Paul Kollman 30 Transcontinental Links, Enlarged Maps, and Polycentric Structures in the History of World Christianity 635 Klaus Koschorke 31

World Christianity as a Theological Approach: A Reflection on Central and Eastern Europe 665 Dorottya Nagy

VOLUME 3 Themes I Mission and Language 32

Bunyan in Africa: Text and Transition 689 Isabel Hofmeyr

33

Translation Teams: Missionaries, Islanders, and the Reduction of Language in the Pacific 704 Jane Samson

34 Christianizing Language and the Dis-placement of Culture in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea 722 Bambi B. Schieffelin 35

Exploring Nineteenth-Century Haida Translations of the New Testament 749 Marcus Tomalin

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Mission and Politics 36 Race, History, and the Australian Faith Missions 787 Joanna Cruickshank 37

British Missions and Indian Nationalism, 1880–1908: Imitation and Autonomy in Calcutta and Madras 804 Chandra Mallampalli

38 Medical Missionaries and Modernizing Emirs in Colonial Hausaland: Leprosy Control and Native Authority in the 1930s 828 Shobana Shankar

Mission and Social Change 39 Christian Mind and Worldly Matters: Religion and Materiality in Nineteenth-Century Gold Coast 859 Birgit Meyer 40 Mission or Empire, Word or Sword? The Human Capital Legacy in Postcolonial Democratic Development 887 Tomila Lankina and Lullit Getachew 41

A Saturated History of Christianity and Cloth in Oceania 922 Margaret Jolly

Missionaries 42 Christian Missionaries as Anticolonial Militants 951 Karen E. Fields 43 Saint Apolo from Europe, or ‘What’s in a Luganda Name?’ 966 Emma Wild-Wood 44 ‘Culture’ as a Tool and an Obstacle: Missionary Encounters in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan 990 Mathijs Pelkmans

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45 ‘It’s Really Where Your Parents Were’: Differentiating and Situating Protestant Missionary Children’s Lives, c. 1900–1940 1016 Hugh Morrison

Mission, Women, and Gender 46 ‘God and Nature Intended You for a Missionary’s Wife’: Mary Hill, Jane Eyre and Other Missionary Women in the 1840s 1049 Valentine Cunningham 47 Female Emancipation in an Imperial Frame: English Women and the Campaign against Sati (Widow-Burning) in India, 1813–30 1070 Clare Midgley 48 Married to the Mission Field: Gender, Christianity, and Professionalization in Britain and Colonial Africa, 1865–1914 1094 Elizabeth Prevost

VOLUME 4 Themes II Mission, Education, and Science 49 From Heathen Kraal to Christian Home: Anglican Mission Education and African Christian Girls, 1850–1900 1137 Modupe Labode 50 From Transformation to Negotiation: A Female Mission in a ‘City of Schools’ 1154 Julia Hauser 51

Some Reflections on Anthropology’s Missionary Positions 1178 John W. Burton with Orsolya Arva Burton

Contents

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Natural Science and Naturvölker: Missionary Entomology and Botany 1190 Patrick Harries

Mission, Health, and Healing 53

The Medical Mission Strategy of the Maryknoll Sisters 1233 Suzanne R. Thurman

54 Converting the Hospital: British Missionaries and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Madagascar 1249 Thomas Anderson 55

Chinese Perspectives on Medical Missionaries in the 19th Century: The Chinese Medical Missionary Journal 1268 Gao Xi

56 Language, Medical Auxiliaries, and the Re-interpretation of Missionary Medicine in Colonial Mwinilunga, Zambia, 1922–51 1290 Walima T. Kalusa

Mission and Other Faith Traditions 57

Towards a Missionary Theory of Polytheism: The Franciscans in the Face of the Indigenous Religions of New Spain 1323 Sergio Botta

58 Some Hindu Perspectives on Christian Missionaries in the Indic World of the Mid Nineteenth Century 1346 Richard Fox Young 59 Methodists and Muslims in the Gambia 1370 Martha T. Frederiks 60 Evangelicalism, Islam, and Millennial Expectation in the Nineteenth Century 1386 Andrew Porter

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Mission and Art 61

Dance, Image, Myth, and Conversion in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1500–1800 1413 Cécile Fromont

62 The Indian Conquest of Catholic Art: The Mughals, the Jesuits, and Imperial Mural Painting 1438 Gauvin Alexander Bailey 63 The Truth-Showing Mirror: Jesuit Catechism and the Arts in Mughal India 1452 Gauvin Alexander Bailey 64 Africanising Christian Imagery in Southern African Missions 1472 Elizabeth Rankin Index of Places 1489 Index of Personal Names 1501

Part 2 Approaches

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Eusebius Tries Again: Reconceiving the Study of Christian History Andrew F. Walls The most striking feature of Christianity at the end of the second millennium is that it is predominantly a non-Western religion. On all present indications, the numbers of inhabitants of Europe and North America who profess the faith are declining, as they have been for some time, while the churches of the other continents continue to grow. Already more than half the world’s Christians live in Africa, Asia, Latin and Caribbean America, and the Pacific. If present trends continue, at some point in the twenty-first century, the figure could be twothirds. It seems that the representative Christianity of the twenty-first century will be that of Africa, Asia, Latin and Caribbean America, and the Pacific. It is at least possible that the Christianity of Europe may become increasingly a matter of historical reference. The events that, for its weal or for its woe, will shape the Christianity of the early centuries of the third millennium are those already taking place in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. We have long been used to a Christian theology that was shaped by the interaction of Christian faith with Greek philosophy and Roman law. We are equally accustomed, though not usually so conscious of its origins, to ecclesiology and codes of practice shaped by Christian interaction with the traditional law and custom of the Germanic and Slavic tribes beyond the Roman frontiers. These forms have become so familiar and established that we have come to think of them as the normal and characteristic forms of Christianity. But in the coming century we can expect an accelerated process of new development arising from Christian interaction with the ancient cultures of Africa and Asia, an interaction now in progress and with much further to go. The fact that Christianity, after being a Western religion for centuries, has now become a non-Western one is especially striking for the suddenness and rapidity of the transition. Kenneth Scott Latourette spoke of the nineteenth century as the great century of missions, but it is the twentieth that has been

Source: Walls A. F., “Eusebius Tries Again: Reconceiving the Study of Christian History,” in W. R. Shenk (ed.), Enlarging the Story: Perspectives on Writing World Christian History, Maryknoll NY: SAGE, 2002, pp. 1–20. Copyright © 2002 by SAGE. Reprinted by Permission of SAGE Publications, Ltd.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004399594_020

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the most remarkable for the transformation of Christianity. One has to go back many centuries to find such a huge recession in one part of the world paralleled by such a huge simultaneous accession in another, producing the radical shift in the cultural and demographic composition of the Christian church that has occurred since 1900. It took Christianity a long time to become a Western religion, let alone the Western religion. It did not begin as a Western religion (in the usual significance of that word), and it took many centuries to become thoroughly appropriated in Europe. It was still later that Christianity became so singularly associated with Europe and Europe alone as to be thought of as a European religion. Indeed it was not until comparatively recent times—around the year 1500—that the ragged conversion of the last pagan peoples of Europe, the overthrow of Muslim power in Spain, and the final eclipse of Christianity in central Asia and Nubia combined to produce a Europe that was essentially Christian and a Christianity that was essentially European. Paradoxically it is just at this point, when Europe and Christianity were more closely identified with each other than ever before, that the impact of the non-Western world upon the Western became critical. In the very era in which Western Christianity became fully and confidently formulated, the process that was to lead to its transformation or supersession had begun. I speak deliberately of the impact of the non-Western world upon the West, rather than the other way round. I do so because insofar as the rewriting of church history is concerned, that is the more important aspect of the story. New church history writing must deal with the interaction between a Christianity formulated in relation to Western needs and conditions and a Christianity formulated by a whole series of other cultures with histories of their own. If church history writing is to recount the whole story of the faith of Christ, it must explore how that story since the sixteenth century has been determined, directly or indirectly, by the worlds that first burst upon Western Christian consciousness at that time. Not until the twentieth century did it become clear how substantial that impact had been. And the task of catching up with that development academically has hardly yet begun.

Shifting Boundaries in Scholarship

When I began academic work relating to Africa some forty years ago, religion was a marginal area of African studies. The primal religions of Africa were still largely considered to be the domain of the anthropologist. A place could be allowed for Islamic studies as a specialized area, but as regards Christianity in Africa, only African Independent Churches, as they were then beginning to be called, could be regarded as properly African. The rest of African Christianity

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could be subsumed under the heading “missions,” and any study of missions was likely to be about external influences on Africa. Thus, for example, one of the distinguished studies published in the 1950s is entitled The Missionary Factor in East Africa. That period of academic study saw the beginning of decolonization and the emergence of the new African states. It was, and is, recognized that “the missions” influenced these events through the organizational and leadership structures of the churches and through the education of the elite who led the movement to independence. In general, however, the undoubted Christian influences on the pan-African revolution of the 1950s and 1960s–a period when the study of Christianity in Africa was largely the study of “missions”—were indirect, often unconscious, and sometimes unintentional. A generation later, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a second pan-African revolution took place, as dictators and military regimes in different parts of the continent were overthrown and a new South Africa emerged out of Africa’s seemingly most intractable situation. In this second revolution, in country after country the churches were vehicles of change or catalysts in times of transition, or they acted as umpires on behalf of society. Time after time the churches of Africa preserved a viable form of civil society when other forms had collapsed or had been suppressed. The phenomena can be observed in countries as different as Benin and Zambia; even in an overwhelmingly Muslim setting such as Mali, a Christian bishop acted as keeper of the national conscience. Political scientists in the African field found that knowledge of church structures was a necessary part of their equipment. It is now clearly the case that Christianity has become so much a part of the fabric of sub-Saharan African life that scholars in a wide variety of disciplines who want to undertake serious study of Africa need to know something about Christianity. The converse is equally true; anyone who wishes to undertake serious study of Christianity these days needs to know something about Africa. It follows that the student of Christian history not only must know something about Africa but also must consider the part that Africa plays in the total story of the faith. The issue is much wider than Africa; it goes to the heart of the task of the global church historian. What is required is no less than the reconception of the task of the Christian historian.

Reconception of Resources

What conceptions govern the present study and teaching of Christian history, and to what extent does the Christian historian’s understanding of the contemporary situation of Christianity call for adjustment or replacement?

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It is difficult here to avoid intruding an autobiographical note. Three episodes come particularly to mind. The first occurred in West Africa while I was in my early thirties. I had been appointed to teach church history. My training for the purpose could be counted impeccable; what better exposure could the younger churches (as they were called in those days) have than to the ripe experience of the older churches, and especially of their oldest period? I had done my graduate work in patristics, and in Oxford, a temple of patristic study, and under the great F. L. Cross, its high priest. What I lacked, however, was something all my students already possessed: the actual experience of living in a second-century church. My early life as a teacher, seeking to impart the lessons of early church history, was somewhat frustrating. My rich compensation came from developing acquaintance with the local church and society. The students, of course, wrote down all I said; it was part of the ritual transfer of knowledge. Yet all the while they possessed keys that might have opened new doors into such vexed questions as apostolic tradition, whereas I had only secondhand accounts of earlier versions of those questions. I doubt if I did much good in my first five years as a church history teacher in Africa, but I am everlastingly grateful that I learned there that second-century Christianity (and third-century, and even first-century) can still be witnessed and shared in. A saying of F. L. Cross, my revered teacher, brought further illumination. “We know next to nothing about the ante-Nicene church.” He was right, as he usually was. But we now have better resources for understanding the patchwork of fragments of Christian literature that survive from before the age of the great councils. We will find that by examining the recent histories of the churches of Africa and Asia we will discover more than the Bodleian or the Vatican libraries can yield. The same themes, often the same media, occur. When we look at post-Apostolic, anti-Nicene materials, we find earnest, but rather turgid, moral homilies (much of Romans 12–16, little of Romans 1–8); eloquent episcopal letters displaying equally autocratic temper and moving self-sacrifice; apocalyptic visions of the fate of church members who behave badly; guidance on discerning the spirits (a prophet whose “word from the Lord” is to order a meal for himself is a false prophet, one who outstays reasonable hospitality is a false prophet); cheerful fictional correspondence between Jesus and a local king, showing how early this particular locality accepted the Gospel; decisions of synods determining who had what relations with which now-discredited government officials; regulations about exorcising the water prior to baptism; gospels with bigger and better miracles than the canonical ones. These anteNicene snapshots are found among heart-moving testimony and muckraking scandal, coded utterances, gnomic memorials, and thought-provoking graffiti.

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And all readily find analogies, and sometimes replications, in the recent and contemporary history of the churches that are now in their first and second centuries of existence! I yield to no one in desiring that the theological libraries of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific be equipped to bear the responsibilities in Christian scholarship that are theirs. But the scholars of those areas will have resources in their own experience, and in the present and recent experience of their churches, that may provide deeper insight than we have yet had into the surviving literature of ante-Nicene Christianity. The whole delirious mixture includes the proliferation of local varieties, the official and popular faces of the church, its moderates and its radicals, its bridge builders and its pacesetters, and its interaction with the mind-sets of the synagogue and the academy, the club and the street corner. Latter-day Protestants, nourished on the legacy of the sixteenth-century Reformation, are sometimes puzzled by the transition from the Apostle of the Gentiles to the Apostolic Fathers. How is it that leaders of churches associated with Paul, who treasured his words and revered his memory, people to whom we owe the very preservation of the Pauline letters—and who knew Greek better than we do—seem to have no idea of what we think Paul means by justification by faith? Scholars coming from the new second-century churches will probably see no puzzle at all. The first aspect is thus to reconceive the resources available for the study of the history of world Christianity. There are rich possibilities in rereading earlier history in the light of the living experience of the churches of the southern continents.

Church History, or Clan History?

The second aspect is suggested by another personal experience. After almost a decade teaching church history in Africa, I was again teaching church history, but this time in the theological faculty of an ancient Scottish university, in a course designed principally for candidates for the ministry of the Church of Scotland. The course was solidly planned and executed, demanding three years’ study. The first year was devoted to study of the early church (a concept that we must examine in a moment). The second year was concerned with the Reformation, for the Church of Scotland is a Reformed church. (Notice how effortless is the transition from Augustine to Luther, how cursory the consideration of the intermediate period in which Scotland, and most of northern Europe, became Christian. Very few Western theologians get much idea about

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the origins of Western Christianity from their church history course.) The third year was devoted to Scotland. There could hardly be a clearer statement of the purpose of a degree course in church history: it is to gain an understanding of Us As We Are. The general scope of this course, reflecting and incorporating the work of very formidable scholars, had probably changed little over the twentieth century. What had changed over that time, however, was the shape of the Christian constituency. A person following that course could gain an excellent grasp of how the Church of Scotland came to be what it was. But what hope would one have of understanding the true nature of the twentieth-century church, of which Scottish Christians were a part? What mental space was there to take in the idea of a world church in which Scotland was on the outside edge? Everything in ministerial training conspired to promote the idea that Scotland was at the center. But the students following the course, preparing for the ministry, were aware that the Church of Scotland was a church in recession, losing members every year since 1950. By devoting its ultimate focus to Scotland, the teaching of church history implicitly emphasized decline—a glorious past, but an uncertain future. What hope would Scottish congregations so served ever have of learning the full truth about the church? The traditional Scottish church history syllabus of that day—a rather blatant example of the genre—exhibited in conception and design the general features of most Western church history syllabuses. These provide a selection of topics designed to exhibit a particular tradition. Usually that tradition is partly geographic—that is, the selection represents influences bearing on a particular locality, such as Scotland, Germany, or North America. The geographical bias starts early. Church syllabuses tend to lose interest in the Greek-speaking church—though it was still the largest sector of Christianity—after the great creedal controversies. There are two reasons for this bias. The first is that Scottish, German, and American Christianity were more directly affected by events in the Latin-speaking area. And in this case, as in others, the geographic bias reinforces a linguistic and cultural one. The second reason is simply that the main principle of selection is confessional: the church that is the subject of church history is implicitly defined as the church we ourselves know—our tradition as it has developed. In principle, there is no harm in this focus, provided we know what we are doing, and provided also we do more than this. It is natural and right to seek to understand one’s own tradition; it means to know who one’s ancestors are. But there are lurking dangers, both historical and theological. One is that we think by study of our own tradition we are doing church history. We are not—we are doing our church history. If this is the only lens through which we

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study Christian history, we have bypassed the story of the whole people of God in favor of clan history. Such an approach reduces the area in which we look for the works of God, whereas the promises of God are to all who trust them. The Lord of Hosts is not to be treated as a territorial Baal. The second danger arises from inertia: There is little internal compulsion to review the construction of one’s historical framework as conditions change. This was the case with the Scottish example mentioned earlier, a framework that fairly interpreted the tradition around 1910 no longer did so sixty years later. As a result, the students, and the congregations beyond them, were actually being prevented from understanding their own church history. They were part of a larger, more dynamic Christian movement than they could ever realize from their education.

Reconception of the Syllabus

There is a third danger. Not only may we think we are engaged in church history when it is only clan history, but our version may be copied by people who have different ancestors. My most vivid recollection of this danger comes from my involvement a few years ago with a group of seminary teachers from various part of India. We were engaged in a workshop on the teaching of church history. It soon became clear that those present were using versions of syllabuses originating in Europe or, more often, North America. Most were also trying to teach some Indian, or sometimes Asian, church history which in most cases was taught as a separate course. That is, there was church history, and there was Asian church history. And (it was an entirely Protestant gathering) the latter, after the obligatory reference to St. Thomas, began in 1792 with William Carey. Church history was a given; the course offered for study was a seamless robe into which Asia could not readily be sewn. The striking thing about that gathering in India was that everyone seemed to realize that what they were doing was dire, that both the teachers and the students were bored with the process of transmitting and receiving an assemblage of facts that were completely unrelated to anything that actually excited any Indian Christian of today. But both must persevere; their task was theological education and church history was a constituent of theological education. And how could theological education, continue without one of its principal constituent disciplines? If the traditional Western church history syllabus is defective and obscuring for Western Christians, how much more stultifying is it for African and Asian Christians? The problem is not so much that it does not contain African or

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Asian church history, but that it provides no framework in which either can be considered as part of the whole Christian story. If the first aspect of our task is the reconception of resources, the second must surely be the reconception of syllabus. There is no way in which African and Asian church history can be incorporated within a traditional Western-type syllabus, nor can they be treated as appendages to Western church history.

Reconception of the Early Church

A more fundamental issue affects the teaching of church history in any setting. If Christianity is principally a non-Western religion, why should its Western period dominate the approach to its history? How great is that dominance can be divined if we examine more closely the assumptions underlying the standard forms of syllabus that have been exported all over the world. For instance, the majority of academic institutions provide courses on the history of the early church. It is safe to assume that in most cases “early church” means, substantially, the church in the Roman Empire. Undoubtedly, Western Christianity, Catholic and Protestant (and for that matter Greek and Russian Orthodox too), were shaped by events that took place in the church’s interaction with Hellenistic civilization and the Roman state. As Eusebius, the first great church historian recognized, the conversion of Constantine marks a turning point, a turning of the tide, a new epoch. But suppose we look at early Christianity outside the Roman Empire? Sup­ pose we look not only at the well-known movement westward from Antioch but at the eastward movement as well? The little buffer state of Osroene, on the Roman imperial frontier, was the early base of a remarkable Christian movement. In Edessa, its capital, are the remains of the oldest church building yet discovered, built at a time when no such thing was possible in the Roman Empire. Edessa, indeed, often does appear on maps of the early church. Unfortunately, it is usually at the eastern extremity of the map, yielding the idea that it represents the eastern extremity of a Christianity centered on the Mediterranean. If, however, we place Edessa at the western end of the map, and pigeonhole the Roman Empire for a while, we can observe a remarkable alternative Christian story. Early Christianity spread down the Euphrates valley until the majority of the population of northern Mesopotamia (i.e., modern Iraq) was Christian. It spread through the Arab buffer states, so that a third-century poet could announce that the social customs of the desert Arabs had changed. It moved down to Yemen and was adopted by the royal house. It moved steadily into

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Iran proper, into the Zoroastrian heartland of Fars, and northward to the Caspian. (It had previously moved west of the Caspian; the first nation to adopt Christianity as its state religion was not the Roman Empire but the Kingdom of Armenia.) This eastern Christianity that grew up in the Persian Empire had much in common with the form of the faith that was developing in the same period in the Greco-Roman world, but its cultural milieu was quite different. Like the earliest church of all, it was Semitic in language and in cast of thought and retained some of the features of that earliest church that were lost in the development of Hellenistic Christianity. Its immediate milieu was not solely Hellenistic, and its earliest leaders show little interest in the issues that so exercised those who were trying to translate the Gospel and the convictions associated with it into Greek terms. Arius caused hardly a ripple. With much less need to work with the categories and methods of philosophical discourse, these Christians had to take account of a range of indigenous and Eastern religious influences, including the effect of the Zoroastrian influence in local culture. There emerged a religion of intense moral seriousness, of spiritual athleticism, that spoke to a community marked by the eternal conflict of the principles of Light and Darkness and by the realities of death and judgment. A literature developed that gloried in displaying Christ’s victory over death and evil, rich poetic theology, and striking imagery, such as we find in Ephraem’s magnificent taunting songs about the defeat of humanity’s two discredited enemies, Death and Satan. Like their fellow Christians in the Roman Empire, the Christians in the Persian Empire fell foul of the principalities and powers. The persecutions under Decius and Diocletian are a well-known feature of the story of Christianity of the Roman Empire; the Christians of the Persian Empire knew still fiercer, and more sustained, pressure. In one forty-year period of the fourth century, no less than 16,000 Christians were put to death by the Persian emperor Sapor II. The cause for this particularly savage attack on Christians was a direct response to the increasing favor shown by Constantine to Christians. Anything so appealing to the Roman state as Christianity had now become could hardly appeal to Rome’s perennial enemy. The critical difference between the story of Christianity in the Persian Empire and that in the Roman Empire is that the Persian Empire never had a Constantine. Eastern Christianity never knew steady imperial favor or predictable political security. That factor in itself makes it a story worth studying along with that of its Roman neighbor. Eastern Christianity, however, had its periods of peace and substantial seasons of growth. It spread not only through but beyond the Persian Empire, along the trade routes by sea and by land. Its age-old presence in India is well

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known, its presence beyond India—in Sri Lanka, for instance—documented. That Eastern Christianity reached China is also often recognized; those interested in synchronous parallels might note that the missionary whose Chinese name was Alopen was putting Christianity before the Chinese Emperor in 635, much the same time as the faith was put before the king and council of Northumbria in northern England. Indeed, if we are thinking in terms of geographic extent, the eastward spread of the Christian faith across Asia is still more remarkable than the westward spread across Europe. Its spread was sustained through a period that in Western church history is substantially one of loss and decline. The arrival of the Muslim Arabs in Egypt and Syria, the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, marks the beginning of a period of eclipse—Latourette’s “thousand years of uncertainty.” Further east, Christianity was allowed a new period of flowering, so that the tenth century began a time of Christian growth. Right up to the fourteenth century the expansion of the faith went on among the shamanistic Turkic peoples who surrounded the Chinese Empire. It is a period little understood, and the sources are difficult of access; yet if we could understand it better, we might gain some clues to developments of much later periods—perhaps, for instance, some features of Korean Christianity, which also has a shamanistic background. One striking feature of the period is that during it Christianity became the faith of nomadic peoples. Many of the Turkic peoples were pastoralists on the move. We hear of bishops appointed to such peoples who had no fixed capital but moved with their communities. In the modern period of missionary endeavor it is hard to find examples of nomadic communities who embraced the Gospel and remained nomadic. If we look at the eastward as well as the westward Christian movement, and look at it on the grids of the Persian and Chinese Empires as well as on that of the Roman Empire, it is evident that there was almost a millennium and a half of Christian history in Asia before ever Western Christian missions to Asia began. It is equally evident that the early Christian history of Asia is not a marginal or ephemeral one, but substantial. The ancestors of modern Asian Christianity exist, but their names are not being called. And both Western and Asian Christians will remain impoverished by this omission until the work of reconception of the syllabus progresses.

Reconception of Early African Church History

African church history is equally distorted by attempts to make it an appendage of a general church history that is really a form of European clan history.

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Africa has a continuous Christian history since subapostolic times, a history that antedates not only Western missions to Africa but also the Islamic presence there. It is important for African Christian consciousness that this heritage be reflected in the syllabus. Even the part of African Christianity that lay within the Roman Empire has its ongoing importance, not least because, in Egypt, it has continued to the present day. The sheer luxuriance of early African Christianity is worth noticing. It was the source of such seminal figures as Origen, the first systematic theologian, and Tertullian, the first theologian of Pentecostalism. It was the birthplace alike of vernacular theology and of Western theology through the African lawyer-theologians Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine, and it was the source of innovative, socially conscious Christian movements like Donatism, which perhaps produced the first liberation theologians. We dare not separate these factors from modern Christianity in Africa any more than we can separate sub-Saharan Africa from the lands to its north. There are geopolitical forces that tie the whole continent together. In our own day Islam has become the focus of those forces. It is worth recalling that Christianity once had a similar role in African history. The Christianity of Egypt and Roman Africa normally reaches the standard syllabus. But equally significant for Africa is an aspect of early African church history that rarely does: the Christian movement in Africa outside the Roman Empire. With all the uncertainties and deficiencies of the sources, we nevertheless have enough material (with archaeology providing much that was not available to our predecessors) to illuminate one chapter of African Christian history that lasted nearly a millennium and another that has continued to the present. The thousand-year chapter is that of Nubia. This Christian community in what is now Sudan antedated the rise of Islam by five hundred years and for further five centuries held a unique place as a Christian state on the borders of the Islamic world. The continuing story is that of Ethiopia. That story begins with the Syrian brothers Frumentius and Aedesius, deflected from their original purpose when stranded in Aksum, in what is now Tigre, entering the service of the king and eventually seeing not only a church emerging but the conversion of the king. Again the archaeological sources illuminate the story; King Ezana’s inscriptions show his progress from polytheist to monotheist to Christian. The continuation of the story has many other surprises and many mysteries. In Ethiopia a tradition of Christianity grew up in the heart of Africa, in daily contact with the realities of African worldviews, that was recognizably part of the Great Church, and yet quite unlike anything that developed elsewhere. Ethiopian Christianity has incorporated the Old Testament to a degree unusual among Christians, and its people have often lived under conditions

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reminiscent of those of the Old Testament. Yet Ethiopia, for all its distinctiveness and all its long years of isolation, never entirely lost contact with the church outside. The foundation story makes the point clear: Frumentius went to the nearest center of the Great Church to ask for a bishop for the church he had founded. The patriarch sent him back as bishop. That patriarch was Athanasius. Century after century afterward, the Ethiopian church drew its bishop—its only bishop—from Alexandria, thereby recognizing the universality of the church, even in its very particular circumstances. The significance of Ethiopia for all African Christians—as symbol of Africa indigenously, primordially Christian, and as symbol of a Christian tradition completely independent of the West—has been seized all over the African continent. To this meaning countless churches and societies across the breadth and depth of Africa bear witness by taking “Ethiopian” as part of their title.

Catholic and Protestant, Mission in Common

If the new situation calls for reconception of the object and content of the syllabus, it calls also for reconception of the significance of some elements within it. A single example must suffice. For Western Christians, the sixteenthcentury Reformation (perhaps it would be better to say Reformations) is of defining significance, a watershed. But in the total history of Christianity its significance may be different and not necessarily so defining. Certainly it continues to determine the outside affiliations and the church-consciousness of Christians across the world, but for some historical purposes the differences between the various types of Western Christians have been less significant than the similarities. This fact may be particularly true in tracing the place of Western Christianity in the non-Western world. From the point of view of Africa and Asia, the missionary movement—Catholic and Protestant—has been a single story since the sixteenth century, the Catholic Reformation and the Evangelical Revival alike necessary to it. Protestants as much as Catholics owe the conception of a missionary movement, based on people sent to persuade and commend but unable to coerce, to the first encounter of Western Christians with the non-Western world. The missionary movement emerged from the realization that Asia and Africa could not be won for Christ by the methods used to extend Christendom in Mexico and Peru. In the West it is possible to recount Catholic and Protestant histories separately from one another. In many parts of the world it is not; the stories interlock. The first Protestant missionary in China owed his initial grounding

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in Chinese to the presence in the British Museum and the Royal Society of a translation of the Gospels and a Chinese-Latin dictionary made by Jesuit missionaries of an earlier century. He owed his first breakthrough in China to the assistance of Chinese Catholics. There is a single Christian story in China from the sixteenth century; nay, even that story needs its prologue in the movement that began nine centuries earlier when Alopen and his Syriac-speaking colleagues reached the emperor’s court by way of central Asia. There is another reason why we may need to reconceive the historical significance of the Reformation. We have become used to the assumption that Christianity exists in three more or less permanent modes: Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox. These categories, however, reflect events in Western history; in the West they have a significance that they cannot have in the nonWestern world. They will continue to be valid outside the West as indicators of organization and affiliation, but they will likely become less and less useful as descriptors. A large segment of African Christianity, for instance, cannot be called either Catholic or Protestant in any meaningful sense: it is simply African. Furthermore, its features are to be found among thousands of African believers whose affiliation is Catholic or Protestant. There are “traditions” in the Christian world community today that reflect modes of Christian existence in the same way as the labels “Catholic,” “Protestant,” and “Orthodox” have hitherto done. It seems likely that, if we are to acquire historical understanding of Christianity as a non-Western religion, the reconception of the categories by which Christians have been described will be required. The situation of the global church at the end of the second millennium calls us to a reconception of the task of the Christian historian and offers a new vision to direct the study, teaching, and writing of Christian history. The task of research will be immeasurably expanded beyond what has ordinarily been in view, and vast unexplored sources are already at hand to support that research. The church historian’s task will now need more than a simple, natural evolution from current practice. It will require a new breed of church historians with all the skills and virtues nourished in the older school but with a range of others as well, skills and virtues demanded by the new environment of Christianity in the southern continents. It is time for the recommissioning of church historians.

From Missions to Mission to Beyond Missions: The Historiography of American Protestant Foreign Missions Since World War II Dana L. Robert In 1964, Professor of History of Missions at the University of Chicago R. Pierce Beaver wrote From Missions to Mission, a reflection book published by the YMCA. In his small book, this eminent American mission historian of the midtwentieth century reviewed the early part of the century and saw a Christianity that had ridden to success on the coattails of Euro-American imperialism and prestige. Two world wars, however, had demonstrated to growing nationalist movements in the developing world that Christianity was not part of a superior culture, but was an agent of colonialism. Beaver went on to analyze the current climate for world missions—militant nationalism, urbanization, secularization, repudiation of the West, and revivals of non-Christian religions. To move forward in such a context, he said, missions must begin to cooperate among themselves and with younger nonwestern churches on behalf of Christ’s mission. Beaver saw embodied in the World Council of Churches the beginning of new approaches to mission that would stress reconciliation over competition, and peace and justice issues alongside proclamation. Missions from the west should become a common worldwide enterprise: pluralism must give way to unity. Beaver’s small volume, its prescience notwithstanding, illustrates the danger of historians drawing on the past in order to predict the future. The ecumenical movement that Beaver touted as the source of new forms of mission had within ten years so modified the definition of mission that confusion over its meaning was widespread in mainline churches. When Beaver retired from the University of Chicago in 1971, his post was eliminated, a practice followed in numerous mainline institutions during the 1970s. “Foreign missions” had become “universal mission,” only to evaporate into generalizations. Oddly enough, the North American evangelical missionaries whom Beaver described in 1964 as “sectarian and partisan,” and as disrupting the unity of mission “for Source: Robert, D. L., “From Missions to Mission to Beyond Missions: The Historiography of American Protestant Foreign Missions Since World War II,” in H. S. Stout and D. G. Hart (eds.), New Directions in American Religious History, New York – Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 362–393. Copyright © 1997 by SAGE. Reprinted by Permission of SAGE Publications, Ltd.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004399594_021

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the first time in three hundred years,” (98) surpassed mainline missionaries in number and vigor. Today, with pluralism celebrated and competition among religions fierce, with nondenominational missions dwarfing the efforts of the old mainline, with indigenous Pentecostalism exploding in nooks and crannies around the world, the prospect for mission in the twenty-first century is dynamic and diverse but bears little resemblance to the top-down, unified witness Beaver envisioned in 1964. The vibrancy of multicultural Christianity on every continent has completed the shift from “mission” to “beyond missions.” The road traveled so painfully by American Protestantism since the Second World War, from separate “missions” to unified “mission” to “beyond missions,” has been trod as well by historians. Mission history prior to World War II was largely a denominational affair, told from the perspective of efforts by individual denominations to spread their form of Christianity around the globe.1 R. Pierce Beaver and other mission historians of the post-World War II generation saw their vision of Protestant foreign missions through the lens of ecumenical unity. Similarly, American secular historians were captivated by an interpretation of Protestant missions as a symbol of American identity. Important to both the secular and the church historians was the transition from missions to mission, from a pluralistic enterprise to the symbol of either national or ecclesiastical cooperation. However, the social changes that Beaver described in 1964 accelerated throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, narrowing not only the common religious vision but the secular one as well. By the late 1960s, there was scarcely a work written on American Protestant missions that did not focus on their role in promoting imperialism. Historical concern for mission died like the chairs of missiology in mainline Protestant institutions: interest was either gone or confined to the negative. The 1980s witnessed an explosion of renewed scholarly interest in the history of American Protestant missions. The acknowledgment of pluralism both in American society and within American Protestantism freed mission history from its captivity to unity. Intellectual historians discovered a full range of American mission theory that had lain forgotten in mission libraries for decades. Feminist historians recognized the dominance of women in the missionary movement and used the ample documentation provided by mission sources to uncover hidden angles on American women. The “sectarian” evangelicals excoriated by Beaver in 1964 had reached a level of institutional 1 Even Yale professor Kenneth Scott Latourette’s magisterial seven-volume history of world missions was largely a compilation of denominal activity in the course of Christianity’s propagation throughout the world. Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of the Expansion of Christianity, 7 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1937–1945).

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maturity and ecclesiastical dominance where critical historical analysis had become both possible and necessary. Church historians realized that missions were a central preoccupation of not only the “mainline,” but of ethnic Americans, women assorted subcultures, and Roman Catholics as well. From the ashes of “mission” reemerged “missions,” a lively and diverse enterprise, no longer able to fit comfortably into the outgrown garb of denominational history, Christian unity, or American identity. Before the historiographic trail from mission singular to missions plural is explored, a caveat is in order. This essay seeks to cover only “foreign” missions, defined as those efforts to spread Protestant Christianity from North America to cultures and contexts outside its borders. The United States as a mission field itself, including outreach to immigrants and to indigenous peoples of North America, deserves another full essay and cannot be considered adequately without including Roman Catholicism. Arguments can be made that foreign missions should include missions to native Americans prior to the conquest of their territory by the United States, or that the convenient but missiologically archaic term “foreign” should be replaced by the nongeographic term “crosscultural.” However, for the sake of convenience and to remain true to the way that American Protestants have generally used the term “foreign,” this essay will exclude the historiography of North America itself as a mission field.

Protestant Foreign Missions and the Mission of America

Intellectual history’s search for national identity, for a central unifying idea of what it means to be an American, dominated the study of Protestants and foreign missions during the mid-twentieth century. When the field of American intellectual history emerged between the two world wars, historians anchored the meaning of America to its concept of national mission. Unable to base their unity on common ethnic backgrounds, Americans apparently drew their identity from common purpose—shared commitment to democracy, voluntarism, individual rights, and free enterprise. With the United States entering the fray against both fascism and communism, Ralph Gabriel published The Course of American Democratic Thought.2 To Gabriel and his followers, the public function of the mission idea was so compelling that it diverted attention from its historic roots in American Protestant 2 Ralph Henry Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought: An Intellectual History Since 1815 (New York: Ronald Press, 1940).

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missions to non-Christians. When Gabriel, Perry Miller, and others created “American intellectual history” in the 1930s and 1940s, they loosened the idea of mission from its theological context, secularized it, and made it the basis for Protestant-dominated national identity. For American intellectual historians, to be an American meant de facto to be a Protestant. To be a Protestant meant to be in mission. Therefore, the syllogism concluded, to be an American was to participate in mission. Foreign missions, in the plural, became a manifestation of the singular mission of America. By the mid-twentieth century, intellectual historians had subsumed the specifically religious dimensions of the American mission impulse under the issue of nationalism. In 1952, Perry Miller, who had rescued the intellectual life of American Puritans from oblivion, published the important essay “Errand into the Wilderness,” in which he traced the origins of American identity to the Puritans’ desire to propagate pure religion through emigration from Europe.3 The abundance of land, however, worked against disciplined purity and created the national mission from the failure of the religious one. Adapting to their environment, the American Puritans did not abandon their “errand to the wilderness” but transformed it into the process of Americanization. Miller’s essay symbolized for a generation of thinkers the essential unity of American tradition and identity, and the captivity of religious motivations to secular ones. Following World War II, a new generation of church historians deepened the focus on mission’s relationship to nationalism. With the World Council of Churches being founded in 1948 as the “United Nations of Christendom,” the 1950s was not only the heyday of “consensus history,” but of the Protestant ecumenical movement, a powerful force that deeply influenced mainline church historians. Although they acknowledged that spiritual motives were primary in Protestant mission, church historians like R. Pierce Beaver at the University of Chicago, William Richey Hogg of Southern Methodist University, and Robert T. Handy at Union Theological Seminary nevertheless examined missions through the prism of unity, either in terms of national identity or as a basis for ecumenical cooperation.4

3 Miller’s essay was reprinted in Perry Miller, Errand Into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1956). 4 See R. Pierce Beaver, Ecumenical Beginnings in Protestant World Mission: A History of Comity (New York: Thomas Nelson & Son, 1962); William Richey Hogg, Ecumenical Foundations: A History of the International Missionary Council and its Nineteenth Century Background (New York: Harper, 1952); Robert T. Handy, We Witness Together: A History of Cooperative Home Missions (New York: Friendship Press, 1956).

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Robert Handy’s interest in church–state relations, the ecumenical movement and in other Protestant efforts to initiate the kingdom of God on earth, such as the Social Gospel and home missions, made him a perceptive analyst of Protestant mission’s contribution to nationalism. Handy explored how turn-of-the-century Protestants used foreign missions to propagate so-called Christian civilization.5 Missions became an imperialistic crusade to spread western civilization throughout the world, as well as the motivating force behind the ecumenical movement. Mission-oriented Protestants “felt themselves part of one crusade for the evangelization, the Christianization, and the civilization of the world” (135). In the first twenty years of the twentieth century, Protestants, according to Handy, “easily idealized the culture and democracy of America. There was a considerable transfer of religious feelings to the civilization and the nation” (139). Missionary forces had unwittingly become involved in “religious nationalism.” The idea that Protestant foreign missions were a tool of nationalism and by extension abroad, imperialism, proved to be an irresistible thesis that has generated numerous monographs from the late 1950s until the present. After consensual interpretations of American history were challenged by the social upheavals of the 1960s, and the ecumenical movement splintered on the shoals of secularized theologies and political disunity, mission increasingly became a metaphor not for national virtue but for imperialistic excesses. The mission of America and by association Protestant foreign missions no longer represented America’s virtue, but its fatal flaw. Monographs on American missions and imperialism tended to focus on a particular geographic region or moment in history. One of the earliest works to explore the foreign policy implications of missionary nationalism was an excellent book produced in 1958 on China by Paul H. Varg.6 He concluded that the struggle initiated by missionaries between Chinese and western culture was so severe that “American nationalism threatened to triumph over the religious” (ix). In 1961, Kenneth MacKenzie wrote on the Philippines, showing how foreign missions were a reason for President William McKinley’s decision to keep the Philippines as a colony in 1898.7 The role of New England in early-nineteenth-century missionary imperialism was explored by John A. 5 Robert Handy, A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). 6 Paul H. Varg, Missionaries, Chinese and Diplomats: The American Protestant Missionary Movement in China, 1890–1952 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958). 7 Kenneth MacKenzie, The Robe and the Sword: The Methodist Church and the Rise of American Imperialism (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1961).

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Andrew III.8 Andrew argued that American foreign missions were in fact the result of “cognitive dissonance” by Congregationalists who sought to compensate for their loss of power at home by extending it abroad to places like the Pacific Islands. One of the finest examinations of missionary involvement in American foreign policy was Joseph Grabill’s study of the Protestant missionary impact on the Near East. Running against the current of seeing missions as supportive of American imperialism, Grabill argued that missionaries promoted internationalism and the protection of minorities in the Ottoman Empire.9 Other more recent monographs on American missions’ relationship to nationalism and imperialism include Rosa del Carmen Bruno-Jofre’s study of Methodist mission education in Peru.10 Based on primary sources and written by a Peruvian, Methodist Education in Peru argues that Methodist educational missionaries imported American ideologies couched in theological formulations and the theories of John Dewey. In 1986, Kenton Clymer produced a finely nuanced study of American missionary attitudes toward American colonialism and Filipino culture.11 Following the pattern set by intellectual historians, the historiography of American Protestants and foreign missions evolved from identifying the Protestant missionary impulse as the source of American identity (from missions plural to mission singular), to mission as the source of both ecclesiastical and national unity, and from nationalism to imperialism. Given the historical reality that Americans engaged in political imperialism far less than Europeans, who carved out empires in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, it has been important to define the precise relationship between missionary activity and imperialism. Two valuable articles have been written on the nature of American missionary imperialism in general. The first of these was by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., whose essay “The Missionary Enterprise and Theories of Imperialism” equated American missions with cultural imperialism.12 Missionaries may not have per8 John A. Andrew III, Rebuilding the Christian Commonwealth: New England Congregation­ alists and Foreign Missions, 1800–1830 (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1976). 9 Joseph L. Grabill, Protestant Diplomacy and the Near East: Missionary Influence on American Policy, 1810–1927 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971). 10 Rosa del Carmen Bruno-Jofre, Methodist Education in Peru: Social Gospel, Politics, and American Ideological and Economic Penetration, 1888–1930 (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1988). 11 Kenton Clymer, Protestant Missionaries in the Philippines, 1898–1916: An Inquiry into the American Colonial Mentality (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1986). 12 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “The Missionary Enterprise and Theories of Imperialism,” in The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, ed. John K. Fairbank (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 336–73.

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sonally wielded economic or political power, he argued, but they represented the purposeful aggression of American culture against the ideas and cultures of other people. In 1982, William R. Hutchison reasoned that the broad support of Americans for foreign missions at the turn of the century was because of the shared belief that “Christianity as it existed in the West had a ‘right’ not only to conquer the world, but to define reality for the peoples of the world.”13 Apologists for American missions were not so much agents of American colonialism as the ideologues of the movement, providing a “moral equivalent” for American imperialism. The tendency inherited from intellectual history to evaluate Protestant foreign missions in relation to American nationalism has had both strengths and weaknesses as an interpretive framework. The greatest strength has been its refusal to evaluate the mission movement apart from the larger stream of American history: American missionaries, after all, retained American attitudes no matter where they worked. The benefits, however, must be held in tension with the weaknesses of nationalist mission history. For one thing, nationalist mission history could turn the mission impulse into a hireling at the service of national identity. In the 1950s, parallel support for national and church unity made missionaries into heroes, the shock troops of the eminently compelling “American way”; by the late 1960s, the missionary had become the villain of American foreign policy. In either case, until the 1980s missionary thought and activity was seldom studied in its own right, nor was the role of the missionary as transmitter of cross-cultural information to America taken seriously. In sinologist John K. Fairbank’s words, “the invisible man of American history” was the missionary.14 13 William R. Hutchison, “A Moral Equivalent for Imperialism: Americans and the Promotion of ‘Christian Civilization,’ 1880–1910,” in Missionary Ideologies in the Imperialist Era: 1880– 1920, ed. Hutchison and Torben Christensen (Aarhus, Denmark: Christensens Bogtrykkeri, 1982), 167–78 (174). 14 Among secular historians, sinologists have made the greatest use of American missionary documentation to illuminate their field of research and thus represent an exception to the academic neglect of missions. Some of the best scholarly studies of American missionaries both collectively and individually are by sinologists. In particular, the research of Harvard professor John King Fairbank and of his students and followers represents the finest body of work that analyzes the role of missions in relation to foreign policy, American nationalism, internationalism, and cultural interaction. Fairbank’s interest in the “missionary factor” transformed the history of United States–China relations. For valuable studies of American Protestant missions in China, see for example Paul A. Cohen, China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Antiforeignism, 1860–1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963); Kwang-Ching Liu, ed., American Missionaries in China: Papers from Harvard Seminars (Cambridge, Mass.: East Asian Research Center Harvard University, 1966); James C. Thomson, While China Paced

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Another weakness of nationalist mission history was that its focus on identity led it to concentrate on the so-called mainline churches as the “thought leaders” of American Protestantism. Consensus intellectual history was biased toward texts produced primarily by white male New Englanders, to the exclusion of women, conservative evangelicals, Anabaptists, African Americans, Pentecostals, and other groups deemed marginal or nonexistent. Popular piety was ignored in favor of formal theological and political pronouncements. Intellectual sources superseded other forms of documentation, with the social biography of the missionary force seldom examined except where it fed nationalist identity or Christian unity, as in the case of the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions.15 One of the most egregious failures of nationalist mission history was, surprisingly enough its parochialism. With the exception of studies of the ecumenical movement or of missionaries in China, scarce were assessments of Protestant missionary activity in relation to the mission work of other nations, or in relation to the indigenous cultures and religions affected by the missionary. Seldom was the question raised about how people of other cultures viewed the mission enterprise; indigenous converts became by implication “running dogs” of American imperialism. In effect, the study of Protestant foreign missions leaned toward becoming a subsidiary of a political agenda, either in the service of national identity or in the debunking of the same. West: American Reformers in Nationalist China, 1928–1937 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969); Shirley S. Garrett, Social Reformers in Urban China: The Chinese Y.M.C.A., 1895–1926 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970); Sidney A, Forsythe, An American Missionary Community in China, 1895–1905 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971); Jessie Gregory Lutz, China and the Christian Colleges, 1850–1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971); John K. Fairbank, ed., The Missionary Enterprise in China and America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974); Ellsworth C. Carlson, The Foo-chow Missionaries, 1847–1880 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974); Philip West, Yenching University and Sino-Western Relations, 1916–1952 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976); James Reed, The Missionary Mind and American East Asia Policy, 1911–1915 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); Suzanne Wilson Barnett and John King Fairbank, eds., Christianity in China: Early Protestant Missionary Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Committee on American-East Asian Relations of the Department of History with the Council on East Asian Studies Harvard University, 1985); Jessie Gregory Lutz, Chinese Politics and Christian Missions: The Anti-Christian Movements of 1920–28 (Notre Dame, Ind.: Cross Cultural Publications, 1988). 15 See Clifton Phillips, “The Student Volunteer Movement and Its Role in China Missions, 1886–1920,” in The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, ed. John K. Fairbank (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 91–109; Valentin H. Rabe, The Home Base of American China Missions, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978).

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The Discovery of Mission Theory

Despite the use of selected mission thought as a basis for constructing national identity, until the 1980s American intellectual historians seemed uninterested in the full range of mission thinking regardless of its undeniable importance for American history and culture. The causes for neglect were several: the captivity of missions to the national mission of America, the embarrassment of secular historians at ideas smacking of either conservatism or “proselytization,” and neglect of cross-cultural issues in history generally. Interest in mission theory was confined to the missiologists, who were seldom in dialogue with intellectual historians. The noteworthy exception was R. Pierce Beaver, whose commitment both to missiology and to history caused him to write books with “cross-over” value. In the 1950s he produced two of the earliest articles written on American mission theory from an historical perspective.16 In 1967, Beaver collected the works of the most important nineteenthcentury mission theorist, Rufus Anderson of the American Board.17 In rediscovering Anderson, Beaver uncovered the source of much mission theory that Americans had long taken for granted, particularly the indigenous church principles of self-support, self-government, and self-propagation. Another valuable source book for mission thought was Beaver’s collection of early American missionary sermons.18 In 1968 he contributed a groundbreaking overview of American missionary motivation.19 Although outside the scope of this essay, Beaver also wrote pioneer scholarly works on the relationship of missions to American Indians.20 16 R. Pierce Beaver, “North American Thought on the Fundamental Principles of Missions During the Twentieth Century,” Church History 21 (4) (1952): 3–22; “Eschatology in American Missions,” in Basileia. Walter Freytag zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. J. Hermelink and H. J. Marguli (Stuttgart: Evang. Missionsverlag, 1959), 60–75. 17 R. Pierce Beaver, ed., To Advance the Gospel: Selections from the Writings of Rufus Anderson (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1967). 18 R. Pierce Beaver, ed., Pioneers in Mission: The Early Missionary Ordination Sermons, Charges, and Instructions (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1966). 19 R. Pierce Beaver, “Missionary Motivation Through Three Centuries,” in Reinterpretation in American Church History, ed. Jerald Brauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 113–51. 20 R. Pierce Beaver, Church, State, and the American Indians (St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia, 1966); “Methods in American Missions to the Indians in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Journal of Presbyterian History 47 (2) (1969): 124–48; and “The Churches and the Indians: Consequences of 350 Years of Missions,” in R. Pearce Beaver, ed., American Missions in Bicentennial Perspective (Pasadena, Calif.: William Carey Library, 1977), 275–331.

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In the 1970s, a smattering of works on the history of mission thought appeared to whet the appetite of historians. In 1970 Denton Lotz wrote a dissertation at the University of Hamburg, “‘The Evangelization of the World in This Generation’: The Resurgence of a Missionary Idea Among the Conservative Evangelicals.” While Lotz’s dissertation was never published, it was important because not only did it deal seriously with American mission thought, but it also traced a key idea from its origins in the late-nineteenth-century evangelical mainline to conservative groups in the present. Also, 1970 saw the publication in Holland of J. A. DeJong’s work on millennialism and missions, which traced a particular theme in mission thought prior to the beginning of explicitly American foreign missions.21 Charles Chaney in 1976 published a thorough study of mission thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.22 Despite the importance of Chaney’s work for American intellectual history, the book did not attain the recognition it deserved because it was published by a mission press. In 1977 appeared the seminal essay by missiologist and historian Charles Forman of Yale, “A History of Foreign Mission Theory.”23 Forman had discovered in the mission library of Yale Divinity School 150 serious works written by American mission theorists between 1890 and 1950, virtually none of which had been read by intellectual historians. Roger Bassham placed American mission thought in its global context in a work on ecumenical, evangelical, and Roman Catholic mission theology since World War II.24 The academic study of American mission theory received a major boost when in 1977 missiologist Gerald Anderson revived the periodical Occasional Bulletin from the Missionary Research Library that in 1981 became the Inter­ national Bulletin of Missionary Research, now the largest circulation scholarly mission periodical in the world. Anderson had written a doctoral dissertation in 1960 that was the first comprehensive study of twentieth-century Protestant mission theory.25 With an historian’s training and sensibilities, Anderson began a series on the legacies of major nineteenth- and twentieth-century mission theorists, recruiting experts to write biographical sketches of such 21 J. A. DeJong, As the Waters Cover the Sea: Millennial Expectations in the Rise of AngloAmerican Missions, 1640–1810 (Kampen: Kok, 1970). 22 Charles Chaney, The Birth of Missions in America (South Pasadena, Calif.: William Carey Library, 1976). 23 Charles Forman, “A History of Foreign Mission Theory,” in Beaver, ed., American Missions in Bicentennial Perspective, 69–140. 24 Roger Bassham, Mission Theology, 1948–1975: Years of Worldwide Creative Tension: Ecu­ menical, Evangelical, Roman Catholic (Pasadena, Calif.: William Carey Library, 1979). 25 Gerald Anderson, “The Theology of Missions: 1928–1958” (Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 1960).

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mission thinkers as E. Stanley Jones, Daniel Fleming, Rufus Anderson, and A. J. Gordon. The series continues today, and every quarter the mission thought of another hitherto neglected mission theorist is brought to light. Probably more than anything else, Anderson’s legacy series has created scholarly interest in mission theory among missiologists and evangelical church historians. Apart from the series, the International Bulletin of Missionary Research publishes other articles relevant to American mission theory.26 In 1988, Anderson’s own article, “American Protestants in Pursuit of Mission: 1886–1986” appeared in a centennial volume for the American Society of Church History.27 His article was a helpful overview of both mission thought and activity over a century. One further recent article of Gerald Anderson’s extensive corpus requires mention, namely, bis overview of the entire field of mission research, including history.28 Currently, Anderson is editing the Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, which when published will be the first-ever work of its kind. Mission theory moved out of the missiological ghetto and into mainstream history with the 1987 publication of William R. Hutchison’s eagerly awaited history of American Protestant mission theory.29 As an intellectual historian rather than a missiologist, Hutchison examined mission theory “as American.” While granting integrity to the body of mission thought, Hutchison’s book descended from intellectual history’s quest for national identity. Errand to the World represented the first book-length attempt to grapple with a full range of mission thought. Its sources were nevertheless limited almost entirely to “high texts” from the Reformed tradition, broadly defined. Hutchison’s book, while a brilliant piece of work, was the beginning rather than the end of mainstream historical research into Protestant mission theory. 26 For example, see Dana L. Robert “The Origin of the Student Volunteer Watchword,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 10 (4) (1986): 146–49; Nathan D. Showalter, “Crusade or Catastrophe? The Student Missions Movement and the First World War,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 17 (1) (1993): 13–17. Anderson collected many of the articles on the mission thought of outstanding nineteenth and twentieth century mission leaders into Gerald H. Anderson, Robert T. Coote, Norman A. Horner, James M. Phillips, eds., Mission Legacies: Biographical Studies of Leaders of the Modern Missionary Movement (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1994). 27 Gerald Anderson, “American Protestants in Pursuit of Mission; 1886–1986,” in A Century of Church History: The Legacy of Philip Schaff, ed. Henry Warner Bowden (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 168–215. Reprinted in the International Bulletin of Missionary Research 12 (3) (1988); 98–118. 28 Gerald Anderson, “Mission Research, Writing, and Publishing: 1971–1991,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 15 (4) (1991): 165–72. 29 William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

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Hutchison’s focus on the “American-ness” of Protestant mission thought has been shared by historians of nonwestern Christianity. In 1970 Norman Etherington wrote “An American Errand into the South African Wilderness.”30 Etherington applied his extensive knowledge of South African mission history to show how American Board efforts to evangelize the Zulus in the 1830s were an attempt to reproduce “the American experience among the primitive peoples of Africa” (62). An important example of viewing American missions as quintessentially American was the essay by Scottish professor Andrew Walls, “The American Dimension in the History of the Missionary Movement,”31 Walls is probably the most profound analyst of global Protestant mission history today, and his article analyzed the particularities of both American thought and culture as evident in Protestant missions. The history of Protestant mission theory in its fullness is just coming into its own; increasingly, secular scholars are realizing that they cannot generalize about missionaries but must take into account the ideological tradition out of which they operated, not to mention their social location. The historical study of Protestant mission theory has its limitations, however. For one thing, as essentially an exercise in intellectual history, it faces the same problems of sources as nationalist mission history. Another problem is its tendency not to be grounded in study of actual missionary practice. Until studies of mission theory can be cross-checked with how such theories played themselves out in different mission fields, and in comparison with non-American missiologies, the full implications of mission thought are unknowable. Lacking also have been historical examinations of mission theory in the broader context of American theology. Like nationalist mission theory, for historians the study of Protestant mission theory so far has been the most helpful in understanding American identity.

Protestant Missions and Pluralism

One fruitful by-product of the collapse of consensus over American identity in the 1960s and 1970s was the unshackling of foreign missions from national purpose. Historians began to realize that foreign missions were not an activity 30 Norman Etherington, “An American Errand into the South African Wilderness,” Church History 39 (1) (1970): 62–71. See also Etherington’s full study, Preachers Peasants and Politics in Southeast Africa, 1835–1880 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978). 31 Andrew Walls, “The American Dimension in the History of the Missionary Movement,” in Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Missions, 1880–1980, ed. Joel Carpenter and Wilbert Shenk (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1990), 1–25.

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confined to male New England Congregationalists in the early nineteenth century, but were intrinsic even to apparently marginal Protestant groups, ethnic minorities, and women. By the 1980s, pluralistic mission history became possible, with the relationship of various groups to nationalism only one of the questions asked of the data. Ethnic and gender analysis, the techniques of social and cultural history, and increased historical awareness by denominations ranging from Mennonites to Southern Baptists to Nazarenes to Assemblies of God produced a range of new studies, although it must be said that most of the denominational literature has been ignored by the academy. Missions and Ethnicity In 1982, three books appeared on the mission history of African Americans. Despite its coverage of a narrow time period, the best overview of the subject was Walter Williams’s exploration of the way in which missions in various denominations stimulated interest in Africa among African Americans and thus prepared the way for pan-Africanism.32 Sylvia Jacobs edited a volume that included articles on African American missionaries, motivations, and missionary ideology.33 The third important book on African Americans that appeared in 1982 was by David W. Wills and Richard Newman,34 Their edited volume contained valuable essays on prominent antebellum missionaries, such as Daniel Coker, Francis Burns, Alexander Crummell, and Lott Carey. Wills and Albert Raboteau are coediting “African-American Religion: A Documentary History Project” that will contain considerable information on African American contact with Africa, including foreign missions. Although brief overviews exist in broader denominational histories, booklength treatments of African-American missions by denomination are rare. An exception was Sandy D. Martin’s history of black Baptist missions to Africa.35 In 1989, James T. Campbell wrote a dissertation on the relationship between 32 Walter Williams, Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa, 1877–1900 (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982). 33 Sylvia Jacobs, ed., Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982). Jacobs has written articles on the missiological contributions of African American women, including “Three Afro-American Women: Missionaries in Africa, 1882–1904,” in Rosemary Keller, Louise Queen, and Hilah Thomas, eds., Women in New Worlds: Historical Perspectives on the Wesleyan Tradition, vol. 2 (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon, 1982), 268–280; and “Their ‘Special Mission’: Afro-American Women as Missionaries to the Congo, 1894–1937,” in Jacobs, 155–176. 34 David W. Wills and Richard Newman, eds., Black Apostles at Home and Abroad: Afro-Americans and the Christian Mission from the Revolution to Reconstruction (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982). 35 Sandy D. Martin, Black Baptists and African Missions: The Origins of a Movement, 1880–1915 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer, 1989).

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black Americans and South Africans, the role of the AME in educating South Africans, and debates over “industrial education” for blacks.36 Biographies of important black denominational mission leaders that have appeared recently are of James Theodore Holly, founder of the Episcopal Church in Haiti; Lott Carey, first African American missionary to Liberia; Alexander Crummell, Episcopal missionary; Henry McNeal Turner, African Methodist Episcopal bishop and pan-Africanist; and William Sheppard, Presbyterian missionary to the Congo.37 Many ethnic Protestant denominations such as Lutherans, Mennonites, and Moravians have received more attention for their work with immigrants or their substantial work with Native Americans than for overseas missions.38 With overseas mission work organized relatively late, the historiography of traditionally ethnic denominations is not as well-developed as that of the Protestant mainstream. Nevertheless, a number of fairly recent full-length accounts appeared in the 1970s and 1980s.39 Articles on particular aspects 36 James T. Campbell, “Our Fathers, Our Children: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa” (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1989). Campbell’s revised dissertation was published as Songs of Zion: The American Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). See also the earlier dissertation by Josephus R. Coan, “The Expansion of the Missions of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Africa, 1896–1908” (Ph.D. dissertation, Hartford Seminary, 1961). 37 David M. Dean, Defender of the Race: James Theodore Holly, Black Nationalist Bishop (Boston: Lambeth Press, 1979); Leroy Fitts, Lott Carey: First Black Missionary to Africa (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1978); Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Alexander Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); John R. Oldfield, Alexander Crummell (1819–1898) and the Creation of an African-American Church in Liberia (Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 1990); Stephen Ward Angell, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and African-American Religion in the South (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1992); William E. Phipps, The Sheppards and Lapsley: Pioneer Presbyterians in the Congo (Louisville, Ky.: Presbyterian Church, USA, 1991). 38 For example see Ann Fienup-Riordan, The Real People and the Children of Thunder: The Yup’ik Eskimo Encounter with Moravian Missionaries John and Edith Kilbuck (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); Earl P. Olmstead, Blackcoats among the Delaware: David Zeisberger on the Ohio Frontier (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991). 39 See G. W. Peters, Foundations of Mennonite Brethren Missions (Hillsboro, Kans.: Kindred Press, 1984); Elaine Rich, Mennonite Women: A Story of God’s Faithfulness, 1683–1983 (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1983); Theron Schlabach, Gospel Versus Gospel: Mission and the Mennonite Church, 1863–1944 (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1980); George F. Hall, The Missionary Spirit in the Augustana Church (Rock Island, Ill.: Augustana Historical Society, Augustana College, 1984); Albert T. Ronk, History of Brethren Missionary Movements (Ashland, Ohio: Brethren Church, 1971); and James C. Juhnke, A People of Mission: History of General Conference Mennonite Overseas Missions (Newton, Kans.: Faith and Life Press, 1979).

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of these missions are occasionally found in denominational periodicals and newsletters.40 Missions and Evangelicalism One of the most important directions in the pluralization of Protestant mission history has been recent study of twentieth-century evangelicals. Although evangelicals have been the most active proponents of foreign missions since 1945, until 1990 there was virtually no examination of evangelical missions as a whole. The reason for such neglect was probably that most critically trained church historians were biased toward church unity and saw twentiethcentury evangelicals to be fissiparous and on the margins of American history. The first attempt at a general interpretation appeared as the result of a conference sponsored by the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, published in 1990 under the title Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Missions, 1880–1980. The volume contained valuable essays on conservative evangelical mission theory and on evangelical missionaries in several parts of the world, and an important essay on fundamentalist missions by Joel Carpenter.41 Probably the greatest contribution of Earthen Vessels was that it opened the way for further studies on the topic of evangelicalism and missions. It also included an article by Grant Wacker that explored the views of liberal Protestants toward other religions.42 There have been several good studies of twentieth-century evangelicals in actual mission situations, although what exists is only a drop in the bucket of what is possible.43 The most detailed analysis of an evangelical/fundamentalist mission in relation to the indigenous culture in which it worked was David Sandgren’s study of the Africa Inland Mission in Kenya.44 Sandgren’s research was remarkable in its use of oral interviews obtained from indigenous converts, but its use of missionary documentation was narrow. The area in which 40 For example, see Martin Schrag, “Societies Influencing the Brethren in Christ Toward Missionary Work,” Notes and Queries in Brethren in Christ History 8 (January 1967): 1–12. 41 Joel Carpenter, “Propagating the Faith Once Delivered: The Fundamentalist Missionary Enterprise, 1920–1945,” in Carpenter and Wilbert Shenk eds., Earthen Vessels (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1990), 92–132. 42 Grant Wacker, “Second Thoughts on the Great Commission: Liberal Protestants and Foreign Missions, 1890–1940,” 281–300. Wacker is continuing to work on the theme of liberalism and missions and presented a paper on missionary Pearl S. Buck at the December 1993 meeting of the American Society of Church History. 43 See for example Allen V. Koop, American Evangelical Missionaries in France, 1945–1975 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1986). Ralph Covell’s Mission Impossible: The Unreached Nosu on China’s Frontier (Pasadena, Calif.: Hope, 1990) reflected one aspect of the work of Conservative Baptists in the 1940s. 44 David Sandgren, Christianity and the Kikuyu: Religious Divisions and Social Conflict (New York: P. Lang, 1989).

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the study of evangelical missions has excelled is in-house denominational or parachurch institutional histories. Although the in-house materials are of varying quality and are usually pioneer attempts to chart the basic parameters of the missionary work, some of them contain real critical insight.45 In 1993, the Wesleyan/Holiness Studies Center at Asbury Theological Seminary held a conference on “Mission in the Wesleyan/Holiness Traditions,” which should result in a volume on the Holiness movement in American missions, to be edited by David Bundy. When Pentecostalism emerged from the Holiness movement, it carried with it the Holiness movement’s commitment to missions. At present, no survey of Pentecostal mission history exists, although the fine work of Gary McGee on the Assemblies of God must be mentioned.46 An in-house periodical that contains frequent high-quality articles on Pentecostal mission history is Assemblies of God Heritage, edited by archivist Wayne Warner. Finally, reference must be made to the Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, which contains valuable entries on Pentecostal missionaries, mission organizations, and mission theory.47

45 The following is a list of some of the better histories of evangelical mission agencies: Baker J. Cauthen et al., Advance: A History of Southern Baptist Foreign Missions (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1970); Robert L. Niklaus, John S. Sawin, and Samuel J. Stoesz, All for Jesus: God at Work in the Christian and Missionary Alliance Over One Hundred Years (Camp Hill, Pa.: Christian Publications, 1986); Robert Wood, In These Mortal Hands: The Story of the Oriental Missionary Society, the First Fifty Years (Greenwood, Ind.: OMS International, 1983); J. Fred Parker, Mission to the World: A History of Missions in the Church of the Nazarene through 1985 (Kansas City, Mo.: Nazarene, 1988); Gary B. McGee, This Gospel Shall Be Preached: A History and Theology of Assemblies of God Foreign Missions, 2 vols. (Springfield, Mo.: Gospel, 1986, 1989); Edwin L. Frizen, Jr., 75 Years of IFMA, 1917–1992 (Pasadena, Calif.: William Carey Library, 1992); Lester A. Crose, Passport for a Reformation: A History of the Church of God Reformation Movement’s Missionary Endeavors Outside N. America (Anderson, Ind.: Warner Press, 1981); A. J. Broomhall’s six-volume history of the China Inland Mission, Hudson Taylor and China’s Open Century (London: Hodder & Stoughton and the Overseas Missionary Fellowship, 1981–); H. Wilbert Norton, To Stir the Church: A Brief History of the Student Foreign Missions Fellowships, 1936–1986 (Madison, Wis: Student Foreign Missions Fellowship, 1986); David M. Howard, The Dream That Would Not Die: The Birth and Growth of the World Evangelical Fellowship, 1846–1986 (Exeter, England: Paternoster Press; and Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1986); William R. Estep, Whole Gospel—Whole World: The Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1845–1995 (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1994). 46 See McGee, This Gospel  … Shall be Preached. Articles of interest by McGee include “The Azusa Street Revival and Twentieth-Century Missions,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 12 (2) (1988): 58–61; and “Assemblies of God Mission Theology: A Historical Perspective,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 10 (4) (1986): 166–170. 47 Stanley M. Burgess, Gary B. McGee, and Patrick H. Alexander, Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (Grand Rapids: Regency Reference Library, 1988).

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The surge of interest in evangelical history in general has stimulated a number of works on the “home base,” the context out of which twentieth-century conservative Protestant missions emerged. Bible schools provided most of the training for evangelical missionaries, and Virginia Lieson Brereton explored their history in 1990.48 Timothy Weber examined the ideological developments that produced the turn-of-the-century fundamentalist missionary movement, including missions to the Jews.49 My doctoral dissertation on mission theorist Arthur T. Pierson, published in Korean in 1988, looked at the transition from denominational missions to faith missions during the same time period.50 Evangelical and Pentecostal mission history from many angles will continue to increase in importance as interpreters gain historical distance from the topic, and it becomes self-evident that the future of world Protestantism belongs more to Pentecostalism than to the old “mainline.” The story of how Pentecostalism impacted missionary activity and emerging indigenous Christianity is just beginning to be told.51 Topics in the greatest need of future research include evangelical missionary attitudes toward other cultures and religions, the relationship between American and non-western evangelicals, and studies of evangelical work “in the field.” The most serious barriers to evangelical mission history are the tendency toward hagiography among evangelicals for whom missionary biography is primarily a source of spiritual inspiration, and the activistic orientation that provides power for missions but considers historical analysis to be a waste of time. An important exception to the biography as hagiography tendency with a focus on evangelicals was Ruth Tucker’s biographical history of missions published in 1983.52 The biggest problem in writing twentieth-century evangelical history is that of sources. Activistic evangelicals are notoriously poor at keeping records, 48 Virginia Lieson Brereton, Training God’s Army: The American Bible School, 1880–1940 (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1990). 49 Timothy Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism 1875–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). 50 Dana L. Robert, “Arthur Tappan Pierson and Forward Movements of Late-NineteenthCentury American Evangelicalism” (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1984); published in Korean by Yangsuh Publishing Company, 1988. An earlier dissertation on the origin of faith missions was Marybeth Rupert, “The Emergence of the Independent Missionary Agency as an American Institution, 1860–1917” (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1974). 51 See, for example, the unpublished paper by Daniel H. Bays, “The Impact of Early Pentecostalism on Established American Missions in China,” written for a conference on “Pentecostal Currents in the American Church” held in March of 1994. 52 Ruth Tucker, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: A Biographical History of Christian Missions (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1983).

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especially when their theology predisposes them to look toward an imminent second coming of Christ. The age of the telephone and e-mail has also preempted traditional source material such as letters, personal journals, and regular mission correspondence. Fortunately, places like the Billy Graham Center Archives at Wheaton College and the Assemblies of God Archives are collecting oral histories of evangelical and Pentecostal missionaries. Another important resource is the Ida Grace McRuer Missions Resource Centre, sponsored by missiologist Jon Bonk at Providence College and Seminary in Otterburne, Manitoba. The center collects ephemeral material such as fund-raising literature and prayer letters sent free of charge by nearly six hundred evangelical mission organizations. Missions and Women Aside from work on evangelicals, the greatest amount of recent historical work on a subgroup in Protestant missions has been on women. Since the late nineteenth century, women have constituted a numerical majority in the mission field, and in all denominational traditions they have dominated educational and social work, as well as mission support in local churches. In terms of the transmission of American culture abroad, the role of missionary women has been paramount. Although the early twentieth century saw a massive amount written by women on women and missions, little of this penetrated the maledominated history profession. The bias toward intellectual history also kept the contributions of missionary women hidden from view because women tended to produce “popular” writing. Once again missiologist R. Pierce Beaver pioneered the way for historians when he wrote All Loves Excelling: American Protestant Women in World Mission.53 An institutional history of the woman’s missionary movement, Beaver’s book reflected his bias toward Christian unity and therefore concentrated on women in the mainline churches and the movement toward ecumenism. Consequently, there was no reference to twentieth-century evangelical or Pentecostal women in the first edition. A revised edition issued in 1980 claimed that the women’s missionary movement was “the first feminist movement in North America” but failed to define feminism or put the material into the context of women’s history. Beaver’s volume is still useful as an

53 R. Pierce Beaver, All Loves Excelling: American Protestant Women in World Mission (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1968). Republished as American Protestant Women in World Mission: History of the First Feminist Movement in North America (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1980).

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institutional overview of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century mainline women in mission. By the late 1970s feminist historians had begun to appreciate the importance of studying missionary women for understanding gender relations in America. As a popular movement involving millions of women, the women’s missionary movement became a filter through which women historians could analyze the roles of Protestant women in America. Barbara Welter opened the topic with her essay “She Hath Done What She Could: Protestant Women’s Missionary Careers in Nineteenth-Century America.”54 Welter argued that although women’s careers as missionaries were varied and fulfilling, mission careers for women typified the phenomenon whereby men abandoned an occupation to women when they lost interest in it. In 1980, Joan Jacobs Brumberg issued a study of the Judson family, Adoniram and his three wives Ann, Sarah, and Emily. Adoniram and Ann Judson were the pioneer missionaries of the Congregationalists and later the Baptists.55 Although Brumberg’s group biography was an important social study of evangelicalism, its chief importance was in showing how missionary wives as role models contributed to the selfunderstanding of American Protestant women. In 1984, Jane Hunter forcefully demonstrated the value of examining women missionaries as representatives of American female culture in a doctoral dissertation-turned-book.56 Relying on the correspondence and journals of mainline China missionaries, Hunter uncovered how female missionaries were representative of the struggle of middle-class Protestant women between public outreach and private home life. Women missionaries were “the most successful emissaries” of American culture abroad (xiv). Continuing the exploration of missionary women as “civilizers,” or promoters of western culture and social change, Leslie A. Flemming in 1989 edited a volume on women missionaries and social change in Asia.57 54

Barbara Welter, “She Hath Done What She Could: Protestant Women’s Missionary Careers in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Quarterly 30 (Winter 1978): 624–38. 55 Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Mission for Life: The story of the family of Adoniram Judson, the dramatic events of the first American foreign mission, and the course of evangelical religion in the nineteenth century (New York: The Free Press, 1980). 56 Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). 57 Leslie A. Hemming, Women’s Work for Women: Missionaries and Social Change in Asia (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1989). Of particular importance to the question of women’s missions and social change were the articles by Flemming, “New Models, New Roles: U.S. Presbyterian Women Missionaries and Social Change in North India, 1870–1910”; and Marjorie King, “Exporting Femininity, Not Feminism: Nineteenth-Century U.S. Missionary Women’s Efforts to Emancipate Chinese Women.” Women and social change

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The largest contingent of American Protestant women abroad in the early nineteenth century were the Congregational missionary women in Hawaii. The Hawaii women were in a unique position to reproduce New England female culture in a controlled setting where it could be studied, and ample documentation through correspondence exists. Studies of these women began to appear in the 1980s. Char Miller discussed the impact of domestic responsibilities on their missionary work in “Domesticity Abroad: Work and Family in the Sandwich Island Mission, 1820–1840.”58 A book-length examination of the stresses and strains of missionary life, particularly of enforced domesticity and gender discrimination, appeared in 1989 by Patricia Grimshaw.59 The most recent and well-nuanced examination of the Hawaiian missionary wives, particularly sensitive to their religious motivations, was Mary Zwiep’s 1991 study of the first group of Congregational missionary women.60 Consideration of the home base of the woman’s missionary movement began with the publication of a book by Patricia Hill, the first in-depth analysis of the mainline women’s missionary movement at its height.61 Hill argued that the success of the women’s missionary movement was based on its gender-based ideology, and the collapse of the movement occurred when professionalization and secularization undercut its distinctive rationale. The most important inter-Protestant women’s organization at the height of the missionary movement was undoubtedly the Young Women’s Christian Association. The history of the missionary wing of the YWCA was ably chronicled by Nancy Boyd.62

was also the focus of Alison R. Drucker’s article, “The Influence of Western Women on the Anti-Footbinding Movement, 1840–1911,” in Richard W. Guisso and Stanley Johannesen, eds., Women in China: Current Directions in Historical Scholarship (New York: E. Mellen Press, 1981), 179–99. 58 Char Miller, “Domesticity Abroad: Work and Family in the Sandwich Island Mission, 1820–1840,” in Miller, ed., Missions and Missionaries in the Pacific (New York: E. Mellen Press, 1985), 65–90. 59 Patricia Grimshaw, Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989). See also her earlier article, “Christian Woman, Pious Wife, Faithful Mother, Devoted Missionary: Conflicts in Roles of American Missionary Women in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii,” Feminist Studies 9 (3) (1983): 489–521. 60 Mary Zwiep, Pilgrim Path: The First Company of Women Missionaries to Hawaii (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). 61 Patricia Hill, The World Their Household: The American Woman’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870–1920 (Ann Arbor, Mich.; University of Michigan Press, 1985). 62 Nancy Boyd, Emissaries: The Overseas Work of the American YWCA, 1895–1970 (New York: Woman’s Press, 1986).

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Gender analysis from a conservative evangelical perspective first appeared in 1988 when Ruth Tucker produced a biographical history of woman’s missions.63 Although Guardians of the Great Commission was anecdotal rather than systematic, it contained helpful observations on domesticity, gender relations, and mission theory scattered throughout the biographical sketches. The greatest significance of Tucker’s book was that it was the first book on women in mission to cover twentieth-century evangelical women. Denominational historians have produced material of quality on women and missions in their own tradition. Noteworthy among these are studies of missionary women in the Southern Baptist, Episcopal, Presbyterian, United Methodist, Congregational, and Canadian Methodist denominations.64 A number of denominational women’s organizations have issued popular books containing biographical sketches of prominent missionaries or home base leaders.65 One of the most illuminating biographical studies of women leaders 63

Ruth Tucker, Guardians of the Great Commission: The Story of Women in Modern Missions (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Academie Books, 1988). 64 See Catherine B. Allen, A Century to Celebrate: History of Woman’s Missionary Union (Birmingham, Ala.: Woman’s Missionary Union, 1987), a history of the powerful women’s auxiliary of the Southern Baptist Convention. Allen also wrote an excellent biography of Lottie Moon, “patron saint” of Southern Baptist missions, The New Lottie Moon Story (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1980). Episcopal missionary women received treatment in Mary Sudman Donovan’s A Different Call: A History of Women’s Ministries in the Episcopal Church, 1850–1920 (Wilton, Conn.: Morehouse, 1986). Lois A, Boyd and R. Douglas Brackenridge produced the insightful Presbyterian Women in America: Two Centuries of a Quest for Status (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983) which explored the role of women’s missions in the Presbyterian context. Of predecessor denominations to the United Methodist Church, Audrie Reber wrote Women United for Mission: A History of the Women’s Society of World Service of the Evangelical United Brethren Church, 1946–1968 (Dayton, Ohio: Board of Missions of the United Methodist Church, 1969); and Ethel Born wrote By My Spirit: The Story of Methodist Protestant Women in Mission, 1879–1939 (Cincinnati: Women’s Division of the General Board of Global Ministries, 1990). Barbara Brown Zikmund, ed. Hidden Histories in the United Church of Christ (New York: United Church Press, 1984), contained an article by Zikmund and Sally A. Dries entitled “Women’s Work and Woman’s Boards.” An important recent book on Canadian Methodists was Rosemary R. Gagan’s A Sensitive Independence: Canadian Methodist Women Missionaries in Canada and the Orient, 1881–1925 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992). 65 These include Catherine Allen, Laborers Together with God: 22 Great Women in Baptist Life (Birmingham, Ala.: Woman’s Missionary Union, 1987); Octavia W. Dandridge, A History of the Women’s Missionary Society of the African Methodist Church 1874–1987 (New York: Women’s Missionary Society, 1987); and They Went Out Not Knowing: An Encyclopedia of 100 Women in Mission (NY: The Division; Cincinnati: General Board of Global Ministries, United Methodist Church, 1986). Heroes of the Faith (Springfield, Mo.: Assemblies of God Division of Foreign Missions, 1990), stories of Assemblies of God missionaries, is an example of a book that contains information on both men and women.

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at the home base is Louise A. Cattan’s treatment of Helen Barrett Montgomery and Lucy Waterbury Peabody. The two American Baptist women were important American leaders of the ecumenical women’s missionary movement in the twentieth century.66 The discovery of women missionaries by feminist historians has been a valuable contribution to American history. Analysis of women missionaries permits study in a microcosm of self-conscious, articulate groups of women who either deliberately or despite themselves were bearers of American culture to other groups. Feminist history of the woman’s missionary movement has been outstanding in its sensitivity to cultural issues, even though the explanatory category of separate male and female “spheres” has probably been overemphasized. Missionary women represented Protestant Christianity both at its most self-denying and at its most culturally imperialistic. The weakness of the feminist history approach toward missionary women, however, parallels the weakness of nationalist mission history. Religious piety has sometimes been treated as a screen for domesticity or for social control of nonwestern women, as cultural imperialism rather than being taken seriously on its own terms, thus reflecting a bias against considering religiosity as a category separate from race, class, or gender. Feminist analysis of women missionaries has concentrated on American gender identity and ideology, much as nationalist history focused on American identity. Unsurprisingly, feminist historians have studied almost exclusively mainline Protestant women during the height of the imperialist era. Except for self-avowed evangelical historians, the twentieth-century conservative evangelical woman has been relegated to marginality, as retrograde in the development of the woman’s movement. A recent theme in women’s missionary history is to move away from preoccupation with how missionaries did or did not reflect the domestic women’s movement and social change, toward examination of women’s motivations, piety, and mission theory both in their own right and in relation to the total missionary enterprise. Although written in different styles and for different audiences, Mary Zwiep’s and Ruth Tucker’s aforementioned works are examples of this approach. Emphasizing a comparative approach so as to analyze how 66 Louise A. Cattan, Lamps are for Lighting: The Story of Helen Barrett Montgomery and Lucy Waterbury Peabody (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1972). Between them, Montgomery and Peabody attended the Edinburgh 1910 conference, began publication of Christian literature for women around the world, wrote study materials for women’s mission groups, and acted as leaders of the combined women’s mission boards. Peabody founded a faith mission, and Montgomery was first woman moderator of the American Baptist Convention. See also William H. Brackney, “The Legacy of Helen B. Montgomery and Lucy W. Peabody,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 15 (4) (1991): 174–78.

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social context affected the development of women’s mission thought, I have written several articles in preparation for a forthcoming history of American women’s mission theory.67 The examination of American women’s mission history by nonwesterners is another new development that promises to help historians evaluate American culture and theology from the so-called receiving end. The December 1986 issue of Indian Church History Review focused on the roles of women missionaries in India.68 Kwok Pui-lan’s recently published study of Chinese women and their appropriation of Christianity is a model of how western missionary women’s materials need to be used to evaluate the missionary movement from broader perspectives than those defined by American agendas.69 Missions and Denominationalism Finally, in the discussion of the pluralization of Protestant missionary history, it is important to revisit the idea of mainline denominational history. Now that the hold of nationalist interpretations of mainline mission history has been broken, the time has come to look at the mission work of Methodists, Presbyterians, American Baptists, Congregationalists, Disciples, and others with new eyes. How did denominational mission movements not only reflect American identity and create church unity, but change over time in connection with the wider debates in American Christianity? How have missions transmitted knowledge of other cultures back to American Protestants? How have the social reform agendas of the mainline been evaluated by indigenous 67 Dana Robert, “Evangelist or Homemaker: The Mission Strategies of Early NineteenthCentury Missionary Wives in Burma and Hawaii,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 17 (1) (1993): 4–12. A recent article published in the journal of the South African Missiological Society, “Mount Holyoke Women and the Dutch Reformed Missionary Movement, 1874–1904,” Missionalia 21 (August 1993): 103–23, explored how American women’s mission theory, piety, and culture influenced the missionary culture of white South Africans. My forthcoming book is the first overview of women’s mission thought and treats mainline Protestant, evangelical, and Catholic women missionaries. Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of Mission Theory (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, forthcoming). 68 It included articles by Indian scholars such as S. Immanuel David, “A Mission of Gentility: The Role of Women Missionaries in the American Arcot Mission, 1839–1938,” 143–52. A study of the interaction between Indian and American missionary women was the dissertation by American Charlotte Staelin, “The Influence of Missions on Women’s Education in India: The American Marathi Mission in Ahmadnagar, 1830–1930” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1977). 69 See Pui-lan Kwok, Chinese Women and Christianity, 1860–1927 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992).

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historians? Rather than seeing Protestant mission as a monolith, were there differences among denominations that led to differing relationships with non-Christian cultures and religions? How has the drastic change in mission thought and the decline of the mainline missionary force since the 1950s affected the vitality and self-understanding of American Protestantism? From the perspective of the twenty-first century, how should historians evaluate the record of mainline missions in the twentieth century, the most productive century in mission history thus far? Rare is the denominational mission history that integrates the contributions of men and women into a balanced whole, or that considers missions as essentially a relationship between different cultures rather than implicitly an imposition by one on another. The rewriting of mainline denominational mission history is one of the key tasks for mission history in the 1990s. Beginnings have been made, but much more needs to be done. The interest in taking a new look at mainline mission history was exemplified by a recent volume of reprinted essays edited by church historian Martin E. Marty.70 In 1992, Ian Douglas completed a dissertation on Episcopal mission structures and theology covering the mid-twentieth century.71 Also in 1992 appeared Gerald De Jong’s study of the Reformed Church in China.72 James Cogswell, former associate general secretary for overseas ministries of the National Council of Churches, is writing a comprehensive history of Presbyterian missions. Both Presbyterian and Mennonite mission historians hope to meet with colleagues in the Third World to stimulate the collaborative writing of mission history from both sides. The advent of denominational oral history projects in the 1980s has pulled together some of the resources necessary for fresh evaluations of twentiethcentury denominational history. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, for example, has been engaged in an oral history project on women in mission. Denominational church history magazines have frequently published articles on particular aspects or fields of American mission history and are one of the

70 Martin E. Marty, ed., Missions and Ecumenical Expressions (New York; K. G. Saur, 1993). Unfortunately the articles in Marty’s volume are mostly concerned with the “old” issues of American identity and imperialism. 71 Ian Douglas, “Fling Out the Banner: The National Church Ideal and the Foreign Mission of the Episcopal Church” (Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 1992). See his related article “‘A Light to the Nations’: Episcopal Foreign Missions in Historical Perspective,” Anglican and Episcopal History 61 (4) (1992); 449–81. 72 Gerald DeJong, The Reformed Church in China, 1842–1951 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1992).

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best sources for local studies.73 The role of American denominations in specialized forms of mission is another area needing research.74 A subsidiary focus of the emerging interest in denominational history is the renewed appreciation for missionary biography. From the time of David Brainerd’s diary in the eighteenth century, to Harriet Newell’s journal in the nineteenth, to the numerous biographies of Ann and Adoniram Judson in the nineteenth and twentieth, missionary biography has inspired Protestants to become missionaries. Evangelical Christians continue to read missionary biographies of twentieth-century heroes.75 Historians are realizing, however, that missionary biography is not necessarily hagiography: critically done, it can illuminate aspects of American identity, cross-cultural relations, and theological development. A case in point is Char Miller’s biography of the Bingham family of Hawaii over multiple generations.76 Where, we might ask, is the study of the Dulles family, which began with Myron and Harriet Winslow in Ceylon in 1819, and continued into India, culminating in John Foster Dulles as secretary of state under President Dwight D. Eisenhower? Where is the critical study of the Samuel Moffetts or the Horace Underwoods, whose families have spent a century in Korea? 73

See for example Mark Douglas Norbeck, “False Start: The First Three Years of Episcopal Missionary Endeavor in the Philippine Islands, 1898–1901,” Anglican and Episcopal History 62 (June 1993): 215–36; Dana L. Robert, “Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Missions to Russians in Manchuria, 1920–1927,” Methodist History 62 (January 1988): 66–83; “The United Presbyterian Church in Mission: An Historical Overview,” Journal of Presbyterian History 57 (Fall 1979, full issue); “Whom Shall I Send?” American Baptist Quarterly (September 1993, full issue); Peggy Brase Siegel, “Moral Champions and Public Pathfinders: Antebellum Quaker Women in East Central India,” 81 Quaker History (Fall 1992): 87–106; Dennis C. Dickerson, “Bishop Henry M. Turner and Black Latinos: The Mission to Cuba and Mexico,” The A.M.E. Church Review (January–March 1993): 51–55. 74 A large recent history of missions to seamen includes a section on American activity in this field. Roald Kverndal, Seamen’s Missions: Their Origin and Early Growth (Pasadena, Calif.: William Carey Library, 1986). 75 See for example, Elizabeth Elliot, Shadow of the Almighty: The Life and Testament of Jim Elliot (New York: Harper Collins, 1989); Olive Fleming Liefeld, Unfolding Destinies: The Untold Story of Peter Fleming and the Auca Mission (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1990); Mary H. Wallace, compiler, Profiles of Pentecostal Missionaries (Hazelwood, Mo.: World Aflame Press, 1986); Anna Marie Dahlquist, Burgess of Guatemala (Langley, B.C.: Cedar Books, 1985); Andres Kung, Bruce Olson, Missionary or Colonizer? (Chappaqua, N.Y.: Christian Herald Books, 1981); John Dekker, Torches of Joy (Westchester, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1985). 76 Char Miller, Fathers and Sons, The Bingham Family and the American Mission (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982).

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In addition to the missionary dynasties, the lives of “ordinary” missionaries should be mined for the perspective they provide on American history. Privately printed and limited-edition missionary journals are sometimes issued by family members. Important missionaries sometimes write their autobiographies.77 These first-person accounts are the primary sources of twentieth-century missions and should be collected by libraries interested in mission history, but frequently are not considered of sufficient interest to justify the expense. Some missionary biographies are published by university presses with an interest in particular geographic areas. Probably the part of the world that has generated the largest number of mainline missionary biographies is China.78 Edwin Mellen Press publishes a mission series that includes scholarly missionary biographies and collections of writings.79 Autobiographies and biographies of leading “home base” leaders and ecumenists have also found a market.80 Among missionary biography, denominational history magazines, and archival projects, there is reason to hope that mainline mission history is at the beginning of a much-needed renaissance.

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See, for example, John Leighton Stuart, Fifty Years in China (New York: Random House, 1954); Ralph E. Dodge, The Revolutionary Bishop Who Saw God at Work in Africa: An Autobiography (Pasadena, Calif.: William Carey Library, 1986); Don Richardson, Peace Child (Ventura, Calif.: Regal Books, 1974); Loren Cunningham, Is that Really You, God? (Seattle: Chosen Books/Baker Books, 1984). 78 A few that have been published in recent years include E. G. Ruoff, ed., Death Throes of a Dynasty: Letters and Diaries of Charles and Bessie Ewing, Missionaries to China (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1990); Elsie Landstrom, ed., Hyla Doc: Surgeon in China Through War and Revolution, 1924–1949 (Fort Bragg, Calif.: Q.E.D. Press, 1991); Ralph Covell, W. A. P. Martin: Pioneer of Progress in China (Washington D.C.: Christian University Press, 1978); Edward V. Gulick, Peter Parker and the Opening of China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973); Adrian A. Bennett, Missionary Journalist in China: Young J. Allen and His Magazines, 1860–1883 (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1983); Stephen Endicott, James G. Endicott: Rebel Out of China (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980); Irwin T. Hyatt, Jr., Our Ordered Lives Confess: Three Nineteenth-Century American Missionaries in East Shantung (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976). 79 See for example Daniel M. Davies, The Life and Thought of Henry Gerhard Appenzeller (1858–1902): Missionary to Korea (Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 1988); Char Miller, ed. Selected Writings of Hiram Bingham—Missionary to the Hawaiian Islands, 1814–1869: To Raise the Lord’s Banner (Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 1988). Mellen Press also plans to publish Appenzeller’s collected writings. 80 See for example C. Howard Hopkins, John R. Mott, 1865–1955 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1979); John Coventry Smith, From Colonialism to World Community: The Church’s Pilgrimage (Philadelphia: Geneva Press, 1982): and Marilee Pierce Dunker, Days of Glory, Seasons of Night (Grand Rapids Mich.: Zondervan, 1984).

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Protestant Missionary History in International Perspective

The study of Protestant foreign missions has been important to American history because it has shown how commitment to the spread of Christian faith, myth, and ritual has helped to shape American identity, both in religious and secular realms. The continued importance of mission history, however, lies not only in what it will reveal about changing American self-perceptions, but in its function as a bridge to understanding the United States in relation to the rest of the world. The triumphalistic tendency to see the world as the playground of “Yankees” is being left in the past; new world realities demonstrate that American Protestantism’s importance for the future might not lie so much in its own destiny, but in the role it has played in the rise of Christianity in the nonwestern world. Even as Protestantism struggles to hold its own in the west, the growth of the church in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are shifting the dynamic center of Christianity to the southern hemisphere. Future considerations of American Protestant foreign missions must take into account that the old Rome is giving way to the new; Boston and Nashville are yielding to Seoul and Nairobi. Increasingly, the significance of missions for American history lies in international relationships. Scholars should no longer study missionaries without recognizing how they were affected by indigenous peoples, or how the cultures in which they worked shaped their mission theories. Historians should study how the interaction of Christianity with other religions has shaped its message in different settings. Since American Protestantism resides in a global village, it must be studied in relation to European, African, Asian, and Latin American Christianity. Indigenous historians of Christianity bring their own agendas to the source material and can thereby enrich with new perspectives American selfunderstanding. One theme that international scholars have isolated from their study of American Protestant missions is the role played by missions among the larger forces of modernization in nonwestern cultures: American missions were frequently an important path to westernization and/or nationalism.81 81 American historians who are fluent in languages other than English are also beginning to evaluate the influence of American missionaries in disseminating modern ideas that affected larger issues in nonwestern cultures. For example, historian Richard Elphick is working on a manuscript that analyzes how missionaries inserted liberal ideas into twentieth-century South African political discourse. A critical usage of mission sources can also reveal how indigenous Christians opposed mission policy and learned from the unwitting missionaries ways to promote their own independent agendas. See the case study by Myra Dinnerstein, “The American Zulu

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Ethicist Masao Takenaka examined how American missionaries contributed to the transition from feudalism during the Meiji Restoration in Japan.82 In 1967, historian Sushil Madhava Pathak studied the interplay between Hinduism and Protestant missionary thinking, including the social modernization and Hindu renaissance stimulated by Christianity.83 Sociologist Chung Chai-sik has written on how progressive Koreans in the late nineteenth century deliberately accepted American missionaries as agents of modernization.84 H. K. Barpujari developed an important study of Baptist missionaries among the Assamese. He showed how through their mission work, translation work, and study of the people’s culture, missionaries played a vital role in the identity formation and rejuvenation of the Assamese in Northeast India.85 Studies of missionaries by indigenous scholars demonstrate convincingly how the values and practices offered by missionaries were used by converts for their own ends: converts were not passive victims of a monolithic American imperialism.86 The influence of American missionaries on indigenous evangelism and church-planting in nonwestern cultures is another topic addressed by indigenous church historians. To take the influence of American Protestant missions on South African churches as but one example, two works by South Africans have traced the influence of conservative American faith missionaries on the founders of black Zionist churches.87 A Rhodes University dissertation dealing

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Mission in the Nineteenth Century: Clash over Customs,” Church History 45 (2) (1976): 235–46; Dana L. Robert, “The Methodist Struggle Over Higher Education in Fuzhou, China, 1877–1883,” Methodist History 34 (April 1996): 173–89. Masao Takenaka, Reconciliation and Renewal in Japan (New York: Friendship Press, 1957). Sushil Madhava Pathak, American Missionaries and Hinduism: A Study of their Contacts from 1813 to 1910 (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1967). Chai-sik Chung, “Tradition and Ideology: Korea’s Initial Response to Christianity from a Religious and Sociological Perspective.” Asia Munhwa 4 (1988): 115–46. Another article by Chung on the themes of missions, westernization, and interfaith relationships is “Confucian–Protestant Encounter in Korea: Two Cases of Westernization and De-Westernization,” in Peter K. H. Lee, ed., Confucian–Christian Encounters in Historical and Contemporary Perspective (Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 1991), 399–433. H. K. Barpujari, The American Missionaries and North-East India, 1836–1900 (Delhi: Spectrum Publishers, 1986). Unlike mission history that sought to show “results,” critical studies by indigenous historians familiar with American and indigenous sources sometimes demonstrate that the influence of decades of mission work was modest. In her study of American Board missionaries among the Bulgarians, for example, Tatyana Nestorova shows that Bulgarians took from the missionaries what would promote their national interest and ignored what else the missionaries had to offer. Tatyana Nestorova, American Missionaries Among the Bulgarians: 1858–1912 (Boulder, Colo.: East European Quarterly, 1987). Christiaan Rudolph De Wet, “The Apostolic Faith Mission in Africa: 1908–1980. A Case Study in Church Growth in a Segregated Society” (Ph.D. dissertation, University

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with the American sources of Indian Pentecostalism in South Africa was written by Gerald John Pillay.88 In 1992, the influence of American Methodism on black Methodism in South Africa was explored in an article by South African missiologist Daryl M. Balia. Balia showed how the famous revivals of American Methodist William Taylor were in fact dependent on the indigenous preacher Charles Pamla.89 Increasingly, works on church-planting written by indigenous historians show that American missionaries interacted with and were dependent on indigenous Christians for their success in evangelism. The “lone ranger” western missionary capable of single-handedly evangelizing thousands of people was a rare or nonexistent phenomenon. The new era of world Christianity demands that American mission history be considered as part of a whole, as part of the dynamic interplay of cultures and religions that characterizes our world today. The global nature of Christianity in many ways gives a greater urgency to the study of Protestant mission history than it has had previously. There is a greater legitimacy in the academy to studying American foreign missions today than there was twentyfive years ago, a factor perhaps of the dawning realization that Christianity is global, and that mission history can provide an entree into the larger reality. Increasingly, Protestant foreign missions are being studied by international teams of scholars who bring with them the expertise in various languages and histories that American historians lack. One example of the team-based approach is the North Atlantic Missiology Project, a series of conferences held on both sides of the Atlantic to develop and compare British and North American themes in mission history. The project seeks to examine how Christian mission interacted with other religions, and how other religions shaped Christianity at points of initial contact. Missiologists Andrew Walls of the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World (University of Edinburgh) and Lamin Sanneh of Yale Divinity School have held a series of consultations bringing together American with European mission historians, along with secular historians in related fields. Sinologist Daniel Bays of the University of Kansas is heading a project funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts to create a data base of Cape Town, 1989); G. C. Oosthuizen, The Birth of Christian Zionism in South Africa (KwaDlangezwa, South Africa: University of Zululand, 1987). 88 Gerald John Pillay, “A Historico-Theological Study of Pentecostalism as a Phenomenon within a South African Community,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Rhodes University, 1983). 89 Daryl M. Balia, “Bridge Over Troubled Waters: Charles Pamla and the Taylor Revival in South Africa,” Methodist History 30 (January 1992): 78–90. For an analysis of how the Taylor Revival fit into the African social context, see the earlier article by Wallace G. Mills, “The Taylor Revival of 1866 and the Roots of African Nationalism in the Cape Colony,” Journal of Religion in Africa 8 (2) (1976): 105–122.

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of pre-1949 Christianity in China. Chinese and American scholars are working collaboratively to make the data base possible, which when completed will be a valuable addition to what exists in western mission archives. In another major Pew-funded, team-based project, Indologist Robert Frykenberg of the University of Wisconsin is coordinating research into Christianity in South India, including transcultural interactions between Indian and Western Christians. Although American Protestant foreign missions constitute only one aspect of the projects listed here, they will be analyzed in broader contexts and by people from the so-called “receiving” as well as the “sending” end of missionary activity. In the nineteenth century, foreign missions captured the imagination of American Protestants and turned their eyes toward the rest of the world. In the twentieth century, North American Protestantism became one of the most powerful forces for world mission in the history of Christianity. In the twentyfirst century, American Protestant foreign missions must take their place as part of a larger world that they helped to create, but that they can neither organize nor control.

Directions for Further Research

The journey from “mission” to “beyond missions,” from unitary interpretation of the American missionary enterprise toward decentralized and pluralistic interpretations, has been a welcome trend in the historiography of American Protestant missions since the Second World War. A rebirth of mission historiography that includes denominational missions but is more inclusive than the old formulae has the potential to reimage the history of American Protestantism. The essence of American Protestantism, a crucial source of its vitality, has lain in what William Hutchison and others have called its “activism,” and at many times in American history, Protestant activism and missions were coterminous. Even in periods of relatively reduced missionary activity, foreign missions represented the cutting edge of theological application, international relations, and conscious cultural interaction on the part of American Protestants. In addition to what it shows about American Protestantism, mission history can be used as a prism through which to illuminate many aspects of American culture. Freed from its prison as a subject of interest only in theological seminaries and Bible colleges, the history of Protestant missions needs to be taken in new directions, some of which have already been suggested by the scholarship reviewed above. In international perspective, to move from mission to

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beyond missions is to use the study of American foreign missions as a bridge to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Just as transatlantic dialogue with Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries mediated cultural change and provided a mirror for American self-understanding, so has traffic with Asia, Africa, and Latin America increasingly defined North America in the twentieth century. Missionaries have not only carried American culture abroad, but they have been the chief interpreters of nonwestern culture in churches and small towns throughout the heartland of America. There is urgent need to study missionaries as messengers of nonwestern culture, critics of American foreign policy, and mirrors reflecting American identity for the “folks back home.” In significant ways, foreign missionaries have created America’s image of the rest of the world in the twentieth century. The number of missionary children who have become seminary professors, shapers of American foreign policy, or leaders in international business has often been noted but seldom studied. As multicultural elites, foreign missionaries have played a major role out of proportion to their actual numbers in the conduct of the United States abroad. The American obsession with communism in the 1950s, for example, needs to be studied in relation to the missionary mediators who were critics of antiChristian or Marxist political systems. The influence of anticommunist former China missionaries should be balanced against that of missionaries who supported the nationalist struggles of indigenous peoples, such as the efforts of Ho Chi Minh. The “missionary factor” in mid-twentieth-century foreign policy is but one area that needs critical scholarly analysis. The development of international ethical movements around such issues as world peace and human rights cannot be understood apart from missionary influence. Another neglected area of research in mission history is the role played by foreign missions in the pacifism and focus on world friendship that emerged between the two world wars. The extensive dialogue between Protestant women in the United States and Japan prior to World War II is but one small example of an important but unstudied contribution of foreign missions to internationalism. The full story of missions and refugee relief has never been told. Missions have been frequently analyzed in relation to American nationalism. Unexamined but equally important is the contribution made by missions to internationalism and America’s ability to transcend its own narrow self interest. In the theological arena, the nexus among mission theory, missionary thought, and American understanding of non-Christian religions has been seriously neglected. Changing American attitudes to non-Christian religions could be charted by reviewing missionary literature of the past century. Although formal interfaith dialogue would not exist without the centuries of missionary

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effort that have gone before, theologians, philosophers, and comparativists seldom acknowledge that the groundwork for their study was laid by the very missionaries they sometimes denigrate.90 Sound historical scholarship on the relationship of missions to interfaith understanding is needed to correct the unidimensional portrait that now exists. Study of mission institutions in their social contexts is another area desperately needing research. In the early twentieth century, American mainline Protestants supported seven interdenominational women’s institutions of higher learning in China, Japan, and India, as well as thousands of lower-level schools. Western medical practice was mediated to the rest of the world by missionaries, and mission discoveries in the “field” helped to change the western understanding of disease and treatment. The impact of missionary institutions on their social, economic, and cultural contexts on both sides of the water has yet to be analyzed, although a beginning is being made in current doctoral-level research. Missionary institutions are an unexplored source of important transcultural interactions and social change. As areas of further research into American Protestant foreign missions are mapped out, and the complex and diverse picture of American Protestant missions takes shape, the historiographic task will of necessity revolve around interpretation. Taken in its fullness, what has the mission impulse meant for American Protestantism and for American culture, society, and theology? How has the mission experience, broadly defined, affected the larger course of American history and of world history? In 1964, R. Pierce Beaver unrealistically prophesied in From Missions to Mission a future for Protestant missions that flowed from ecumenical unity and confidence. But despite his failure as a prophet, his assessment of missionary historiography made in 1968 still stands today. Writing for a study called Reinterpretation in American Church History, Beaver noted of American mission history that interpretation needed to take place before reinterpretation could occur.91 A generation after R. Pierce Beaver, the tools for interpretation are being shaped and honed. The historiographic task began with denominational 90

Negative use of missionary history is sometimes taken as the starting point for reflection by theological pluralists. See for example John Hick, “The Non-Absoluteness of Christianity,” in The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, ed. Hick and Paul F. Knitter (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1987), 16–36. Ideological use of mission history fails to acknowledge that a source of the western pluralistic theological enterprise was the mission experience itself. 91 R. Pierce Beaver, “Missionary Motivation through Three Centuries,” in Jerald C. Brauer, ed., Reinterpretation in American Church History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 113–51 (113).

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missions, and from there proceeded to mission. Following a narrowing of historical interest in mission, mission studies collapsed in the late 1960s. The last decade has seen a revival of mission history with the growing realization that it has the potential to enliven numerous other fields of inquiry and to provide an entree into nonwestern Christianity. At last the historiography of Protestant foreign mission is maturing, growing through adolescence into adulthood, through and beyond missions to perspectives that may reveal the global historical significance of American Protestant foreign missions for the first time.

The Overly Candid Missionary Historian: C. G. A. Oldendorp’s Theological Ambivalence over Slavery in the Danish West Indies Anders Ahlbäck

Introduction

Shocked and deeply offended, the pietistic preacher and scholar Christian Oldendorp (1721–1787) wrote an indignant letter of protest to the elders of the Moravian Church on 2 June 1777. He had just received the published volumes of his great history of the Moravians’ mission to the Danish West Indies, only to find that his three thousand-page manuscript had been cut by three quarters and thoroughly rewritten by the editor appointed by his principals, the church elders. Oldendorp felt degraded to ‘an assistant who only provided materials for the editor’ and utterly humiliated by the editor’s foreword, which stated that the author had been unable to condense his vast materials into a publishable book. ‘The History has been taken away from me and my name is included only to disgrace me,’ he wrote.1 A comparison of Oldendorp’s manuscript with the book published in 1777 by the editor, Johann Jakob Bossart (b. 1721), largely confirms the author’s lamentation that these are in many respects two different works.2 One of the Source: Alhbäck, A., “The Overly Candid Missionary Historian: C. G. A. Oldendorp’s Theological Ambivalence over Slavery in the Danish West Indies,” in H. Weiss, Ports of Globalisation, Places of Creolisation: Nordic Possessions in the Atlantic World during the Era of the Slave Trade, Leiden, Brill, 2016, pp. 191–217. The original article holds an illustration, (fig. 7.1), which is not included here. The location of this illustration is marked with an * in the text. 1 C. G. A. Oldendorp to uac, 2 June 1777 and 22 June 1777, in Gudrun Meier, P. Stein, S. Palmié and H. Ulbricht (eds.), Christian Georg Andreas Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln Sanct Thomas, Sanct Cruz und Sanct Jan., vol. IV: Kommentarband (Herrnhut: Herrnhuter Verlag, 2010), pp. 81–101, quote p. 100; Paul Peucker, Vorwort, in ibid., p. viii. 2 Christian Georg Andreas Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln Sanct Thomas, Sanct Crux und Sanct Jan, insbesondere der dasigen Neger und der Mission der evangelischen Brüder unter denselben, vol. 1–2, edited by Gudrun Meier et al. (Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2000–2002); C. G. A. Oldendorp, Geschichte der Mission der evanglischen Brüder auf den caraibischen Inseln S. Thomas, S. Croix und S. Jan, vol. 1–2, edited by Johann Jakob Bossart (Barby: C. F. Laux, und in Leipzig in Commission bey Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1777), introduction, n.p.

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most conspicuous differences concerns the conflicting approaches to depicting slavery and the African Caribbean slave population. In spite of its many ambivalences, the original manuscript can be read as a scathing critique of the West Indian slave society and a passionate appeal for the human dignity of its African and African Caribbean victims. This is remarkable both because Oldendorp deviated far from the official Moravian policy on the matter and because these elements in his text were largely removed or subdued by the editor. Bossart, head of the Moravian Church archives and teacher at its theological seminar in Barby, Saxony, had never visited the Caribbean.3 Christian Oldendorp, on the other hand, had made extensive first-hand observations for his history during a journey to the Danish sugar islands of St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix in 1767–1768. Around the time Oldendorp’s mission history was published, the Moravian church, a radical pietistic-protestant revivalist movement, was making great efforts to restore its international reputation, which had been severely damaged by a period of ecstatic excesses in the 1740s and a financial crash resulting from overspending in 1753. Starting in the 1760s, the Moravians, also known as the United Brethren or Herrnhuter Brüdergemeinde, published a number of works intended to improve their public image and bring out their merits in the missionary field. These works included Oldendorp’s history of their mission to the Danish West Indies. Control and oversight was concentrated within the Unity Elder’s Conference (uac), which started exercising a strict supervision of all the Moravian’s far-flung international activities. The uac re-emphasized the Moravian policy of deference towards the power that be and respect for secular authority. In the Caribbean context, this meant accepting slavery and supporting the social status quo of slave society.4 Eventually, this careful public relations work both towards colonial authorities and the European general public yielded very good returns. The Moravians’ apparent success in turning heathens into ‘civilised’ and humble ‘real Christians’ was important for their 3 Gudrun Meier, ‘Preliminary remarks on the Oldendorp Manuscripts and Their History,’ in Stephan Palmié (ed.), Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), p. 68; H. A. Lier, ‘Oldendorp, Christian Georg Andreas,’ Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (1887), http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd119331926.html?anchor= adb, retrieved 19 March 2014; This Month in Moravian History 36 (October 2008), http:// www.moravianchurcharchives.org/thismonth/08%20oct%20collecting.pdf, retrieved 19 March 2014. 4 J. C. S. Mason, The Moravian Church and the Missionary Awakening in England, 1760– 1800 (Woodbridge & Rochester: Boydell, 2001), pp. 9–13, 41–44, 64–68; Gisela Mettele, Weltbürgertum oder Gottesreich. Die Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine als globale Gemeinschaft 1727–1857 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009), pp. 77–87.

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rehabilitation and rise to a model for the modern missionary movement towards the end of the eighteenth century.5 The discrepancies between Oldendorp’s history of the Caribbean mission and the ‘doctored’ version published by the editor appointed by the church elders, however, point to significant tensions within the Moravian church in the 1760s–1770s over what policy to adopt concerning slavery. In this article, I explore these tensions by analysing the differences between depictions and assessments of Caribbean slavery and the African Caribbean slave population in Oldendorp’s manuscript and Bossart’s edition. I focus on Oldendorp’s emotional and theological struggle as he tried to reconcile his own subjective experiences from the Caribbean with his pietistic worldview. Modern historians have used Bossart’s edition of the history of the West Indian mission, especially the 1987 English translation from the German original,6 as a source to study the eighteenth century Caribbean and its African Caribbean population, unaware of the qualitative differences between the texts.7 The translators of the 1987 edition unsuspectingly characterised Bossart’s editing as ‘energetical, aggressive and, in some ways, careless,’ and thus politically innocent.8 Probably the most read modern historical work drawing on Oldendorp’s history, Jon Sensbach’s book about the Moravian African Caribbean preacher Rebecca Freundlich (2005), summarizes Oldendorp’s opinions as ‘proslavery’ and claims that his mission history was intended as ‘a promotional tract to entice planters to engage the Brethren’s services.’ This is certainly true of Bossart’s edition, but hardly a correct characterisation of Oldendorp’s own writings.9 5 Mason, Moravian Church, pp. 132–138, 189–190, 195. 6 C. G. A. Oldendorp, History of the Mission of the Evangelical Brethren on the Caribbean Islands of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John, edited by Johann Jakob Bossard, translated by Arnold R. Highfield and Vladimir Barac (Ann Arbor: Karoma 1987). The editor’s surname is spelled ‘Bossard’ on the title page but ‘Bossart’ in the editors’ introduction. I have used the 1777 German edition (here referred to as Bossart, ed., Geschichte der Mission) as primary source and the 1987 edition (here: Bossard, ed., History of the Mission) for quotes in English. 7 See e.g. Neville A. T. Hall, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 43, 47, 137; Mason, Moravian Church, p. 124. For an overview of earlier research, see Meier, ‘Preliminary Remarks,’ pp. 71–72. 8 Arnold R. Highfield and Vladimir Barac, ‘Translators’ Introduction,’ in Bossard (ed.), History of the Mission, p. xxiii. In a review of the English 1987 edition, Danish historian Karen Fog Olwig suspected that Bossart might have tampered with depictions of the Africans ‘according to Moravian general precepts.’ This suggestion has nonetheless remained uninvestigated. Karen Fog Olwig, ‘An Eighteenth-Century Ethnographer of the Danish West Indies,’ Plantation Society 2:3 (1989), p. 341. 9 Jon Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 236–239.

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The publication of Oldendorp’s original manuscript in 2000–2002 has been welcomed as providing an outstanding source to eighteenth-century African Caribbean cultures, languages and identities,10 yet little attention has been paid to Oldendorp himself as a traveller, observer and religious thinker. Only Hartmut Beck has briefly discussed Oldendorp’s attitude towards slavery within the context of Moravian missions and their delicate relationship to colonial authorities and slave-owners. Noting that Oldendorp remained incapable of detaching himself from a perspective giving precedence to mission work, Beck ascribes Oldendorp a ‘problem awareness’ concerning the moral justification of slavery.11 This, I argue, must be considered a gross understatement.

A Pietist Travelling the Atlantic World

The Moravian Church became an important player in the transatlantic arena of eighteenth-century religious revival soon after its emergence in presentday Saxony in the 1720s. Moravian settlements and societies were formed in Germany, the Netherlands, England, Pennsylvania, Switzerland, Scandinavia and the Baltic states. Simultaneously, the Moravian community rapidly established mission stations in the colonies of the protestant colonial powers Denmark, England and the Netherlands: on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas in 1732, on Greenland in 1733, in Georgia 1734, Guyana in 1735, South Africa in 1736, Suriname in 1738, Pennsylvania in 1740, and Labrador and Jamaica in 1754. As pointed out by Peter Vogt, the United Brethren were eager to sow the seeds of the Gospel among peoples neglected by other churches: the black slaves in the West Indies as well as the natives of North America, Greenland and South Africa.12 The Moravian missionaries were initially on a collision course with the plantation owners on the Danish West Indian islands (present-day U.S. Virgin Islands). Many slave-owners feared that Christianising the slaves and giving them even the slightest education in religion and literacy would pose a threat to the social order of the slave society. The missionaries soon realized that trustful relationships with plantation owners and colonial authorities were an absolute prerequisite for their missionary endeavour. This required that they 10 Louise Sebro, Mellem afrikaner og kreol. Etnisk identitet og social navigation i Dansk Vestindien 1730–1770 (Lund: Lunds Universitet, 2010). 11 Harmut Beck, ‘Die Jungferninseln: Phase und Modell der Missionsgeschichte,’ in Meier et al. (eds.), Kommentarband, pp. 32–35. 12 Peter Vogt, ‘“Everywhere at Home:” The Eighteenth-Century Moravian Movement as a Transatlantic Religious Community,’ Journal of Moravian History 1 (2006), pp. 7–29.

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publicly accept slavery and the economic system on the islands. In order to reassure slave-owners, the founding leader of the Moravian church, Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf (1700–1760), made the Moravian position perfectly clear: conversion to Christianity and spiritual salvation did not bodily liberate black converts from bondage. In a speech to black converts on St. Croix in 1739 (included in its entirety in both Oldendorp’s manuscript and Bossart’s edition), Zinzendorf told them they must humbly remain content with the position assigned to them in this life by divine providence.13 This policy was confirmed by a Moravian general synod in 1769. Zinsendorf’s successor, bishop August Gottlieb Spangenberg, named it part of the ‘invariable principles’ of Moravian mission work in 1782.14 Historian Claus Füllberg-Stolberg claims that Zinzendorf’s instructions contradicted the everyday practice of early Moravian missionaries in the 1730s–1740s, who felt closer to the slaves than to the decadent and suspicious slave-owners. The reports by ordinary missionaries, he writes, show that they were aware of and pained by the tensions and ambivalences in their attitudes towards slavery. The Moravians acknowledged black slaves as human beings and spiritual equals. Yet they chose to actively support their bondage. The Moravians even became slave-owners themselves, as they bought their own sugar plantations in the Danish colonies, slave labourers included, in order to finance and facilitate their mission work.15 An empathic observer with an inadequate sense of political correctness, Christian Oldendorp expressed ambivalent feelings over slavery in his writings. These conflicting emotions were probably still shared by other Moravian missionaries in the 1760s. By the time Oldendorp visited the islands, however, the Moravian missionary efforts were not only tolerated but increasingly appreciated both by pious Danish administrators and the white minority. The Moravians were seen as suppressing discontent and holding at bay the

13 Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln, pp. 349–352; Bossart (ed.), Geschichte der Mission, pp. 594–595; Bossart (ed.), History of the Mission, pp. 361–363. See also Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival, pp. 140–143. 14 August Gottlieb Spangenberg, An Account of the Manner in which the Protestant Church of the Unitas Fratrum, or United Brethren, Preach the Gospel and Carry on their Mission among the Heathen [German original 1782] (London: H. Trapp, 1788), pp. 42–43; Mason, Moravian Church, pp. 102–103. 15 Claus Füllberg-Stolberg, ‚Die Herrnhuter Mission, Sklaverei und Sklavenemanzipation in der Karibik,’ in Elisabeth Herrmann-Otto (ed.), Sklaverei und Zwangsarbeit zwischen Akzeptanz und Widerstand (Hildesheim, Zürich and New York: Georg Olms, 2011), pp. 254–280.

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ever-present threat of insurrection among the slaves by preaching humble Christian submission to their converts.16 Not only Oldendorp’s journey to West India but also his movements through different locations across the Moravian Atlantic world apparently contributed to his ambivalence. Born the son of a Lutheran vicar in a small village near Braunschweig, Oldendorp had worked as a preacher and tutor for a series of Moravian congregations and boy’s schools. In 1753–1759, he served as private tutor in an aristocratic family in Livonia. This experience underlay his later perceptions of West Indian slavery and allowed him to compare its severity and effects to Eastern European serfdom.17 He was commissioned to write the history of the Caribbean mission in 1766 and travelled to St. Thomas, St. Croix and St. John in 1767–1768, spending eighteen months on the islands. He participated in the life of the local Moravian congregations, conducted extensive interviews with the converted African Caribbean slaves, and travelled the islands widely with a keen eye for their economic and social order as well as plant and animal life*.18 He was well-versed in contemporary natural history scholarship, and his manuscript displays a striking combination of empiricist and deeply religious discourse.19 On his homeward journey in 1768, Oldendorp spent four months in the Moravian colony of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he was evidently exposed to anti-slavery thought. The Moravians in Bethlehem had since the 1740s been critical of the West Indian missionaries’ decision to acquire sugar plantations and possess slaves. This was obviously due to Puritan influences in their North American setting. During his stay in Pennsylvania, Oldendorp was exposed to literature on the slave trade and West Indian slavery that described slavery as a barbaric and godless practice. In a footnote to his manuscript, he primarily referred to several works by the French-American Huguenot-turned-Quaker and early abolitionist Anthony Ebenezer.20 16 Helen Richards, ‘Distant Garden: Moravian Missions and the Culture Of Slavery in the Danish West Indies, 1732–1848,’ Journal of Moravian History 2 (2007), p. 65; Mason, Moravian Church, pp. 17–20, 100–106. 17 C. G. A. Oldendorp, Lebenslauf von Christian Georg Andreas Oldendorp (von eigener Hand und ergänzt von seiner Familie), in Meier et al. (eds.), Kommentarband, pp. 1–8. 18 For Oldendorp’s own account of his travels and interactions with black converts, see Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln, pp. 1666–1689, 1729–1738, 1797–1799, 1832–1837, 1844–1848. 19 Meier, ‘Preliminary remarks,’ p. 70. 20 Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln, pp. 520, 682–683, 1847–1848; Beck, ‘Jung­ ferninseln,’ pp. 44–46. Oldendorp uses above all Anthony Benezet, A short account of that part of Africa, inhabited by the Negroes (Pennsylvania: Dunlop, 1762). He also mentions

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Oldendorp began writing the mission history in Pennsylvania. A first draft completed in 1769, soon after his return to Germany, but he struggled to revise the text until 1775. His manuscript was certainly in need of editing when Bossart took over. Its enormous length was due not only to a wealth of topics and an endlessly detailed chronicle of the mission, but also to repetitions, summaries of earlier literature and meandering moral and religious ponderings. Its very incomplete character, however, makes the manuscript all the more rewarding for historical analysis. The inconsistencies in this draft version lay bare its author’s ambivalence as he struggled to make the theological positions officially embraced by the Moravian church compatible with his pietistic convictions and personal impressions from the Caribbean.

Compassion and Concoction

It is evident that Christian Oldendorp was deeply affected by the plight of his African Caribbean informants. Comparing their condition to bondage and slavery in Eastern Europe and the Orient, he characterised the fate of black slaves on the sugar islands as the hardest and most miserable of any human beings in the whole world: ‘a wretched life—miserable cabins, furnishings, food and garments, little sleep or rest, perpetual work and no wages and beatings for the smallest offence, now and then for no offence at all.’21 He wrote extensively about the duress and amount of work the slaves performed, which he found astounding that any human being could endure. During the harvest months, he observed, the slaves on some plantations had to work almost around the clock without rest or sleep. In addition, they had to grow their own provisions in their scarce leisure hours. He reported that the slaves actually preferred this arrangement, since they could sell any surplus and earn a few pennies, but also pointed out that they often faced hunger and undernourishment when their crops failed.22

John Woolman, Considerations on keeping Negroes, recommended to the Professors of Christianity, of every Denomination (Philadelphia: Tract Association of Friends, 1762). Further, he draws repellent depictions of the slave trade from the Danish merchant Ludwig Ferdinand Römer’s Nachrichten von der Küste Guinea (Kopenhagen: Pelt 1769). 21 Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln, p. 744. 22 Ibid., pp. 535–538, 550–557, 1695, 1701.

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Throughout the year they know of nothing else than straining and tormenting themselves and being driven on like animals. (…) Their sweat enriches only their master and their plenitude of bitter labour provides sweet sugar only for our tender tongues. They themselves get nothing else for it than the daily misery of slavery.23 The slaves’ complete lack of legal protection against their masters was to Oldendorp’s mind ‘the deepest humiliation of a human being’ one could possibly imagine. The slightest delays or inadequacies were punished with lashes, Oldendorp claimed. He confronted his readers with graphic descriptions of how the whips used by the foremen cut the skin and made blood spurt out. He reported having seen slaves who were full of scars from these beatings. The royal Danish ordinance forbidding cruel and merciless treatment of slaves was dismissed by Oldendorp as a dead letter, since a slave in reality had no possibility to file a complaint against his master. No wonder that such horrible cruelties were being committed against the black slaves, he wrote, and proceeded to describe some particularly sadistic cases.24 Through both radical cuts and subtle strings of omissions and additions, Johann Jakob Bossart softened the critique of slavery and slave-owners as he edited Oldendorp’s manuscript. Bossart shifted the image of the African Caribbean slaves from one of fellow human beings suffering terrible injustice to one of savages being put to useful work under reasonable conditions. In Bossart’s rendering, the depiction of West Indian slavery was transformed into one where sensible slave-owners certainly demanded hard work, yet always allowed their slaves enough time to eat and rest and provided for their basic needs. Whereas Oldendorp described the slaves’ miserable dwellings in the context of extreme working hours, undernourishment and poverty, Bossart subtly shifted the blame onto the slaves themselves with an insertion claiming that ‘the negroes seek neither beauty nor comfort in their living quarters.’ Whereas Oldendorp expressed his deep astonishment that the plantation slaves were capable of ‘banishing the bitterness of their condition’ by chatting, joking, laughing and singing as they worked the fields, Bossart stated that this cheerfulness indicated that the slaves were ‘not in fact as oppressed in their condition as is commonly supposed.’25 23 Ibid., p. 555. 24 Ibid., pp. 533–535, 538, 552–557, cf 1701, 1732. 25 Bossart (ed.), Geschichte der Mission, pp. 373, 375, 382–383; Bossard (ed.), History of the Mission, pp. 219, 222, 226–227; Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln, p. 555. On other contemporary depictions of the slaves’ living conditions, see Hall, Slave Society, pp. 72–80, 93–102.

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Bossart’s editing technique is aptly demonstrated by the changes made to Oldendorp’s eyewitness account of a slave market in St. Croix. The original text compassionately depicted the newly arrived Africans’ despair and heartbreak as children were separated from their mothers. It emphasised the fearfulness and confusion of the slaves, who did not know what fate awaited them. The ‘innocence paired with shame and sorrow’ in a young girl’s countenance as she was auctioned off aroused ‘a deep sympathy’ in Oldendorp.26 Bossart cut all such expressions of the author’s emotional first-hand experience and removed the repeated allusions to how the Africans were treated like cattle at a livestock market. Instead, he pounced on Oldendorp’s passing mention that ‘cheerful’ conversations took place in the slave market as black slaves living on the island sought out their countrymen among the new arrivals. This single adjective was transformed into the concoction that ‘a ray of hope brightened the gloomy faces of the Negroes who were about to be offered for sale.’ From this image of his own invention, Bossart deduced that the new arrivals ‘witnessed for themselves that it was possible to be a slave without at the same time being quite unhappy and without hope.’27 Oldendorp claimed that the masters’ unchecked power over their slaves gave free reign to their ‘cruel and barbaric inclinations.’ In the West Indies, beyond the firm grip of Old World ecclesiastical authority and social order, he wrote, ‘useless, lecherous and wicked people’ from Europe had found a refuge and ‘more open roads to sin.’28 In Bossart’s version, such negative depictions of the slave-owners were removed or softened. In order to be on the safe side and flatter the Danish colonial administration, Bossart embellished Oldendorp’s statement that the majority of white inhabitants were honest and charitable people with an addition of his own, attributing this happy state of affairs to the influence of ‘a wise and Christian government’ and by the example set by ‘virtuous authorities.’29 Oldendorp obviously had mixed feelings about the white islanders. He praised their courtesy and helpfulness to strangers, only to then remark that anyone who grew up used to treating those around him as slaves ran the risk of developing an ‘insolent, arrogant and cruel nature’ towards even those who were not his slaves. One might venture a guess that Oldendorp had himself

26 27 28 29

Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln, pp. 510–512; cf pp. 1798–1799. Bossart (ed.), Geschichte der Mission, p. 369; Bossard (ed.), History of the Mission, p. 219. Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln, p. 362. Bossart (ed.), Geschichte der Mission, p. 269. This particular passage has gone missing in the English translation.

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been the object of condescending arrogance on part of wealthy planters and hurt in his pride as a learned European of modest means.30 Most disturbing to Oldendorp was nonetheless the sexual exploitation of female slaves. Although he believed that pagan black women often were ‘inclined to fornication,’ he repeatedly expressed his dismay regarding reports of lecherous white masters who had coerced African Caribbean women to sexual relations and savagely punished female black converts who tried to resist. He accused the whites on the Danish sugar islands of having obstructed the mission’s work primarily because it interfered with their loose living with the slave women. The slave-owners, he claimed, wanted to keep the slaves in ‘brutish stupidity and ignorance’ in order to use them at discretion for any lasciviousness.31 In several places, however, Oldendorp suddenly retracted after such condemnations of the slave-owners’ abuses, interjecting qualifications underlining that conditions had ‘lately much improved’ and ‘nowadays’ most masters on the Danish islands treated their slaves humanely and kindly. A disconcerting ambivalence enters his text as accusations against the slave-owners in the present tense—‘the spirit of fornication and whoring is the main cause why many whites bitterly resist the conversion of the blacks’—are interlaced with assurances that the ‘barbaric and sinister spirit’ among the whites mainly belonged to the past.32 It is as if Oldendorp vacillated between expressing his moral outrage and realizing its political implications.

Intercultural Contact at the Mission Stations

In view of the political conditions faced by the Moravian missions in the West Indian slave society, Bossart’s eagerness to mitigate the images of slavery is easy to understand. Oldendorp’s frankness and politically inopportune expressions of compassion with the slaves are actually more intriguing. What made him challenge the Moravian policy of acquiescence in relation to slavery? His manuscript points to two factors that evidently propelled his transgressions:

30 Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln, pp. 331, 362. 31 Ibid., pp. 673, 1945–1946. The original manuscript thus to some extent contradicts Jon Sensbach’s claim—obviously made on the basis of Bossart’s edition—that Oldendorp downplayed the violence of the exploitation and misrepresented African women’s sexuality. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival, p. 34. 32 Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln, pp. 362, 559, 562–563, 565–568, 646–647, 674, 744.

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the close intercultural interaction between missionaries and converts in the West Indian Moravian congregations and Oldendorp’s pietistic religiosity. Historians who have studied the Moravian mission in the Danish West Indies emphasise the close interaction between European missionaries and African Caribbean converts. According to Hartmut Beck, Moravian missionaries had over several decades gained an empathetic understanding of the reality of slavery through their daily interaction with the slaves.33 Louise Sebro argues that Moravian missionaries had a genuine interest in the cultural notions and personal experiences of African Caribbeans, since knowledge about these matters was thought necessary for successful proselytising. Their dependence on mission assistants among the African Caribbeans furthered a higher degree of intercultural understanding than in many other colonial contexts. As described by Jon Sensbach, these ‘helpers’ were significant for the relative success of the Moravians’ missionary endeavours: around 1768 circa 14 per cent of the 26,000 African Caribbeans on the three Danish islands had voluntarily joined their congregations.34 Christian Oldendorp made note of the attention that the missionaries paid to individual proselytes. They conducted private conversations at regular intervals on ‘matters of the heart’ with each convert and Oldendorp underscored the great value that African Caribbean slaves placed on these talks.35 He did not, however, comment on what was probably self-evident to him, namely that these proselytes were still not accepted as equal members of the United Brethren. As pointed out by Gisela Mettele, the relationship between converts and Moravians was of a paternalist nature and referred to as ‘care’ (Pflege) on the part of the missionaries. With some notable exceptions, the Moravians treated non-European converts as ‘children to be educated’ rather than as equal partners in dialogue.36 Yet in spite of this, Louise Sebro argues, the black converts and European missionaries formed spiritual communities based on a certain degree of reciprocity.37 Along the same lines, Jon Sensbach powerfully argues that the Moravian mission provided the slave population with a new sense of dignity and community despite its policy of accepting the structures of slave society.38

33 Beck, ‘Jungferninseln,’ pp. 32–33. 34 Sebro, Mellem afrikaner og kreol, pp. 39–40, 44–46; Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival, pp. 69–83, 94–99. 35 Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln, pp. 2020–2021. 36 Mettele, Weltbürgertum, pp. 106–108. 37 Sebro, Mellem afrikaner og kreol, pp. 150–154. 38 Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival, pp. 56–57, 91–93, 242–243.

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In the entangled spaces of the Moravian mission stations, Oldendorp obviously experienced a feeling of solidarity with the African Caribbean bornagain Christians and was touched by their misfortunes under the transatlantic slave system. As both pietistic preacher and historian, he took a great interest in the cultural background and personal experiences of the African Caribbean converts at the Moravian mission stations he visited. He would interview small groups of them on Sundays, when the plantation slaves had some time off. Some kind of mutual trust seems to have developed between the historian and his informants. He openly expressed his admiration of their skilfulness as vivid and merry storytellers, but also underlined that these converted Christians were ‘honest and sensible’ people whose accounts were much more trustworthy than those of their pagan countrymen.39 Oldendorp’s autobiography—written to be read out at his own funeral according to Moravian custom—conveys an image of the young Oldendorp as a spiritual seeker who was easily carried away by spiritual and emotional influences in his immediate surroundings.40 Although obviously shaped by genre conventions such as the movement from sin to salvation,41 it contains indications of two characteristics that apparently shaped Oldendorp as an observer and historian: his susceptibility to the social environment and the centrality of emotion in his perception of life. These were not merely personality traits but intimately connected with Oldendorp’s pietistic religiosity. Zinzendorf’s radical pietism was anti-rationalistic, celebrated the experiential side of religious life, and encouraged its adherents to impressionability of the heart.42 Oldendorp accordingly described his spiritual yearning for ‘true conversion,’ which to him meant ‘a feeling of the heart that flows from an intimate communion with the Saviour.’43 In his depictions of the Moravians’ mission work among the African Caribbeans, he stressed the importance of ‘touching their hearts’ with the story of Christ’s suffering.44 One of Oldendorp’s main objections 39 Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln, pp. 367, 672. 40 Oldendorp, ‘Lebenslauf.’ 41 On Moravian autobiographies, see Mettele, Weltbürgertum, pp. 208–255, especially pp. 236–238. 42 Peter Vogt, ‘Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf,’ in Carter Lindberg (ed.), The Pietist Theologians (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), p. 213; F. Ernest Stoeffler, German Pietism during the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1973), pp. 144–145; Arne Jarrick, Den himmelske älskaren: Herrnhutisk väckelse, vantro och sekularisering i 1700-talets Sverige (Stockholm: Ordfront, 1987), pp. 14–15, 40–41; Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Jesus Is Female: Moravians and Radical Religion in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), p. 5. 43 Oldendorp, ‘Lebenslauf,’ p. 3. 44 Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln, pp. 1958–1966, quote p. 1964.

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to Bossart’s alterations after the publication in 1777 was actually that the editor had discarded many ‘emotional expressions that touch the heart’ from the manuscript. In his protest letters to the uac, Oldendorp characterised Bossart’s style as pandering to fleeting fashion and the fickle tastes of a rationalist and worldlyminded general public. As a natural history specialist, Johann Bossart was evidently more influenced by the drier prose of contemporary scholarly literature. His edition assumed a different ethical and emotional attitude to Oldendorp’s African Caribbean informers to whom the editor had no personal relationship. Already at the outset of the ethnographic section, Bossart undermined their credibility by adding a passage where he (posing as the author) regretted that his hopes to present substantial new and reliable knowledge about the African nations had been dashed due to the ‘overwhelming ignorance’ of his interviewees as well as their lack of ability to ‘form their ideas properly and express them clearly.’45 There is no reason to doubt that Bossart was as pious a Pietist as Oldendorp. Yet lacking personal experience of the Caribbean, his pre-understanding of the subject stayed closer to the stereotypical images in European literary accounts, with their contradictory notions of complacent African slaves, the happiest people in the world when gently treated yet simultaneously arrogant, untrustworthy and ready to exploit the slightest weakness or leniency of their masters. Indeed, most European first-hand accounts of the slave population on the Danish sugar islands depicted the black slave as indolent and evil. Only the constant fear of punishment, it was claimed, induced them to labour hard in the fields and prevented revolt.46 This image of Africans naturally served to legitimate the brutally repressive regime of plantation society. Not only the images of slavery itself but also how the enslaved African Caribbeans were depicted in the mission history was therefore a highly sensitive matter and called for the editor’s acute attention.

African Caribbeans: Wicked by Nature and Corrupted by Slavery

The descriptions of heathen Africans were unflattering in both versions of the history of the Caribbean mission. Oldendorp himself described them as the most morally depraved people on earth, distinguished by their sexual 45 46

Bossart (ed.), Geschichte der Mission, p. 270; Bossard (ed), History of the Mission, p. 159. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 174–176; Hall, Slave Society, pp. 41–44.

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immorality, insuperable obstinacy, cruelty towards subordinates, and an immense propensity for deceitfulness. In the same breath, however, he boldly stated that the blacks were innately no worse than whites. They were certainly ‘wicked by nature,’ yet according to Scripture, he pointed out, they had this in common with all descendants of Adam.47 To Oldendorp, the pietistic son of a Lutheran priest, it was a natural matter of fact that a pagan was incapable of virtue. In spite of the Moravians’ Hussite and Reformist legacy, Count Zinzendorf had decisively placed the United Brethren within a Lutheran theological context in the 1730s. According to the count, all human beings were equally good or evil and therefore being reborn in Christ had nothing to do with good deeds, only with God’s mercy. This corresponded to Luther’s teachings on human beings as capable of good deeds only when filled with a living faith in Christ and eager to follow his example. The Lutheran twin concepts of man’s inevitable disposition to sin and the saving grace of Christ as the only way to salvation thus became central to Moravian mission theology.48 In meetings with Oldendorp and later Bossart, the Moravian church elders impressed upon both of them that the main purpose of the history of the Caribbean mission was to provide proof of the miracle of grace and the power of the Gospel. This should be done by demonstrating how even those perceived as furthest removed from righteousness—the pagan black slaves of the Danish West Indies—could find salvation by the humble recognition of the sacrifice of Christ. Both Oldendorp and Bossart, therefore, had a theological and rhetorical interest in emphasising the blacks’ ‘wickedness.’ That way they could better comply with the elders’ wish to show the world that ‘no human being can be so corrupt that he could not become God’s own through belief in Jesus.’49 In a draft preface, Oldendorp declared his intent to demonstrate ‘the power of the blood of Christ’ to heal and save ‘even the most wretched and corrupted human beings,’ namely, ‘the negro nations, known to be beyond others in pagan blindness and wickedness.’ Bossart’s introduction proclaimed that the

47

E.g. Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln, pp. 500, 606, 633–644, 649, 651–652, 661; quote p. 630. 48 Oldendorp, ‘Lebenslauf;’ Ibid., Historie der caribischen Inseln, pp. 664–665, 1965; Dietrich Meyer, Zinzendorf und die Herrnhuter Brüdergemeinde 1700–2000 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), pp. 35–38, 66–67; Stoeffler, German Pietism, pp. 142–143; Jarrick, Himmelske Älskaren, p. 40; Highfield and Barac, ‘Translators’ Introduction, p. xxv. 49 Excerpt from uac session protocol 30 May 1775, in Meier et al. (eds.), Kommentarband, pp. 73–74.

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history would show that peoples hitherto regarded only as ‘unfortunate, ignorant and condemned to servitude’ were also blessed by the grace of God.50 However, Oldendorp’s strong emphasis on the shared humanity of Africans and Europeans went missing in Bossart’s edition. The original manuscript recurrently stressed that blacks shared the same suffering under bondage and the same longing for freedom, but also the same ‘natural disposition’ for sinfulness and barbarism as all other peoples. It dismissed assertions that black peoples were created by the devil, cursed by God or inherently unable to become Christians, as ‘hideous opinions’ expounded by white slave-owners who only wanted to justify their own cruelty. Nature, Oldendorp claimed, provided ample evidence that God loved variety among his creatures.51 Bossart consistently cut sentences that asserted the fundamental similarity of blacks and whites in the eyes of God. He omitted Oldendorp’s appreciative comments on the Africans’ physique, good health and cheerful temperament, as well as his scorn for European prejudice concerning skin colour. With conspicuous consistency, Bossart also removed the author’s recurrent accusation that slaves in the Caribbean were not treated like human beings but forced to live like beasts or cattle (wie Vieh).52 Africans could develop the same faculties of reason as other peoples, if only they were properly educated—Oldendorp wished to make this very clear. Their ‘childish ideas’ and ‘nasty vices’ were entirely due to lack of education, science, good government, teaching in righteousness and knowledge of Christ.53 Bossart essentially retained this view of the Africans’ wicked character as a product of ignorance and heathendom rather than intrinsic moral or intellectual features. Both author and editor primarily explained African inferiority in terms of religion, civilisation and Christian notions of sinfulness, not in terms of what would later be viewed as racial differences. They differed, however, in their view on the impact of slavery on the Africans’ moral character. Oldendorp saw the slavish state in itself as a source of wickedness, obstinacy and vindictiveness. It was obvious to him that a person treated with contempt, ‘like a beast of burden,’ could not develop charitable feelings or virtuous strivings. Bossart, however, removed most wordings in the manuscript that made slavery itself appear morally pernicious. As if this was not enough, he added 50 C. G. A. Oldendorp, ‘Vorbericht,’ 18 November 1776, in Meier et al. (eds.), Kommentarband, pp. 154–164, at p. 163; Bossart (ed.), Geschichte der Mission, introduction, n.p.; Bossard (ed.), History of the Mission, p. xxxi. 51 Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln, pp. 613–623, 630. 52 See e.g. Bossart (ed.), Geschichte der Mission, pp. 370–371; Bossard (ed.), History of the Mission, pp. 181, 220. Cf Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln, p. 514. 53 Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln, pp. 621–622, 631, 636, 659–661, 670.

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a passage declaring that the slaves’ ‘deficiency of virtues’ could not be seen as a necessary consequence of their slave status, ‘because there is no doubt that true virtue can manifest itself in this as in other circumstances.’54 The readers of Bossart’s edition were told that strictness and severity was simply necessary with any workforce with ‘an African upbringing.’ Most heathen Negroes were accustomed to having their will restricted in no other way than through the use of force. Only fear of severe punishment could restrain them in the exercise of their ‘vicious inclinations.’ Comparing this necessary severity to a loving father’s strictness, Bossart declared it perfectly compatible with humanitarian ideals.55 These formulations originated in Oldendorp’s observation that slaves must be more severely treated than free servants, lest they become arrogant and defiant. What the editor omitted, however, was the author’s subsequent claim that this ‘unnatural treatment’ was a necessary consequence of the ‘unnatural state’ of slavery. Comparing his observations of black slaves in the Caribbean and ‘white slaves in Livonia,’ Oldendorp stated that in neither case did their master’s love, trust and encouragement have the same positive effect as on free servants. Threats and beatings were ‘inseparable’ from slavery—in any part of the world. Applied with moderation, he conceded with obvious dismay, harshness brought about more obedience and humility in slaves than kindness and mildness, yet the result was ‘the humility of a dog.’56 The Moravian converts, though, were an entirely different matter. Oldendorp extolled them as ‘true Christian heroes,’ since they patiently endured the ‘perpetual misery’ of slavery, industriously served their masters and willingly submitted to their destiny. They were content with their present state, he claimed, endured their burdens with joy and thought it was sinful to try to escape them. Elsewhere, Oldendorp could write about the ‘natural’ longing for freedom of all men. Writing about the converted slaves, however, he stepped back into a religious discourse where what was ‘natural’ to man was rather associated with sinfulness. In this context, he complied completely with the Moravian church elders’ wishes, as he depicted the converts overcoming their weak and wicked human nature and demonstrating the miraculous power of the Gospel by humbly submitting to their earthly state and trusting in the grace and love of God to give them another, eternal, life.57 54 Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln, pp. 632, 636; Bossart (ed.), Geschichte der Mission, p. 420; Bossard (ed.), History of the Mission, p. 247. 55 Bossart (ed.), Geschichte der Mission, pp. 383–385, 388–389; Bossard (ed.), History of the Mission, pp. 227–228, 230. 56 Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln, pp. 559–560. 57 Ibid., pp. 531, 567, 606, 667–678, 1945.

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It should be pointed out that Oldendorp idealised the African Caribbean converts only to the degree that they adapted European beliefs and behaviours. He lauded their humble readiness to admit their wretchedness and leave their pagan ways in order to start living ‘decently’ and ‘righteously’.58 It was selfevident to him that ‘Christian,’ i.e. European, standards of sexuality, family life, worship, and even clothing and furnishing were superior to any cultural forms brought along from Africa or developed on the islands by African Caribbeans. Despite his interest in African culture, he condemned any ‘pagan’ customs among the African Caribbeans, such as African dances and music, and showed little interest in any non-Christian elements of creolised culture and religion on the sugar plantations.

Terror and Ambivalence: A Pietistic View on Slave Society

Close encounters with West Indian slavery apparently offended Christian Oldendorp’s religious and moral sensibilities. As we have seen, he could not stomach that the same African Caribbeans with whom he shared long conversations and the Holy Communion were treated worse than animals—indeed turned into animals—on the sugar plantations. Yet this alone would not have required him to renounce slavery as such, only its particular forms in the Caribbean. What made him falter and brought his ambivalence in the matter to the fore were the contradictions he perceived between the social order in the Caribbean and his notions of what constituted a good, righteous and Christian society. Hartmut Beck claims that in order to understand the Moravian missionaries’ attitudes towards West Indian slavery in Oldendorp’s time, we must enter into the early modern Lutheran view of society. The social order was perceived as divinely ordained and it was no business of human beings to attempt to change it—with the possible exception of the equally divinely instituted earthly authorities. The notion of social progress itself was still alien to the general mentality. Slavery was associated with the ideal Christian household, ruled by reason and just authority, understood in terms of reciprocal relationships between loving masters and loyal servants, instituted by God to maintain order in a sinful world.59 This framework of interpretation certainly fits the edition of Oldendorp’s mission history doctored by Johann Bossart, which stated that the teachings 58 Ibid., pp. 645, 658–662. 59 Beck, ‘Jungferninseln,’ pp. 32–33, 39.

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Jesus Christ prescribed the duty of Christian slaves toward their masters ‘clearly, emphatically, and completely.’ It was the Christian duty of slaves to serve their masters with the same fidelity and submissiveness that they felt obliged to exercise in the service their Saviour. In congruence with the Moravians’ ambition to make their mission palatable and even appreciated among the powerful white planters, Bossart stated that the Christian faith in itself provided the only really effective means of lightening the slaves’ condition, making them happy and cheerful, and providing their masters with obedient, willing, and loyal slaves.60 Oldendorp was no less keen to point out that the Moravians taught their converts Christian submissiveness, humility and acceptance of their earthly fate. He also advertised the missionary work as benefitting not only the poor slaves but their owners’ economic interests as well.61 There are indications that he came to understand not only the African Caribbean slaves but also their owners better during his long stay on the islands. Newly arrived in the West Indies, he wrote, as one ‘each morning has to listen for hours upon hours to the wailing of black slaves being whipped at a plantation nearby … one might well find this way of life a prelude to hell.’ Yet the slave-owners explained that they had to treat their slaves severely since they were wicked, deceitful and obstinate people who disregarded mild punishment. If the blacks were not kept under strict control, no one would be safe on the islands. ‘One must hold these reasons for valid,’ Oldendorp stated. ‘Crime must be punished and who would doubt that the slaves often commit crimes?’ As long as the owners acted ‘fairly and sensibly,’ he did not hold it against them if they justly punished their slaves.62 In this instance, he acknowledged the slave-owners as legitimate earthly authorities. And yet Oldendorp’s position is impossible to squeeze into Beck’s pattern of social conformism. Many of the omissions and alterations made by Bossart actually point to this fact. For example, Oldendorp repeatedly came back to how slave-owners separated married slave couples—including converts in Christian wedlock—by selling husband and wife to different buyers. According to Moravian theology, marriage was a divinely instituted order and a representational image of the relationship between Christ and the church. It was 60 Bossart (ed.), Geschichte der Mission, p. 387; Bossard (ed.), History of the Mission, p. 229. 61 See e.g. Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln, pp. 531, 560, 606, 1725, 1746–1747; Bossart (ed.), Geschichte der Mission, Editor’s foreword [n.p.] and pp. 387, 401; Bossard (ed.), History of the Mission, pp. xxxi–xxxiii, 229, 236. 62 Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln, pp. 582–583.

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thus only logical that Oldendorp should have found it ‘painful’ and ‘inconceivable’ that anybody could ‘treat God’s creatures in such an evil way.’63 Bossart removed these troublesome exclamations just like he excised Oldendorp’s inopportune conclusion from his interviews with slaves born in Africa that the great majority of slaves in the transatlantic trade were the innocent victims of slave-catchers. The original manuscript referred to the captives of African slave traders as the ‘stolen black people,’ indirectly accusing European traders and slave-owners of profiteering from man-stealing or even instigating this great sin.64 Bossart’s edition did not downright beautify the slave trade in Africa, but it softened Oldendorp’s critique of the European buyers and shifted more of the blame onto the greediness and ‘savage inclinations’ of the Africans and their ‘despotic’ rulers. It can be no coincidence that the words ‘stolen’ and ‘man-stealing’ disappeared in editing, nor that in their place appeared a new wording claiming that most slaves had been captured ‘in the course of a declared war or in a treacherous attack’ (in einem offenbaren Kriege, oder in einem hinterlistigen Ueberfall). Bossart thus cold-bloodedly inserted the requisite reference to the classic exception to the theological and legal ban on manstealing: enslaving captives taken in just war.65 In spite of his theological education, the protestant ideal of a stable, hierarchical social order could not provide Christian Oldendorp with an easy solution to the moral challenges of slavery. On the contrary, I argue that this ideal was a reason for his ambivalence. In Martin Luther’s view, social and governmental institutions were created by God and good in themselves, whereas the faults of society arose from the corrupt nature of men. If society was badly governed, this was not due to bad institutions but to the evil of the men who operated them. Yet Luther, like most other Christian moralists, based his view of the social order on the fifth commandment, ‘honour thy father and thy mother.’ This carried the notion of reciprocal commitments, such as those between parents and children, and opened the door for questions about what to do when those in power did not fulfil their obligations and take loving care of their subordinates. In spite of the dominating social conformism, there was no 63 Ibid., pp. 562–569, 644, 646, 1945, 2044–2046. Cf Peter Vogt, ‘Zinzendorf’s ‘Seventeen Points of Matrimony:’ A Fundamental Document on the Moravian Understanding of Marriage and Sexuality,’ Journal of Moravian History 10 (2011), pp. 39–67. 64 Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln, pp. 478–479, 489–490, 521, 528, 530. 65 Bossart (ed.), Geschichte der Mission, pp. 348–350; Bossard (ed.), History of the Mission, p. 208; Davis, Problem of Slavery, pp. 165–166, 186–202; Seymore Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2009), pp. 62, 71, 76; Hall, Slave Society, p. 51.

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lack of early modern Christian thinkers and movements, such as the Jansenists or Quakers, who questioned the established order and social inequality.66 In accordance with Lutheran teachings and the pietistic emphasis on human feeling, Oldendorp understood the hierarchical relationship between master and servant as one based on mutual trust, affection, fairness and satisfaction. This, he observed, was not the case in a society based on slavery where there was ‘only mutual fear and reluctance and no love or affection.’67 Every slaveowner, he wrote, dreads his slaves, because their relationship is based purely on compulsion. The master tries to keep his slaves in constant fear through harsh discipline and cruel punishments, whereas the enslaved party always feels offended, seeks his freedom and even longs for revenge.68 In other words, Oldendorp did not shy away from describing Caribbean slave society as a social order fundamentally based on pure terror. He condemned cruelty against the slaves in religious and philosophical terms that he evidently had picked up during his visit to the Moravians in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Any true Christian, Oldendorp stated, must agree with the opinion ‘held by many people in North America’ that the violations of ‘natural and revealed rights’ of the black slaves constituted a great sin and would be subject to God’s judgement.69 Oldendorp’s most explicit standpoint on slavery was eradicated as Bossart completely removed 22 manuscript pages where the author meticulously reviewed the ‘apprehensions’ over the moral justification of slavery found in a number of literary works. Concluding this extensive exposition of abolitionist arguments, Oldendorp frankly stated as the ‘objective opinion of a friend of humanity’ who had ‘learnt the truth’ about slavery among the black Africans that he thought it ‘unnatural, not originated from God, and blasphemous to his image.’ In a fashion typical of both his personality and his pietistic faith, he swept aside dry reasoning at this critical point: ‘There are matters you need nothing more to decide than a human heart, which has not yet hardened and become incapable of feeling.’70 Yet eventually, Oldendorp did make a tangible effort to stay within the bounds of Moravian missionary policy. He wavered, proceeding from his penetrating analysis of mutual terror, to stating that slavery in spite of everything 66 W. D. J. Cargill Thompson, The Political Thought of Martin Luther (Brighton: Harvester, 1984), pp. 6, 23, 91–111; Marc Venard, ‘Christentum und Moral,’ in Marc Venard (ed.), Die Geschichte des Christentums. Religion, Politik, Kultur, vol. 9: Das Zeitalter der Vernunft (Herder: Freiburg, Basel & Wien, 1998), pp. 1002, 1012–1014. 67 Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln, p. 528. 68 Ibid., pp. 528; cf pp. 604–605. 69 Ibid., pp. 570, cf pp. 530. 70 Ibid., pp. 527–528.

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had to be understood as a ‘misfortune imposed or authorised by God’ (ein göttliches Verhängnis oder eine solche Zulassung), since God tolerated this evil among other worldly evils. Moreover, he continued, God in his wisdom and goodness made good come out of this evil, as it made possible the salvation of the poor souls of the slaves in the Danish Isles. Almost immediately after his condemnation of slavery as ‘blasphemous,’ he thus wrote approvingly of how the missionaries taught the converts to regard their bondage as ‘God’s will.’71 The slaves on the Moravians’ plantations, Oldendorp claimed, were mostly converted Christians who felt they served the Lord through their work and needed no other chastisement than evangelical admonitions. He laboriously defended the slave-owning of the Moravian missions, explaining how slaves were the only available domestic and agricultural workforce in the West Indies and even did the fieldwork performed by oxen and horses in Europe. ‘That one has to buy and use them is a custom that no private person can change and the abolition of which depends solely on God and his maidservant, the authorities.’ The Moravians, he wrote, did not concern themselves with whether slavery was justified or not, only with saving the souls of the black people on the islands.72 Contradictory theological understandings of the origins slavery seem to have been at the root of Oldendorp’s ambivalence. To the extent that he understood slavery, with all the cruelties and abuses he witnessed on the islands, as an expression of human wickedness in the absence of Christian faith, love for one’s neighbour and a good, orderly society, he thought it was nothing more than a product of human sinfulness and should be fought by any good Christian. Yet in other contexts he was able to view slavery as part of an orderly social structure sanctioned by the authorities and ultimately by God. If that was the case, it was not for a good Christian to oppose it but to lead a virtuous life of humble submission, obedience and diligence within the existing structures.

Concluding Remarks

What actually happened to Oldendorp’s mission history? Was Bossart explicitly instructed by the church elders to play down any critique of slavery in the manuscript? The editors of Oldendorp’s manuscript have rummaged out a number of sources in the Moravian church archives in Herrnhut, Saxony, 71 Ibid., pp. 530–531. 72 Ibid., pp. 531, 560, 1471, 1935–1937.

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pertaining to the decision making process around the mission history. None of them, however, provide a conclusive answer.73 The official protocols of the Unity Elders’ Conference merely mention that the elders thought the manuscript was far too extensive and needed ‘thorough revision.’74 The only clue to the slavery issue is a subclause in Oldendorp’s letter of protest to the uac upon publication of Bossart’s edition. Offended by the extent of Bossart’s alterations, he pointed out that the uac had expressed satisfaction with his own abridged version, ‘but only thought the assessment of the slave trade and slavery were questionable.’ The interpretation of this ‘smoking gun’ is complicated by an undated memorandum titled ‘On the appraisal of slavery’ that the editors of Oldendorp’s manuscript assume to have been written by a member of the uac. Its author stated that the history of the Caribbean mission should not take sides on the issue of slavery, for two reasons. Firstly, it was the duty of any good Christian to humbly submit to secular order and worldly authority. Secondly, there were great differences of opinion within the church on this matter. Therefore a publication in the name of the Brotherhood should express no ‘private opinion.’ Then, however, the author proceeded to criticise the mission history as overly pro-slavery, declaring as invalid the propositions that the Christianised slave is happier and more useful in his enslaved state than he would have been as a pagan in idleness. This critique was evidently directed towards Bossart’s edition rather than Oldendorp’s manuscript. It nonetheless confirms the conclusion that the two versions of the mission history gave expression to conflicting views on slavery within the Moravian church. Oldendorp’s initial reaction to the published book in June 1777 centred on the humiliation he had suffered and on accusations against Bossart for having overstepped his commission. Only in a second letter of protest three weeks later, detailing an extensive list of factual errors in the edited version, did he comment on the transformed depictions of the African Caribbeans. He did not object, he wrote, to the omissions and mitigations of many depictions of the slaves’ living conditions. However, he took issue with the way his editor used ‘affected and malicious epithets,’ and generalised about the blacks ‘without distinction or reservation,’ resulting in ‘unjust, harsh and untrue’ depictions. ‘When I look into the book at all, I read most of it with distaste. Almost 73 Gudrun Meier, ‘Quellen und Dokumente aus dem Umfeld der Missionsgeschichte von St Thomas, St Croix und St Jan von C. G. A. Oldendorp,’ in Meier et al. (eds.), Kommentar­ band, pp. 143–180. 74 uac protocols 29 October 1770, 31 October 1770, 19 June 1773, 29 June 1773, 1 May 1775, in Meier et al. (eds.), Kommentarband, pp. 68–73.

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everything has been altered,’ he wrote. Putting a finger on the subtly distortive manner of Bossart’s editing, he added, ‘I have also said all these things, but with due reservations, fairness and exceptions.’75 Always susceptible to his social surroundings, Christian Oldendorp nonetheless seems to have submitted to the official Moravian policy, since he expressed no objections to the censoring of his take on slavery as such. The growing distance to the West Indies—that initially put him at liberty to express views that would have been highly dangerous to parade on the islands— also meant increasing proximity to the political considerations of the church elders. They probably exerted an increasing influence over Oldendorp’s fading impressions from the Caribbean. It appears evident that Oldendorp’s version of the mission history was not only too massive for publication, but also too controversial and compassionate in its depictions of slavery and its African Caribbean victims. The Moravians’ anxiousness to ‘keep out of all political business’ possibly made them restrain from publishing an intended English translation of Oldendorp’s history, since even the mitigated version produced by Bossart attracted the attention of British abolitionists searching for useable information on slavery and the slave trade in 1788.76 Abridged translations to Danish and Swedish were published in 1784–1788. Oldendorp might have been pleased to know that in 1791, four years after his own death, a royal Danish commission recommending a ban on the slave trade throughout the Danish empire referred to his mission history for proof of the African Caribbeans’ susceptibility to Christian education.77 The United Brethren, however, kept their distance to abolitionism and slave emancipation to the very last, only manumitting their own last slaves in Suriname in 1863. Bibliography Beck, Harmut. ‘Die Jungferninseln: Phase und Modell der Missionsgeschichte.’ In Gudrun Meier, P. Stein, S. Palmié and H. Ulbricht, (eds.), Christian Georg Andreas Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln Sanct Thomas, Sanct Cruz und Sanct Jan, vol. IV: Kommentarband. Herrnhut: Herrnhuter Verlag, 2010, pp. 9–50. 75

Oldendorp to uac, 2 June 1777, 22 June 1777, in Meier et al. (eds.), Kommentarband, pp. 81– 137, quotes pp. 119–121. 76 Mason, Moravian Church, p. 124. 77 Erik Gøbel, Det danske slavehandelsforbud 1792: Studier og kilder til forhistorien, forordningen og følgerne (Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag 2008), pp. 230–231.

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Benezet, Anthony. A Short Account of that Part of Africa, Inhabited by the Negroes. Pennsylvania: Dunlop, 1762. Cargill Thompson, W. D. J. The Political Thought of Martin Luther. Harvester: Brighton, 1984. Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970. Drescher, Seymore. Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Fogleman, Aaron Spencer. Jesus Is Female: Moravians and Radical Religion in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Füllberg-Stolberg, Claus. ‘Die Herrnhuter Mission, Sklaverei und Sklavenemanzipa­ tion in der Karibik.’ In Elisabeth Herrmann-Otto (ed.), Sklaverei und Zwangsarbeit zwischen Akzeptanz und Widerstand. Hildesheim, Zürich and New York: Georg Olms, 2011, pp. 254–280. Gøbel, Erik. Det danske slavehandelsforbud 1792: Studier og kilder til forhistorien, forordningen og følgerne. Odense: Syddansk Universtitetsforlag, 2008. Hall, Neville A. T. Slave Society in the Danish West Indies. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1992. Highfield, Arnold R. and Vladimir Barac. ‘Translators’ Introduction.’ In C. G. A. Oldendorp, History of the Mission of the Evangelical Brethren on the Caribbean Islands of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John. Edited by Johann Jakob Bossard. English edition and translation by Arnold R. Highfield and Vladimir Barac. Ann Arbor: Karoma, 1987. Jarrick, Arne. Den himmelske älskaren: Herrnhutisk väckelse, vantro och sekularisering i 1700-talets Sverige. Stockholm: Ordfront, 1987. Lier, H. A. ‘Oldendorp, Christian Georg Andreas.’ Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (1887), http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd119331926.html?anchor=adb. Consulted 19 March 2014. Mason, J. C. S. The Moravian Church and the Missionary Awakening in England, 1760– 1800. Woodbridge & Rochester: Boydell, 2001. Meier, Gudrun. ‘Preliminary Remarks on the Oldendorp Manuscripts and Their History.’ In Stephan Palmié (ed.), Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995, pp. 67–77. Meier, Gudrun, Stein, P., Palmié, S. and H. Ulbricht (eds.). Christian Georg Andreas Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln Sanct Thomas, Sanct Cruz und Sanct Jan, vol. IV: Kommentarband. Herrnhut: Herrnhuter Verlag, 2010. Meier, Gudrun. ‘Quellen und Dokumente aus dem Umfeld der Missionsgeschichte von St Thomas, St Croix und St Jan von C. G. A. Oldendorp.’ In Gudrun Meier, P. Stein, S. Palmié and H. Ulbricht, (eds.), Christian Georg Andreas Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln Sanct Thomas, Sanct Cruz und Sanct Jan, vol. IV: Kommentarband. Herrnhut: Herrnhuter Verlag, 2010, pp. 143–180.

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Mettele, Gisela. Weltbürgertum oder Gottesreich: Die Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine als globale Gemeinschaft, 1727–1857. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009. Meyer, Dietrich. Zinzendorf und die Herrnhuter Brüdergemeinde, 1700–2000. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000. Oldendorp, Christian Georg Andreas. Geschichte der Mission der evanglischen Brüder auf den caraibischen Inseln S. Thomas, S. Croix und S. Jan, vol 1–2. Edited by Johann Jakob Bossart. Barby: C. F. Laux, und in Leipzig in Commission bey Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1777. Oldendorp, Christian Georg Andreas. Historie der caribischen Inseln Sanct Thomas, Sanct Crux und Sanct Jan, insbesondere der dasigen Neger und der Mission der evangelischen Brüder unter denselben, vol 1–2. Edited by Gudrun Meier et al. Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2000–2002. Oldendorp, Christian Georg Andreas. History of the Mission of the Evangelical Brethren on the Caribbean Islands of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John. Edited by Johann Jakob Bossard. English edition and translation by Arnold R. Highfield and Vladimir Barac. Ann Arbor: Karoma, 1987. Olwig, Karen Fog. ‘An Eighteenth-Century Ethnographer of the Danish West Indies.’ Plantation Society 2:3 (1989), pp. 337–342. Peucker, Paul. ‘Vorwort.’ In Gudrun Meier, P. Stein, S. Palmié and H. Ulbricht, (eds.), Christian Georg Andreas Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln Sanct Thomas, Sanct Cruz und Sanct Jan, vol. IV: Kommentarband. Herrnhut: Herrnhuter Verlag, 2010, pp. vii–x. Richards, Helen. ‘Distant Garden: Moravian Missions and the Culture Of Slavery in the Danish West Indies, 1732–1848.’ Journal of Moravian History 2 (2007), pp. 55–74. Römer, Ludwig Ferdinand. Nachrichten von der Küste Guinea. Kopenhagen: Pelt, 1769. Sebro, Louise. Mellem afrikaner og kreol: Etnisk identitet og social navigation i Dansk Vestindien, 1730–1770. Lund: Lunds Universitet, 2010. Sensbach, Jon. Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2005. Spangenberg, August Gottlieb. An Account of the Manner in which the Protestant Church of the Unitas Fratrum, or United Brethren, Preach the Gospel and Carry on their Mission among the Heathen. [German original 1782] London: H. Trapp, 1788. Stoeffler, F. Ernest. German Pietism during the Eighteenth Century. Leiden: Brill, 1973. This Month in Moravian History 36 (October 2008), http://www.moravianchurchar chives.org/thismonth/08%20oct%20collecting.pdf. Consulted 19 March 2014. Venard, Marc. ‘Christentum und Moral.’ In Marc Venard (ed.), Die Geschichte des Christentums: Religion, Politik, Kultur, vol 9: Das Zeitalter der Vernunft. Herder: Freiburg, Basel & Wien, 1998, pp. 987–1030. Vogt, Peter. ‘Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf.’ In Carter Lindberg (ed.), The Pietist Theologians. Malden: Blackwell, 2005, pp. 207–223.

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Vogt, Peter. ‘“Everywhere at Home:” The Eighteenth-Century Moravian Movement as a Transatlantic Religious Community.’ Journal of Moravian History 1 (2006), pp. 7–29. Vogt, Peter. ‘Zinzendorf’s “Seventeen Points of Matrimony:” A Fundamental Document on the Moravian Understanding of Marriage and Sexuality.’ Journal of Moravian History 10 (2011), pp. 39–67. Woolman, John. Considerations on Keeping Negroes, Recommended to the Professors of Christianity, of Every Denomination. Philadelphia: Tract Association of Friends, 1762.

The Colonization of Consciousness John and Jean Comaroff South Africans trained in the United Kingdom, Jean and John Comaroff are both professors of anthropology at the University of Chicago. They have sustained a remarkable intellectual partnership and are among the most powerful exponents of classical social theory applied to ethnographically situated historical transformations. They write with great urgency and passion about large issues, most recently on “millennial capitalism,” but with subtle attention to detail. If, in the analysis of small-scale societies, religion is understood to be intimately connected to social relations, production, reproduction, and politics, so the Comaroffs demonstrate that the impact of Christian missionary activity on southern Africans, while ostensibly about purely “religious” matters, actually reshaped sociality, person-hood, and everyday practices, preparing Africans to be docile laborers at the bottom end of the emerging capitalist economy and docile citizens in the newly forming states. They show how modernity is cultural through and through and emphasize the role of Christianity in exporting and inculcating this culture, even if the missionaries themselves were not always aware of the connections. One of the effects of the missionaries, they argue, was that whether Africans were converted or not—and they problematize what such “conversion” could mean—the Africans became drawn into conversations whose terms (central concepts and arguments) were set by Europeans. At the same time, the Comaroffs argue that the results are neither inevitable nor complete; elements of the new are synthesized with the old and form a space for resistance. Such resistance may be all the more powerful for being tacit, contained in signifying practices that themselves become quotidian. The passages describing nondiscursive forms of response have been largely elided here, but they are the subject of beautiful exposition in Jean Comaroff’s Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance (1985), as well as their joint two volumes on the encounter between missionaries and southern Africans (1991, 1997),

Source: Comaroff, John and Jean Comaroff, “The Colonization of Consciousness” in Ethnog­ raphy and the Historical Imagination, Oxford: Westview Press, 1992, pp. 235–263, reprinted in Lambek, M. (ed.), A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion, New York: Wiley 2006, pp. 493–510.

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Sundkler (1961) provides a superb earlier introduction to the creativity of southern African forms of Christianity. Modern Southern Africa is built upon a long history of symbolic struggle, a bitter contest of conscience and consciousness. This is not to deny the coercive, violent bases of class antagonism and racial inequality here. Nor is it to underplay the brute material dimensions of the struggle; indeed, it is never possible simply to prize apart the cultural from the material in such processes. But, in the eyes of the Southern Tswana the rural people with whom we shall be concerned in this essay, the past century and a half has been dominated by the effort of others to impose on them a particular way of seeing and being, to colonize their consciousness with the signs and practices, the axioms and aesthetics, of an alien culture. This alien culture is the culture of European capitalism in its various guises: capitalism as the direct extension of British commerce; capitalism, both agrarian and industrial, erected on the foundations of settler economy and society; capitalism matured in the systematic mold of the racist state. Capitalism, that is, refracted from an expanding global order into a myriad of local facets. In the face of this assault, some black South Africans have succumbed, some have resisted, some have tried to recast the intrusive European forms in their own terms. And most have done all of these things, at one or another time, in the effort to formulate an awareness of, and gain a measure of mastery over, their changing world. It is no wonder, therefore, that any attempt to understand the Southern Tswana past and present keeps being drawn back to the colonization of their consciousness and their consciousness of colonization. Of course, the dominant theme in the modern history of these peoples has been their incorporation into a colonial, and later postcolonial, state. But it is important to stress that this is a “state” in both senses of the term: an institutional order of political regulation and a condition of being, a structure and a predicament. Consequently, the effort of the. colonizer to impose it upon them has been as much a matter of the politics of experience as a matter of constitutional (and coercive) authority. So, too, with Tswana reactions: they have flowed well beyond the formal channels of political discourse and onto the diffuse terrains of everyday life. Nor is this unusual. Colonizers in most places and at most times try to gain control over both the material and semantic practices through which their would-be subjects produce and reproduce the very bases of their existence; no habit being too humble, no sign too insignificant to be implicated in the battle. And colonization everywhere

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gives rise to struggles—albeit often tragically unequal ones—over power and meaning on the moving frontiers of empire. It is a process of “challenge and riposte” (Harlow 1986:xi, after Bourdieu 1977:12) often much too complex to be captured in mechanical equations of domination and resistance—or, for that matter, in grand models of the political economy of colonialism and the modern world system. Among the Southern Tswana, any effort to document such processes—to analyze, that is, the colonization of consciousness and the consciousness of colonization—begins with the entry of evangelical Christianity onto the historical landscape. Not only were Nonconformist missionaries the vanguard of the British presence in this part of the South African interior; they were also the most ambitious ideological and cultural agents of Empire, bearing with them the explicit aim of reconstructing the native world in the name of God and Great Britain (Comaroff and Comaroff 1986). Of course, the chronicle of evangelical Protestantism does not tell us the whole story of the Tswana past. Nothing does, in and of itself. But it does hold one key to the symbolic and material processes involved in the colonial encounter—and to the modes of cultural transformation and ideological argument, of “challenge and riposte,” to which it has given rise. We should like, in this essay, to trace out an early chapter in the confrontation between the missions and the Tswana—and, with it, an early phase in the struggle over being and consciousness here. For this phase, partial and passing though it is in the broader history of Southern Africa, has some important lessons for the anthropology of colonialism in general, and for the history of consciousness in particular. In this respect, too, we offer our account with a general methodological point in mind: whether it be in the tradition of Durkheim, Marx, or Weber, anthropologists usually study consciousness and its transformations by examining its effects or its expressions. To be sure, modern anthropology has become highly skilled at describing the social and symbolic manifestations of the conscience collective, inferring the phenomenon, as it were, from the recurrent shadows it seems to cast upon the wall. Rarely, however, do we examine the nature of consciousness in the making—let alone in its own full historicity. Indeed, as a fashionable synonym for “culture,” “ideology,” “thought,” or an ill-defined blend of all three, the notion of consciousness itself is seldom scrutinized. Sometimes it is regarded as the mere reflection of a reality beyond human awareness, sometimes as the site of creativity and agency. But, almost invariably, “consciousness” is treated as a substantive “model of” or “for” the world, as so much narrative content without form. Only specific

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historical analyses may force us to think beyond this inchoate preconception; to explore the relationship, in the making of human meaning, of form and content, sign and practice, intention and outcome. The Nonconformist evangelists of the London Missionary Society (LMS) and the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMMS) entered in the 1920s the world of the people whom we know today as the Tswana. We cannot describe that world in detail here …, [but] far from being closed communities or possessing “cold cultures,” early nineteenth-century Tswana polities were dynamic structures that underwent complex transformations over space and time (see e.g. Legassick 1969; Comaroff and Comaroff 1990; J. Comaroff 1985; J. L. Comaroff 1973). What is more, they already had a long history of interaction; interaction, over considerable distances, through trade, raiding, and— most important here—the exchange of medical knowledge and cultural practices. For example, one of the earliest missionaries to visit the interior, the Reverend John Campbell (1822, 1: 307), tells how a party of Ngwaketse traveled for almost a year, far to the north of the Tswana world, to learn techniques and obtain preparations that might bring them rain and cause their enemies drought. Such odysseys, albeit usually on less grand a scale, seem to have been undertaken quite frequently. Nor shall we go into the social origins of the British churchmen here; it, too, is a complex issue…. But it is necessary to stress that their mission was conditioned by an imperial vision conjured up in the fervent images of a triumphant bourgeoisie during the Age of Revolution (Hobsbawm 1962); that their position in the crevices of the changing class structure of industrial revolution Britain shaped their project, their own personal careers of upward mobility becoming an ideological mold for the moral future of Africa. In an epoch that celebrated hero-worship (indeed, as Carlyle [1842:1] asserts, almost made it into a theory of history) theirs was an epic quest, their emerging sense of “biography” as a “moral career” providing a model of and for a heroic history—their own as well as that of the heathen lands that would become colonies of God and the British monarch. This quest took them far into the Southern African hinterland; far beyond the colonial frontier and the gaze of its administration, with which they had very uneasy relations from the first. In fact, as a “dominated fraction of the dominant class” and as the self-styled moral conscience of the civilized world, they were to come into frequent conflict with more powerful political and economic agents of colonialism for a long time to come (see Comaroff and Comaroff 1986). In this respect, their efforts to build a new Empire of the Spirit, and later of Great Britain, were driven by tensions inherent in a rapidly

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changing, secularizing Europe: they wished to recreate a romantically (and mythologically) conceived society, in which spiritual authority remained unquestioned; in which technical progress, itself much admired, did not cause the massive social upheaval it had sown among the working class in the north of England; in which the countryside was not disfigured, nor its free yeomanry dispossessed—as many of their own peasant fathers and grandfathers had been. They sought, in other words, a modern industrial capitalist world without its essential contradictions. More immediately, they set about the task of “civilizing” the native by remaking his person and his context; by reconstructing his habit and his habitus; by taking back the savage mind from Satan, who had emptied it of all traces of spirituality and reason. Most of all, however, they wished to establish a viable peasantry—remaking, in Africa, the destroyed British yeomanry of their own imagined origins—tied at once to the soil and to an ethos of universal commerce. Remember that David Livingstone, perhaps the most popular missionary in the Victorian public consciousness (Jeal 1973), was to say, in a famous passage of his best selling Missionary Travels and Researches (1857: 34): “The promotion of commerce ought to be specially attended to … [I wish] to promote the preparation of the raw materials of European manufactures in Africa, for by that means we may not only put a stop to the slave-trade, but introduce the negro family into the body of corporate nations.” In order to achieve these objectives, initially, the Protestants sought to hold up a mirror to the savage; a looking-glass in which he might gaze upon himself and, in a revelatory moment of self-reflection, open his eyes and ears to the Good News, the narrative of Christianity. At the same time, in the same mirror, the heathen might also come to recognize the divided self of bourgeois individualism, the subject upon whom the edifice of modern European civilization was constructed. Of course, this was all presented to the Tswana, and to the wider world, in the non-coercive rhetoric of rational argument and free choice. Again, take David Livingstone (1857: 21): “In our relations with this people we were simply strangers exercising no authority or control whatever. Our influence depended entirely on persuasion; [on teaching] them by kind conversation (our italics).” As the first encounter between the Tswana and the evangelists gave way to a more sustained interaction, each tried to cast the other in his own image: the missionary, to portray the native as an unregenerate savage to be transformed; the Tswana, to draw on the power of the mission to protect a world endangered. Each, in other words, found the other indispensable in making real his own fantasy—although the Europeans were ultimately to prove better positioned to impose their construction on the reality they would come to share. For the Christians brought with them goods and knowledge—guns,

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wealth objects, technical skills, and the capacity to act as authoritative diplomatic agents—at a time when many chiefs were desperate for just such things in their struggle to maintain their autonomy in the face of difaqane and early settler advance. Indeed, the fact that this was a period of great upheaval played into the hands of the missions, facilitating greatly their entry into the Tswana world. For, while many chiefs and royals saw the Europeans as potential rivals to their authority—some, it seems, even observed that their presence would “change the whole [social] system”—they became too valuable to pass up, and the various chiefdoms competed for their attentions (see e.g. Moffat 1842: 389f, 414). Seizing the opportunity, and showing great resourcefulness in making themselves indispensable, the evangelists soon entered into the conversation of which Livingstone wrote. But the African rulers were as assiduous in trying to limit their influence. Here we explore three crucial registers in this long argument and the battle that ensued for control over its terms. For convenience, we refer to them as (i) the politics of water, (ii) the politics of production, and (iii) the politics of language.

The Politics of Water

As soon as they gained entry into Tswana communities, the evangelists set about establishing what we might think of as a mundane theater of industry; a site for the total reconstruction of the practical world of the natives. For example, the very first act of James Read, the earliest regular missionary among the Tlhaping, was to erect a square European house—even though he seems to have lived very comfortably in his wagon. He then built a smith’s forge and began, before the “astonished” eyes of much of the local citizenry, to fashion the tools of peasant production. His account of these events indicates a keen awareness of their impact: “The people were struck with wonder,” he wrote. “One of them said ‘these men must be from God that can do such things’.” Here, then, was the matter-of-fact drama of Protestant fabrication, setting forth bit by bit the mode of rural production through which the missionaries hoped to shape the servants of Christ. Spanish Catholicism in seventeenthcentury Mexico used ritual drama to impress pious submission on the natives (Trexler 1984), and colonizing Anglicanism in Rhodesia took hold of the Shona by making their landscape its own icon (Ranger 1987). But the Nonconformists in South Africa sought to reconstruct the inner being of the Tswana chiefly on the more humble ground of everyday life, of the routines of production and reproduction. Not only were they predisposed to such methods by their puritan

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creed and by their commitment to the bourgeois ideal of self-improvement through rational labor; their ritual parsimony also struck a chord with Setswana practice, which lacked symbolic or ceremonial elaboration. As Moffat (1842: 243–4) lamented early on: The situation of the missionary among the Bechuanas is peculiar, differing … from any other among any nation on the face of the earth … He seeks in vain to find a temple, an altar, or a single emblem of heathen worship  … Thus the missionary could make no appeals to legends, or to altars, or to an unknown God, or to ideas kindred to those he wished to impart. Moffat was correct. Rather than proclaim itself to the European as overtly “religious,” Tswana symbolic practice operated on another plane entirely. It saturated the ground of everyday activity, breathing life into the habitual forms of social existence. It was on this terrain that the missions had to battle for control over the salient signs of the world they wished to conquer (cf. Volosinov 1973)—a battle not for sacred sites, but for mastery of the mundane. In their effort to engage the Tswana in just such a conversation about everyday life, the evangelists soon found themselves caught up in the politics and poetics of water. As it turns out, they were encouraged by both climes and times to conceive of themselves, in horticultural idiom, as the irrigators of the African desert. “Her vast moral wastes,” wrote Moffat (1842: 614), a gardener by vocation in England, “must be watered by the streams of life.” Such is the force of the poetic that this analogy, so good for the missionaries to think with, was to give particular form to their deeds in the “field.” But the “wastes” of the Tswana world had already called forth a torrent of indigenous symbolic techniques to conserve this most precious and capricious resource. Furthermore, control over water was a vital aspect of chiefly power: the annual rains were held to be the inseminating force bestowed on the land and the people by a virile ruler, “made” (do dira) either by his own hand or by a rainmaker (moroka) of his choosing (Schapera 1971); without these royal rites the productive cycle could not begin. In fact, the political symbolism of, rain, pula, was central in public life. Not only did chiefs open and close all assemblies by greeting their people “ka pula,” with rain (Campbell 1822, 2: 157; Solomon 1855: 47), but the term itself was associated with the achievement of collective well-being. The word for water, metse, was the plural form of the vernacular for town—which, in Tswana cosmology, was the nucleus of all human life, and stood for the triumph of social order (metonymically represented in the chiefship) over the threatening, chaotic wild beyond the settlement.

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The provision of a regular water supply was vital, too, in the Protestants’ scheme of things, After all, they intended to create a Christian peasantry—to re-create, as we said, the lost British yeomanry—in the “desolate vineyard” of Africa (Moffat 1842: 330). They had also to grow enough for their own survival. To this end, they began to dig wells and trenches with which to irrigate their gardens, an activity that soon set them at odds with local values and interests…. For Southern Tswana, water and land were given not by nature, but by the chief to households whose womenfolk, as primary producers, had direct control over them. In this dryland ecology, water was too scarce a domestic resource to be put to the irrigated cultivation of mission “gardens”; no wonder the women regarded the whole idea as unreasonable. These gardens—a term seldom used, incidentally, by the churchmen to refer to native horticulture— were a great source of pride to the Europeans. Laid out almost at once within neat fences, they were icons of the civilizing mission at large. Described in dispatches home as “examples to the natives of industry,” it was in their cultivated shade that the few would-be converts who died in the early years were laid to rest. The Tlhaping, on the other hand, expressed their resentment by repeatedly stealing their fruits—and finally by destroying all efforts made to water them (Moffat 1842:286). Indeed, Tswana resistance dates back to the very beginnings of the colonizing process and, from the first, involved women. While the war with the women was waged over the productive deployment of water, another struggle raged over its ontology. In the absence of elaborate ritual or explicit iconography, the rites of rainmaking presented the Europeans with Tswana “superstition” in its most tangible form. In these revered rites, performed at the direction of the chief, the missionaries read the essence of savage unreason. “Rainmakers,” said Moffat (1842:305), “are our inveterate enemies, and uniformly oppose the introduction of Christianity amongst their countrymen to the utmost of their power.” The evangelists became fairly obsessed with rainmaking and regarded its eradication, which they linked to the triumph of bourgeois reason, as a major measure of their success. […] … The displacement of water from the domain of “ritual” to that of “technical management” created a legitimation crisis for the chiefship. But we concentrate, here, on the ontological rather than the temporal struggle. For there was a contradiction in the evangelical message—and an especially ironic one at that. On the one hand, the Christians introduce technical innovations and a “scientific” rationale into the production of water, seeking thereby to demystify its magicality. Yet, on the other hand, they tried to prove that the Christian God was the provenance of a superior water supply. And so they presented themselves as rainmakers of a competing power.

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There was another, more subtle dimension to all this, however. Rainmakers might have known how to use the magic with which to activate the clouds and bring pula. But, for the Tswana, their power could only work when the community was in a state of moral balance, of “coolness” (tsididi). Any breach of that balance—through improper conflict among humans, or between them and the non-human realm—might pollute the cosmic order, and create the heat that dried up the rain. The rainmaker “made” the rain purely in so far as he ensured that the condition of the social world met the standards of ancestral beneficence. In this sense, he no more manufactured it than did a churchman praying to God, a point that was lost on the missionaries. As a result, most of them tried to convince indigenous practitioners, in “reasoned” argument, of the illogicality and dishonesty of their activity (Reyburn 1933). While a surprising number of them recorded their efforts, Livingstone (1857:25f; also [ed. Schapera] 1960:239f) alone described his debate with a Kwena practitioner in such a way as to suggest that there was little to choose between their positions: [Medical Doctor]: So you really believe that you can command the clouds? I think that can be done by God alone. [Rain Doctor]: We both believe the very same thing. It is God that makes the rain, but I pray to him by means of these medicines, and, the rain coming, of course it is then mine. It was I who made it for the Bakwains [Kwena] for many years  …; through my wisdom, too, their women became fat and shining. Ask them; they will tell you the same as I do. M.D.: But we are distinctly told in the parting words of our Saviour that we can pray to God acceptably in his name alone, and not by means of medicines. R.D.: Truly! but God told us differently…. God has given us one little thing, which you know nothing of. He has given us the knowledge of certain medicines by which we can make rain. We do not despise those things which you possess, though we are ignorant of them. We don’t understand your hook, yet we don’t despise it. You ought not to despise our little knowledge, though you are ignorant of it. [Original italics.] M.D.: I don’t despise what I am ignorant of; I only think you are mistaken in saying that you have medicines which can influence the rain at all. R.D.: That’s just the way people speak when they talk on a subject of which they have no knowledge. When first we opened our eyes, we found our forefathers making rain, and we follow in their footsteps. You, who send to Kuruman for corn, and irrigate your garden, may do without rain; we can not manage in that way …

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M.D.: I quite agree with you as to the value of the rain; but you can not charm the clouds by medicines. You wait till you see the clouds come, then you use your medicines, and take the credit which belongs to God only. R.D.: I use my medicines, and you employ yours; we are both doctors, and doctors are not deceivers. You give a patient medicine. Sometimes God is pleased to heal him by means of your medicine; sometimes not—he dies. When he is cured, you take the credit of what God does. I do the same. Sometimes God grants us rain, sometimes not. When he does, we take the credit of the charm. When a patient dies, you don’t give up trust in your medicine, neither do I when rain fails. If you wish me to leave off my medicines, why continue your own? In this carefully crafted dialogue, Livingstone presents himself as an uneasy spokesman for God and science, seeming to argue with himself over the logical impasse of the mission. The parallel use of the title “doctor,” as much as the symmetry of the actual debate, implies the conviction that a contest is being waged on equal ontological ground. Thus he allows his opponent to suggest a functional correspondence between Tswana material icons and European verbal signs, and to cast reasoned doubt on the Christian distinction between the sacred and secular. In so doing, Livingstone anticipated by eighty years Eyans-Pritchard’s (1937) spirited defense of the rationality of African “magical” thought. But this did not deter him, or his brethren, from trying to persuade the Tswana to accept the Christian message on “rational grounds.” […] It is hardly necessary to labor another of Evans-Pritchard’s (1937) observations: given that criteria of technical efficacy are culturally specified, established knowledge is not falsified by evidence external to its (tauto)logical structure. What the evangelists took to be definitive proof of the “vain pretensions” of the natives in no way undermined Tswana cosmogonic assumptions. Instead, events merely confirmed that the whites had introduced a distinct and competing power into the local world (see e.g. Hodgson [ed. Cope] 1977: 23). At the same time, everything pointed to the fact that this power was substantial. Their technological prowess and wealth, after all, must have come from somewhere, and the capacity to produce water from under the ground was impressive. It certainly seemed to many Tswana that it was worth pursuing the conversation with the Europeans—and trying to learn the techniques which held the key to their potency. Recall, here, the long-standing indigenous value placed on the exchange of cultural knowledge and practices. Of course, as the participants on both sides searched for signs and symbols through which to communicate, they began also to recognize the distinctions

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between them. And so the speakers of each language came gradually to objec­ tify their world in relation to a novel other, thereby inventing for themselves a self-conscious coherence and distinctness—even while they accommodated to the new relationship that enclosed them. As is now well-known, the selfawareness of post-enlightenment Europe had long been sharpened in contrast to the non-European. The first generation of Protestant missionaries continued this reflexive process on the moral frontier with savage superstition. For the Tswana, the encounter with a people preoccupied with techniques of self-representation and rationalization brought forth a sense of opposition between sekgoa (European ways) and setswana (Tswana ways). The latter was perceived, for the first time, as a coherent body of knowledge and practice in relation to the former, which they had learned to see as a system of “belief” (tumèlò, lit. “agreement,” itself a notion of doctrine as consensus; see Moffat 1842:246f). In this moment of self-objectification, we suggest, lie the cultural origins of modern Tswana ethnicity. For, until this time, “the Bechuana”—who had no name for themselves, other than batho, human beings—were divided into political communities distinguished by their totemic affiliations, a quite different form of collective consciousness (J. L. Comaroff 1987). Increasingly, then, the argument over such issues as rainmaking became a confrontation between two cultures, two social orders. For their part, the Tswana were motivated by a desire to appropriate the cultural and technical power of the whites without losing their autonomy. In the effort to harness that power to their own ends, however, they joined the conversation that was so profoundly to alter their sense of themselves and their world, the conversation of which David Livingstone had written (see above). And here is the point: in so doing, they were inducted into the forms of European discourse; into the ideological terms of rational argument and empirical reason. Who, indeed, was the better rainmaker? How was it possible to decide the issue? The Tswana were not necessarily persuaded by the claims of the evangelists. Nor did this new mode of discourse simply take over their cultural universe. Still, they could not but begin slowly to internalize the terms through which they were being challenged. To be sure, in order even to respond to the arguments of sekgoa, it was necessary to use those terms. This, as we shall see in due course, was a critical moment in the colonizing process. But let us turn, secondly, to the politics of production.

The Politics of Production

The central role of agriculture in the evangelical vision of reconstruction has already been anticipated. Not only did many of the early Nonconformists

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have close ties with the recently marginalized. British peasantry and a nostalgic sense of a lost rural world. They were also heirs to an idea of colonization that linked cultivation to salvation. Missionaries, wrote Moffat (1842:616–17), ought to “put their hand to the plough,” preparing the stony African ground for “a rich harvest of souls.” As agriculture flourished, so too would civilization. Given the African concern with cattle-keeping, it may seem curious that this imagery makes no mention of pastoralism. But the belief in the civilizing role of cultivation was as old as English colonialism itself. In the seventeenth century, Spenser had advocated a settled agrarian existence as the solution to the problem of the “wild Irish,” whose barbarous and warlike state he ascribed to their semi-nomadic, pastoral pursuits (Muldoon 1975:275). Similar notions were carried to the new world and Africa, for they corresponded with what Europeans had come to regard as the natural evolution of their own superior world. Agriculture made men peaceful, law-abiding, and governable. Agriculture, in short, would cultivate the worker as he cultivated the land: The production of new crops and the production of a new kind of selfhood went together in the evangelical imagination. Above all else, this new mode of production would encourage the would-be convert to yield enough of a surplus to tie him through trade with Christian Europe (Bundy 1979:39)—to a Kingdom of God, that is, which looked just like the imperial marketplace. Blighted no more, the dark continent would become a “fruitful field,” a rural periphery of the established centers of civilization (Broadbent 1865:204). As we have already noted, the irrigated garden was an icon of the civilizing mission at large. Within its fenced confines, the churchmen enacted the principles of material individualism: the creation of value by means of selfpossessed labor; the forceful domination of nature; the privatization of property; and the accumulation of surplus through an economy of effort. […] The mission garden, clearly, was also meant as a lesson in the contrast of “labor” and “idleness”—and, no less, in the relative value of male and female work. For, to the churchmen, African production was “topsy-turvy” (Crisp 1896:16). The men, whose herds were tended by youths and serfs, appeared to be lazy “lords of creation” (Moffat 1842:505), their political and ritual exertions not signifying “work” to the missionary eye. Women, on the other hand, seemed to have been coerced into doing what was properly male labor, their desultory “scratching” on the face of the earth evoking the ineffectual efforts of mere “beasts of burden” (Kinsman 1983). There was no private property, no commerce, no sign of the “healthy, individualistic competition” or the maximization of time and effort that the Christians saw as righteous industry (Mackenzie quoted in Dachs 1972:652). As Reverend Willoughby (n.d.) put it,

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“The African lives a simple socialistic life, subordinating his individuality to the necessities of the tribe.” Determined to teach by example and compelled to become self-sufficient, then, the evangelist and his wife became metonyms of the European division of labor. Livingstone (1857:22) talks of “the accomplishments of a missionary in Central Africa, namely, the husband to be a jack-of-all-trades without doors, and the wife a maid-of-all-work within.” Here lay another key to civilizing reform: the black woman was to be confined indoors to the sphere of domestic work—and a maid she was indeed to become in the political economy of modern South Africa. While the first reaction of the Tswana to the fertile mission garden was to steal its fruit (see below), the LMS station at Kuruman, with its droughtresistant crops, became a “comparative Goshen to the surrounding country” (Moffat, quoted in Northcott 1961:148). The heathen, however, did not immediately learn from it what the churchmen wished to teach; namely, that its fertility was the product of rationalized hard labor and “modern” methods of cultivation. In the early days at least, its bountiful harvest was seen to flow from the innate powers of the evangelists themselves, this expressing the Tswana sense of the continuity between persons and their capacities to act upon the world. Among the Seleka-Rolong, for instance, leading men vied to have their wives cultivate fields directly adjoining the obviously potent WMMS plots. But the Nonconformists persisted in offering their new techniques and, in time, the Tswana began to differentiate these forces of production from the personal potency of the whites—thereby also learning another lesson in European selfhood. First came the well and the irrigation ditch, next the plough, each being as critical to the construction of the Protestant worldview as it was to the material basis of the civilizing mission. Both were instruments that would transform the “fitful and disorderly” Tswana into settled communities founded on private property (Shillington 1985:17). […] The churchmen were happy to report the steadily expanding reliance on plough agriculture (Mackenzie 1871:72). They were also glad to note some of its corollaries—the growing use of money from the sale of surpluses to purchase farm implements and consumer goods; the increasing signs of private property; and the reformation of the division of labor as women lost control over crop production. They were not so quick to record other, less palatable implications of their efforts: among them, the fact that drought and disease threatened the cattle economy; that, as more pasture was brought under cultivation, a few powerful families were gaining control of much of the land, including the best acreages around natural water sources (Shillington 1985:62).

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The material bases of inequality were being progressively—and, as it was to turn out, disastrously—reconstructed. Here, then, is the origin of a fragmented peasantry caught up in an uneven transition to capitalism. As it was to turn out, Southern Tswana communities were to splinter along similar lines to those described by Lenin (1971:14f; see also Ferguson 1976) for the agrarian population of Russia. The upper peasantry was to give birth to a small rural black petty bourgeoisie; the lower peasantry, into which the vast majority were to be trapped, was to become South Africa’s notorious reserve army of labor, its emergent class of peasant-proletarians; and, in the middle, was a class of producers who were to suffer all the contradictions associated with the rapid growth of commodity production within a world of non-capitalist relations (J. L. Comaroff 1977, 1982). It was a process of fragmentation that, over time, would lay the basis for emergent patterns of class distinction and consciousness…. […] … While the technological innovations of the mission gave rise to a class of commercial farmers, in the longer term the plough brought the majority a harvest of hunger. It also served to mark the onset of an era in which all Tswana would have to turn toward the market, orienting themselves, at least to some degree, to the culture and practices of commodity production. Of course, an ever greater number would have to do so as laborers. Having come to recreate the lost British yeomanry, the Christians had begun to prepare the ground not for an independent peasantry but for an army of wage workers; or, more precisely, for a population of peasant-proletarians snared in a web of economic dependency. And all this well before coercive colonial policies sought to force the Tswana into perennial wage labor. […] The evangelists could not take all the credit for this situation, of course. There were other forces at work in the dispossession and domination of the Southern Tswana. But they certainly could claim to have contributed, culturally and materially, to the entry of these peoples into a cycle of peasant (under-) production and wage labor. For they had toiled hard to introduce an appreciation of money, time, work discipline and the other essential features of industrial capitalism; in sum, the signs and practices of the commodity form. Again, the Tswana reacted differentially to the call of commerce, commodities, and cash crops. And they did so along the fault-lines of class distinction, whose symbolic markers had themselves been instilled by the churchmen—the small petty bourgeoisie, which came most fully to embody mission values, showing greatest enthusiasm. But gradually all alike were drawn into the purview of a world reconstructed according to the logic of the market. All alike began to

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internalize its terms and, hence, to reorder their own prior system of meanings accordingly. Once more, let us bear this in mind as we move on to the third register of the conversation between the Tswana and the mission, the politics of language.

The Politics of Language

For the Protestants, it was the Word, the literal message of God, that, more than anything else, bore the divine light into the dark recesses of heathen hearts and minds. Its dynamic force, they believed, could reach the inner core of being, penetrating the blindness of man in his “natural” state. A sermon given by Reverend Read captures this well: “I told the Bechuanas [Tswana] that when God’s word began to work in their hearts that their tears would wash away all the red paint from their bodies.” In this vivid image of conversion, outward signs of heathenism, themselves only skin deep, are dissolved by the internalized power of the word. Note also that such Christian rhetoric tended to braid together the themes of words and water, so that each chain of metaphors came to imply the other. Words conveyed reason to the mind as tears bore tangible witness to affected emotions. Water was distilled by the force of God’s moving message, be it rain from the heavens or the weeping of the human heart. Evidence of this association is everywhere to hand in the poetics of the civilizing mission: the verbal “truth” was to irrigate the desert of the native’s mind as moisture was to fructify his blighted habitat. In 1849, an LMS observer wrote: “It is a sight worth travelling some distance to see—the printing and binding operation at Kuruman. The Fountains of Civilization so far up in the interior of South Africa! And scores of men, women and children having renounced heathenism, intelligently reading the Word of Life.” The savage mind was indeed being watered by the word of life, whose truth had to be independently recognized and acknowledged by each self-willed citizen of God’s Kingdom. […] It is noteworthy … that, while the evangelists doubted the competence of Tswana speakers, they did not question the capacity of their language to convey the meanings that civilization might demand of it. The heathen might lack the reflective mentality with which to analyze abstract terms. And he might be so stupid as to confuse homonyms. But the churchmen never doubted that Setswana would yield to their meticulous efforts to translate literally the English message they bore. Thus Moffat (1842:302) was sure that, while “a mass of rubbish … paralyze[d] the mental powers of the natives,” such detritus was easily removed—whereupon their vacant minds would be receptive to the

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biblical text and all that it conveyed. In this spirit of optimism, he began a massive translation project. As we might expect, Moffat’s work had consequences far beyond his own intentions. Not only did he hold up a Setswana mirror to the English text. He created a counterpart of the scriptures, as he read them, in the tongue of the natives—as he had come to understand it. In short, he transposed the Bible into a cultural register true to neither, a hybrid creation born of the colonial encounter itself. Hence, to take just one example, Moffat’s use of badimo (“ancestors”) to denote “demons” (Mathaio [Matthew] 7:22; 8:28, 32) did violence to both biblical and conventional Tswana usage. Nonetheless, it reflected the mission ideology of the period, and was to become standard church usage (Brown 1926:103), with long-term effects on indigenous consciousness. The Tswana did not simply accept the revision of their key constructs, for the logic of a whole cultural scheme intervened. Yet this logic itself was gradually changing under the growing impact of another order, and an obviously powerful one at that. At the very least, they developed an awareness of the relativity of meaning, and of the politics of managing cultural distinctions. Thus all Tswana, whether or not they entered the church, were soon to learn that “ancestors” were phenomena of different valence in setswana and sekgoa. Within the European dominated field of colonial culture, they were signs of the “primitive.” The subversion of native signs, then, was part of the struggle that took place within the speech field of the mission. […] Patently, there were major ontological differences between the linguistic worlds of setswana and sekgoa. We cannot analyze these in any detail here, save to emphasize the performative quality of the former; the axiom that to talk and to name in this culture was to create experience, to construct a reality. For, while utterances bore the imprint of their speakers, they also established tangible links with their referents, a property that was taken by Victorian scholars as evidence of “primitive mentality.” It was this property that Tambiah (1968) was later to dub the “magical power of words”; their power, as Horton (1967: 157) put it of African thought, to “bring into being the events or states they stand for,” Such power goes well beyond the scope of Western ideas of the capacities of speech, further even than the missionaries’ belief in the potency of the word. It implies verbal connections among forces unwilled and inanimate (Turner 1967: 299f): words are enmeshed in dense fans of association that might unwittingly be activated by their mere mention. Thus Tswana have long explained their reluctance to use the term shupa (“seven”) by observing that it also means “to point out” (i.e. with the right index finger, the digit that stands for the number “seven”), a gesture which connotes “to curse” (Willoughby 1932: 143).

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This notion of the continuity of word and action, cause and effect, did not merely differ from European conceptions. It violated the empiricist epistemology inherent in the sekgoa of the nineteenth century, for which positive knowledge lay in the definitive separation of the construct from the concrete, the word from the thing or the act. It also makes clear why the evangelists saw the Tswana as unreasoning, magical thinkers—and why it was so crucial to them to reduce Setswana to (grammatical, conceptual) order. For the Christians, remaking African consciousness entailed freeing the native from this web of animist superstition, this epistemology of unreason. It was with reference to this epistemology, too, that the Tswana were to speak back to them, to give voice to their side of the conversation. In so doing, they were to resist many of the distinctions introduced by the Christians—especially the attempt to sever man from matter, the abstract from the concrete, the word from the world. […] There is also a clear message here for the anthropologist of colonialism…. the argument between colonizer and subject often escapes the register of reasoned verbal debate. History in the making, like ethnography, is not always reducible to a narrative or a text. Indeed, when the colonized respond in the genre of rational debate—at least as defined in European terms—the hegemony of the colonizing culture may be well on the way to instilling itself in its new subjects; that is why truly counter-hegemonic reactions so frequently seek out alternative modes of expression. Consequently, if we are to recover from the documentary record the riposte of the ruled, we have to move with them as they try, often by unexpected means, to shift the unequal encounter with Europe onto an entirely different plane; to acknowledge, that is, that this encounter may involve a struggle over the terms of representation, and is as likely to invoke the poetics of the concrete as it is to rely on a discourse of words. In this struggle, too, the politics of meaning go well beyond the appropriation of the signs of one culture to those of another. Their very essence lies in the shaping of new forms of signification to bear the transfigured images on which history insists. In South Africa, for all the early resistance to the Christian message and the colonial impulse, the process of domination was to take its course, laying down a new hegemony of social forms—even though the surface planes of the world reconstructed in the colonial encounter were to become the site of a long and bitter political struggle. This, in turn, leads to our more general conclusion. The colonization of South Africa—and many other parts of the world—began with an ideological onslaught on the part of Christian missionaries, self-styled bearers of European

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civilization. These men set out to “convert” heathens by persuading them of the content of their theological message and, even more profoundly, by reconstructing their everyday worlds. Modern Protestant conversion, of course, is itself an ideological construct framed in the bourgeois imagery of rational belief and the reflective self; of a moral economy of individual choice that echoes, on the spiritual plane, the material economics of the free market. It made little immediate sense along the South African frontier in the early nineteenth century. On the other hand, the conversation between the evangelists and the Tswana did have an enormous impact on the latter; in this respect, David Livingstone (above …) was to prove correct. The everyday discourse of the mission, its theater of the mundane, was effective primarily because it enmeshed the Tswana in the forms of sekgoa: the commodity form, linguistic forms, kinship forms, rhetorical forms. The politics of water, production, and language—and we could equally have chosen to discuss architecture, clothing, or a number of other things—all tell the same story. The content of the civilizing mission, its substantive message, was debated and often rejected; increasingly, it would turn out later, along emerging class lines. But its forms were conveyed by the very structure of the conversation from the moment that the Tswana engaged in it. Thus, even to argue over the relative success of two kinds of rain medicine was unwittingly to concede a good deal to the ideology of rational empiricism; to adopt the plough was to redefine the division of labor along the lines of the bourgeois family and its engendered signs; to read a vernacular bible was to have Setswana poetics re-presented in the mode of a thin sekgoa narrative; and so on. In each sphere, the discourse presupposed a certain kind of subject, and a particular mode of knowing and being. The colonization of consciousness, in other words, entailed two levels. At its most tangible, it involved an overt effort to convert the Tswana, an argument of images and messages intended to convince them of the ideological content of Christianity. Here the evangelists tried to disseminate, in the heart of darkness, the Good News, a persuasive narrative of biblical morality and “truth.” At a deeper level, only partially distinguished from the first, they set their sights on the total reformation of the heathen world; i.e. on the inculcation of the hegemonic forms, the taken-for-granted signs and practices, of the colonizing culture. The Nonconformists, as we know, were sometimes quite explicit about working on both planes at once, since the really cultivated being had to be converted and reformed. And they seem to have been aware that the kind of personhood and consciousness they wished to instill did not arise from dogma and revelation alone; that it inhered as much in the practical and material forms of “civilization,” those “outer things” at once devalued and yet

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tacitly encouraged by the church. Notwithstanding the intentions of these European colonizers, however, the two levels of transformation—conversion and reformation—do not necessarily occur together. Quite the opposite, the discontinuities between them often lie at the very heart of the history of consciousness and its struggles. That is why people who reject an ideological message may yet be reformed by its medium; why new hegemonies may arise amidst the most bitter of ideological battles. This brings us, finally, to the reactions of people like the Tswana to the modern historical processes in which they find themselves caught up; that is, to their consciousness of colonization. There is much debate at present, among historians and anthropologists, about the nature of those reactions—in particular, about the nature of protest and the so-called “weapons of the weak” (Scott 1985). Does an act require explicit consciousness and articulation to be properly called resistance? Should the term apply only to the intentions behind social and political acts, or may it refer equally to their consequences? When a people can be shown to express some measure of awareness of their predicament as victims of domination—and, better yet, can state the terms of their response—the matter is clear. Where they do not, defining and characterizing their reactions becomes an altogether more murky business. We would suggest, however, that there is an analytical lesson to be taken from the evident fact that most historical situations are extremely murky in just this respect. Aside from organized protest—easily recognizable as “political action” by Western lights—much of what may be seen as the riposte of the colonized, as one or another form of (tacit, indirect) resistance, turns out to be a practical means of producing historical consciousness. Indeed, if anything is clear from our study, it is that much of the Tswana response to the mission encounter was an effort to fashion an awareness of, and gain conceptual mastery over, a changing world. This, it seems, is a very general phenomenon. Early on in the colonizing process, wherever it occurs, the assault on local societies and cultures is the subject of neither “consciousness” nor “unconsciousness” on the part of the victim, but something in between: recognition of varying degrees of inchoateness and clarity. Out of that recognition, and the creative tensions to which it may lead, there typically arise forms of experimental practice that seek, at once, techniques of empowerment and sources of new knowledge. Such reactions, often seen as enough of a threat to the authority of the dominant to elicit coercive measures, seek to plumb the depths of the colonizing process. They search for the logic—and, sometimes, the deus ex machina— that lies behind its visible face. For the recently colonized generally believe that there is something invisible, something profound, happening to them; that their future may well depend on gaining control over it. Thus, for instance,

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many “Christianized” peoples the world over are, or once were, convinced that whites have a second, secret bible or set of rites (cricket? semaphore? tea parties?) on which their power depends. The whimsical “unreason” of such movements as cargo cults stems from precisely this conviction. These movements, as is now well known, are an early effort to grasp the bases of the colonial production of value, and to redirect it to the well-being of the dominated. With time and historical experience, the colonized show greater discrimination, greater subtlety in interpreting the European embrace and its implications. Attempts to come to terms with it grow more diverse, and are ever more closely tied to processes of class formation. Among those drawn most fully into the forms of “modernity”—the petty bourgeoisies and “new elites” scattered along the fringes of the world system—there occurs a gradual appropriation of the images, ideologies, and aesthetics of the post-enlightenment West. And these include orthodox styles of political discourse and protest. But, for the rest, modernity and its modes of resistance are by no means inevitable, or even likely consequences of the colonization of consciousness—or of the consciousness of colonization that follows. Indeed, the dynamics of cultural imperialism are such that, while the power structure of colonialism is everywhere clearly laid down, the colonizing process itself is rarely a simple dialectic of domination and resistance. Bibliography Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. [Translated by R. Nice.] Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Broadbent, Samuel. 1865. A Narrative of the First Introduction of Christianity Amongst the Barolong Tribe of Bechuanas, South Africa. London: Wesleyan Mission House. Brown, J. Tom. 1926. Among the Bantu Nomads: A Record of Forty Years Spent Among the Bechuana. London: Seeley Service. Bundy, Colin. 1979. The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry. Berkeley: University of California Press. Campbell, John. 1822. Travels in South Africa … Being a Narrative of a Second Journey, 2 volumes. London: Westley. [Reprint, 1967. New York and London: Johnson Reprint Corporation.] Carlyle, Thomas. 1842. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History: Six Lectures. New York: D. Appleton. Comaroff, Jean. 1985. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Comaroff, Jean, and Comaroff, John L. 1986. Christianity and Colonialism in South Africa. American Ethnologist 13: 1–19. Comaroff, Jean, and Comaroff, John L. 1990. Goodly Beasts, Beastly Goods: Cattle and Commodities in a South African Context. American Ethnologist 17: 195–216; infra, Chapter 5. Comaroff, John L. 1973. Competition for Office and Political Processes among the Barolong boo Ratshidi. Ph.D. dissertation, University of London. Comaroff, John L. 1977. The Structure of Agricultural Transformation in Barolong. Gaborone: Government Printer. Comaroff, John L. 1982. Dialectical Systems, History, and Anthropology: Units of Study and Questions of Theory. Journal of Southern African Studies 8:143–172. Comaroff, John L. 1987. Of Totemism and Ethnicity: Consciousness, Practice, and the Signs of Inequality. Ethnos 52: 301–23; infra, Chapter 2. Cope, Richard L. (ed.). 1977. The Journals of the Rev. T. L. Hodgson, Missionary to the Seleka-Rolong and the Griquas, 1821–1831. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. Crisp, William. 1896. The Bechuana of South Africa. London: SPCK. Dachs, Anthony J. 1972. Missionary Imperialism: The Case of Bechuanaland. Journal of African History 13: 647–658. Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 1937. Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ferguson, D. Frances. 1976. Rural/Urban Relations and Peasant Radicalism: A Preliminary Statement. Comparative Studies in Society and History 18:106–118. Harlow, Barbara. 1986. Introduction. In The Colonial Harem, (ed.) Malek Alloula. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1962. The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848. New York: New American Library. Horton, Robin. 1967. African Traditional Thought and Western Science. Africa 31:50–71, 155–87. Jeal, Tim. 1973. Livingstone. New York: Putnam. Kinsman, Margaret. 1983. “Beasts of Burden”: The Subordination of Southern Tswana Women, ca. 1800–1840, Journal of Southern African Studies 10: 39–54. Legassick, Martin C. 1969. The Sotho-Tswana Peoples Before 1800. In African Societies in Southern Africa, (ed.) L. Thompson. London: Heinemann. Lenin, Vladimir Illich. 1971. Selections from The Development of Capitalism in Russia, In Essential Works of Lenin, (ed.) H. Christman. New York: Bantam. Livingstone, David 1857. Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. London: Murray. Mackenzie, John. 1871, Ten Years North of the Orange River: A Story of Everyday Life and Work Among the South African Tribes. Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas.

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Moffat, Robert. 1842. Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa. London: Snow. [Reprint, 1969. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation.] Muldoon, James. 1975. The Indian as Irishman. Essex Institute Historical Collections 3:267–89. Northcott, William Cecil. 1961. Robert Moffat: Pioneer in Africa, 1817–1870. London: Lutterworth. Ranger, Terence O. 1987. Taking Hold of the Land: Holy Places and Pilgrimages in Twentieth-Century Zimbabwe. Past and Present 117: 158–94. Reyburn, H. A. 1933. The Missionary as Rain Maker. The Critic 1:146–53. Schapera, Isaac (ed.). 1960. Livingstone’s Private Journals, 1851–1853. London: Chatto & Windus. Schapera, Isaac. 1971. Rainmaking Rites of Tswana Tribes. Leiden: Afrika-studiecentrum. Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shillington, Kevin. 1985. The Colonisation of the Southern Tswana, 1870–1900. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Solomon, Edward S. 1855. Two Lectures on the Native Tribes of the Interior. Cape Town: Saul Solomon. Tambiah, Stanley J. 1968. The Magical Power of Words. Man (n.s.) 3:175–208. Trexler, Richard C. 1984. We Think, They Act: Clerical Readings of Missionary Theatre in Sixteenth Century Spain. In Understanding Popular Culture, (ed.) S. Kaplan. Berlin: Mouton. Turner, Victor W. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Volosinov, Valentin N. 1973. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. [Translated by L. Matejka and I. Titunik.] New York: Seminar Press. Willoughby, William Charles. 1932. Nature-Worship and Taboo: Further Studies in “The Soul of the Bantu.” Hartford: Hartford Seminary Press. Willoughby, William Charles. n.d. Letter from Africa. [Pamphlet.] London: London Missionary Society.

Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Cultural Theory, Christian Missions, and Global Modernity Ryan Dunch The term “cultural imperialism” is wonderfully versatile.1 It emerged in critical scholarship on U.S. media influence in Latin America in the early 1970s; indeed, media studies, in which it refers to the alleged global dominance of American entertainment commodities and cultural images, remains the principal frame of reference for the term.2 However, it has also been employed in academic and popular writing in a wide array of fields, with reference both to historical and to contemporary issues. To cite a few recent examples: “cultural imperialism” has been invoked to explain (and attack) the universalistic claims of Western mathematics (the seductive “secret weapon” of cultural imperialism, “imposed” by colonial powers at the expense of indigenous conceptual systems); the world currency of the English language; the social definition of physical “disability” as a deviation from “normal” human physicality (the cultural imperialism of “ableism”); the de facto medical definition of permanent loss of consciousness (“brain death”) as equivalent to death; the appeal of Elvis Presley and his American peers in 1950s Britain; or the popularity of soccer in Brazil or cricket in India.3 Source: Dunch, R., “Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Cultural Theory, Christian Missions and Global Modernity”, History and Theory 41 (2002): pp. 301–325. Copyright © 2002 by Wesleyan University. 1 For input on these ideas, I thank the editors and reviewers for History and Theory, students in my “Topics in Comparative History” seminar at the University of Alberta in 1998 and 1999, and the participants in “Representations and Misrepresentations of the Missionary Movement,” the tenth meeting of the Yale–Edinburgh Colloquium on the History of the Missionary Movement and Non-Western Christianity, University of Edinburgh, July 6–8, 2000. 2 Emile G. McAnany and Kenton T. Wilkinson, “From Cultural Imperialists to Takeover Victims? Questions on Hollywood’s Buyouts from the Critical Tradition,” Communication Research 19, no. 6 (1992), 724–748. 3 Alan J. Bishop, “Western Mathematics: The Secret Weapon of Cultural Imperialism,” Race and Class 32, no. 2 (1990), 51–65; Lennard J. Davis, “J’accuse! Cultural Imperialism—Ableist Style,” Social Alternatives 18, no. 1 (1999), 36–40; Nicholas Tonti-Filippini, “Revising Brain Death: Cultural Imperialism?” Linacre Quarterly (1998), abstracted in Issues in Law and Medicine 14, no. 2 (1998), 225–226; Laura E. Cooper and B. Lee Cooper, “The Pendulum of Cultural Imperialism: Popular Music Interchanges between the United States and Great Britain,”

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Such invocations of the term are generally fueled by an understandable impulse to critique some form of cultural dominance. That critical impulse does not in itself make the term a convincing one, however. The concern of this article is not with the application of the term to particular fields, but rather with the merits and deficiencies of the term “cultural imperialism” as an analytical tool for understanding cultural intercourse in general, and with reference to the missionary movement in modern history in particular. Viewing “cultural imperialism” as a conceptual model rather than a “reality,” the article examines the term’s utility, what it highlights and obscures in processes of cultural interaction.4 In this regard the essay argues that the term suffers from two chief defects: it is inseparable from essentializing discourses of national or cultural authenticity; and it reduces complex interactions to a dichotomy between actor and acted upon, leaving too little place for the agency of the latter. These problems are illustrated by looking at how “cultural imperialism” and cognate terms have been used with reference to Christian missionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in general and in the specific case of China. The paper concludes by sketching an alternative model to “cultural imperialism” for conceptualizing the role of missionaries in modern history.

“Cultural Imperialism” and Its Problems

Few discussions of cultural imperialism devote much attention to defining it. Broadly, however, most academic uses of the term contain an implicit definition along the following lines: certain cultural products (for example, sociallyaccepted beliefs, ideologies, entertainment commodities) have attained a position of dominance in a foreign culture through a process of coercive imposition, usually through their ties to political or economic power. The effect on another culture and the coercive nature of the process are thus the key issues. Underlying academic discussions of “cultural imperialism” is the recognition developed over recent decades of the connections between knowledge and power, which connects cultural imperialism to questions of post-colonialism and orientalism (although the term predates the emergence of those debates). Journal of Popular Culture 27, no. 3 (1993), 61–78; Allen Guttmann, Games and Empires: Modern Sports and Cultural Imperialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 4 For a parallel argument about “civil society,” see Timothy Brook and B. Michael Frolic, “The Ambiguous Challenge of Civil Society,” in Civil Society in China, ed. Timothy Brook and B. Michael Frolic (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 8.

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As is well known, Edward Said’s Orientalism was a milestone in the development of this line of scholarship. The book’s influence came from Said’s ability to apply the insights of Foucault and Gramsci (among others) to one relatively concrete and international phenomenon. Said argued that the supposedly abstract and apolitical intellectual pursuits of nineteenth-century scholars and novelists were actually complicit in the extension of colonial power. Their writings about the “Orient,” he argued, constituted a discourse which conflated distinct societies and imputed to them a set of negative attributes contrasting to corresponding positive qualities attributed to the “West.” This discourse thus constructed both “Self” and “Other” in ways that made the West’s political dominance over the “Orient” seem both natural and inevitable.5 Said’s work has been deservedly influential, particularly in demolishing the supposed “neutrality” of modern knowledge systems. Few would now claim, for instance, that Western medicine is simply “true” and indigenous healing traditions “false,” or that Western mathematics is not a cultural product. In the abstract, we must acknowledge that the more or less global influence of Western cultural forms has come about historically through a coercive process (leaving aside for the moment the question of who or what is exercising that coercion). Clearly, also, the transformation of the world in the modern era has involved the global extension not only of political relations, industrial production, and trade, but also of cultural forms, nation-states, rationalism and science, secularism in politics, constitutional government, and mass education (in certain forms and emphasizing certain subjects), and these changes have been intimately related to structures of power and dominance, and to colonialism in particular. On the other hand, critics have identified several problems in the use of “cultural imperialism” as an analytical term, problems that call its basic utility into question. Most straightforwardly, many of the less convincing discussions of cultural imperialism replace the “myth of cultural neutrality” of knowledge systems or other cultural products with an equally naive cultural determinism in which cultural products simply “bear” certain values, intrinsically, values which are then “imposed” on a target population conceived as unwitting and passive. Thus, for one author, “western mathematics presents a dehumanized, objectified, ideological world-view which will emerge necessarily through mathematics teaching of the traditional colonial kind.”6 Not coincidentally, such 5 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 6 Bishop, “Western Mathematics,” 58 (emphasis added).

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discussions often dodge the question of historical agency—precisely how, and by and to whom, these alleged values are conveyed—by using the passive voice (“the need was felt to educate the indigenous people only in order to enable them to function adequately in the European-dominated … structures”), or by attributing an imaginary intentionality to abstract forces (“United States cultural imperialism has two major goals, one economic and one political …”).7 In actuality, of course, establishing the audience perception of and response to a given cultural product is very difficult to do, and it is a quite different problem from analyzing the product itself, as critics of the “cultural imperialism” model in media studies have pointed out.8 In other words, for example, analyzing the attributes of mathematics as a cognitive system does not necessarily tell us anything about the response side of the equation: how it was understood, interpreted, reshaped, employed, or rejected by learners in colonial school systems. Similarly, scholars in post-colonial studies have recognized that the study of “colonial discourse,” that is, the discourse within the colonizer societies about the colonized, of which Said’s work was a pioneering example, is quite different from the study of the cultural experience[s] of the colonized themselves.9 No amount of study of Western portrayals of the “other” for Western audiences can uncover, therefore, how individuals in those “other” societies experienced their exposure to European societies. We cannot even safely make the more limited assumption that the representatives of colonizer societies abroad actually held the attitudes portrayed in the colonial discourse or were governed by those attitudes in their day-to-day interactions with the “other” in their host societies. A related problem is that many alleged manifestations of “cultural imperialism” actually occur through market forces, raising the issue of demand for cultural commodities. In less subtle discussions this is beside the point; market demand for the products of (usually) American culture merely demonstrates 7 Ibid., 55; James Petras, “Cultural Imperialism in the Late 20th Century,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 23, no. 2 (1993), 139; cf. John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 104–108. An example of this kind of heavyhanded determinism applied to China is E. Richard Brown, “Rockefeller Medicine in China: Professionalism and Imperialism,” in Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad, ed. Robert F. Arnove (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980). 8 Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism, 51–64; McAnany and Wilkinson, “From Cultural Imperialists to Takeover Victims?” 9 For example, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 16–17.

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the power of cultural imperialism to shape global tastes to profit U.S. corporations. Again, this conceptualization attributes coordinated intent and coercive power to “capitalism” or “imperialism,” and little or no autonomy to the people on the receiving end. Youth fashion is a particular focus of this literature, young people being, according to some, “most susceptible to the consumeristindividualist propaganda.”10 There is no doubt that young people in many societies wear Nikes and listen to Michael Jackson, but assessing the meaning of the phenomenon is more complicated than many of these writings allow. Some have seen the global consumption of American cultural products as the new opiate of the masses, the sign of an emerging homogenized world culture of capitalist consumption, controlled by Western media corporations and undermining class solidarity and third world revolutionary potential.11 Critics of such a conception, on the other hand, have argued persuasively that American-derived slogans and images do not have a fixed meaning, in either cultural or class terms, but have become free-floating signifiers, continually recombined and recontextualized in new settings. “American icons have become the staple of a visual lingua franca that is understood anywhere in the world, yet their use can no longer be dictated solely from America,” asserts one European scholar regarding youth fashion in contemporary Europe.12 The same author also notes that an elitist disdain for popular culture drives some of the European invective against American cultural imperialism; those who decry the popularity of Madonna among French youth would be quite happy for them to listen to the alien musical imports of Beethoven or Bartok. An additional problem is raised when we consider that the term “cultural imperialism” is applied both to Christian missions in the age of imperialism and to cultural interchanges among the wealthy industrial societies of North America and western Europe in the post-World War II era. These usages make no distinction between the kind of “power” exercised in the cultural marketplace by U.S. pop music in pre-Beatles Britain or by U.S. brand logos in 1990s Europe and the much more direct and coercive kinds of power exercised by the imperialist nations in their colonies or in politically weakened societies like China before World War II. Did American popular music really “colonize 10 11 12

Petras, “Cultural Imperialism,” 139. For example, Petras, “Cultural Imperialism.” Rob Kroes, “American Empire and Cultural Imperialism: A View from the Receiving End,” Diplomatic History 23, no. 3 (1999), 475; see also Francis X. Rocca, “America’s Multicultural Imperialism,” American Spectator 33, no. 1 (2000), 34–38.

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the European subconscious” in the 1950s, and, if so, how do we compare such a cultural change with the cultural changes in African tribal societies in the colonial period?13 A term so generic that it can be applied to such widely different situations may not be very useful. The problem of definition has been discussed at length in the literature on cultural imperialism. The term ties together “culture” and “imperialism,” both of which are notoriously difficult to define.14 Many attempted or implicit definitions, such as my loose one at the beginning of this section, simply beg further questions: how do we measure something like “cultural dominance,” for instance? Related to the problem of definition is that of essentialism, of cultures and of nations. The positing of cultural imperialism as foreign cultural domination of a particular culture implies that a cultural status quo ante can be identified, and moreover that that cultural system was not subject to internal contestation and was thus likely to remain unchanged in the absence of foreign contact. Put this way, the fallacies of such a position are obvious, and the impossibility of retrieving any “authentic” pre-colonial cultural voice has been widely recognized within subaltern studies.15 Yet such a conceptualization is embedded in many discussions of cultural imperialism. It is especially evident in attacks on alien cultural elements in the name of nationalism, which overlook the constructed and hegemonic nature of modern national identities themselves.16 Recent scholarship on nationalism has shown that the legitimacy of modern nation-states is bound up with their claim to represent an “authentic” national community or culture, defined in contrast both to “foreign” and to regional or other sub-national elements; it is not surprising, therefore, that the literature attacking cultural imperialism is riddled with the rhetoric of national authenticity that undergirds the nation-state.17 13 Cooper and Cooper, “Pendulum of Cultural Imperialism.” 14 Andrew N. Porter, “‘Cultural Imperialism’ and Protestant Missionary Enterprise,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25 (1997), 372–374; Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism, 2–8; Guttmann, Games and Empires, chap. 9. 15 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s influential essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” reprinted in Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, 66–111. 16 The danger of essentialism inherent in using nativism and/or nationalism to attack colonial discourses has been recognized within post-colonial studies; see Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, 15–16, 23. 17 Prasenjit Duara, “Response to Philip Huang’s ‘Biculturality in Modern China and in Chinese Studies,’” Modern China 26, no. 1 (2000), 36; Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism, chap. 3.

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A further problem is the question of perspective: how to delineate not only an epistemological standpoint from which to identify cultural imperialism, but also a moral standpoint from which to critique it. Inconsistency on this score is one of the charges leveled at Said, most notably by the late Ernest Gellner, who sparked a firestorm in the Times Literary Supplement in part by asserting that Said had no solid foundation for his moral judgments. Said “simply makes himself a present of a stance from which he can pass moral judgement and tell us how things really stand, without facing the difficulties of validating it,” Gellner wrote.18 Said and his supporters rejected Gellner’s criticisms, but the general problem has been acknowledged within post-colonial studies. If all discourses exercise power by constructing and categorizing their objects, and if some precolonial state of “authenticity” is unattainable, how can one claim any validity for the discourses produced by the post-colonial project? In a telling acknowledgement of this problem, the editors of an influential compilation on post-colonialism could only express “hope” that scholars aware of the “mutual implication of power and knowledge” would produce “other knowledge, better knowledge … responsive to Said’s central question: ‘How can we know and respect the Other?’”19 Such epistemological modesty is not always evident in the less nuanced writings around these issues, in which “better knowledge” seems to boil down to knowledge that the guild of “progressive” intellectuals defines as emancipatory rather than repressive. In some such works the luminaries of recent critical scholarship—“Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Edward Said, bell hooks, Helene Cixous, and others”—are constituted as a new canon, familiar to “progressives throughout the world,” as one such author put it with striking offhandedness.20 One is tempted to compare this list to the use of Mao, Che, Castro, and Ho as an alternative canon by an earlier generation—a list equally self-referential, but at least more international! The last problem with the term “cultural imperialism” in general is raised by the breadth of usage of the term as shown by the examples at the beginning of this article. As we have noted, behind all those uses lies the idea that alien cultural products are accepted because they have been imposed. Implicit here is a model of culture as a field of ideological domination, in which cultural 18 19 20

Ernest Gellner, “The Mightier Pen? Edward Said and the Double Standards of Inside-Out Colonialism,” Times Literary Supplement 4690 (February 19, 1993), 3. Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, 8; see also Santiago Castro-Gomez, “Latin American Postcolonial Theories,” Peace Review 10, no. 1 (1998), 27–33. Davis, “J’accuse!” 36.

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change comes about through coercion by outside forces. However, if the sum of angles in a triangle, ideas of “normal” human physicality, youth fashions, and medical definitions of death are all products of cultural imperialism, then surely every definition is an exercise of power, and every change of mind a succumbing to domination—within as well as across cultures. Where, then, does imposition end? Since we all inhabit cultures and accept in some measure the cultural products that come with them, have we all been “colonized?” Even if we acknowledge (as I would not hesitate to) that abstract social forces like capitalism, industrial society, and/or modernity have significantly restructured human subjective experience, to view that restructuring simply as a process of imposition in which individuals play no active role would be a profoundly determinist conception of human social life. Moreover, with reference to crosscultural exchanges in particular, a view that sees cultural change as the result of external impositions leads ultimately to a conception of modern world history in which the West has wielded a determining influence on global culture, in which modernity reduces to Westernization.21 Thus, the discourse of cultural imperialism, originating in opposition to Western cultural hegemony, can ironically lead to a conclusion which is profoundly Eurocentric in its denial of agency or autonomy to non-Western populations.

Christian Missions, Indigenous Agency, and Colonized Consciousness

If there were a single group most commonly held to exemplify the operation of cultural imperialism in modern history, it would have to be Christian missionaries. The assertion that missionaries were implicated in imperialist expansion precedes the more recent theoretical discussions of cultural imperialism by several decades, extending back to attacks on the missionary enterprise by nationalist critics in China and elsewhere in the 1920s.22 Missionaries 21 The fallacy is discussed in Nicos Mouzelis, “Modernity: A Non-Eurocentric Concep­ tualization,” British Journal of Sociology 50, no. 1 (1999), 141–159, and exemplified in Theodore H. von Laue, The World Revolution of Westernization: The Twentieth Century in Global Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 22 I have not been able to trace any direct links between the nationalist critiques of missionary imperialism and discussions of cultural imperialism in media studies since the 1970s, nor have I found the precise term “cultural imperialism” in Chinese nationalist and communist attacks on missions before 1949.

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are routinely portrayed in both literature and scholarship as narrow-minded chauvinists whose presence and preaching destroyed indigenous cultures and opened the way for the extension of colonial rule.23 Few of those portrayals reflect carefully on the usefulness of the cultural imperialism model for understanding the impact of missionaries on non-Western societies, however.24 As one would expect, applications of cultural imperialism to Christian missions are prone to the pitfalls that apply to the term in general, with two important additional qualifications. The first reflects the fact that most discussions of missionary cultural imperialism refer to the century between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, that is, the period of modern imperialism. This means that cultural imperialism, which in the literature about more recent times most often refers to a process of cultural domination in the absence of direct political control, with regard to missionaries often degenerates into arguments about whether missionaries had direct ties to political or economic forces of imperialism. That is to say, some discussions of missions and cultural imperialism work with an implicit model of imperialism as a coordinated intentional endeavor with three interrelated manifestations— political, economic, and cultural—and seek to demonstrate that missionaries were agents of cultural imperialism by showing their direct links to political and economic imperialism.25 Others simply assert it, as in a recent textbook which presents the missionary presence in China as one of “imperialism’s three ‘M’s’: merchants, missionaries, and the military,” all “propelled by a missionarylike urge to spread the gospel of Western capitalism, Western religious truth, and Western state power.”26 The problem here is that the ties between missionaries and government or commercial interests is a more limited and empirical question than the impact of missionaries on indigenous cultures, which is at the core of how the term “cultural imperialism” is used in other fields. It is also a distraction from 23 A recent bestseller, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), is a typical example. An older novel often read along these lines is Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, [1958]), although Achebe himself holds a more nuanced view of the missionary/Igbo encounter; see note 40 below. 24 E.g., Yunseong Kim, “Protestant Missions as Cultural Imperialism in Early Modern Korea: Hegemony and its Discontents,” Korea Journal 39, no. 4 (1999), 205–233. 25 E.g., the works of Lewis Pyenson on imperialism and Western science, which define “cultural imperialism” as direct ties to the political and economic interests of empire; see his Cultural Imperialism and the Exact Sciences (New York: Peter Lang, 1985), 312–316. 26 R. Keith Schoppa, Revolution and Its Past: Identities and Change in Modern Chinese History (Upper Saddle River, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 2002), 45; see also 58–62.

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it. While particular exceptions can be found, generally speaking neither mission societies nor missionaries as individuals were directly influential with their home governments or their colonial representatives, nor were they directly linked to the traders and economic interests of their home countries.27 In fact, the interests of missions were often diametrically opposed to those of their compatriots in government or commerce, and the relationships on the ground between missionaries, consular/colonial officials, and traders were as often cool or antagonistic as warm or cooperative.28 Recognizing this does not absolve missionaries from the charge of cultural imperialism, but it reminds us that we need to be clear in defining the term to mean not simply manifestations of imperialism in the cultural sphere, but an impact of one culture on another. It is worth noting in this regard that work on the missionary connection to imperialism has been influenced by a seminal early article that provided an inadequate and ambiguous definition of cultural imperialism. Writing in the early 1970s, the prominent American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. surveyed the principal theoretical models of imperialism and the place accorded to missionaries in each of them. Having shown that the missionary enterprise could not convincingly be explained as a function of imperialist economic or political interests, Schlesinger proposed that the then-new works of Frantz Fanon and others on the cultural and psychological impact of imperialism might provide a key to unlocking the role of missions that sociological and economic theories of imperialism could not. His exploration of these issues was nuanced and suggestive; however, he defined “cultural imperialism” in passing as “purposeful aggression by one culture against the ideas and values of another.” The problems of agency and abstraction in this definition should be obvious: Whose “purpose,” and are we talking about intentions or effects? What precisely constitutes “aggression” against “ideas and values”? Are the two “cultures” as unitary and distinct from each other as the definition implies?29 27 See the careful discussion in Jean and John Comaroff, “Christianity and Colonialism in South Africa,” American Ethnologist 13 (1986), 1–22. 28 Examples of this for China are legion; for one case in which the British consul agreed with Chinese officials to get the British missionaries out of the city in return for approval to build a race-course, see Ellsworth C. Carlson, The Foochow Missionaries, 1847–1880 (Cambridge, Mass.: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1974), 140, 163. 29 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “The Missionary Enterprise and Theories of Imperialism,” in The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, ed. John K. Fairbank (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 363.

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Such a definition is absolutely dependent on the vantage point adopted, and it distracts from the question of impact, which, I argue, is a different and potentially more fruitful focus than trying to discern missionary motivations or the degree of “aggression” inherent in ideas.30 The second qualification we need to address is that in practice many references to the “cultural imperialism” of missionaries mean simply that some missionaries held condescending or racist attitudes towards the people among whom they lived. Anyone who has read missionary publications or worked in missionary archives can testify to the accuracy of this observation. Not all were as narrow in their vision as Erastus Wentworth, an American Methodist missionary in Fuzhou around 1860 who hankered after burnt johnny cakes and raw coffee in place of the “villainous preparations” of Fuzhou cuisine, and waxed eloquent on “the demand there would be for steel and silver if the Celestials were to be so far Christianized as to eat with knives and forks like the rest of the world.”31 Many crossed the cultural divide better than Wentworth, depending on their personalities, theology, circumstances, adaptability, and, crucially, language facility. It is often quite evident from the way particular missionaries are remembered in church sources in the indigenous languages which ones did and did not earn the respect of their indigenous associates. Nevertheless, in general, missionaries in the imperialist era came to their fields convinced of the intellectual, moral, and spiritual superiority of what they thought of, not as their “culture,” but as “Civilization.” Some were also convinced of the superiority of their “race,” as social Darwinist concepts penetrated Western culture late in the nineteenth century.32 Missionary paternalism is historically significant, but not because it was “cultural imperialism.” Being on the receiving end of missionary condescension was often a galling experience for indigenous Christians or mission school students, and it is critically important for understanding the emergence of 30

Recognizing the problems with Schlesinger’s discussion, Paul W. Harris has tried to make the definition of missionary cultural imperialism more rigorous, in part by arguing for an “expanded definition of force and aggression;” see his “Cultural Imperialism and American Protestant Missionaries: Collaboration and Dependency in Mid-Nineteenth-Century China,” Pacific Historical Review 60, no. 3 (1991), 309–338; quote from 313. 31 Wentworth letter quoted in R. S. Maclay, Life among the Chinese, with Characteristic Sketches and Incidents of Missionary Operations and Prospects in China (New York: Carlton and Porter, 1861), 278. 32 Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester, Eng.: Apollos, 1990), chap. 7.

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Christian nationalism, independent and indigenous church movements, and anti-Christian movements in the twentieth century in China and elsewhere.33 However, the attitudes of missionaries are beside the point when it comes to the crucial question of their effects on indigenous cultures. The distinction is not always kept as clear as it should be in literature criticizing the missionary impact on culture, in which the intent of missionaries to change a culture is frequently confused with the actuality of doing so. The same point applies to missionary publications for home consumption, which (being more accessible than publications for readers in the mission fields in their native languages) are often used to show the condescending or violent or Orientalist views of missionaries towards their host societies. These discussions are not always undertaken with sufficient awareness of the context and purpose of the texts in question, or their relationship to actual missionary practice on the ground (remembering that, unlike Said’s Orientalists, missionaries immersed themselves for decades in their host societies, and were often changed by their exposure to them).34 Ironically, missionaries of the “social gospel” stamp emerging around the turn of the twentieth century, who considered themselves more sympathetic to their host cultures than their forebears but who were theologically disposed to seeking a total social transformation, were generally more culturally invasive than the more theologically conservative missionaries (of earlier or later periods) who explicitly sought to separate evangelism from political or cultural concerns. We have seen that many critiques of the term “cultural imperialism” focus on the failure of its proponents to credit the recipient population with any autonomy in the process of cultural change. In response to this, scholars have pointed out that the consumers of “imperial” culture play an active role in resisting, 33 See Daniel H. Bays, “The Growth of Independent Christianity in China, 1900–1937,” in Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, ed. Daniel H. Bays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Jessie G. Lutz, Chinese Politics and Christian Missions: The Anti-Christian Movements of 1920–1928 (Notre Dame, Ind.: Cross-Cultural Publications, 1988); Susan Billington Harper, “Ironies of Indigenization: Some Cultural Repercussions of Mission in South India,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 19, no. 1 (1995), 13–20; Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (New York: Orbis, 1989), 167–172, 182–190. 34 Some such analyses include Stuart Creighton Miller, “Ends and Means: Missionary Justification of Force in Nineteenth-Century China,” in Fairbank, ed., The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, 249–282; James L. Hevia, “Leaving a Brand on China: Missionary Discourse in the Wake of the Boxer Movement,” Modern China 18, no. 3 (1992), 304–332.

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selecting, and reshaping the cultural products they absorb, as noted above with regard to media and youth culture. An analogous emphasis on indigenous agency has also characterized much recent work on Christianity in the nonWestern world, which has shifted the focus of much scholarship on missions away from the missionaries themselves as participants in a metropolitan culture of empire and onto the indigenous side of the missionary encounter.35 It is perhaps ironic that scholars of missions have moved in the same directions as subaltern studies and post-colonial studies, tracing irony, resistance, hybridity, and selectivity in non-Western appropriations of Christianity.36 However, the recognition that non-Western converts exercised agency in their encounters with Western missionaries may not resolve the problem of cultural imperialism. In their influential works on the long-term interaction (since the 1820s) between the Tswana people of southern Africa and British Protestant (mainly Wesleyan and Congregationalist) missionaries, Jean and John Comaroff argue that indigenous agency can be exercised even as the cultural frame of reference is being reshaped irrevocably. The Comaroffs treat the encounter dialectically, giving full play to the dynamic role played by the Tswana in their interactions with the missionaries, and they criticize previous scholarship for overlooking this dimension.37 However, they also argue that even in rejecting the Christian message of the missionaries, the Tswana were required to enter into conversation with them, and that that “long conversation” itself altered the way the Tswana thought about the self, culture, language, work, the land, time, and many other elements of their lives. They focus in particular on two dimensions of the missionary encounter that they regard as having been too little emphasized in previous scholarship: the mastery of 35 Norman Etherington, “Missions and Empire,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Robin Winks, vol. 5, Historiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998–), 309ff.; Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996); J. D. Y. Peel, “For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things? Missionary Narratives and Historical Anthropology,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 3 (1995), 581– 607; Harper, “Ironies of Indigenization.” 36 Piers M. Larson applies insights from subaltern studies to missions and converts in “‘Capacities and Modes of Thinking’: Intellectual Engagements and Subaltern Hegemony in the Early History of Malagasy Christianity,” American Historical Review 102, no. 4 (1997), 966–1002. 37 Comaroff and Comaroff, “Christianity and Colonialism,” 1–2; Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 6–11.

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symbols, and the importance of everyday mundane practices in the colonial reshaping of culture. Looking at such matters as competing claims about rainmaking, the use of the plow in farming, forms and functions of clothing and architecture, clock time, and written language, the Comaroffs argue that “the mission, by its very presence, engaged all Tshidi in an inescapable dialogue on its own terms.” Furthermore, they argue (drawing on a rather reductionist portrayal of Wesleyanism as an ideological expression of capitalist individualism), that dialogue “cast them as citizens in a world of rational individualism … [in which] personal achievement would be rewarded by the accumulation of goods and moral worth,” a shift in consciousness that led ultimately to the proletarianization of the Tswana and other black Africans in the capitalist colonial order.38 Echoing earlier critiques of colonialism going back to Fanon, the Comaroffs label this process the “colonization of consciousness.” Unlike Fanon, however, and certainly unlike more reductionist recent uses of the term, they do not view this colonization as a kind of cultural strip-mining which leaves the colonized culturally bereft and psychologically demoralized.39 Such discussions imply that cultures are solid objects that collide like billiard balls, displacing one in favor of another; in other words, that colonialism leaves in its wake not a changed or hybrid culture, but the absence of culture.40 With a great deal more subtlety and insight, the Comaroffs give full play to the active engagement of the colonized in the cultural encounter with the forces of colonization. They also recognize that missionaries were not agents of colonization in any direct political sense; indeed, their political role was “necessarily indeterminate,” the Comaroffs argue, due largely due to the separation between religion and politics in the missionaries’ own theology.41 However, for the Comaroffs, “quotidian practices” rather than political authority were the primary vector of colonization anyway—“the seeds of cultural imperialism were most effectively sown along the contours of everyday life”—and on that score “the ideological 38 Comaroff and Comaroff, “Christianity and Colonialism,” 15–16; idem, Of Revelation and Revolution; John and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and Historical Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 258–260. The Tshidi are a sub-group of the Tswana. 39 Readings on the psychology of colonization and a critical discussion of the issue are found in Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, Part One. 40 Achebe’s Things Fall Apart tends to give this impression; Achebe himself does not see the novel as a straightforward account of the destruction of Igbo culture by the encounter with the British, emphasizing instead that cultures, even those under great external challenge, are fluid and adaptable, as he sought to convey in the sequel No Longer At Ease (London: Heinemann, [1960]); see Conversations with Chinua Achebe, ed. Bernth Lindfors (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 66–67, 118. 41 Comaroff and Comaroff, “Christianity and Colonialism,” 17.

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onslaught on the part of Christian missionaries, self-styled bearers of European civilization,” was the very essence of colonization.42 The Comaroffs’ work is perceptive and groundbreaking, and it is easy to see the appeal of a phrase as concise and evocative as “the colonization of consciousness.” In the end, however, this conception of the missionary/indigenous encounter only raises in a different guise the question of how we understand the nature of modern culture. The changes described by the Comaroffs were not just experienced by the Tswana. The introduction of clock time; the ideology of private property, individual labor, and wealth accumulation (whether on settled farms or in factories and mines); certain forms of architecture and domestic arrangement; rationality; the medicalized body; the nation-state; economic development; the desirability of literacy and so on are all aspects of a new world order which has defined the experience of modernity in Western societies just as surely as it did for the Tswana. That world order can quite reasonably be characterized as hegemonic, that is, at once dominant and subtly coercive, yet also simultaneously embraced, contested, and subverted by the human agents within it.43 With regard to missionaries, the missionary movement was peaking just as secular rationalism, which effectively relegated religion to the evolutionary past, was claiming the high ground in public discourse in their home societies; indeed, the missionary movement itself (and missionary discourse about Christian civilization and “heathen” societies) can be seen as part of the Christian attempt to preserve a place of cultural pre-eminence at home. From this perspective, the question becomes, have we all been colonized? Or, remembering again that we are discussing the usefulness of certain abstract concepts as intellectual tools, we must ask whether the notion of the “colonization of consciousness” gives us a useful analytical lever for understanding the cultural changes brought about by modernity. To put this question another way, we need to view the missionary encounter with non-Western societies, and the colonial transformation of those societies, not as sui generis but as part of the broader global transformation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The problem is to find adequate language to grapple with a complex, multi-faceted, wholesale transformation of conceptual universes. From what to what? Can we understand it simply in terms of imposition and subjugation? Are the hybrid societies of modern Africa, for example, simply evidence of a successful “conditioning process” imposed by

42 Comaroff and Comaroff, Ethnography and Historical Imagination, 293, 258. 43 Guttmann distinguishes between imposition and hegemony in his Games and Empires, Introduction.

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Western cultural imperialism, as one scholar puts it?44 What does such an understanding imply? This is not to gloss over the facts of colonial exploitation, hypocrisy, and brutality, or to assert that because all hegemonies are coercive there is no difference in kind or degree between the coercion in colonial states and that inherent in all modern states and modern discourse. Clearly, it also raises other intractable debates—for example, how to define modernity, or to define it in a way that is not inherently capitalist, inherently Eurocentric, inherently teleological. But it does serve to put the question of cultural imperialism and/or the colonization of consciousness into a broader context.45

Missions, Consciousness, and Modernity in China

These issues can be illuminated by turning to the particular case of Christian missions and modernity in China. Of course, there are fundamental differences between Tswana society and a large-scale bureaucratic state like China in the nineteenth century. Many of the elements identified by the Comaroffs as part of the package of capitalist modernity introduced by the missionaries— the plow, literacy, money, property, long-distance commerce, household accumulation, a myth of individual attainment through formal education, taxation, contractual labor, urban life—had already long existed in China. Moreover, while it certainly felt the impact of Western and Japanese imperialism, China was never colonized. Also, unlike the British missionaries who played a decisive role (according to the Comaroffs) in mediating modernity to the Tswana, the influence of the (much more diverse) missionary body in China can seldom be separated from other avenues—commerce, publishing, officialdom, contacts with Japan—by which foreign ideas and institutions were being filtered into the empire. Nevertheless, the changes undergone by Chinese society between the midnineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries were no less momentous in their own way than those experienced by the Tswana. In general, older historiography narrated those changes as a transition from “tradition” to “modernity” and attributed a decisive role in the process, for good or ill, to the Western impact. This has been reflected in treatments of the role of Christian missions 44 G. K. Kieh Jr., “The Roots of Western Influence in Africa: An Analysis of the Conditioning Process,” Social Science Journal 29, no. 1 (1992), 7–19. 45 On modernity and cultural imperialism, see Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism, chap. 5; on modernity more generally, see Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory, 130, 181–189 (excerpting from Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity [Cambridge, Eng.: Polity Press, 1990]).

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in modern Chinese history. In the first half of the twentieth century, works written by missionaries and their supporters claimed for the missions a great deal of the “credit” for jolting a moribund China into the modern world. On the other side of the coin, nationalist critiques from the 1920s, influenced by the introduction of the Leninist theory of imperialism into China after 1919, charged missionaries with imperialism or “cultural invasion,” usually meaning that Christian conversion and missionary education were intended to facilitate imperialist economic and political control by making the Chinese people docile.46 Whereas critiques of missions in some other societies (for example, that of Gandhi in India) distinguished between proselytism and “beneficial” efforts in education and healthcare, the tendency in China was to view mission education and medicine as simply more subtle forms of aggression; the appearance of altruism merely showed superior deceptiveness.47 Mao Zedong encapsulated this outlook with characteristic directness in 1949, singling out the United States, which had been politically less aggressive towards China than Japan or the European powers: “For a very long period, U.S. imperialism laid greater stress than other imperialist countries on activities in the sphere of spiritual aggression, extending from religious to ‘philanthropic’ and cultural undertakings.”48 Beneath their diametrically opposed assessments of the missionary role, missionary accounts of the “uplift of China” and nationalist or communist critiques of missionary imperialism shared a common frame of reference: a modernist narrative of world history, according to which “China,” imagined as a unitary historical subject, had to be “liberated” from its past and take its place in a world order of nation-states through a process of political, economic, technological, and social “development.”49 They also shared a perception that, for good or ill, the missionary movement’s impact on modern Chinese history had 46 As noted above, Chinese nationalist attacks on the missionary movement in the 1920s employed the concept of cultural imperialism, but not the precise wording. Cognate terms like “cultural invasion” and “spiritual aggression” were used, and many discussions simply linked missionaries to “imperialism.” For some 1920s examples see Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao (Historical Materials on the Educational System of Modern China), ed. Zhu Youxian and Gao Shiliang, vol. 4 (Wuhan: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1993), 705–712, 742–761; the period is discussed in detail in Lutz, Chinese Politics and Christian Missions. 47 On Gandhi’s views see Schlesinger, “The Missionary Enterprise,” 366–367. 48 Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong), “‘Friendship’ or Aggression?” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung vol. 4 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1961), 448. 49 Arif Dirlik, “Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 35 (1996), 107–108; Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History From the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

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been considerable. Thus, unlike earlier attacks on missionary work based on maintaining the status quo in late imperial Chinese society, the nationalist critique of missionary imperialism from the 1920s was just as much a product of the modern transformation of Chinese consciousness as missionaries and their converts were. Western historical scholarship in the last thirty years or so has challenged these assumptions in a number of ways: by developing a more dynamic picture of late imperial China, undercutting older portrayals of a static “traditional” society; by showing the diversity within China through regional studies; by emphasizing endogenous causes of change rather than external pressures like the Western presence; and recently by destabilizing the image of the nation as a natural order through careful attention to the construction of Chinese ideas of nationalism, citizenship, and representation since the late nineteenth century.50 In breaking open the tradition/modernity dichotomy, this scholarship has opened up new avenues for assessing the place of Christian missions in Chinese history. At the same time, however, most of the new scholarship has paid little attention to missionaries or their Chinese associates, due in part to a reaction against the previous undue emphasis on “the Western impact” and a related perception that missionaries have “been done,” and perhaps also in part to a residual embarrassment about the pieties of another age. There are, of course, exceptions to this generalization: useful case studies of particular missions, two prize-winning monographs on the Boxer Uprising (which assess the missionary role in that event in quite different ways), and an important recent symposium volume.51 For instance, in a rich essay suggestive of the kind of interactive interpretation that can be done, Roger Thompson shows how the missionary presence in the Shaanxi countryside from 1861 set precedents that were taken up and used by modernizing Chinese officials after 1900 to close temples and appropriate their revenues for state use.52 Overall, however, 50 Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 51 For example, Kathleen L. Lodwick, Educating the Women of Hainan: The Career of Margaret Moninger in China, 1915–1942 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995); Lawrence D. Kessler, The Jiangyin Mission Station: An American Missionary Community in China, 1895–1951 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Bays, Christianity in China. 52 Roger R. Thompson, “Twilight of the Gods in the Chinese Countryside: Christians, Confucians, and the Modernizing State, 1861–1911,” in Bays, Christianity in China. The links between state extension and the discourse of secular modernity are also explored in Prasenjit Duara, “Knowledge and Power in the Discourse of Modernity: The Campaigns

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the prevailing consensus in the field is that the missionary movement played a relatively minor role in modern Chinese history; certainly we can say that a synthesis that engages with recent theory and historiography to place the missionaries fully within modern Chinese history has yet to be written. By contrast, historians within the People’s Republic of China have devoted considerable attention in the last twenty years to the role of missionaries in Chinese history, and are probably more ready than Western scholars to acknowledge their historical significance, and more likely even to discuss it in positive terms. The downplaying of imperialism and class struggle and the official endorsement of “modernization” since 1979 have opened up ideological space for a more favorable appraisal of the missionary movement than that which prevailed in the Maoist decades. For example, one of the best recent works, Wang Lixin’s Meiguo chuanjiaoshi yu wan Qing Zhongguo xiandaihua (American missionaries and the modernization of China in the late Qing), argues that American missionaries, rather than being tools of cultural or other imperialism, were actually engaged in “cultural exchange,” making a significant contribution to China’s modernization in the late Qing period. His major criticism of the missionaries is that their evangelistic aims made them selective to the point of dishonesty in the way they presented Western civilization to the Chinese, for example, by downplaying the significance of the French Revolution or Darwinian evolution.53 Wang’s book is based on careful scholarship, and it has deservedly been seen as a significant milestone in the historiography of missions within China. With earlier work, it adopts a modernizationist and nationalist framework as the standard of historical evaluation: missionaries are evaluated positively because of their contributions to a process of “modernization” seen as both inevitable and unidirectional; they are criticized for trying to lead that modernization in the “wrong” directions. Just as interesting for our discussion is the implicit definition of “imperialism” in Wang’s work and other recent Chinese scholarship, compared to that in Western discussions of cultural imperialism. Chinese scholarship has tended to juxtapose (bad) cultural imperialism to (benign or at least neutral) cultural exchange, with the trend toward viewing against Popular Religion in Early Twentieth-Century China,” Journal of Asian Studies 50, no. 1 (1991), 67–83. 53 Wang Lixin, Meiguo chuanjiaoshi yu wan Qing Zhongguo xiandaihua (American missionaries and the modernization of China in the late Qing) (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1997). Writing in a similar framework in English, Dan Cui advances an even more positive argument for British missionaries in The Cultural Contribution of British Protestant Missionaries and British-American Cooperation to China’s National Development During the 1920s (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1998).

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missionaries increasingly in the latter category. Underlying this shift is the recognition that most missionaries had good intentions towards China, and did not have direct ties to foreign governments or economic interests. However, as we have already noted, from a broader definition of cultural imperialism, neither intentions nor direct political ties have any bearing on the question, and the distinction between cultural imperialism and cultural exchange vanishes in the Comaroffs’ usage (as it does also in Mao’s). Behind these different evaluations lie different definitions of imperialism: as the political expansion of Western powers in a particular period of history, which is how the historiography in Chinese tends to use it, or as an ongoing process of “the globalisation of the capitalist mode of production, its penetration of previously non-capitalist regions of the world, and destruction of pre- or non-capitalist forms of social organisation,” as the editors of a postcolonial reader put it.54 If the former definition is clearly too narrow, the latter is very broad indeed (yet oddly narrow in making the “capitalist mode of production” the sole axis of the definition)—its breadth is one reason why the term “cultural imperialism” is used in so many ways and in so many contexts. The historiography examined here demonstrates how inseparable the assessment of the missionary impact is from broader questions of how to historicize nationalism and modernity. The historiography of modern China has been deeply colored by developmental thinking and by what Prasenjit Duara has called the “ideological construction of the nation-state,” and both have left their imprint on the placement of missionaries in modern Chinese history.55 Changes in China parallel to those identified by the Comaroffs as part of the colonization of consciousness, such as the introduction of Western medicine; campaigns against footbinding (in the name of the “natural” foot), opium consumption, and “superstition;” the adoption of rationalist, graduated, and (in theory) universal education; individual choice in marriage; demands for political representation—all of which involved missionaries to some degree— have long been identified in nationalist historiography as part of a history of national emancipation and “awakening.”56 Arif Dirlik has suggested that the embracing of developmentalism by Chinese intellectuals be seen as a kind of “self-Orientalization,” noting that Said’s work gives too little place to the participation of Asian actors in the construction of Orientalism.57 This approach 54 Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, 2. 55 Duara, “Response to Philip Huang,” 36. 56 John Fitzgerald discusses the discourse of national “awakening” in Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). 57 Dirlik, “Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism.”

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raises the same dilemma as “colonization of consciousness,” however, and gives present-day intellectuals the power to define the meaning of a transformation that its contemporary participants articulated as liberating. Certainly we can see that if transformations so closely associated with the emergence of the modern nation-state as these are to be viewed in terms of a “colonization of consciousness,” then we must see the “colonization of consciousness” as a universal experience.

Christian Missions and Global Modernity

The transformation of world societies over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was profound and inescapable, and we in the present are all caught up inextricably in it, complicating immeasurably the task of historical assessment. It was once common to view that transformation as “Westernization,” a ripple effect expanding inexorably in concentric circles out from Europe. Clearly, however, to picture the transformation thus is to miss entirely the infinite variety of local manifestations and mutations of Western-derived institutional forms and symbolic practices.58 Still, however we conceptualize the process, there is no disputing that the Christian missionary movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was an important medium for the dissemination of Western concepts and institutions into non-Western societies (more so in some settings than others). In assessing the missionary role, however, we need to get beyond the polarized praise and blame tendencies of earlier scholarship, recognizing the dependency of both on the twin teleologies of developmentalism and nationalism. In doing so we need to move beyond the notion of cultural imperialism, which, I have argued, is an unsatisfactory model for analyzing either cultural interaction in general or the missionary movement in world history in particular. The problems with the model boil down to three: it is intertwined with essentializing discourses of an imagined national or cultural authenticity; it disregards or slights the agency of the “acted upon”; and, by conceptualizing cultural transitions in terms of coercion, it reduces a complex set of interactions to a dichotomy between actor and acted upon, and skews our gaze too much towards looking for subjugation, collaboration, or resistance, or, even 58 Recent work questioning earlier assumptions that globalization is a culturally homogenizing force is summarized in J. Boli and F. J. Lechner, “Globalization and World Culture” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001), vol. 9, 6261–6266.

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less usefully, towards fruitless debates about motives and unsupportable distinctions between cultural exchange and cultural imposition. Notwithstanding the richness of the Comaroffs’ work, their application of the term “colonization of consciousness” to the transition they describe has the same drawbacks. In view of the global nature of the changes over the last two centuries that the Comaroffs trace for the Tswana, the reductio ad absurdum of either term is that the “colonized consciousness” becomes a universal experience. If cultural imperialism and the colonization of consciousness are not adequate frameworks for understanding the place of missionaries in the emergence of the modern world order, what alternatives might we draw upon? The starting place is to understand missionaries in the context of a globalizing modernity that altered Western societies as well as non-Western ones in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; missionaries, in other words, were simultaneously agents of the spread of modernity vis-à-vis non-Western societies, and products of its emerging hegemony. The emerging consensus in recent work on the cultural dimension of globalization since the nineteenth century recognizes that, while standardization and homogenization—through the construction of supposed “universal” standards and normative categories from Greenwich Mean Time to human rights—have been one aspect of globalization, cultural differentiation and heterogeneity have not only persisted in the face of globalization, they have actually been produced by it. Indeed, Arjun Appadurai has asserted that “cultural differentiation tends to outpace homogenization, even in this most interactive of economic epochs.”59 This insight provides a foundation for bringing together macro/global and micro/particular perspectives on the missionary movement as a factor in modern world history. On the macro level, can we trace a general missionary role in disseminating some of the categories claiming normative validity in the modern order on the basis of their “universality”—the nation, rationality, science and technology, the autonomous individual, religion itself—from European to non-Western societies? On the micro level, might there be ways in which missionaries generated cultural differentiation within and between societies, whether through appropriations of parts of their message or through reactions against them? The first question points us towards the global picture and the role of Christian missionaries relative to other vectors of change in non-Western societies; the second points us towards questions of translation and to indigenous agency in the reception, local expression, transformation, 59

Arjun Appadurai, “Globalization, Anthropology of,” in Smelser and Baltes, International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 9, 6269; see also Boli and Lechner, “Globalization and World Culture.”

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and/or rejection of missionary teachings in local settings. While much work remains to be done, recent scholarship on modern missions suggests affirmative answers to both questions. We are hampered in considering missionaries as transmitters of global modernity by the long-standing assumption that religion and modernity stand in opposition to each other, with the former belonging to the world of “tradition,” destined to be superseded by “modern” rationality, the secular nation-state, and the individual-as-consumer. This assumption has been called increasingly into question in the last decade, particularly in works examining the connections between religious identities and modern nationalism. Gauri Viswanathan has argued that conversions to minority religions in Britain and India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries should be read as challenges to the twin logics of secular modernity and national identity, and she herself has challenged the scholarly language that relegates religious identities to the premodern and pre-national.60 Viswanathan draws in part on the work of Talal Asad, who contends that religion itself, posited as a universal attribute of human societies in the comparative social sciences, is a product of modern Western discourse.61 Along similar lines, Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann have called on scholars to recognize that the “dichotomy between religion and nationalism is an ideological element in the Western discourse of modernity.” By contrast, they assert that “the location of religion in the modern world should … be addressed in relation to the historical emergence of the modern idea of the nation and its spread over the world.”62 These points have many implications for the study of Christian missions in modern history. Clearly missionaries of all Christian traditions saw themselves as inducting indigenous converts into a transnational religious communion that was explicitly and in the fullest sense universal, spanning space and time. In the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and denominational Protestant missions this was symbolized by the extension of ecclesiastical governance and representation to the developing churches in the mission fields (this proceeded at different paces and took different forms depending on the denomination). Inter-denominational Protestant missions like the China Inland Mission or anti-ecclesiastical movements like the Brethren assemblies had different ways 60 Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 61 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 62 Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann, “Introduction,” in Nation and Religion: Perspec­ tives on Europe and Asia, ed. Van der Veer and Lehmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 3–4.

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of expressing it institutionally, but were no less dedicated in principle to the idea of a single universal Christian church transcending national boundaries. This internationalism mirrored (on an ontologically grander scale) the modern international order of autonomous yet related nation-states. Indeed, it overlapped with it, for the “awakening” of heathen peoples to Christianity was routinely imagined in hymnody and elsewhere as also a national “awakening” bringing the heathen into a world brotherhood of Christian nations.63 These considerations suggest that missionary internationalism may have played a role (along with the more secular international non-governmental organizations that took shape from the mid-nineteenth century64) in generating the mental prerequisites for secular internationalism. More concretely, missions were uniquely placed as conduits for intercultural communication by virtue of their institutional structures. Missionaries were the most widely diffused Westerners in most non-Western societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and they were heavily invested in cross-cultural communication by the very nature of their endeavor. Protestant and Roman Catholic missions recruited personnel who had been shaped by a certain cultural, educational, and religious milieu. Once in the field, they interacted with the host society and with missionaries from other missions and countries working there, through personal contacts and correspondence, periodical literature, and conferences. Through their orders or mission boards, they remained connected to their home countries and churches, and to missionaries of their own denomination or order working all over the world, connections in the form of, again, correspondence, periodical literature, and conferences. The influences on each missionary were thus diverse and highly international, and these multiple connections probably facilitated comparison and standardization across denominations and between national settings, at least within the respective worlds of Roman Catholic and Protestant missions. Specifically, missionaries presented to their audiences, readers, and students many features of what became the modern global order, through their preaching and teaching or through their publications. In China, for example, missionary geographies and histories removed the Chinese empire from its unique spatial and temporal position as the origin and center of civilization, placing it instead within a world of nations, each with its own history. 63 See John Fitzgerald, ‘“Lands of the East Awake!’ Christian Motifs in Early Chinese Nationalism,” in Gong yu si: Jindai Zhongguo geti yu qunti zhi chongjian (Public and private: reconstructing individual and collective bodies in modern China), ed. Huang Kewu and Zhang Zhejia (Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academica Sinica, 2000), 389ff. 64 See Boli and Lechner, “Globalization and World Culture,” 6261.

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Missionaries coined many new terms in Chinese to convey Western religious or scientific ideas, ranging from relatively concrete lexical items like “carbon” or “locomotive” to more abstract concepts like “democracy,” “duty,” or “news.”65 In many other societies missionaries created the very scripts as well as the vocabulary for key terms in their printed materials, an act with far-reaching implications.66 Concerning China, most of the scholarly attention to date has gone to the missionaries’ publications on secular subjects, and relatively little to the Bible and other religious literature, yet the choices of terminology in the religious publications may also have had important implications for Chinese readers which have yet to be brought to light. As the Comaroffs’ stress on “quotidian practices” reminds us, symbols could be as significant as texts in communicating elements of the modern world order. I have argued elsewhere that missionaries and Chinese Protestants were one conduit for the constitution of politics as a public domain in the Fuzhou region of China between roughly 1895 and 1920, in part through their use of national flags (foreign and Chinese) and proto-national anthems.67 Of course, the very presence of missionaries created an awareness of difference and an external perspective on indigenous social life that could have profound implications. As noted above, Roger Thompson has traced how a distinction between legitimate “religion” and wasteful “superstition,” which first entered Chinese state discourse through dealings with missionaries, later provided the rhetorical justification for modernizing Chinese officials to close community temples and expropriate their revenues.68 Another issue related to the missionary role in transmitting global universals is whether conversion by its nature—or at least conversion of the Protestant evangelical variety typical of most modern Protestant missions—requires and constructs the modern notion of the autonomous individual. Another conference volume edited by Peter van der Veer, provocatively entitled Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity, addresses this question directly.

65

Many of these are listed in Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), appendix; Liu also shows the crucial role of Japan as an intermediary for the translation of Western terms into Chinese. 66 Norma Diamond explores the implications of a missionary script for ethnic identity and empowerment in “Christianity and the Hua Miao: Writing and Power,” in Bays, Christianity in China. 67 Ryan Dunch, Fuzhou Protestants and the Making of a Modern China, 1857–1927 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), esp. chap. 4. 68 Thompson, “Twilight of the Gods.”

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In his introduction to the volume, van der Veer states that “the modern conception of the individual person, essential to both capitalism and Protestantism,” was bound up with the “missionary project of conversion.”69 Again, this view requires us to question the long habit of viewing modernity and religion antithetically. The same issue is raised in current scholarship on the spread of Pentecostal movements in non-Western societies in recent decades. Once routinely presented as a reaction against modernity, Pentecostal Christianity is now being seen as quintessentially modern precisely in its stress on individual experience.70 It seems probable, then, that missionaries were significant intermediaries in the construction of global modernity in its universalizing dimension. Their influence was significant in the corresponding process of cultural differentiation, also. To understand why this is so, we must consider how missionaries actually related to the cultures in which they worked, and here again we must address some popular stereotypes. By the nature of their work, even the most inflexible and churlish missionaries had to develop sustainable working relationships with people in their host society. As a practical matter, therefore, they could not afford to adopt a wholly negative attitude towards it. The popular image of the finger-wagging missionary condemning a host culture wholesale and seeking to replace it in its entirety is, to say the least, implausible as a general type; such a person would soon have proved useless as a missionary and been recalled. More importantly, their calling demanded that missionaries learn to express their message in the language of their host society. Translation, therefore, was at the heart of the missionary enterprise. It is now well recognized that the process of translation is much more complex than transferring the “meaning” of a text from one language into another, as if the inner essence of a text can somehow be separated from the particulars of language in which it is expressed. In the act of translation, missionaries had to employ already-existing terminology or coin new terms to express concepts, theological or otherwise, not found 69 Peter van der Veer, “Introduction,” 9, in Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity, ed. van der Veer (New York: Routledge 1996). John Fitzgerald has presented a similar argument for China in “Lands of the East Awake.” 70 Andrew Walker, “Thoroughly Modern: Sociological Reflections on the Charismatic Movement from the End of the Twentieth Century,” in Charismatic Christianity: Socio­ logical Perspectives, edited Stephen Hunt, Malcolm Hamilton, and Tony Walter (London: Macmillan, 1997), 36; cf. Martin Percy, “The City on a Beach: Future Prospects for Charismatic Movements at the End of the Twentieth Century,” in ibid.; David Martin, Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990).

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in the indigenous language. Either choice brought problems: the first meant using terms that were already laden with meanings in that culture; the second risked incomprehension, and did not rescue the missionary from the need to explain the unfamiliar term in language familiar to the hearers. Moreover, the best efforts at translation would make no difference if missionaries did not learn to present their message orally in ways that would capture and hold the interest of their hearers, and in print in a style and format that would appeal to readers. The latter task was probably more difficult in societies where other reading material was already abundant, although mitigated by the fact that those societies had established reading practices. In China, for instance, which had a particularly difficult written language and a discerning popular readership, missionaries usually collaborated with Chinese coworkers in writing works for publication. In all these matters, missionary efforts at communication were constrained and directed in significant ways by the host society. The other key point about communication is that speakers or authors cannot control the meanings their work takes on for its audience, especially in cross-cultural communication in which the speakers/authors may have a very imperfect grasp of the audience’s cultural framework and how their words will be perceived in it. This brings us back to the agency of the audience in intercultural exchange, the slighting of which was discussed above as one of the key criticisms of the cultural imperialism model. Recognition of the agency exercised by the recipient society is a major reason why cultural differentiation is now seen as part of globalization along with homogenization, because every claimed “universal” is translated into existing cultural matrices in which it can take on different meanings or be employed in different ways.71 Placing primary emphasis on the agency of indigenous people in interpreting the missionary message and its meanings in their cultural terms raises our awareness that foreign cultural pressures can bring creative potential as well as dangers of cultural loss or subjugation, for at least some members of a given society.72 Since, as we have seen, there is no viable external standard of authenticity against which to measure them, we must put primary weight in assessing particular cultural changes on the self-understanding of those undergoing them, realizing that culture is fluid and giving historical actors credit 71 Boli and Lechner, “Globalization and World Culture.” 72 Relevant here is Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of “contact zones,” in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1993), usefully applied to China in Dirlik, “Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism.” For a more sanguine reading of the role of Western-influenced Chinese intellectuals than Dirlik’s “self-Orientalization” see Philip C. C. Huang, “Biculturality in Modern China and in Chinese Studies,” Modern China 26, no. 1 (2000), 3–31.

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for recognizing and working with the tensions in their situation. This may require us to shake off labels that are legacies of the exclusionary discourse of the nation-state (for example, Chinese Christians as “running dogs” of imperialism, or other labels that deny minority groups a “legitimate” place in the nation). In the case of China, for instance, recent work is taking us well beyond the one-dimensional images of Chinese Christians found in official documents of the late Qing, nationalist polemics of the twentieth century, and a good deal of earlier scholarship. Sociologists and anthropologists working on contemporary society have demonstrated that it is entirely possible for Christianity to be a fundamental element in the identity of particular Chinese communities, from rural Catholics in north China to Hakka Protestants in the New Territories of Hong Kong and Chinese immigrants in the United States.73 Behind this new understanding is the shift away from structuralism towards a more fluid and diachronic model of culture, which makes it possible to transcend straightforward dichotomies between “Western” Christianity and “Chinese” culture. The implications of translation for the missionary impact on non-Western cultures have been explored in depth by the Africanist Lamin Sanneh, Professor of Missions and World Christianity at Yale University. Sanneh has argued that by translating the Christian scriptures into the vernacular languages of their host societies, missions of necessity validated the vernacular culture: “scriptural translation rested on the assumption that the vernacular has a primary affinity with the gospel, the point being conceded by the adoption of indigenous terms and concepts for the central categories of the Bible.” Sanneh contrasts this with Islam; since in Islam only the Arabic original of the Koran can possess scriptural authority, Islam in West Africa has been more suspicious of the religious value of vernacular cultures than Christianity. Sanneh shows how, for instance, the missionary translation project resulted not only in dictionaries and grammars, but also in voluminous and valuable collections of local proverbs, idioms, mythology, and folklore compiled by missionaries in many African cultures. He also argues that “explicit missionary interest in their language and culture” resulted in an “increased self-awareness” and a heightened sense of national identity for particular African peoples. Conversion was not “a psychological ‘migration’ out of the African world, since it was a consequence of encountering the gospel in the vernacular,” and vernacular translation generated 73 Richard A. Madsen, China’s Catholics: Tragedy and Hope in an Emerging Civil Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Nicole Constable, Christian Souls and Chinese Spirits: A Hakka Community in Hong Kong (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Fenggang Yang, Chinese Christians in America: Conversion, Assimilation, and Adhesive Identities (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).

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indigenous sectarian religious movements also, since missionaries could not control the interpretation of the scriptures once they had been translated and published.74 When we shift our gaze, then, from missionaries as agents of a hegemonic Western culture to the actual process of intercultural communication, it becomes evident why the missionary enterprise would foster cultural differentiation in the very act of disseminating concepts claiming a “universal” validity, whether those were religious concepts or constituent elements of what would become global modernity. The host societies exercised agency in their interaction with missionaries in many ways—as language teachers, as collaborators, as hearers and readers, in their comprehension and appropriation within their own cultural context of missionary communication. Translation was a constant and inescapable requirement of the missionary endeavor, from mundane routines to the communication of the holiest mysteries, meaning that every “universal,” from the term for God on down, entered an existing network of meanings that differed for every language. Moreover, the act of translation imparted value to each vernacular language, and by implication to the culture borne by each. The result could be more generous to variant cultures than the national state was prepared to be; in China, Protestant missions and churches preached, worshiped, and published in regional dialects later discouraged by the state in favor of the national “common speech.” Writing in History and Theory in 1996, Arif Dirlik challenged scholars to undertake the “historicization of capitalist modernity itself, and the identification of alternative modernities … that have been suppressed by the hegemony of capitalist modernity.”75 This end, I believe, can be served by a fresh appraisal of the missionary movement as a systemic factor in modern world history. As Wang Lixin’s book reminds us for China, missionary versions of modernity included elements that were incorporated and others that were left by the wayside in the modern order that emerged in the twentieth century.76 What visions of modernity missionaries articulated, and how those were taken up, contested, and transformed in non-Western cultural contexts, has much to tell us about the process of cultural globalization. I have argued that the cultural imperialism model is too blunt an instrument for analyzing this process, and that “colonization of consciousness” does not take us substantially 74 Sanneh, Translating the Message, esp. chap. 5; quotes from 166, 170, 184. His analysis is continued and extended in Encountering the West: Christianity and the Global Cultural Process: The African Dimension (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1993). 75 Dirlik, “Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism,” 118. 76 See p. 316 above.

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further. Instead, we need a more dynamic and interactive framework, one that recognizes not just imposition, loss, and resistance, but multiple possibilities, fluid frontiers, and creative potential in cultural interaction. Emphasis on the receptors rather than the transmitters, on indigenous agency in the missionary/indigenous encounter, is a methodological key to this, and the recognition that homogenization and differentiation are simultaneous and mutually conditioning dimensions of globalization provides useful leverage. At stake, potentially, is a fuller understanding of roads taken and not taken in the construction of the modern order read as a global cultural process.

The Culture Concept and the Mission of the Roman Catholic Church Michael V. Angrosino In his 1975 encyclical “Evangelization in the Modern World,” Pope Paul VI asked how the Roman Catholic Church could promote its message in the culturally pluralistic world of the late 20th century. There was, he noted, the need to make the basic message of Christianity both comprehensible and attractive to the millions of people who chafe at the assumption that they must adopt the Euro-American culture in which Christianity has been wrapped. He admitted that “the Kingdom which the Gospel proclaims is lived by [people] who are profoundly linked to a culture,” so that “the building up of the Kingdom cannot avoid borrowing the elements of human culture” (Paul VI 1975:16). Paul’s successor, John Paul II, in the course of his many journeys to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, encouraged this trend not only in the process of teaching the faith but also in the form of the liturgy. In a 1982 meeting with the bishops of Nigeria, John Paul said, “The church comes to bring Christ; she does not come to bring the culture of another race” (1992:314). When Christianity was first spread beyond Europe, Rome attempted a strategy of imposition, the enforced use of unmodified Roman forms. This attempt gave way to translation, the preservation of Roman forms encoded in the local vernaculars. At present the church is trying adaptation, the tailoring of Roman forms to local tastes and expectations. The idealized culmination of this process occurs when Roman forms become incarnate in new cultural settings (Schineller 1990; Schreiter 1985). The sequence of strategies is not unlike those of international development. Development agents were no less convinced than religious missionaries that they had truth and historical inevitability on their side. At first they presented their innovations in undigested form with little cognizance of the differences of communication styles, values, or customary practices of the people they contacted. Such programs often failed, not because of the insufficiency of the technology in which the innovators had such great faith, but because the innovations conflicted with local traditions and institutions. At least in part Source: Angrosino, M. V., “The Culture Concept and the Mission of the Roman Catholic Church,” American Anthropologist 96.4 (1994): pp. 824–832. Reproduced by permission of the American Anthropological Association.

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because of long-standing anthropological criticism, developers are beginning to pay attention to sustainable development that incorporates respect for indigenous knowledge (Cernea 1991). The Vatican II spirit of openness has cleared the way for frank discussion of diversity within the global body of Catholicism. One of the earliest proponents of the new diversity was an Indian theologian, D. S. Amalorpavadass, who used the term indigenization to describe the process of conferring on Catholic liturgy, a cultural form that is native to the local community (Davies 1986). He had an ambitious agenda for the liturgy, including the introduction of culturally appropriate gestures, forms of homage, sacred objects, music, and meditative practices and the incorporation of sacred Hindu texts, especially the Rig Veda, into the readings of the mass. Vatican theologians initially approved of the concept of indigenization but were put off by the somewhat patronizing tone of the word itself. At the same time, a parallel concept, contextualization, emerged and found favor with liberation theologians, who suggested that the life and mission of the church had to be made relevant to contemporary society. Because the Vatican distances itself from the political connotations of liberation theology, the term contextualization was dropped by other church writers. The concept of inculturation has come to cover both of these related ideas (Hiebert 1984).1 Inculturation implies that the church must be both true to its traditions and conscious of its universal mission. “It can enter into communion with different forms of culture, thereby enriching both itself and the cultures themselves” (Vatican II 1992:962). Unlike the anthropological term acculturation, which refers to changes that result “when two or more different groups come into significant contact productive of changes in all” (Foster 1969:117), inculturation refers to encounters whose outcome is a convergence that does not replace either of the cultures from which it arose. Both parties to the inculturative exchange undergo internal transformation, but neither loses its autonomous identity. Acculturation may be accidental, but inculturation occurs when a dominant culture attempts to make itself accessible to a subdominant one without losing its own particular character. In other words, the church “is in a stage of welcoming in a profound way those elements that she encounters in

1 Inculturation was first given wide exposure in a 1973 series of lectures by the Protestant missionary G. L. Barney, but the term was popularized in Catholic circles by the Jesuits (Crollius 1978; De Napoli 1987). John Paul was noted for his distaste for neologisms but admitted that “inculturation” served a real need (Chupungco 1992:26).

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every culture, to assimilate them and integrate them into Christianity, and to root the Christian way in different cultures” (Synod of Bishops 1987:13). There are three main methods of inculturation. Dynamic equivalence involves the replacement of an element of the Roman form with something in the local culture that has equal meaning or value. For example, the mass includes the exchange of a “sign of peace”; it is a symbol of the church as a community. In the United States, the typical sign is a handshake or, in more demonstrative communities, a hug. In Zaire, by contrast, it is a ritual washing from a common bowl; in several African tribal cultures such an ablution is a powerful declaration of forgiveness, a concrete way of saying, “I wash away everything I have against you” (CEZ 1985:44–45). Creative assimilation refers to the sacralizing of local customs, a practice as old as the early Christian missionaries’ appropriation of the pagan winter solstice festivals for the celebration of the birth of Jesus. A good modern example is the way in which various secular holidays in the United States have been given liturgical status. There are now recognized liturgies that may be celebrated by a congregation in association with Memorial Day and Thanksgiving in order to give a spiritual dimension to the secular, political acts of remembering and giving thanks. The Martin Luther King holiday is often the occasion for a mass designed to highlight brotherhood and to speak out against the sin of racism. Organic progression is the method of completing ideas that were left as suggestions without authorized form in the various Vatican II reforms. One major example has been the revival of the rite of Christian initiation of adults, a process of several months’ duration during which non-Catholics are gradually inducted into full communion in the church. Adult initiation fell into disuse during the many centuries when infant baptism was the norm; adult converts were inducted quietly after a few private sessions with a priest. But Vatican II made it clear that the act of coming into the church was a matter for the entire community to celebrate and hence had liturgical status (Buckley 1991:254). In the United States, adult initiation consists of instructional lectures, group sharing, and a series of public rites; it brings together a varied group of “inquirers” who go through the process together and perform the rites in the presence of the entire parish congregation. This process seems particularly well attuned to modern American culture, with its zest for support groups and public selfrevelation. In Korea, by contrast, norms of dignity militate against the sharing of intimate revelations with strangers. Adult initiation in Korea, therefore, involves the family circle but not the congregation at large. The point is that Vatican II established a mandate for a new attitude toward the initiation of

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members of the church; by a process of organic progression, local churches work out procedures that seem best to meet their particular needs.2 Experiments with inculturation have ranged all the way from the replacement of Euro-American missionaries by local clergy who celebrate the Roman ritual in a more or less intact form to the approval of full liturgies in Zaire and the Philippines. In most cases only a few culturally significant symbols are tinkered with. However, in Latin American communities there has been a suggestion that inculturation means fundamental change in church structure, in keeping with alternative political and economic realities.3 The situation in the United States illustrates certain problems with the application of the concept of inculturation. Rembert Weakland, the archbishop of Milwaukee and a leading spokesperson for liberal Catholicism, has even spoken of the “birthing of a new Catholicism” (1992). No concept emanating from Vatican II has been more enthusiastically adopted by American Catholics than that of “shared responsibility.” The preconciliar notion of “the church” was defined in terms of its clerical hierarchy, with the laity as the obedient flock. Over the past three decades, this image has given way before a plethora of lay-dominated parish councils, finance boards, and even lay administration of many parishes and diocesan offices (Provost 1989). Laypeople now play a prominent role in the liturgy and in most of the church services traditionally staffed by clergy. Americans both expect and desire “control” in their political and social affairs; thus it was only to be expected that they would seize the opportunity to exert such active ministry within the church when the possibility was opened for them. American Catholics are therefore sensitive to the apparent infringement on their rights by the Vatican. Even though those who remain active in the church profess a sincere loyalty toward and respect for the Vatican, they often chafe at Roman “interference” and the insensitivity of the hierarchy to issues such as birth control, sexual morality, and women in the ministry. If we can think of an indigenized American church in terms of American culture, it would be one with a high degree of lay institutional direction and an emphasis on decentralization of authority. But as yet the Vatican has shown little inclination to include such concerns under the rubric of inculturation. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Vatican condemned as a heresy an 2 See Chupungco 1982 and 1989 for a thorough treatment of the methods. 3 Considerations of space preclude more detailed cross-cultural description in this essay. The interested reader is directed to the following sources: for Africa, Healey 1986 and Tovey 1988; for India, Klostermeier 1986; for Japan, Takagi 1993; for Southeast Asia, England 1986; for the Philippines, Chupungco 1992; for Latin America, Witvliet 1986.

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earlier attempt at “trusteeism” or lay control in the U.S. church (Bokenkotter 1990:338–339). Rome’s current displeasure with American innovations may be less confrontational, but it is no less clear.

Inculturationist Assumptions about the Concept of Culture

Contemporary Catholic inculturationists assume that culture is a more or less unified whole and that it is identified with nation-states or other political units rather than with self-identified ethnic communities. Intracultural variation is not a salient characteristic in this assumption (Barrett 1984:154–182). Culture is identified with a free-floating “ethos” rather than with specific products, actions, relationships, or beliefs that might be observed “on the ground.” For example, a statement was issued by the bishops of Ghana regarding a panAfrican substrate of religious experience that is defined without regard to the evident multiplicity of local expressions (Healey 1986:269). Inculturationists assume that people will automatically prefer “indigenous” to “foreign” expressions, but this distinction is no longer easy to maintain. Bishops in the United States, for example, have permission to schedule occasional Latin masses for the benefit of believers who feel that Catholicism is only valid when celebrated in Latin. Such people have never accepted the vernacular mass, even though it is easier to understand and relate to everyday life. Inculturationists assume that people in Africa or Asia will automatically reject the Roman forms, although experience suggests that those forms might seem more desirable because they are the “real thing” even when they are not totally comprehensible. Inculturation tends to divorce ritual from its social context. Thus, while the Vatican is quite open to inculturating the liturgy of a wedding ceremony, being sensitive to various customs regarding veiling the bride, it may not be able to inculturate the social structure of marriage. Polygyny, for example, is culturally valid in some places but can have no place in Catholic marriage. But there are practices, such as matrilateral cross-cousin marriage, that fall into a grayer area. Questions about birth control and abortion, so obvious a part of marriage, are matters that exhibit considerable cross-cultural diversity. It makes little sense to have a properly inculturated ritual while condemning the social reality that the ritual is meant to celebrate. However, the church implies that ritual may be culturally varied, whereas social action is subject to unvarying teachings.4 4 These thorny questions are explored at length in Metz and Schillebeeckx 1989.

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A further assumption is that inculturative exchange can occur without a fundamental transformation of the parties to the exchange. The inculturated liturgy, for example, is said to have created a common ground in Zaire, although neither the basic message of Catholicism nor the “heart” of Zairian culture (however that may be defined) is said to have been changed. It is doubtful that any anthropologist would agree that a culture could remain unchanged in the wake of its encounter with a large, external system of beliefs and behaviors that purport to represent a higher moral authority. It is also doubtful that this larger system can remain unchanged, since culture is not a thin veneer of interchangeable symbols that can be taken on or cast off without affecting internal realities. It may seem innocuous to cover a tabernacle in East Africa with leopard skin. However, the chieftainship symbolized by leopard skin, deeply rooted in the values and expectations of African people, is a profoundly different concept of royalty from that implied when Westerners talk about “Christ the King.” While there is great concern for liturgical trappings to provide the proper setting for worship, worship is a social act reflecting ideas about not only what is beautiful but also what is socially feasible. For example, composing a liturgy for Martin Luther King Day allows Catholics in the United States to contemplate the sin of racism in the broader context of Catholic teachings on social justice. But catholicizing the day hardly divorces the commemoration from its historical nexus. The social, political, and economic issues represented by Martin Luther King continue to demand redress by the American body politic; Catholics may well be moved by the liturgy to take a more active political stand, but in doing so, they take the liturgy beyond its aesthetic function and give it a function of social action. There can be no true inculturation—no final incarnation—unless the social, political, and economic aspects of the society are dealt with. To have a Martin Luther King Day liturgy without a concomitant program to advance a political-economic agenda of racial accommodation is to condemn the liturgy to irrelevance. To encourage a Philippine mass without considering the implications of the nationalist aspirations that it might inspire is similarly to underestimate the power of symbols to motivate social action. The church explicitly states that “culture must be subordinated to the integral development of human persons, the good of the community, and of the whole of mankind” (Vatican II 1992:963). Traditional anthropological relativism notwithstanding, this view is not entirely different from the way in which at least some contemporary anthropologists use the concept. After all, applied anthropology is based—implicitly or otherwise—on the assumption that certain technologies or behaviors are better than others. It is desirable to inculcate an appreciation of those technologies and behaviors in culturally

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sensitive ways, but few anthropologists would care to defend such locally appropriate cultural practices as infanticide, female circumcision, or child labor, which violate supposedly “innate” principles of human dignity. Anthropology long ago came to the realization that there were moral limits to a philosophy of cultural relativism. Finally, the Vatican recognizes that “culture flows from man’s rational and social nature” (Vatican II 1992:963) and can be harnessed to achieve moral purposes precisely because people are capable of learning new ways. The very fact that there are different cultures, rather than the single human way of life that might be expected if culture were strictly an element of natural law, demonstrates that culture is a human rather than a divine creation.

The Question of Power

The theology of inculturation has benefited from the insights of several anthropologists who have analyzed the role of religion within culture. Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, and Mary Douglas in particular are frequently cited as having informed the church’s understanding of culture (Mannion 1990:313). Theologians, however, tend to focus on the contributions of these anthropologists to the study of ritual, which is reflected in the Vatican’s emphasis on liturgy as the primary field of inculturative activity (Grimes 1985). Moreover, there is an emphasis on these scholars’ descriptive studies of ritual as expressive behavior, without a concomitant interest in their analyses of how ritual offers a way of understanding how people think and feel about the social environment in which ritual is embedded. There is even less interest in the communicative properties of ritual or its ability to alter social reality, as suggested by Rappaport (1979). As Asad (1983) has pointed out, however, one of the problems with focusing on the description and endogenous meaning of ritual is that one can easily ignore the social disciplines that condition the reception of the sacred text. In Asad’s view, it is power, not a configuration of symbols, that implants religious dispositions. He advocates an analysis of the ways in which social disciplines produce and authorize bodies of knowledge, the ways in which people are required to respond to that knowledge, and the ways in which knowledge is accumulated and distributed (Asad 1983:252). In this view, the Vatican strategy of inculturation relies overmuch on the interpretive meaning of symbols and not enough on the social forces that dispose people to act on the message imparted by those symbols. The central problem is therefore not that the Vatican has misunderstood or distorted anthropological teachings on the nature of culture

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but rather that it has emphasized a single aspect of culture. In so doing it has paid less than optimum attention to issues of social class, gender, ethnicity, and other conditioners of power. The church is in the position of assuming that if people are involved in properly inculturated liturgies, then they will be able to use their spiritual empowerment to ennoble the culture around them. A different emphasis in the anthropology of inculturation might suggest that such ennoblement of culture can occur only if the Gospel message is inculturated at the level of the social disciplines, in equal measure with idealized ritual. The Vatican, however, has recently banned several incarnational liturgy initiatives in Brazil precisely because they were perceived as going too far in reaching the hearts of African-Americans, indigenous peoples, and the poor (Wirpsa 1993). This move indicates that the church understands that ritual has the capacity to link participants with sources of power in the wider society but does not favor the use of ritual for such a purpose.5 The church, like any international development agency, is a representative of political and economic power and not simply of moral authority. In both cases, the rhetoric of sensitivity to cultural variation exists in a state of some tension with a fundamental belief in the lightness of the beliefs or behaviors that are the substance of the program of directed change. That both churches and development agencies are instruments of social discipline is germane to the ways in which an ideology of culture is translated into the reality of intercultural intervention. With regard to contemporary Catholicism, we may distinguish four models that represent different projected relationships between culture and power, and hence, four different potential strategies for inculturation. The conservative approach, perhaps best represented by the late excommunicated Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and his followers, is committed to immutable doctrine; it is therefore extremely cautious about any tinkering with the ritual forms in which doctrine is conveyed. Conservatives will admit some indigenous artistic elements in peripheral roles, but their principal concern 5 Since this essay was originally drafted, an even more serious confrontation of this sort erupted when the Vatican put the brakes on the 1994 synod of African bishops. They were prepared to argue for a form of inculturation that went far beyond the aesthetics of liturgy and touched on issues of social organization (including norms of marriage) and hierarchical structure (including the role of women). The synod, originally scheduled to meet in Africa, was directed to meet in Rome instead. Its resolutions were made under the watchful eyes of the Vatican. The controversy precipitated a new Vatican formulation of its inculturation policy, one with a far more conservative tone than had been in evidence until that point “The liturgy, like the Gospel,” the Vatican said, “must respect cultures, but at the same time invite them to purify and sanctify themselves” (CWS 1994:745). See Edwards 1994a and 1994b and Hebblethwaite 1994a and 1994b for summaries of this developing confrontation.

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is the integrity of the Latin rite. They uphold a society whose culture represents a nearly complete integration of religion and social life. Liturgical and catechetical innovations are to be avoided because they can disrupt the link between the church (seen as the model of the perfect society) and believers. The church, in effect, has an existence apart from its believers, and people are perfected insofar as they permit themselves to experience the ministry of the church. The church, therefore, derives spiritual as well as political and economic power from its position as the unchallenged authority on the question of what constitutes the perfect society. To allow more than a cautious smattering of liturgical innovations is to call into question the authoritative perfection of the church and, hence, to jeopardize the salvation of all souls. The liberal approach, suggested by Archbishop Weakland, sees modern culture not as a threat but as a challenge to creativity. Liberal inculturation is a matter of intensive dialogue between the gospel message and the cultures of people to whom the gospel is preached. Like the conservatives, the liberals implicitly view the church and the people as distinct units of analysis. The crucial difference, however, is that the liberals see them as units having roughly equivalent moral authority. This approach is based on a pluralistic vision of society, the essence of which is that religion and social life are no longer automatically intertwined. People can find satisfaction in many other forms and institutions, and there is no automatic belief that perfection is the unique province of a single institutional church. In order for that church to be relevant, therefore, it must go out to meet people where they are. The paradox of liberalism, however, is that its tolerance for pluralism cannot be absolute. Even the most liberal inculturationist must at some point believe that immutable truth is at stake; otherwise there would be no need to “incarnate the gospel” in the first place. The liberals are in somewhat the same position as anthropologists who are critics of traditional development theory; they have been successful in challenging the monolithic, hegemonic assumptions of international development, but their own guidelines for proper development—based ultimately on a philosophy of cultural relativism—are held to be universally applicable. Moreover, the world now forms a globally interrelated system in which prospects for the absolute autonomy of local traditions can hardly be encouraging. The Vatican’s current neoconservative approach insists on the priority of Catholic tradition, but with a “sophisticated appreciation of change and development within the tradition” (Mannion 1990:312). Like the conservatives, the neoconservatives see the church as the model of the perfect society; like the liberals, however, they recognize that people in the modern world must be sensitively drawn back to that model of perfection, not coerced into it.

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The radical approach, typified by liberation theology, seems most attuned to contemporary anthropological thinking. It is based on a sweeping criticism of both the gospel and modern culture. The gospel message must be purged of the sexism, racism, and class bias that it has accumulated over the centuries. And modern culture must be shorn of its materialism and extreme individualism. Radicals are committed to true religious pluralism, not merely to a diversity of cultural expressions of something held to be an essential truth. For example, they point out that non-Christian religious traditions have Christ-figures, or exemplars of the highest moral authority, who are equally worthy of devotion. The radical approach is a broadly based rejection of tradition, as tainted by centuries of bias. It supports instead what might be called the popular religion in which the church is the people, who are held to have a greater moral authority than any formalized institution or hierarchy ever could.

Conclusions

The Roman Catholic church uses a version of the culture concept in its contemporary evangelization strategy that relies overmuch on the aesthetics of ritual and on a view of culture as divorced from social action. There is an underlying assumption that inculturation is something that the Vatican, out of a sense of noblesse oblige, is in a position to grant; it is calling people to the truth and only uses cultural forms to induce people to heed that calling. A more anthropologically informed assumption might be that, in a diverse multicultural world, inculturation can be achieved only by negotiation among players with varying access to political, economic, and social power. The Roman Catholic church’s directed social change agenda mirrors certain forms of international development that anthropologists have long called into question. Other strategies for inculturation exist, however, that might bring into fuller play aspects of the culture concept that have been developed by a broader range of anthropological discourse than has been tapped by the Vatican. The point is that a global institution with vast potential for touching the lives of millions could benefit from a more open dialogue with anthropology rather than relying on its own formulation of the culture concept. References Cited Asad, Talal (1983). Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz. Man 18:237–259. Barrett, Richard A. (1984). Culture and Conduct. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

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Bokenkotter, Thomas (1990). A Concise History of the Catholic Church. Rev. edition. New York: Doubleday. Buckley, Francis (1991). Inculturation and Orthodoxy: The Christian Message. Origins 21:249–257. Cernea, Michael M., ed. (1991). Putting People First: Sociological Variables in Rural Development. 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press and the World Bank. Chupungco, Anscar (1982). Cultural Adaptation of the Liturgy. New York: Paulist Press. Chupungco, Anscar (1989). Liturgies of the Future: The Process and Method of Inculturation. New York: Paulist Press. Chupungco, Anscar (1992). Liturgical Inculturation: Sacramentals, Religiosity, and Catechesis. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press. Conférence Episcopale du Zaïre (CEZ) (1985). Rite Zaïrois de la Célébration Eucharis­ tique. Kinshasa: CEZ. Congregation for Worship and Sacraments (CWS) (1994). Instruction: Inculturation and the Roman Liturgy. Origins 23:745–756. Crollius, A. (1978). What Is So New about Inculturation? Gregorianum 59:721–738. Davies, J. G. (1986). Indigenization. In The New Westminster Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship. J. G. Davies, ed. Pp. 268–280. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. De Napoli, G. (1987). Inculturation as Communication. Inculturation 9:71–98. Edwards, Robin T. (1994a). African Bishops Offer Wish Lists to Synod. National Catholic Reporter, April 29, p. 7. Edwards, Robin T. (1994b). Inculturation Is Africa’s Ecclesial Crux. National Catholic Reporter, April 29, p. 8. England, John C. (1986). Asia. In The New Westminster Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship. J. G. Davies, ed. Pp. 276–280. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Foster, George (1969). Applied Anthropology. Boston: Little, Brown. Grimes, Ronald L. (1985). Research in Ritual Studies: A Programmatic Essay and Bibliography. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Healey, Joseph G. (1986). Africa. In The New Westminster Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship. J. G. Davies, ed. Pp. 269–271. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Hebblethwaite, Peter (1994a). Everything under Control in Rome—But Not Quite. National Catholic Reporter, April 29, pp. 10–11. Hebblethwaite, Peter (1994b). Synod on Africa a World Away from Real Life African Church. National Catholic Reporter, April 8, p. 8. Hiebert, P. (1984). Critical Contextualization. Missiology 12:287–296. John Paul II (1992). Address to the Bishops of Nigeria. In Catholic Almanac. Felician Foy, ed. P. 314. Huntington, IN: OSV Publishing. Klostermeier, Klaus (1986). India. In The New Westminster Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship. J. G. Davies, ed. Pp. 271–274. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Mannion, M. Francis (1990). Liturgy and Culture. In The New Dictionary of Sacramen­ tal Worship. Peter E. Fink, ed. Pp. 307–313. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press.

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Metz, J.-B., and E. Schillebeeckx, eds. (1989). Concilium: World Catechism or Incultura­ tion? Edinburgh: T & T Clark. Paul VI (1975). On Evangelization in the Modern World. Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference. Provost, James (1989). Canon Law and the Role of Consultation. Origins 18:793–799. Rappaport, Roy (1979). Ecology, Meaning, and Religion. Richmond, CA: North Atlantic Books. Schineller, Peter (1990). Inculturation of the Liturgy. In The New Dictionary of Sacramental Worship. Peter E. Fink, ed. Pp. 598–601. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press. Schreiter, R. J. (1985). Constructing Local Theologies. London: SCM. Synod of Bishops (1987). Vocation and Mission of the Laity: Working Paper for the 1987 Synod. Origins 17:1–20. Takagi, Takago Frances (1993). Inculturation and Adaptation in Japan before and after Vatican Council II. Catholic Historical Review 79:246–267. Tovey, Philip (1988). Inculturation: The Eucharist in Africa. Bramcote, England: Grove Books. Vatican II (1992). Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. In Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Postconciliar Documents. Rev. edition. Austin Flannery, ed. Pp. 903–1001. Northport, NY: Costello. Weakland, Rembert (1992). Catholics as Social Insiders. Origins 22:33–39. Wirpsa, Leslie (1993). After 25 Years, Medellin Spirit Lives. National Catholic Reporter, October 15, pp. 11–13. Witvliet, Theo (1986). Latin America. In The New Westminster Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship. J. G. Davies, ed. Pp. 274–276. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.

The Problem of Colonialism in the Western Historiography of Christian Missions Jane Samson This essay reflects my frustration with the historiography of modern Christian missions.1 Some recent work suggests that the tide is turning, but for the most part a ‘postcolonial’ establishment holds sway, emphasising the structures of power at the expense of other historical factors. Despite the radical claims made by many postcolonial scholars, a radically new analysis of modern missions has rarely been delivered. For the most part, traditional preoccupations and narratives have been reinforced in new guises. New fields of investigation, such as discourse analysis, use new formulations of academic authority to endorse a familiar process: the unmasking of Christianisation as colonisation. I question whether this now-traditional preoccupation is either “postcolonial” or “postmodern”. Perhaps the most obvious problem, one which has attracted revisionists in recent years, is the dilemma raised by traditional critiques of Christianisation. If missionaries were always racist colonialists, how did they make converts? Some scholars have begun to explore the issue of conversion in an historically nuanced way which grants non-European peoples their own agency in making choices. Instead of being the dupes of colonialism, whose actions must be limited to the subjectivities of victimisation or resistance, they can be regarded as active agents in their own histories. They did not interact with a monolith, but instead with a plethora of Christianities from Russian Orthodox to Roman Catholic and a range of Protestantisms. The pluralism of both sides of the indigenous/Christian encounter invites further exploration. The context of Source: Samson, J., “The Problem of Colonialism in the Western Historiography of Christian Missions,” Religious Studies and Theology  23.2 (2004): pp. 3–25. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004. 1 This essay is based on a paper I gave to the Association for Research in Religious Studies and Theology (ARRST) annual meeting Edmonton in November, 2004. It will form part of the introduction to my forthcoming book, Race and Redemption: British Missionary Anthropology in the South Pacific. I would like to thank Earle Waugh for inviting me to submit the paper to this journal, the participants at the ARRST conference (especially Willi Braun and John-Paul Himka) for their helpful questions and comments, David Goa and Andrew Gow for many illuminating discussions, and the journal’s anonymous referees for helping me to improve it for publication.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004399594_026

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colonialism can never be ignored, but is it all-determining? If non-Europeans are more than eternal victims, are Christian missionaries more than eternal villains? Are Christian subjectivities always and everywhere colonising subjectivities? Although the pluralism of ‘the indigenous’ response to Christianity is at last being recognised, the implications of this for the traditional equation of missionaries with colonialism has remained relatively muted. I want to emphasise that this is not a zero-sum exercise. To complicate questions about power is not to ignore power, or to celebrate it. My work on the intersections between Christian humanitarianism and British imperialism has revealed a complex network of information exchange and identity politics.2 What I have termed “imperial benevolence” was both Eurocentric and prescriptive. That was not all that it was, however; the universalist imperatives of Christian theology were also of great importance. Concern about aboriginal rights in the colonies of settlement, for example, can be unmasked as the power structures of anthropological knowledge systems and colonial paternalism. Less easy to unmask, however, is the reason why so many Europeans, many of them Christians, began to believe that the maltreatment of non-Europeans was wrong. If Christianity was simply a set of racial distancing strategies, like any other colonial discourse, what was the source of its ability to challenge racial distance? These questions must be faced rather than elided. I will be suggesting that a historiography which takes religion both seriously and critically can provide valuable answers to questions about the relationship between colonialism and the expansion of Christianity. First, however, we need to investigate the ways in which the modern academy has established a hermeneutics of suspicion about Christianity in history. Next, I will turn to the historiography of Christian missions in general, and the relationship between missions and colonialism in particular. After identifying key problems I will discuss the newer, revisionist work which is raising questions about traditional postcolonial analysis. The essay will end with an exploration of the significance of this new work, and a call for the continued diversification of debate.

2 See Jane Samson, Imperial Benevolence: Making British Authority in the Pacific Islands (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press and London: Curzon Press, 1998), “British Authority or ‘Mere Theory’? Colonial Law and Native People on Vancouver Island,” Western Legal History 11:1 (1999), pp. 39–63, and “British Voices and Indigenous Rights: Debating Aboriginal Legal Status in Nineteenth-Century Australia and Canada,” Cultures of the Commonwealth 2 (1996–97), pp. 5–16.

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The subject of religion as a whole has been problematic for some time outside theological colleges or religious studies departments. My analysis will focus mainly on work in anthropology, history and literary studies, but many other disciplines have also been involved in shaping the modern academic study of religion. What I mean by ‘modern’ owes much to the work of Catherine Bell, who explains that modernism’s optimism about science allowed it to dissociate itself from the cultural contingencies of religion. Modern academics have therefore tended to be suspicious about bias in the scholarship of confessional communities, locating their own work in a narrative ‘of rational and progressively scientific thinking that yielded a ‘coherent research tradition’ with which to replace the reigning theological paradigm’.3 Progressive, rational modern research therefore constructs itself against a religious ‘other’ whose perceived biases are presumed to render objective investigation impossible. Part of the postmodern revolution has, of course, been to expose the naiveties of modernism itself, especially its faith in science and its narratives of intellectual progress. Despite the ubiquity of the term ‘postmodern’, however, its radical potential has been slow to influence the academic study of religion. In the mid1980s, Mark C. Taylor proposed a powerful new reconfiguration which would combine postmodern epistemology (especially its insights about the cultural grounding of all human enterprises including science) with the critical study of theology. A vigorous debate ensued, notably in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JAAR), giving rise to hopes ‘that postmodernism will permit miraculous transcendence of those debates concerning modernism and religion in which many departments have become hopelessly mired’.4 How far the readership of the JAAR debate penetrated English, anthropology, sociology or history departments is another question. Institutional and intellectual boundaries present formidable obstacles even to miraculous transcendence! For a scholar of modern history like myself, one of the most interesting views of the debate about modernism comes from recent work on religion in the medieval and early modern periods. It is easy to forget that Europeans were themselves the objects of Christian missionary endeavour, and that European societies can and should be studied anthropologically. How far should Europeans be seen as active agents in the context of their own 3 Catherine Bell, “Modernism and Postmodernism in the Study of Religion,” Religious Studies Review 22 (1996), 183. 4 Johannes C. Wolfart, “Postmodernism” in Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon, eds. Guide to the Study of Religion (Cassell Academic, 2000), 391.

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conversion to Christianity? Some recent work suggests very interesting possibilities. James C. Russell, in The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity (1994) sees the conversion of Europe in terms of the conversion of Christianity. Russell’s use of sociological theory to analyse his material has generated controversy, but in an extended review of Russell’s work, John Kitchen sees his phenomenology as a challenge to generations of modernist scholarship in the field. This scholarship has traditionally been “posited on the alterity of the religious belief”,5 enabling an authoritative academic voice to withhold authenticity from this belief. Kitchen diagnoses a fear of apologetics at the heart of this pervasive tendency: a fear that phenomenology “implies at some level an acceptance of the religious activity or belief under analysis.”6 I will say more about the issue of fear later on. For now, I would like to underline Kitchen’s call to discard the either/or binaries of convential historiography: “We are negotiating, rather than opposing or professing, religion.”7 A fine example of this is Sylvia Brown’s carefully nuanced work on early modern missions to New England. One does not have to be ‘for’ or ‘against’ providentialist theology to recognise its importance in debates about missiology. Likewise, one should be sceptical about uncritical linkages between providentialism and colonialism. Brown’s study of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) in New England was intended to challenge the presumption that theology’s operation was functional, providing a convenient rationale for colonisation through an affirmation of English superiority. Instead, Brown found a ‘critical uncertainty about England’s identity as God’s chosen nation’.8 Even when newly-Christian Indians were described in familial terms as ‘children’, they were conceptualised as children whose virtues reproached their parents’ spiritual failings. It might be their nation, not England’s, on which God’s blessings would fall. A particularly good comparison can be made here with the work of anthropologist Rita Kipp on the Dutch East Indies. Kipp interviewed Indonesian church leaders, elders and others who had been connected with the mission she was studying, making a genuine and laudable effort to understand missionaries on their own terms. She locates this intellectual engagement, however, within a narrative of progress involving her own life story. Youthful Sundays 5 John Kitchen, “Going Medieval: Paradigm Shifts and the Phenomenological Tendency in the Contemporary Encounter with Medieval Religion,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 14 (2002), 409. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Sylvia Brown, “Converting the Lost Sons of Adam: National Identities and the First Publication of the ‘Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England’,” Reformation 4 (1999), 171.

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spent in a southern Baptist church were followed by a process of intellectual maturity: “At some imperceptible moment on the way to becoming an anthropologist, I stopped being a Baptist or even a Christian.”9 Kipp is an honest scholar: she admits that the missionaries she studied did not conform to the racist, ignorant stereotypes she had been expecting to encounter. Nevertheless, I wonder whether she is aware of duplicating Freud’s classic understanding of religion as “childish”. To understand the colonisation of southeast Asian peoples she draws on her skills as a mature anthropologists, but to understand the missionaries she tells us that she draws on the “fantasies and faith” of her childhood.10 If a literary juxtaposition of this kind occurred in missionary ethnography about Africans, it would rightly be exposed and denounced as an infantilising and colonising discourse. What does it mean, then, when it is found in the methodology of a “postcolonial” anthropologist? Similarly, the task for Pacific anthropologist Nicholas Thomas is to identify ‘that which separates much modern discourse from the religious construction of otherness’ which prevailed in pre-modern times.11 He does not explain why ‘modern’ and ‘religious’ should be regarded as separate realms, and despite much rhetoric about reflexivity, foregrounding and other postmodern exercises, he seems unaware that he is operating in an unreflectively modernist mode with regard to the presumed progression from religious to modern. Thomas argues that textual ‘hierarchizing practices’ must be emphasised over Christian universalism in order to expose the colonising effect of missionary texts.12 Christian universalism is not real; hierarchizing practices are. Religious faith loses significance in a modern context where only power matters: a Whiggish narrative of progress worthy of the high Enlightenment. Even Edward Said, whose deconstruction of Enlightenment knowledge systems has been so influential, did not reflect critically on the dilemmas of modernist approaches to religion. His own background is Arab Protestant and in Culture and Imperialism he notes that ‘Imperial competition for converts and constituents in the Ottoman Empire’ produced Christian communities ‘all of 9 Rita Kipp, The Early Years of a Dutch Colonial Mission: The Karo Field (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 10. 10 Ibid. 11 Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 79. 12 Nicholas Thomas, “Colonial Conversions: Difference, Hierarchy, and History in Early Twentieth-Century Evangelical Propaganda” in Robert Borofsky, ed. Remembrance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), 237. Despite the promotion of this book as a collection of provocative new work, Thomas’s piece is the condensed version of a paper published nearly ten years previously.

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which without exception played an honourable role during the period of the Arab Renaissance.’13 Here Said could have come to grips with the provocative conjunction of imperial structures and emancipatory activism, but he does not. He simply privileges Arab Protestants as somehow external to the main story, reflecting an ‘experience of imperialism that is essentially one of sympathy and congruence, not of antagonism, resentment, or resistance.’14 This is a provocative Said, one who is withholding grand narratives in order to acknowledge historical complexity. But is this the Said whose theory of ‘orientalism’ helped to spawn ‘postcolonial’ scholarship? On the contrary, Said’s comments about Arab Protestantism remain almost unknown. To my knowledge, only Jeffrey Cox has undertaken a published critique of Said’s unresolved epistemology with respect to religion. Cox rightly says that Saidian theory cannot cope with the particularities that his own research (and personal experience) have identified. Said’s theory of orientalism demands not ‘sympathy and congruence’ but rather the monolithic pronouncement that “every [nineteenthcentury] European, in what he could say about the Orient, was … a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric”.15 This is the Said that his followers prefer, and thus the problem remains: how are we to explain the process of communication and engagement by which some Arabs become Christian in the first place? How do we explain the ‘honourable role’ of their communities in seeking emancipation? Only by taking religion seriously as a site of meaning can we begin to answer these questions without being forced to take a zerosum, for-or-against position on Christianisation. Religion as both site and process is deeply pluralised; hence Said’s dilemma. Making God-talk can involve top-down authority and colonising praxis, but it can also inspire activisms that even the most ardent postcolonial critic finds “honourable”. Unfortunately, generations of modernists have tended to divide religion from science to create a narrative of progress (explicit or implicit) in which the epistemologies of science prevail over the backwardness of theology. The supposed erosion of faith during the Scientific Revolution, or the Enlightenment, or after Darwin, is a classic example of this narrative. Only recently have scholars begun to question whether or not the subjectivities of faith and science are mutually exclusive, and they have now thoroughly discredited the idea 13 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), 45. 14 Ibid., 46–47. 15 Said, Culture and Imperialism, cited in Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 14. I am extremely grateful to Jeffrey Cox for these insights; before his book was published I was unaware that anyone else had spotted the seriousness of this particular problem in Said’s work.

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of a progressive scheme in which one inevitably must yield to the other. In the Victorian period, which is the one I know best, Darwinian evolutionary theory provided welcome ammunition for missionaries and other Christian universalists against the racist skull-measurers and “missing link” theorists of Victorian anthropology.16 By the early twentieth century the relativism of theoretical physics had restored mystery to cosmology: science began pointing beyond itself to questions that, by its own rules, it can never answer. Far from ‘reason’ trumping ‘faith’, recent explorations of the science-theology nexus suggest something quite different: the possibility of fruitful conversations and shared methodologies.17 This was not a possibility envisioned during the early centuries of modernism. The scientific discovery of relativity means that our universe and its constituent atoms are best explained not by the mechanical models of classical modern science, but by the counter-intuitive and paradoxical features of quantum physics and the non-linear equations of chaos theory. How odd it is that the “postmodern” humanities and social sciences have been so slow to grasp the implications of these epistemological developments for their own fields of study. Taking religion seriously is theoretical physicist John Polkinghorne’s stock in trade, but to anthropologist Rita Kipp it is a backward step which recalls the ‘fantasies’ of childhood.

II

It is time to move to a discussion of the problems posed by the historiography of missions, especially with regard to the issue of colonialism. This historiography goes back to the mid-twentieth century and the successful Communist revolution in China. Hostility to western encroachment combined with Marxist-Leninist definitions of imperialism to create a powerful critique of missionaries as “in essence the ideological arm of Western imperial aggression”.18 Marxism in Africa also prompted an interpretation of Christianisation as a culturally alien assault on indigenous life “leaving the colonized with no ideological resources to resist the imposition of Western rule”.19 By the 1960s these historiographies were well established. One of the most famous unmasking exercises was undertaken by the Marxist historian (and Prime Minister of 16

See, for example, George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 248–54. 17 Here I am indebted to the work of John Jefferson David, John Polkinghorne and Sjoerd Bonting. 18 Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag (Leicester: Apollos, 1991), 15. 19 Ibid., 26.

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Trinidad) Eric Williams in Capitalism & Slavery (1944).20 For Williams, the humanitarian motives of antislavery campaigners were merely a distraction from the real story of capitalist self-interest. This view has long since been discredited: it ignores the long history of minority Christian objections to slavery, and it fails to take seriously the impact of the eighteenth-century evangelical revival in Britain and the northern United States.21 The idea that slavery was a sin, for which atonement must be made, was promulgated through a Christian anthropology that must be dealt with in conjunction with other, more material factors. The flight from Marxian historiography during the later 1980s prompted an extensive critique of the Eurocentrism and modernism of Marxist theory. Nevertheless, the idea lingers that Christian universalism must be exposed as apologetics for capitalist colonialism. Even pioneers of postcolonial studies, who claimed to be doing something radically new, simply put a new gloss on conclusions first reached by Williams’s generation. Mary Louise Pratt is considered one of the pioneers of colonial discourse analysis, yet she concludes that missionary writings were “articulations of conquest” whose apparently “anti-conquest” emphasis on universalism must be unmasked as capitalist and colonialist apologetics.22 Western power is the only real story; even the most apparently genuine attempts to transcend race must be exposed as colonial manipulation. Likewise the pioneering work of Catherine Hall on the construction of ‘Britishness’ sees missionaries as collaborators in the ‘racing’ and denigration of non-Britons: ‘missionary work in Jamaica was always a complex exercise of power, and in aiming to construct new black subjects the missionaries were defining their own whiteness’.23 Like Pratt, Hall is doing something very different from classical Marxian studies of black exclusion, and she is more candid than many postcolonial scholars in acknowledging the influence of Marxist theory in her life and work.24 Nevertheless, her conclusion—that missionary work was always about power—is deeply traditional, and the dilemmas with which I began this essay remain: is Christianity always and everywhere reducible to a raced system of colonial control? 20

Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1944). 21 For an overview of the debate see Thomas Bender, The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 22 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 38–39, 74. 23 Catherine Hall, untitled article in Small Axe 14 (2003), 75. 24 Ibid., 74.

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The work of Pratt, Hall and others promotes the type of “master narrative” explored by Jeffrey Cox in Imperial Fault Lines (2002). Cox contends that academics have failed to take religion seriously because of a heavy investment in materialist theories of history: Marxist, social constructivist, and literary structuralist In the resulting master narrative, the only real story is that of western colonialism and the cultural forms that facilitated it. Missionaries (and their converts) appear in this narrative in a functional capacity as the dupes of colonial power. In its most recent ‘postcolonial’ form, this master narrative has focused primarily on texts and other forms of cultural production, drawing on the theories of Edward Said.25 In ‘the presuppositions of a Saidian master narrative of unmasking’, Cox writes, ‘missionaries were, simply, imperialists; if different from other imperialists, it is because they were marginal, or because they were worse.’26 Recent work on missions often refers to the pioneering study of Tswana responses to Christianity conducted by John and Jean Comaroff in Of Revelation and Revolution (1991). Jeffrey Cox notes that this study became ‘caught in the binarisms of collaboration and resistance’ because Christianity was only authorised as legitimate when it was deployed by Africans resisting imperialism.27 Like Said, the Comaroffs were unable to cope with the complexities revealed by their own research. They correctly identify a fundamental contradiction in the missiology of the nineteenth-century evangelists they have studied: hopes for “a global democracy of material well-being and moral merit, of equality before the law and the Lord” and the bitter realities of “an empire of inequality, a colonialism of coercion and dispossession”.28 They seem to feel compelled to deem only one of the elements of this contradiction to be real; in other words, to reduce the paradox down to an either/or choice. The Comaroffs’ original objective was to analyse what they call ‘the long conversation’ between missionaries and the Tswana, but they were forced away from this task by privileging European power as the only real story. “It is no wonder”, they tell us, “that in our attempt to understand the Southern Tswana past and present, we kept being drawn back to the colonization of their consciousness and their consciousness of colonization.”29 Instead of an innovative account of a ‘conversation’, we get the traditional strategy of unmasking and denouncing western power. 25 26 27 28 29

As we have seen, such work draws heavily on some aspects of Said’s work while ignoring Said’s own views of the ambiguities of conversion and colonialism among Arabs. Cox, Imperial Fault Lines, 10. Ibid. Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 12. Ibid., 4.

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Let me give some other examples from my own field of Pacific history.30 In many cases there is considerable overlap between history, anthropology and literary studies: a welcome multi-disciplinarity which, unfortunately, has constructed itself as part of a narrative of progress which consigns other paradigms and methodologies to the dustbin. The origin of this narrative seems to lie with the work of anthropologist Nicholas Thomas and his book Colonialism’s Culture (1994). Thomas pioneered a sophisticated use of colonial discourse theory to explore various aspects of imperialism in the Pacific. He wished to avoid the use of colonial discourse theory as a blunt instrument believing, quite rightly, that in their early enthusiasm some scholars had too readily accepted the idea of colonial discourse as monolithic and all-conquering. Thomas concluded instead that imperialism was variable and often contradictory: a conclusion familiar to generations of imperial historians. It is therefore puzzling to read Thomas’s description of his work as a radical departure from what he calls the “mindlessly particular conventional colonial history” which has been preventing scholars from appreciating the complexities of empire.31 It is not clear who these mindless scholars were, but Thomas’s remarks have been enthusiastically cited by a number of rising stars in Pacific history, and also by established scholars who wish to construct their work in new ways. The denunciation of other approaches to the study of colonialism creates a distancing strategy which caters to narratives of progress and enhances the novelty and authority of postcolonial studies. It also conceals connections (and debts) across the generations and invokes an alarming sense of closure. Francis Fukuyama spoke of ‘the end of history’, but what seems to be mooted by Thomas and others is ‘the end of historiography’. Current critical theory wants the last word. Early Pacific anthropology had developed amid a salvage paradigm which struggled to preserve information about ‘authentic’ indigenous cultures before they were altered by westernisation. Missionary records were scoured for information about pre-Christian practises, but neither the missionaries nor their island converts were of much interest in themselves unless they contributed to syncretic or resistance movements that could be considered authentically indigenous, as in the vast literature on Melanesian cargo cults. Other scholars of Pacific Christianity emphasised the traditional beliefs that were maintained privately or locally beneath a superficial Christian conformity. 30 Some parts of the following discussion on Pacific historiography are drawn from a paper I gave to the “British World” conference in Melbourne (July, 2004). That paper has been published in electronic format by Melbourne University Press as part of the collected conference proceedings; see http://www.informit.com.au/library/default .asp?t=coverpage&r=L_BRIWOR. 31 Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, 60.

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This scrutiny of resistance, subversion and syncretism has largely ignored the many ways in which Christian identities are deeply entangled with the processes of identity formation, modernisation and nationalism in the Pacific. Few scholars have wanted to discuss this entanglement, perhaps because postcolonial theory guarantees a comfortable scholarly politics. Liberal western scholars uneasy about the history and legacy of colonialism can locate their work on a moral high ground. A hermeneutics of suspicion permits the scholar of missions or Christianisation to reassure readers that he or she is engaging with these subjects only in order to unmask and denounce them. A notable example is the showcase of postcolonial perspectives in the recent Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders edited by anthropologist Donald Denoon. The book’s subject is a range of Pacific peoples who are almost all Christians today, yet missionaries appear in piecemeal fashion (the real story being colonialism), and there is no index entry for “religion”. Christianity is mentioned on only 29 of 518 pages. One of the only extended passages of analysis declares, with fastidious scare quotes and sarcasm, that “Christianity has shed its ‘light’ on the Islands for more than a hundred years”.32 The image of an outside force, acting illegitimately or hypocritically on Islanders, could not be more clear. It is hard to see how a serious, critical study of Pacific Island Christianity can proceed in the face of such sturdy obstacles. The Cambridge History lamented the small number of Pacific Island voices in its pages, yet its formidable combination of silencing and unmasking strategies can hardly have seemed inviting. Rather than tackle the complexities of Pacific Christianity, many scholars continue to cling to the comforts of literary structuralism. Rod Edmond uses Mary Louise Pratt’s narrative categories of conquest and anti-conquest to describe the writings of Pacific missionary William Ellis, whose texts feature the same “deep structure”.33 Edmond describes this structure as an oscillation between “science and sermon”, as though these are somehow oppositional.34 The reader is left with a very traditional conclusion: that colonialism is an epiphenomenon which explains and is explained by the structures it generates. Bronwen Douglas has described her recent conversion to postcolonial literary theory in an important article titled “Encounters with the Enemy? Academic Readings of Missionary Narratives on Melanesians”. Here she tells how she used to skip “the boring theological passages” in missionary texts in 32 Donald Denoon et al., eds. The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 423. 33 Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 34 Ibid.

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order to find glimpses of pre-Christian Pacific Islanders. She has been more attentive than most to the political problem of silencing Christian voices, however, and describes the process by which she has given herself permission to take Melanesian Christianity seriously. She now allows Islander voices to speak to her from the missionary archives by reading against the grain—a standard technique of the 1960s and 1970s—while acknowledging the imperial power which produced the archives she consults. This is an important and exciting step toward engagement with Pacific Christianities. Unfortunately, Douglas cannot take European Christianities equally seriously. She equates theological statements with literary “tropes”, denouncing them as “politically and morally obnoxious signs” which alienate and disgust her.35 “Original sin is not my trope”36 she explains, as though only a confessional position would permit a historical analysis of religious doctrine. The implications of this stance for her attempted engagement with Pacific Christianities remains unexplored. For all their promotion of radical novelty in postcolonial studies, and for their careful scholarship in other respects, Douglas and others simply reinforce the timehonoured alterity of religion. Bronislaw Malinowski once said of the earliest anthropologists that they had been “enamoured of the unspoiled primitive” instead of studying “the native enslaved, oppressed, or detribalized.”37 Are there really no other frameworks from which to explore Christianisation besides silencing it (to study the “unspoiled primitive”) or denouncing it (as the facilitator of enslavement, oppression and detribalisation)? In no way do I suggest enslavement, oppression and detribalisation unimportant. My question is: are they, without remainder, the only features we should be exploring? If so, are we not continuing primitivism by other means by suggesting that real, living non-western culture belong only to the pre-colonial past? Is cultural dislocation and loss the only story of the present? If not, what happens to the theory of Christianity as colonialism?

III

The postmodern survival of this modernist hermeneutics of suspicion is remarkable, especially when we consider the complexities being brought to 35 Bronwen Douglas, “Encounters with the Enemy? Academic Readings of Missionary Narratives on Melanesians”, Journal for the Comparative Study of Society and History 43:1 (2001), 55. 36 Ibid. 37 George W. Stocking, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 414.

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light by a new generation of historians of mission. As James G. Greenlee and Charles M. Johnston have noted in Good Citizens: British Missionaries & Imperial States (1999), “postcolonial scholarship has tended to emulsify an ‘essentialized’ West into one undifferentiated and imperialistic ‘Self’. Closely examined, missionary records do not support that interpretation. Instead [they] appear to have been fraught with ambiguity, contradiction, and paradox where dealings with secular imperialism were concerned”.38 These conclusions reflect the findings of some recent scholarship, especially in African history, which is determined to take seriously the historical agency of non-Europeans. This new approach rejects traditional silencing or unmasking strategies in favour of a more nuanced historical analysis.39 An excellent example of this is Brett Christophers’ Positioning the Missionary (1998) which examines an Anglican mission in colonial British Columbia. Christophers sees many unexamined value judgments and narratives in most current work on missions and Christianisation. He calls for theology to be taken seriously in historiography, suggesting that theologies of universalism (such as St. Paul’s or St. Augustine’s) “could be mobilized towards a theology of empire that scarcely required, and in many respects resisted, a theory of race”.40 Christophers also insists that “rather than accepting postcolonial theory at face value” we must read missionaries’ own words back into it “and, where necessary, unsettle its assumptions”.41 In my opinion, this is truly reflexive and postmodern scholarship. At no point is Christophers ignoring or apologising for colonial power: the colonial period is the focus of his analysis and he undertakes a sensitive analysis of missions in their colonial context. His willingness to tackle an unsettling archive, however, means that his approach to questions 38 James G. Greenlee & Charles M. Johnston, Good Citizens: British Missionaries & Imperial States 1870 to 1918 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s, 1999), xii. 39 Examples include two important books by David Chidester, Authentic Forgery and Forging Authenticity: Comparative Religion in South Africa (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1994) and Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (University Press of Virginia, 1996) as well as Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799– 1853 (Montreal and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), Paul Landau’s The Realm and the Word: Language, Gender, and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995), J. D. Y. Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000) and Isabel Hofmeyr’s exploration of local and global networks in The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (Princeton University Press, 2004). 40 Brett Christophers, Positioning the Missionary: John Booth Good and the Confluence of Cultures in Nineteenth-Century British Columbia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1998), xvii. 41 Ibid., xvi.

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of power is deeply nuanced and in striking contrast to the all-or-nothing approach of traditional postcolonial scholarship. Critical studies of modernity are also raising questions about the conventional postcolonial approach to the study of religion in history. Gauri Viswanathan points out that modernity has consigned religious identities to an inferior, alterior position as “modernity’s estranged self” and praises the recent scholarship which has helped bring this to light.42 For example, Susan Harding notes that the construction of religious fundamentalism as modernity’s ultimate “other” has been “systematically ignored by [postcolonial] antiorientalist critiques, which otherwise have had little hesitation in taking up issues involving race, class and gender …”.43 In a recent interview, anthropologist Clifford Geertz made a similar point, criticising the traditional “power-reductionist” scholarship which decrees “that it is power that really matters and not [religious] belief”.44 This privileging of western power is certainly a convenient way of keeping westerners (including academics) forever at the focus of attention. China specialist Ryan Dunch suggests that Christianisation is only “one element in a globalizing modernity that has altered Western societies as well as non-Western ones”.45 He has studied the archaeology of the phrase “cultural imperialism”, beginning with its first recorded use in China before the Second World War, and wonders whether western scholars have applied it to missionaries because of “a residual embarrassment about the pieties of another age”.46 Dunch grapples with paradox rather than reducing it to something else, noting that missionaries could be agents of modernity, but were also the products and critics of it. This means that we need to know much more about the background and beliefs of missionaries if we are to understand the way they related to the cultures in which they worked. This concern speaks to Andrew Porter’s recent insight that too much recent scholarship has presumed “that the issue

42 Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), xiii–xiv. 43 Ibid., xiv. 44 Arun Micheelsen, “‘I Don’t Do Systems’: An Interview with Clifford Geertz,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 14 (2002), 9. My thanks to Willi Braun for drawing my attention to this interview. 45 Ryan Dunch, “Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Cultural Theory, Christian Missions, and Global Modernity,” History & Theory, 41:3 (2002), 301. This important article also contains information about work on modern Chinese Christian identities, including Dunch’s own, which like its African counterpart does much to drive debate forward about the presumptions of standard postcolonial treatments of the subject. 46 Ibid., 315.

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of imperialism, together with the claims and motivation of missionaries, were already sufficiently understood”.47 Pacific scholarship has only slowly begun to address the problems posed by traditional postcolonial theory. Anthropologist John Barker has long been an advocate of critique, describing most recent studies of Pacific Christianity as demonstrating “a tendency to focus on the Western/indigenous encounter rather than people’s experiences and understandings”.48 He has urged his fellow anthropologists to take Christianity seriously, calling their ignorance of it “methodical, deriving on the one hand from a narrow conception of cultural authenticity and, on the other, from a simplistic conception of Christianity as a missionary imposition”.49 Barker believes that rather than being seen as merely an alien imposition, Christianity can be analysed as one of many frameworks within which Pacific islanders have shaped their societies and identities. Another Pacific heretic is Greg Dening who, as a former Jesuit priest, has reflected provocatively on the meaning of sacrifice across cultural divides: in texts about Marquesan human sacrifice, for example, but also in the Catholic mass. He refuses to consign his ordained ministry to the lower end of a narrative of intellectual progress; in fact, Dening is better than almost any other Pacific specialist at deconstructing such narratives without sparing himself from scrutiny. “The thousands of eucharistic communions in my life, for all their scruples and arithmetic, have been sweet”, he writes in his most recent book, “Why should I laugh at that? Why should I turn it upside down and say it is the effect of something else?”50

IV

Amid this heartening discussion of new challenges to old paradigms, it is not out of place for me to acknowledge my indebtedness, not only to the scholars whose work has inspired me, but also to the environment in which I work. 47 Andrew Porter, “Church History, History of Christianity, Religious History: Some Reflections on British Missionary Enterprise Since the Late Eighteenth Century”, Church History 71:3 (2002), 557. 48 John Barker, Christianity in Oceania: Ethnographic Perspectives (Lanham: University Press of America, 1990), 9. 49 John Barker, “Christianity in Western Melanesian Ethnography” in James G. Carrier, ed. History and Tradition in Melanesian Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 145. 50 Greg Dening, Beach Crossings: Voyaging Across Times, Cultures and Self (Carlton, Vic: Meigunyah Press, 2004), 103.

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The University of Alberta has a multi-disciplinary programme in Religious Studies which draws on the expertise of faculty members who are based in a range of different departments. Team-teaching and brainstorming with my colleagues, many of whom are cited in this essay, has been incredibly fruitful. Transgressing traditional boundaries has never been easier. I must also confess that, having grown up with Foucault and Said, it is difficult for me to see them as offering radically new insights into the questions I have posed throughout this essay. Instead, I perceive their work as the traditional foundation of the current establishment. It has been nearly thirty years since Orientalism was published, and even longer since Foucault’s first books. What was radically new in the 1980s (especially in the English-speaking world) is new no longer. We owe much to the radical insights of colonial discourse theory, but these are not the last word. They have become a comfortable, well-established set of critical tools, and as such they inevitably invite challenge and debate. If their advocates are truly as reflexive and postcolonial as they claim to be, they will welcome a multiplicity of perspectives and theories. Even so modish a theorist as Bruno Latour is having second thoughts about the reign of postmodern and postcolonial scholarship. He suspects that “Critique has not been critical enough in spite of all its sore-scratching” and calls for a “second empiricism” which can take account of matters of concern in the social realm without turning its back on the hard-won insights of recent critical theory.51 Latour’s field is the history of science, but I suggest that religion is an equally urgent “matter of concern” and I echo his plea that “Is it really asking too much from our collective intellectual life to devise, at least once a century, some new critical tools?”52 The key here is the need for critical tools, and the debate surrounding George Marsden’s work is of particular relevance in this respect. Marsden’s The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (1997) suggests that Christian apologetics should be permitted to take their place alongside feminist or gay/lesbian studies as an equally legitimate intellectual position.53 The problem, as Johannes Wolfart has noted, is that feminist or gay studies developed out of modern critical theory while Christian theology did not.54 Postmodernism’s deconstruction of Enlightenment paradigms about religion has opened a number of doors, not all of which lead to critical thinking. Thus, far from resolving traditional dilemmas about taking religion seriously, 51 Bruno Latour, “The Last Critique,” Harper’s Magazine (April, 2004), 18. 52 Ibid., 20. 53 George M. Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), passim. 54 Wolfart, “Postmodernism”, 392.

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Marsden and his followers are tending to revive ancient fears about the dangers of confessional scholarship. The hesitation displayed by so many distinguished scholars with regard to Christian universalism and humanitarianism can probably be explained with reference to these fears. Better to accept an intellectual failure of nerve, with a comfortingly anti-colonial result, than run the risk of apologetics. If nuance and rigor are sacrificed in the process, so be it. “It would be too much to expect that we can lay to rest the political view of missionaries as the religious surrogates of colonialism,” writes a pessimistic Lamin Sanneh, “for it is built rock solid into the self-image of the West.”55 Packaged as “postmodern” or “postcolonial” scholarship, traditional modernist narratives continue to hold sway. Much recent scholarship on missions still features the classical Enlightenment contrast between faith and reason, or (to put it in more contemporary terms) between religion and science. Taking material processes and structures seriously is presumed to be superior to taking religion seriously. This was the very argument by which early social scientists distinguished their modernist, scientific project from the traditional humanities and from theology. Its duplication in supposedly ‘postmodern’ times should therefore be open to question. I’ve said elsewhere that the need “to explore the links between British intellectual history, missions, and imperialism” is acute.56 Missionary theorizing about islanders and their origins served a complex purpose, underscoring the need for redemption through accounts of ‘savagery’ while building vital points of connection in order to permit the gospel to be communicated: the intersection of ethnography and faith. This intersection involves a double-edged struggle to understand both human alterities and human universals: a situation difficult to reduce down to textual tropes, or to a unidirectional process of colonisation. Only if this tension is taken seriously can we understand why modern Christianity and modern colonialism must be considered together and also why Christianity was (and still can be) the inspiration for human rights activism. There are many grounds for activism, of course, but my point here is that current academic master narratives can explain only some of them. The activism of Marxists is comprehensible in terms of class struggle, and thus we can explain Nelson Mandela, but how do we account for Archbishop Tutu? My analysis of the traditional hermeneutics of suspicion, especially 55 Lamin Sanneh, “The Yogi and the Commissar: Christian Missions and the African Response,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 15:1 (1991), 9. 56 Jane Samson, “Ethnology and Theology: Nineteenth-Century Mission Dilemmas in the South Pacific” in Brian Stanley, ed., Christian Missions and the Enlightenment (London: Curzon Press, 2001), 122.

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its “colonialism-only” variant, has implications beyond historiography. If the Comaroffs are right, and Christian African subjectivities feature only the colonisation of consciousness and the consciousness of colonisation, from where are Christian Africans going to derive alternative subjectivities? How will they find an intellectual position from which to engage with other groups in order to work toward a more harmonious future? Heaven help us if they cannot. I have been very encouraged by the emergence of a new historiography that is critical and reflexive about conventional postcolonial scholarship. We need more academics who are genuinely and creatively postmodern, reflecting critically on the persistence of modernist intellectual presumptions and narratives, and tackling the complexity of Christianity’s relationship with other processes such as modernisation, westernisation and globalisation. We should give thought to the longevity of liberal “Whiggish” narratives of progress which presume that more recent scholarship is always superior to its ancestors. We should take care lest we seem to be telling western society that it can do nothing except exercise hegemonic power. If this is our message we are colluding with that power by disabling the grounds for oppositional activism. When I consider the importance of transcending race and geography in order to come together around shared matters of concern such as the environment or human rights, I wonder what the traditional ‘postcolonial’ hermeneutics of suspicion has to offer for the future. For example, we can deconstruct and unmask the assimilation policies which motivated mission-run residential schools for aboriginal children, but how should we react to the reconciliation processes currently under way in various former colonies of settlement? Will we unmask them too, suggesting that even conversations about repentance and forgiveness are reducible to the tropes of colonial discourse? Anne McClintock has called for “a proliferation of historically nuanced theories and strategies  … which may enable us to engage more effectively in the politics of affiliation.” If the academy withholds such proliferation “we face being becalmed in an historically empty space in which our sole direction is found by gazing back, spellbound, at the epoch behind us, in a perpetual present marked only as ‘post’”.57 If the repentance of churches responsible for residential schools abuse aren’t real (because only the structures of power are real), what alternatives to repentance does the postcolonial academy suggest? Critical theory has become its own political prisoner.

57 Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Postcolonialism’” in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen, eds. Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), 266.

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Postcolonial scholarship has been colonising the debate about missions and Christianisation for too long. Loud claims about radical progress have disguised unexamined prescriptions and narrative constraints. In a searing critique of postcolonial studies, Arif Dirlik points out that traditional academic pronouncements about cultural authenticity have erased the legitimacy of any encounters other than colonial ones. Only the power dynamics of colonial “borderlands” can make real culture, creating “a blindness of other ways of perceiving cultural self-identification” and therefore ensuring that the claims of postcolonial theory “are taken more seriously at first world locations than in third world origins”.58 This authoritative western voice has become selfvalidating and, too often, impervious to the deconstruction process that it claims to advocate. Religion matters to humans, and although we must not take it uncritically, we must take it seriously. If we do not, we will not be able to explain the many ways by which and in which non-Europeans have made Christianity their own and wish to keep it their own. We will never fathom the histories or motives of reconciliation projects with Christian dimensions. Instead we will reinforce what we claim to deplore: the connections between Christianity and power. In a special issue on “The New Christian Activism” in 2003, Religious Studies and Theology carried several articles revealing changes in the history and definition of Christian social activism. Earle Waugh, in his introduction, noted that contemporary activism is less concerned with the structures of inequality and more focussed on targeted, local change. “It puts off the hope of changing the system to a distant point.”59 Similar conservative activisms have been found in the past, as when early nineteenth-century British evangelicals sought to rescue individual prostitutes rather than challenge the structures of gender and economic inequalities. It is particularly unfortunate, however, that the recent turn to conservatism activism (and conservative politics, in the United States at least) is being reinforced by postcolonial studies. How can Christianity be conceptualised as anything but a conservative force when even “secular” academics agree that this is its natural and inevitable role? I have suggested in this paper that the tide is turning in favour of a more nuanced historiography. This process will inevitably open up a greater range of possibilities for the future: complex histories generate inheritances which are enabling rather than disabling. They offer choices instead of closure. I hope that others will join me in 58 59

Arif Dirlik, “How the Grinch Hijacked Radicalism: Further Thoughts on the Postcolonial,” Postcolonial Studies 2:2 (1999), 151. Earle Waugh, “Prolegmena to the New Christian Activism,” Religious Studies and Theology 22:2 (2003), 3.

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encouraging these developments. Clinging to established paradigms, fearing political contamination, “postcolonial” scholarship has proved unequal to the task of analysing the multiple and contested meanings of Christianity in history. Now, perhaps more than ever, we must investigate the ironies and subversions of these multiple meanings, listening to the transgressive archives from which the dead speak to us not only of colonialism and despair, but also of emancipation and hope.

Theology and Mission between Neocolonialism and Postcolonialism Joerg Rieger “To missionize is to colonize and to colonize is to missionize.”1 Ever since the conquest of the Americas, Christian mission and colonialism have been inex­ tricably related. And while the forms of both colonialism and mission have changed over the centuries, they have continued their alliance. Yet colonialism has now, by and large, officially come to an end. While some African countries have seen the end of their status as colonies only in recent years (Zimbabwe in 1980, Namibia in 1990), various countries in the Americas have seen the end of colonial status two centuries ago (the U.S. in 1783, Argentina in 1810, Brazil in 1822). Much of theology and mission has followed along, happily assuming the end of colonialism but wasting little thought about what it means to live in a postcolonial society. Few mainline theologians would defend the ventures of colonial Christi­ anity. But have we truly overcome our colonial legacies? Do we even under­ stand what the basic problems of colonial Christianity were? Is this case really closed? Can we return to business as usual? These questions impose them­ selves as soon as we leave the safe havens of “first world” mainline Christianity. Encounters with Christians from other parts of the world who bear many of the marks of both colonialism and neocolonialism in their own bodies, and even encounters with Christians at home subjected to internal colonialism and neocolonialism, might teach us that we must not move on too quickly. The quality of international encounters, if not the future of theology and mis­ sion itself, depends on how we deal with colonialism, neocolonialism, and postcolonialism.

Source: Rieger, J., “Theology and Mission between Neocolonialism and Postcolonialism,” Mission Studies 21.2 (2004): pp. 201–227. 1 In 1913, the German Roman Catholic missiologist J. Schmidlin complemented the statement of German Colonial Secretary W. H. Solf with the statement “to missionize is to colonize.” See Bosch 1991: 306.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004399594_027

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My main concern is with two roadblocks that prevent Christians in the U.S. and in other parts of the so-called “first world” from building genuine relation­ ships with other Christians around the world. First of all, failure to consider our colonial heritage may result in failure to understand who we are today. This question has nothing to do with the guilt trips of certain strands of mainline middle class Christianity; the question is simply how we have been shaped by our histories. Second, failure to deal with our colonial histories may also result in failure to deal with the neocolonial histories that are now being made and thus in another failure of mission as a whole. In Jacques Lacan’s words, what has been repressed from the symbolic order—from the realm of language and open discourse, from the stories that we tell about ourselves—returns in the real. In other words, if we repress our colonial and neocolonial histories, they will come back to haunt us all the more.

Mission, Colonialism, and Power

The missionary enterprises of past centuries have greatly extended the reach of Christianity. The Portuguese and the Spanish introduced Christianity in the South of the Americas, the British spread Christian faith in India, Asia, and Africa, and U.S. missionaries further extended the reach of Christianity in many of these parts of the world. It is well known that in all of these cases Christianity worked in close relation with the colonial powers. The relation of mission and colonialism took different shapes in the different contexts. The Spanish missions that were set up in sixteenth century Latin America, for instance, could rely on their King’s army—whose function was not pri­ marily to convert the Indians but to pacify the mission field and to regulate dissent (see Rieger 1998: 49). While early British colonialist ventures worked without missionary support, in the nineteenth century the missionaries could rely on the support of the economic and political structures that had been es­ tablished (Bosch 1991: 303). Yet while American missionaries in the U.S. were supported by the westward movement of the nineteenth century, a form of “internal colonialism,” their colleagues in mission to other countries were much less connected to formal colonialist structures. U.S. American missions to Latin America might even be seen as the first postcolonial missions, since most of the Latin American nations had received their independence in the early 1800s. Nevertheless, even in this situation the U.S. missionaries still found their work in accord with U.S. interests, as expressed for instance in the

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Monroe doctrine of 1823 that announced a special interest of the U.S. in the affairs of both Americas.2 While the relations between colonial structures and Christian mission were thus quite complex, one of the common features has to do with relations of power and authority (see Rieger 1998). With few exceptions, colonial power went hand in glove with the theological authority claimed by the missionar­ ies. The authority of the Spanish missionaries, for instance, supported by the unquestioned authority of the pope and the classical texts of the church, closely resembled the power of Spanish colonialism supported by the Spanish monarchy (Ibid.:  46 ff.). And while missionaries and monarchs were not al­ ways in agreement, Christianity collaborated with the colonial forces to such a degree that it was often difficult to distinguish the two (see Klaiber 1992: 197). In the later colonialisms of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the power of the colonialist empires was usually seen as direct proof for the authority of Christianity. In the words of German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher: “In view of the great advantage in power and civilization which the Christian peoples possess over the non-Christian … the preachers of today do not need such signs [i.e., miracles]” (Schleiermacher 1986: 450). The proof of the power of the colonialist nations was ultimately seen as stronger than the reference to the authority of the miracles of Christ. In other words, the power differential between the colonizers and the colonized was also perceived as an authority differential: God was on the side of the missionaries. In the high imperial era after the 1880s, missionary enterprises were still in full swing. At this time, the North American missions had taken the lead in global missions, modeling an activist and pragmatic spirit.3 People simply wanted to help those in other parts of the world who seemed less fortunate. But once again, power and authority went hand in hand. As David Bosch has pointed out, the “operative presuppositions” of the missionaries were “those of Western democracy and the free-enterprise system” (Bosch 1991: 334). “There was something businesslike,” Bosch adds, “… about the launching of the new societies” (Ibid.:  330). Here, power was once again supported politically, yet 2 “Since the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, Latin America has been subject more than any other region in the world … to neocolonialism in the form of U.S. imperialism: military, political and economic” (Young 2001: 194). 3 After the 1880s, during the high imperial era, “activism and pragmatism were propound­ ed with renewed vigor. They were now more clearly identified as an expression of North American missions, but were by no means restricted to them. It was the ‘age of energy’ and a time for great enterprises” (Bosch 1991: 336).

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now with an increasing emphasis on economic structures. Once again, the power differential between colonizers and colonized was also perceived as an authority differential. No wonder that this approach saw mission basically as a one-way street, moving from the wealthy to the poor or, in terms that prob­ ably reflect better the mindset of those who were trying to help, moving from the “civilized” to the “primitives,” or from the “more developed” to the “less developed.” A similar mentality can still be found in the middle of the twenti­ eth century. Reinhold Niebuhr, assuming that the new empires of his day are superior in both civilization and technology, leaves no doubt that colonialism has been and still is providing a service to the world.4 The power differential authorizes both the colonial mentality and Christian mission. What were the underlying problems of colonialist missions? Ethical and moralizing explanations fail here, for greed and the strife for personal gain can­ not explain the missionaries’ actions. Often the missionaries themselves—a large number of them went either as volunteers or with minimal support from the sending agencies—did not benefit directly from the colonial system. But even in the cases of those missionaries who had more formal support, greed and personal gain were not the main motivation. There was simply too much hardship and danger at the everyday level (think only of the medical challeng­ es), and (unlike for the colonialists who pursued political office or business ventures) too little promise of profits.5 Reading the histories, one gets a strong sense that the missionaries meant well; they genuinely wanted to make a dif­ ference and wanted to help. So why did Christian mission end up as part of the colonial enterprise? On the whole, the missionaries accepted the colonial powers—or at least did not question them. David Bosch helps us to understand part of the prob­ lem when he points out that “simply by accepting the presence of the colonial lords as incontrovertible reality” (Bosch 1991: 306) the missionaries ended up supporting the system. At best, the missionaries perceived themselves as inter­ mediaries between the powers that be and the people.

4 Niebuhr, as would be expected, also stresses the moral ambiguity of colonialism. For this reason, he argues for the need of checks and balances. See Niebuhr 1959: 24–25; 28–29. 5 George E. Tinker addresses this enigma in terms of the North American missions to Native Americans: “While the missionaries clearly functioned to facilitate the exploitation of Indian people, they themselves usually did not benefit from those acts of exploitation” (Tinker 1993: 17).

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They did not comprehend that, in their attempts at playing the media­ tor between colonial government and local population, they were— simply by accepting the presence of the colonial lords as incontrovertible reality—actually serving the interests of the colonizers. The best they could do in these circumstances was meekly to plead with the govern­ ments to be more careful in the selection of colonial officials and to choose “practical moral men.” (Ibid.) But the relationship of mission and colonialism might be perceived at an even deeper level: What if for the missionaries the role of the colonial system was like the role of water for fish? Not only did their mission depend on colonial structures (for virtually everything from transportation to moral support), they lived within the system to such a degree that they were simply able to forget about it. On the whole, it seems that the missionaries did not see much wrong with the colonial system as such—except of course for what was perceived as abuses of that system—a response that is not unlike the current critique in the U.S. of abuses by CEOs in that it sees the fault not with the system itself but with individuals who fail morally. Here, I would argue, lies the deepest root of the question why the mission­ aries ended up supporting the colonial system. Taking for granted the colonial system, living within it to such a degree that it would be the natural context for mission, they simply had no other option. Colonialism cannot be critiqued from within, from the level of those who more or less are part of the system; a fish cannot critique water—except perhaps the quality of it. George Tinker has illustrated the problem in regard to the missions to Native Americans in the U.S. While they meant well, the missionaries were so caught up in their own worlds that they were virtually unable to learn from the people they came to missionize. The result, says Tinker, was cultural genocide.6 It was the wellmeaning but patronizing attitude of the missionaries that prevented this learn­ ing from happening. Theology and mission were caught in the same vicious circle: unable to see through the colonial powers, they were left supporting the system. No wonder the authority structures that they promoted matched the structures of the powers that be: the colonizers’ “principles of reason” and their “dictates of common sense” were seen to blend with scripture and providence 6 Tinker draws the parallel to today: “If the missionaries, with the best of intentions, perpe­ trated such havoc among Indian peoples, what does our own, modern myopia conceal from us, whatever our intentions to the contrary?” (Tinker 1993: 16).

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(Bosch 1991: 335).7 Yet even Tinker wonders whether the missionaries could have stayed completely oblivious to what was going on all those years.8

Postcolonial Missions

There is some awareness today that mission in the past shared the colonial mentality. Even though the deeper reasons are not addressed, the colonialist mistakes of mission in the past are acknowledged (strangely enough, there is considerably less awareness of the colonial mistakes of the theology of the same period).9 Now, however, that colonialism is officially over, there is a sense—whether the language of postcolonialism is used or not—that we do not have to worry about these problems any more. The encyclopedic book on mission by David Bosch, which dedicates a substantial part to describing the problem of colonial mission, embodies the problem. For Bosch, the problems of modernity appear to be fading away as we move into postmodernity (Bosch 1991: 349–362). By the same token, colonialism (which in Bosch’s narrative is merely a sub-section of his overarching concern with modernity and the Enlightenment) seems to have faded away as well. Mission is thus seen as hav­ ing found new freedom (and new innocence). Without having to worry about colonialism and the associated (mis)use of power and authority any more, mis­ sion and missionary enterprises now seem to be free to reinvent themselves.10 But while colonialism in its political manifestations of direct govern­ ment over a particular area is indeed over, many of the colonial structures persist. Even though direct patronizing structures at the political level have been discontinued with the end of colonialism, patronizing structures con­ tinue at other levels, including the economic and the intellectual. This is the 7 8

9 10

The issue, however, is not merely Enlightenment thinking, as Bosch seems to assume, but the whole spirit of the age, including economics and politics. Tinker wonders whether it can all be explained by “naive innocence,” and concludes that “at some level, they must have know what they were about” (Tinker 1993: 18). Did the North American missionaries to the native Americans never wonder why, for instance, the fur trading companies would make generous contributions to their efforts (see Ibid.: 10)? Little work has been done on theology and colonialism. For a reading of Schleiermacher that gives some consideration to the colonial context, see Rieger 2001. See also Donaldson and Kwok 2002. See, for example, the essays in Foust, Hunsberger, Kirk, and Ustorf, eds., 2002. What gets most of the attention is postmodernity and the end of modernity, and even the essays that address globalization say little about the colonial/neocolonial background of missions.

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phenomenon captured by the term “neocolonialism” (see Rieger 2004a). Talk about neocolonialism serves as a reminder that, even in a postcolonial age, co­ lonial mentalities have not disappeared; many have simply been pushed under ground and have adapted in other ways, frequently taking more vicious shapes than ever before.11 Very early examples of missions after the end of formal colonial systems can be found, as already indicated, in nineteenth century Latin America. Here, after formal independence of many of the Latin American nations, Protestants began new mission projects without being the beneficiaries of formal colonial­ ism. The focus of these projects was strongly on education. Education included not only academic subjects but also the teaching of discipline and manners and—perhaps even more important—the study of English. Such missions also introduced other North American values such as the ideas of democracy and, at least to a certain degree, were emancipatory for women. These missions introduced Protestantism as a denomination that provided stepping-stones, which aimed at the middle classes and helped people become upwardly mo­ bile and find their way into those newly emerging middle classes. Even though mission here is no longer tied to colonialism, the ties to neocolonial structures and to the hegemonic tendencies of another world are quite obvious. In the words of David Martin, in Peru the “arrival of American Methodism was  … parallel to the arrival of American capital” (Martin 1990: 86).12 This approach coincides with the overall tendency of mission at the end of the nineteenth century (after a time of “church planting” in which the church had become self-centered) to focus more and more on social mission projects. Despite the benevolent intentions, this tendency toward social mission proj­ ects introduces new problems for it reflects, in the words of David Bosch, “the modern Western mood of activism, do-goodism, and manifest destiny” (Bosch 1991: 332). The end of blatant ecclesial and colonial self-centeredness does not end self-centeredness as such. A neocolonialist bent appears already in these 11

Niebuhr defends U.S. imperialism by economic means. In his judgement, European im­ perialism based on ethnic and cultural superiority was much worse and caused more harm (Niebuhr 1959). 12 Martin emphasizes the effectiveness of this approach: “The Methodists, like the Pres­ byterians in many other parts of Latin America, played a surprisingly significant role in offering new perspectives, new areas of competence, new conceptions of self and of per­ sonal discipline, through their schools. What they lacked in numbers they made up for in influence and in contributions to social change” (Martin 1990: 85). See also Bonino 2003 and Bosch 1991: 328.

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early postcolonial missions. The end of formal colonial structures does not sig­ nify the end of colonial intellectual attitudes, reflected now for instance in the belief in the “manifest destiny” of the missionaries and their nations, led by the U.S., to shape the globe in their own image. Neither does the end of formal colonial structures signify the end of economic dependencies, reflected now in growing capitalist networks that mainly benefit one side. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, neocolonialist attitudes are often tied up with arguments about the processes of globalization, combin­ ing both economic and intellectual claims. In his famous book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, a book that might be called the “Bible” of another seemingly benevolent strand of neocolonialism, Thomas Friedman leaves no doubt that globalization is the way of the future. And while he gives room to the idea that some of the manifestations of globalization can be used by people at the bot­ tom as well, e.g. the use of the Internet (Friedman 2000: 88, 257), Friedman is clear about what really matters: “What developing countries need most from America today is not aid. Rather, it is an understanding of what is the real source of American prosperity; the combination of the right operating system—free markets—with the right software, political institutions and po­ litical consensus that can protect property and innovation, maintain a level playing field, ensure that the most productive players usually win, and provide some minimum safety net to catch the losers” (Ibid.: 163). The parallels to the early neocolonialist missions in nineteenth century Latin America are stun­ ning. What is new is a stronger economic claim: “free markets” are now at the center of it all. Neocolonialism is perhaps more subtle than colonialism—we no longer tell people what to do through direct governance—but it is no less clear about its mission (“we know what is right for the world”) and no less powerful when it comes to the results (those in power shape the lives of those without power). The process of globalization, according to Friedman, cannot be stopped, and it is this process which decides what is right or wrong (Ibid.:  132).13 One of the reasons why neocolonialism still remains fairly invisible has to do with its relation to the U.S. Historically, the U.S. has not been too involved with overt colonialism. While the footprints of the old colonialist powers are still visible

13 Friedman talks about the “saving grace” of globalization: “While problems can come faster, so too can solutions—provided your country does the right things” (Friedman 2000: 132). What is right is solely dependent on the rules of the market.

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and can be easily identified in their neocolonialist ventures (when the English make demands, for instance, their former colonial subjects are quite sensitive for good reasons), most of the new powers based in the U.S. often leave hardly any footprints at all, operating through financial networks, stock markets, and low-key political projects (such as the clandestine but sustained support for certain governments and guerilla groups in Latin America). The only excep­ tions to these hidden operations are occasional military interventions such as the recent war on Afghanistan and the earlier war in the Persian Gulf, a war that is continuing in the present war with Iraq. The powers of globalization identified with the U.S. have thus rarely felt the need to examine their own colonial attitudes. Colonial Christianity failed to question colonialism, mostly because it oper­ ated under the tacit assumption that the colonial enterprise was the Christian enterprise. Contemporary Christianity, by comparison, is even less able to question neocolonialism, mostly because we are unaware of its existence on a grand scale and how it shapes our mission. In the words of Jonathan Freedland, comparing the parallels and differences between the Ancient Roman Empire and the U.S.: “Romans reveled in their status as masters of the known world, but few Americans would be as ready to brag of their own imperialism. Indeed, most would deny it” (Freedland 2002: 4). Once again, authority and power are closely related. In the colonial setting, the authority of the missionary (and of the theologian) was based, at least to a certain degree, on the visible support of the colonizing powers, a commonly accepted and proclaimed set of morals and values, and what was called “civili­ zation.” In other words, mission was shaped by these factors and—if anybody had raised questions—this would have been defended as a good thing. In the neocolonial setting, on the other hand, the authority of the missionary and of the theologian is tied to less visible realities. It relates to more sublime ar­ rangements of power: to global economic networks that are worked out in the boardrooms and often remain invisible even to the politicians and the state, to intellectual structures that seem more interested in the well-being of the “other” than ever before, and to cultural arrangements that now permit the affirmation of “multiculturalism” without being challenged by people who are different. Mission is now shaped by these neocolonial realities, whose dark side is often overlooked. Economic networks distribute power unevenly, intellectual concerns for the other end in affirmation of tolerance rather than equality, and issues of multiculturalism or “inculturation” often do not challenge cultural

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power.14 Even progressive academic ventures such as “area studies” often per­ petuate neocolonialist interests without being aware of it. After all, the study of areas such as Africa or Latin America provides important information: new business ventures and other enterprises depend on it. As a result, the study of these areas often proceeds in one-way fashion, trying to figure out the “others” without being willing to learn from them (see Mignolo 2000). In relation to the mission to Native Americans in the U.S., George Tinker has re­ minded us that “the cultural imposition of the missionaries continues today, even among the more sensitive and liberal-minded missionaries of our own time” (Tinker 1993: 113).15 This question is most sensitive in the context of the U.S. Having become a “hyperpower,” one step up from being a “superpower,” we have an important role in the formation of a neocolonial empire that is both more subtle and more powerful than any of the old colonialist empires (see Hardt and Negri 2000). The U.S. is said to be more powerful now than Britain ever was. If mis­ sion and theology fail to develop an awareness of these developments and some insight into the close relation between authority and power, we will end up, once again, on the side of the powers that be, escaping the colonialist traps only to be caught in the neocolonialist ones. There is simply no “in-between” left in a globalizing world. There are no more spaces that remain untouched by neocolonialism, not even the proverbial ivory towers of academia and the church.16 In the following, I will take a look at contemporary efforts at mission and their theological rationale in light of the neocolonialist challenge.

14

For a critique of the postmodern notions of multiculturalism, otherness, and difference, see Rieger 2003. In mission, the notion of “inculturation” shares in this problem. At the same time, the concern for inculturation can be quite helpful when it is raised by people at the grassroots. See, for instance, Martey 1993. At the same time, the concern for incul­ turation, when raised by those in power, however, is often pitted against the concern for liberation, and ends in a celebration of multiculturalism that does not challenge the pow­ ers that be. 15 Tinker shows the cultural and systemic roots of the problem, pointing to “‘liberal’ and ‘open’ white missionaries [who] usurp native cultural forms into their own repertoires” (Tinker 1993: 114). He offers a brief suggestion of the inextricable relation between religion and political and economic forces (see Ibid.: 113–117). 16 The problem with the academic “ivory towers,” for instance, is not that they are irrelevant. They are part of the system, unless they reflect on it and raise questions. If they appear as irrelevant it is more likely that nobody really needs their support at this point—or that they are so integrated in the system that their support is taken for granted. The same is true for churches that have become self-centered.

Theology and Mission



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Mission as Outreach

At the level of both local churches and mission agencies, mission is still fre­ quently identified primarily as an “outreach” activity of the church. In fact, the interest in mission as outreach is growing. More and more churches, from the smallest to the largest, continue to add “outreach programs.” No doubt, this position is a huge improvement over the common self-centeredness of the church. It takes into account the fact that the church does not exist for itself. The proponents of outreach have told us for many years, and with good rea­ sons, that the church needs to go out into the world. Mission as outreach takes many well-known forms, from soup kitchens, Meals on Wheels, Habitat for Humanity and other building projects, educa­ tional opportunities, to medical and legal assistance for the destitute. Mission understood as outreach also includes forms of teaching and preaching that might be called “monological,” where the missionaries talk and those to be missionized listen (at best they are permitted to ask questions of clarification). One of the most common ways for church people to be in mission now is to join volunteer mission teams, which travel either to foreign countries or to places in inner cities and other locations of pressure at home (places that, for many members of these teams, are just as much uncharted territory as foreign countries). A recent report from a youth group in the Dallas, Texas, area exemplifies the high level of commitment of such a group and people’s genuine willing­ ness to help: “The eyes and hearts of our youth group and the adults who went along were opened to the desperate needs of other people. What this youth group learned and saw was appalling! … This year they are planning to make a  … video that will show the conditions that these people in and around Matamoros, Mexico have to live in. It is our hope that our North Texas Conference will see these desperate needs and help us continue to do some­ thing about them. However small our efforts might be, something has to be done and every little bit helps. We can’t do everything, but we can all do some­ thing to make a difference.”17 How could anyone dare to question the work of such a well-meaning and compassionate group? But there are problems, and the main one has to do with the one-sidedness of the approach. Like the missionaries in colonial times, the volunteers engaged in outreach projects too easily project their own ideas and values on other people. The work performed by these missionary 17

Letter of a United Methodist youth group of the North Texas Conference, August 5, 2002.

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enterprises, whether practical or theological, is usually done by the missionar­ ies themselves; the missionized remain on the receiving end. The position of power in which the missionaries find themselves—backed to a very large de­ gree by the uneven distribution of wealth of the neocolonialist system—once again provides and shapes their theological authority. While few people who embrace mission as outreach would deny that the missionaries are also receiv­ ing something in return, this is not where the emphasis lies. In the case of the above youth group, a certain amount of learning does indeed take place. But this involves mainly learning about the perceived needs of the other and what might be done about it: the situation is “appalling,” the needs are “desperate,” and “we” have to “do something about them.” Is this the whole meaning of the beginning sentence, that “the eyes and ears of our youth group … were opened”? Theology in this situation often resembles the theol­ ogy done by the friends of Job in the Old Testament. While these friends are deeply concerned about Job’s suffering, their theological responses never man­ age to escape the status quo. This approach does not threaten the neocolonial system. Necolonialism does not mind if someone takes care of its victims or repeats the doctrines of colonial theology. From this perspective mission as outreach, whether in far away countries or at home, is always a good thing. Here no questions arise about why the situation is so appalling and about what it is that gets people into these positions. And even if there is an occasional vague idea of the reality of neocolonialism lurching in the back, like for instance the realization that a multitude of people have to work for abominably low wages so that a few can get rich off their labor, there seems to be little that can be done about it. We have been taught for the last two decades that capitalism is here to stay and we have come to believe that the forces of globalization are “natural.”18 What is missing in the mission as outreach model is the ability to learn from the other in ways that lead to self-knowledge. What if the question is not first of all, What can we do? but, What is going on? and, How might we be part of the problem? Unless these questions are raised in the encounter with people on the mission field, nothing will change. South African Methodist Bishop Mvume Dandala has reminded us that, even after the official end of

18

Friedman sees globalization in terms of a “fundamental, age-old human drive—the drive for sustenance, improvement, prosperity, and modernization” (Friedman 2000: 32–33).

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colonialism, first world missionaries are still imposing their own ways of life on African traditions. Many Africans are thus made to feel that all they can do in this situation is to play along in the outreach game, conform to the expecta­ tions of the neocolonialist system, and hope that they receive at least a few of its benefits.19 There is now a rapidly growing sense that we must not ask too many ques­ tions. U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, when asked in an interview on the Jim Lehrer “News Hour” whether the U.S. should try to find out why people in the world do not like us, answered with a definite “no” (September 8, 2002). From Cheney’s perspective, what could possibly be the harm in trying to find out? Does he not believe the conservative propaganda that people do not like us, and commit terrorist acts, because they are jealous of our liberties in the U.S.? Such an answer would only underscore the greatness of the neocolonial sys­ tem. But what would happen if U.S. citizens discovered alternative answers and found out what role the U.S. plays in the world? Asking questions can indeed be dangerous. Mission as outreach is usually an afterthought for theology and the church: this is where we “apply” our abilities. Returning mission teams are celebrated, but no one expects to learn anything new, except perhaps for a few interesting facts. Being non-essential to the life of the church and to theological thinking, outreach programs are therefore often the first to be cut if there is a budget­ ary crisis such as the current one. Still, mission as outreach performs a muchneeded service to the system. As long as we are preoccupied with helping others—with all the temptations of trying to shape them in our own neocolo­ nial image and make them conform to our world—we will not raise nosy ques­ tions about ourselves. As long as we continue to celebrate our own generosity, nothing can really challenge us. Yet mission does not have to end here. There is evidence that even the focus on outreach can never be so absolute as to prevent real encounters with other people and to prevent some learning from taking place. Here lies the hope—even if it is a hope against hope, a hope against the way we have set up the system.

19 Lecture at the Oxford Institute of Methodist Theological Studies, Oxford, England, August 21, 2002, and following conversation.

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Mission as Relationship

In light of the shortcomings of mission as outreach, the current theological em­ phasis on relationship might offer a better alternative. In the struggle against the self-centeredness of the church, thinking about mission in terms of build­ ing relationships is even more helpful than thinking about mission in terms of outreach. Here seems to be a way out of mission as a one-way street, allowing for a greater mutuality between the missionaries and the missionized. Here, mission projects would be concerned not primarily with “getting the job done” but with working together. Relational teaching and preaching would let us take some of the concerns of the people seriously. Thinking about mission in terms of building relationships might also prevent us from overreacting against the mission-as-outreach model and falling into the opposite extreme: too often those disappointed by outreach have claimed that instead of trying to help people we should simply get off their backs. Mission as relationship recognizes that we are all connected and must, therefore, not leave people to themselves. But how are we connected—what kinds of relationships are we talking about? The calls for relationship that can now be heard across the board are no lon­ ger the trademark of more progressive strands of Christianity alone. In an essay in Christianity Today, Philip Yancey illustrates the importance of relationship in the following statement: “American Christians trained in Enlightenment reductionism can learn about spiritual warfare firsthand on mission trips to South America. We can learn about suffering from the church in China, about passionate evangelism from Africa, and about intercessory prayer from Korea. Just as nothing threatens my faith like a visit to the agnostic portions of Europe, nothing invigorates my faith more than a visit to churches in nonWestern countries” (Yancey 2002: 88). In this passage, the sort of relationship that promotes learning from the other is key. But this learning does not seem to go much beyond the “invigoration” of what one already has (the author re­ fers to “my faith”) and is seen in opposition to that which might pose a threat to one’s faith. The churches of the former colonies now have a special role to play: “nothing invigorates” more. Is this “mission in reverse,” a relationship that allows for a two-way street, or is it yet another way to exploit the resources of others for our own purposes—just like neocolonialism still depends on “raw materials”?20 20

Gustavo Gutiérrez has talked about an “ecclesiastical ‘colonial treaty,’” according to which “Latin America was to supply the ‘raw materials’: the faithful, the Marian cult, and popu­ lar devotions.” On the other hand, “Rome and the Churches of the northern hemisphere were to supply the ‘manufactured goods’: studies of Latin-American affairs, pastoral di­ rectives, clerical education, the right to name bishops” (Gutiérrez 1971: 45).

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Relationships demand a certain level of mutuality and inclusiveness. This, too, is recognized by many conservatives today. Riley Case, a retired pastor active in the Methodist Good News and Confessing movements reports: “We have been ‘inclusive’ in the best sense of the word. We have allowed ourselves to be enriched by the worship and cultural styles of ethnics, charismatics, those in para-church ministries and those in welcoming ministries” (Case 2002: 4). While being enriched is certainly an important part of a relationship, the metaphor has undertones of economic gain that are not unfamiliar in neo­ colonialism. In fact, there is an increasing openness to such enrichments at all levels in the business world: ethnic minorities and women are admitted to the higher ranks of corporations, particularly where they help to broaden the horizon and open up new markets. Yet mutuality is limited to those individu­ als who conform to the system and control remains firmly in the hands of the establishment. The liberals are not off the hook in this matter. George Tinker has pointed out the limits of relationship in regard to some New Age attempts to relate to Native American traditions. Here the problem is exactly the opposite of that of the colonial missionaries of old. Some liberal white Euro Americans now seek to participate in Native American spirituality. But their efforts are still destruc­ tive for the Native Americans since the Euro Americans are in a position of power which allows them to impose their own concerns on the old ceremo­ nies. Thus, in Tinker’s words, “dancing in a ceremony in order ‘that the people might live’ gives way to the New Age, Euro American quest for individual spiri­ tual power” (Tinker 1993: 121–122).21 All this is not to say that trying to build relationships always fails. Mission trips that focus on building relationships are much more powerful than those that see themselves simply in terms of outreach. In my own efforts to build re­ lationships between Perkins School of Theology and West Dallas, a part of town marginalized along the lines of race and class, some Perkins School of Theology faculty and students experienced that these relationships were transforming us—not only individuals but also the school—and that “meeting God in West Dallas might transform both our lives and our theology.”22 Nevertheless, even these relationships are constantly messed up by the overarching relationships already in place, established by the structures of the market economy and of 21

In this situation, there is a strong temptation for the Native Americans to sell out to the dominant interests. Even those who do not sell out may be impacted by these encounters in subtle ways that are not recognized. 22 Perkins Perspective (Summer, 1997): 13. This was acknowledged also by the fact that some of those colleagues who initially congratulated us for doing such a nice outreach job put up some serious resistance to our efforts to allow these experiences to transform the school as a whole.

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political power. These asymmetries made our relationships almost impossible to maintain over the long run. Calls to build relationships that focus mainly on religion and culture do not go far enough. The rift in relationships—and the asymmetry of power—is hardly limited to this level. For this reason it makes little difference whether Muslims will be the global religious majority soon, as Samuel Huntington has argued, or whether Christians will be in the majority, as Philip Jenkins has claimed more recently. Jenkins indirectly acknowledges the deeper source of the conflict when he points out that “the Christian and Muslim communities experiencing the fastest growth will be neighbors,” and that “due to God’s sense of humor, these places are in areas rich with oil” (Jenkins 2002a).23 The events of September 11, 2001, for instance, cannot really be explained in terms of ten­ sions between Christianity and Islam.24 Once again, the power brought to bear by neocolonialism shapes the au­ thority claimed by mission and theology, even though these powers are now even more hidden than before. No doubt, the claim to authority is on more solid grounds than in the outreach model. Authority is now seen in a relational way, shared by those who enter into a relationship, which includes the relation to God. But, due to the asymmetry of power, authority turns out asymmetrical too, as the above examples show. We get stuck not only celebrating our own power but also our own authority, never really being able to relate either to the neighbor or to God. In light of this asymmetry, even the now common insight that it is better to be in ministry with others than for them reaches its limits and needs to be rethought. In sum, the problem with understanding mission as relationship is not that we would not mean well. Just the opposite: because we do mean so well, be­ cause we really want to see the other as equal, we often fail to give an account of the deeper inequalities and differentials in power. Unless we understand who we are and become aware of these differentials of power, we are simply not in a position to learn from the other and to share authority in any meaningful 23 See Huntington 1996, and Jenkins 2002b. Not taking into account the broader perspec­ tive of neocolonialism, Jenkins ultimately comes up with the suggestion that what really needs to happen is that we get to know each other and that wealthy Christian societies need to “assist” the poor who are increasingly Christian. See Jenkins 2002b: 216–217. 24 Jenkins assumes that “the critical political frontiers around the world are not decided by attitudes toward class or dialectical materialism but by rival concepts of God” (Jenkins 2002b: 163), and he references the work of Samuel Huntington, Peter Berger, and David Martin. There is no doubt much fuel in religious conflicts, but this can hardly be seen as the sole center. One wonders if claims such as the one by Jenkins are designed to distract from the growing U.S. empire.

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way.25 One of the more progressive models of mission displays the problem: “It is better to teach people to fish than to give them fish,” as the old saying goes. What is presupposed, however, is precisely the asymmetry of power and authority that I have been talking about: Apparently, the people have no idea how to fish, and we know it. Therefore, we are the teachers. This asymmetry is also behind much empowerment-talk, however progressive it may be: those of us who have the power can pass it on to the people in need of it. In fact, the power differential in neocolonialism is now so great that some postmodern and postcolonial theorists have argued that the “outside” has vir­ tually disappeared. There is no independent “outside” any more—places or people who have not been touched by global capitalism in any way—to which we could build relationships. The other has been reshaped, at least to a certain degree, in our own mirror image.

Mission as “Inreach”

If mission as outreach still harbors too many of the colonial sentiments, and if mission as relationship is too easily distorted by asymmetries of power sup­ ported by the new neocolonial world order, what other shape can mission take? How can we resist the neocolonial models of power and authority and their impact on our mission projects and our theology? How were the few who resisted in the past able to do it?26 What if the most important thing in mission—after a long period in which we celebrated our ability to transform others and make them more Christian—is not what we are doing but what God is doing? But the mere reference to God’s own mission—the missio Dei that has been emphasized for over half a decade—may not be enough.27 This, 25 Jacques Lacan has explored this issue in regard to sexual relations between men and women. In patriarchy, where men are in power, there is no real sexual relation. Even where intercourse takes place, those in power relate only to themselves. See Rieger 1998: 83. 26 One of the early resisters of Spanish colonization is Bartolomé de Las Casas. Gustavo Gutiérrez points out his ability to learn from the Indians (Gutiérrez 1993). At the same time, Las Casas had his own limitations. See Boff 1991: 15. Roland Boer reports on the Australian context where the dissenting churches and their lay preachers were more like­ ly to resist the official colonial efforts (Boer 2002). Another element of resistance finds roots in where the Bible is read “from below.” 27 The emphasis on the missio Dei, mission as God’s own mission, was picked up in various ecumenical meetings since the early 1950s and became a central emphasis of the World Council of Churches, as well as other churches, including the Eastern Orthodox, evangeli­ cals and the Second Vatican Council. See Bosch 1991: 389–393.

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too, can be pulled into the neocolonial force field: God can be claimed for almost anything. Nevertheless, how can we still develop some awareness for what God is doing? One of the more recent emphases of volunteer mission teams has been on what comes back to those who are in mission. Among the things that are often identified as coming back are (besides a long list of insights into the social loca­ tions and the lives of other people) a new awareness of one’s privileged status, one’s obligation to help others, and perhaps a somewhat changed awareness of oneself. Here, “outreach” is beginning to be reshaped in light of what, for lack of a better word, might be called “inreach.” Mission gathers new steam where both outreach and inreach are connected.28 Here, mission projects need to be rethought from the bottom up and teaching and preaching can only happen in truly dialogical modes (everything else would be pious self-gratification). Nevertheless, this initially rather dim awareness of something coming back is only a first step at best. Rethinking mission in terms of “inreach”—where something comes back to us—serves as a first reminder of the fact that mission does not start with ourselves. Mission starts with God’s mission. John Wesley’s insight that even the so-called “works of mercy” are means of grace offers a similar reminder (see Rieger 2002). All mission starts with God’s grace. God is the first mission­ ary, and all of us are recipients. We continue to be recipients even in our own participation in God’s mission. Even our acts of mission and solidarity with others are never one-way streets; they function as means of grace, as channels through which God’s grace comes back in our lives. As we encounter the other in mission—and only then—do we become recipients of God’s power. This insight moves counter to the colonial/neocolonial attitudes, according to which our main task is to bring something to others—or to “grace them” with our presence. Here, a radical reversal takes place. The first task of those who consider themselves to be in mission is to give up control, to commit things to God, and (as a result) to leave things in the hands of those to which the mission is directed. This latter part is, of course, the most difficult one. But here it shows whether we truly trust in God’s grace. As we learn to leave things in the hand of others, we learn anew what it means to leave things in the hands of God as well. In other words, as a reversal of power takes place, a reversal of authority happens as well.

28 A very brief reference to the word “in-reach” can also be found in one of Frederick Herzog’s later essays (see Rieger 1999: 286).

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The biggest challenge, however, is that this reversal forces us to take a deep­ er look at ourselves. Before we can become part of the solution, we need to develop a self-critical attitude that helps us reflect on how we have come to be (and still are) part of the problem. Mission as inreach leads us to a new look at ourselves, at our interconnectedness with others, which includes an aware­ ness of how the suffering of others is related, inversely, to our success. This is perhaps most clear when it comes to economic issues—just take a look at what (and who!) is involved in keeping down the prices on clothes and other manufactured products that we consume in the U.S. But this interconnected­ ness also holds true for intellectual, theological, and other matters (see Rieger 2004a). In the gracious encounter with other people and God (this is the point of the “means of grace”), we can learn a few lessons about ourselves and the state of the world that no one else can teach us, not even the experts. One thing is certain, and John Wesley, writing during the times of British colonialism puts it best: “religion,” including mission and theology, “must not go from the great­ est to the least, or the power would appear to be of men” (Wesley 1986: 178). Neither colonial nor neocolonial power, always moving from the greatest to the least, will thus do Christianity any service. What happens when Christianity goes the other way around? As global Christianity grows exponentially in many places outside of the first world and shrinks at home, there are now many calls for “mission in reverse.” In Britain, there are at least 1500 foreign missionaries at work, most from Africa and Asia (Jenkins 2002b: 205).29 The problem is that, despite the growing numbers of Christianity all around the world, the neocolonial powers continue to prevent us from seeing the “other,” except as mirror image of ourselves. And so these missionaries are often seen as embodiments of us at some time in the past when we still “had more faith,” and were “more spiritual.” “Mission in reverse” often ends in a mystification and romanticization of the faith that often oc­ curs when we meet people from other parts of the world who have fewer eco­ nomic means and less power. But this will not do much for anybody. Mission in reverse cannot be about their “simple faith,” or their “incredible trust in God”—the kinds of things that impress mission teams the most. Mission in reverse only happens when we begin to realize what is really going on in the world, who we are in relation to each other, and how we continue to exploit the rest of the world. In this sense, mission in reverse happens not just when we are touched by people from other parts of the globe; mission in reverse also 29 Other numbers are impressive too. In 1900, Christianity in Africa was at six percent. Today, fifty percent of all Africans are Christians, and the percentage keeps growing.

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happens at home, where those who have been pushed to the sidelines of soci­ ety (usually on grounds of their class, race, or gender) become means of grace, teach us a few new things about ourselves, and thus become agents of God’s missionary transformation of the world. In this context we can revitalize some of the key terms of traditional mis­ sionary discourse, particularly the notions of conversion and repentance. When we consider these terms not first of all in relation to those who are to be missionized but in relation to those who are in mission, the “missionaries,” another major reversal takes place which includes a radical reversal of neoco­ lonial power and authority. Mission begins not, as is often assumed, with the conversion of the other. Mission begins with the conversion of the missionary self—in light of God’s own mission. Such a conversion includes repentance, a confession of what distorts God’s mission, and a turning away from these things, particularly from our own attempts to form the other in our own mirror image (neocolonial authority) and to direct economic and other affairs to our own exclusive benefit (neocolonial power). Mission as inreach gets us one step closer to challenging and overcoming the colonial/neocolonial heritage of mission. While the mainline churches on the whole are past the stage at which they actively promoted colonialism, the problem is that we are not aware of how much of what they do feeds into the invisible structures of neocolonialism. By not addressing the political and eco­ nomic dynamics of neocolonialism, theology and the church are not asserting their independence (as we sometimes believe) but forego resistance and are more and more pulled into their force field. In this situation, we need mission as inreach in order to inform us about where we are and about the invisible “principalities and powers” that use even the most well-meaning efforts at mis­ sion for their own purposes. Mission as inreach can free our view once again for God’s own mission, lead us to position ourselves in line with the channels of God’s grace, and thus help us to become more truly “postcolonial.”

A Theological Conclusion

The three different approaches to mission are built on different theological presuppositions which usually operate below the surface and are thus rarely named. The mission-as-outreach model—deep down—assumes not only that God is on our side, the side of the established churches, but also that God is introduced to other places through us. This is one of the common rationales behind much of what is currently called “urban ministry,” especially when it is pursued by the mainline churches. Here urban ministry often means that the church needs to move back into the cities which it vacated in the 1960s and

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1970s, and that in the process we bring God back. The tacit assumption is that the churches have taken God with them into the suburbs. The God who is on our side left the cities when the churches left. The mission-as-relationship model is clearer about the fundamental Christian belief that God’s presence cannot be limited. God is everywhere, not just on our side. But since this model does not take into account the asymme­ try of power that is the mark of a neocolonial world, it often ends in a theologi­ cal asymmetry according to which God appears to be more on one side than the other. God is with those who mean well. The mission-as-inreach model pays closer attention to the fact that God is never limited by the powers that be. Here, we can take more seriously the thought that God may be in places where our common sense logic least ex­ pects it—one of the constant surprises of encounters with God reported in the Bible. This puts mission on a new footing and encourages a true dialogue and encounter with others. Unless we encounter God in these unlikely places, we may miss God’s reality altogether. In all three models, authority and power are closely related. The self-centered powers of colonialism/neocolonialism hold up a mirror to the mission of the church. Mission, and the theological authority it claims, has often been just as self-centered as the colonial/neocolonial system. It has failed to take other peo­ ple seriously, and thus it has often ended up supporting conquest and exploi­ tation. The consequence has been a severe distortion and perversion of both mission and theology: Missing the reality of other people, we have also missed the reality of God (see Rieger 2001). Failing to respect others—celebrating our own power over others—we have also failed to respect the divine Other, and replaced God with our own authority. Where we thus miss God’s own reality, the otherwise very helpful reminder that mission is first of all about God’s own mission does not help us much. How do we get back in touch with the missio Dei, to God’s own mission? A reconstruction of theological authority needs to go hand in hand with a recon­ struction of power. The first step, therefore, is to become open to the “inreach factor,” which includes not only a fundamental reshaping of theological au­ thority but also the reconstruction of our power over other people. The radical reversal of authority and power that I am calling for can also be approached from a slightly different angle, by asking from where the energy of each of these approaches to mission derives. In the outreach model, the energy comes mostly from ourselves, even though we may not realize it. No wonder that burnout is often the result.30 In the relationship model, there is a better sense that we receive much of our energy in relation; but the power differential 30

I explore this problem in Rieger 2004b.

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bends this question in such a way that our own needs set the stage. The energy that comes from working with others is often not much more than a parasitic “feel-good energy,” an energy that misuses the other for our own purposes. The inreach model, finally, locates the source of energy elsewhere, not only with other people but also with the divine Other, whose mission meets us in unex­ pected ways and transforms the way things are (see Rieger 2001). Here, energy is generated outside of ourselves, even though not independently of ourselves (see Rieger 1998: chapter 3). This is why genuine dialogues, trialogues, and other “multilogues” are no longer optional but absolutely essential to the fu­ ture of both mission and theology. References Boer, Roland (2002). “Marx, Postcolonialism and the Bible.” Drew University Col­ loquium in Transdisciplinary Theological Studies on Com/promised Lands: The Colonial, the Postcolonial, and the Theological. September. Boff, Leonardo (1991). New Evangelization: Good News to the Poor. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Bonino, José Míguez (2003). “Methodism in Latin American Liberation Movements.” In Rieger and Vincent, eds. Pp. 193–206. Bosch, David J. (1991). Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Case, Riley (2002). The United Methodist Reporter. September 13. Donaldson, Laura E. and Kwok Pui-lan, eds. (2002). Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Religious Discourse. New York: Routledge. Foust, Thomas F., George R. Hunsberger, J. Andrew Kirk, and Werner Ustorf (2002). A Scandalous Prophet: The Way of Mission after Newbigin. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Freedland, Jonathan (2002). The Guardian. September 18: 4. Friedman, Thomas L. (2000). The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York: Anchor Books. Gutiérrez, Gustavo (1971). “Contestation in Latin America.” In Urresti, ed. Pp. 40–52. Gutiérrez, Gustavo (1993). Las Casas: In Search of the Poor Jesus Christ. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heitzenrater, Richard P., ed. (2002). The Poor and the People Called Methodists. Nashville, TN: Kingswood Books. Huntington, Samuel P. (1996). The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster.

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Jenkins, Philip (2002a). “Christendom: On the Rise in the World.” The Washington Times. May 10. Jenkins, Philip (2002b). The Next Christendom The Coming of Globalized Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Klaiber, Jeffrey (1992). The Catholic Church in Peru, 1821–1985: A Social History. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Martey, Emmanuel (1993). African Theology: Inculturation and Liberation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Martin, David (1990). Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mignolo, Walter D. (2000). Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Niebuhr, Reinhold (1959). The Structure of Nations and Empires: A Study in the Recurring Patterns and Problems of the Political Order in Relation to the Unique Problems of the Nuclear Age. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Rieger, Joerg (1998). Remember the Poor: The Challenge to Theology in the Twenty-First Century. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International. Rieger, Joerg (2001). God and the Excluded: Visions and Blindspots in Contemporary Theology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Rieger, Joerg (2002). “Between God and the Poor: Rethinking the Means of Grace in the Wesleyan Tradition.” In Heitzenrater, ed. Pp. 83–99. Rieger, Joerg (2004a). “Truth that Liberates: Postcolonialism and the Challenge of the Margin.” In Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner, and Mayra Rivera, eds., Postcolonial Theology: Divinity and Empire. St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press. Rieger, Joerg (2004b). “Beyond Burnout: New Creation and the Economics of Grace in Late Capitalism.” Quarterly Review Spring: 67–79. Rieger, Joerg, ed. (1999). Theology from the Belly of the Whale: A Frederick Herzog Reader. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International. Rieger, Joerg, ed. (2003). Opting for the Margins: Postmodernity and Liberation in Christian Theology. American Academy of Religion, Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rieger, Joerg and John Vingent, eds. (2003). Methodist and Radical: Rejuvenating a Tradition. Nashville, TN: Kingswood Books. Schleiermacher, Friedrich (1986). The Christian Faith. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Tinker, George E. (1993). Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Genocide. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Urresti, Teodoro Jiméz, ed. (1971). Contestation in the Church. New York: Herder and Herder.

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Wesley, John (1986). The Works of the Rev. John Wesley. Thomas Jackson, ed. Third Edition. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson. Original edition London: Wesleyan Methodist Book Room, 1872. Yancey, Philip (2002). “God’s Funeral.” Christianity Today 46. 10. September 9: 88. Young, Robert J. C. (2001). Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.

Translating the Word: Dialogism and Debate in Two Gikuyu Dictionaries Derek Peterson Early in 1946, a frustrated Presbyterian missionary named Arthur Barlow wrote of his difficulties in translating the Bible into Gikuyu, a language spoken in much of central Kenya.*,1 The further I pursue this work the more I realize my limitations, limitations which, I am sure, I share with any European who has to deal with the more complicated workings of the African mind as reflected in his language. Many a rendering which seemed to tally nicely with the English or the Hebrew, and which had the approval of this or that native helper, has broken down when put to the ruthless test of questions such as, “What will this convey to the ordinary Kikuyu of average intelligence?” “What will it mean to the Kikuyu of another dialect?”2 Barlow’s lament—which could have easily been made by anyone engaged in the work of translation, or interpretation—highlights the paradox which I want to pursue in this essay. His question—“What will it mean?”—is an ambitious attempt to anticipate and predetermine Gikuyu readings of the translated text. It is also, paradoxically, a vexed admission that the same text will be shot through with meanings which he cannot control. By asking about meaning, Barlow recognizes that the translated biblical language will “break down”: Source: Peterson, D., “Translating the Word: Dialogism and Debate in Two Gikuyu Dictionaries,” Journal of Religious History 23.1 (1999): pp. 31–50. Reproduced by permission of John Wiley and Sons. * This paper was first presented at the conference, “Africans Meeting Missionaries: Rethinking Colonial Encounters,” University of Minnesota, May 1997. I wish to thank the participants for their perceptive comments, and John Mowitt, John Lonsdale, and Kirk Allison for their close readings of earlier drafts of the essay. Research for this project was carried out with support from the Fulbright Program and the University of Minnesota’s MacArthur Program and Department of History. 1 Throughout the essay, I use the phonetic spelling “Gikuyu” for the group usually referred to as the “Kikuyu.” 2 A. R. Barlow, Annual Letter, Kikuyu News 176 (1946) (file I/G/7 in archives of St. Andrew’s Church, Nairobi).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004399594_028

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it will be a new creation, conveying meanings and ideas which neither he nor his Gikuyu interlocutors could expect. This paper attempts to evaluate and extend the current critical literature on colonizing discourses in Africa in light of the hermeneutical questions raised by Barlow’s lament. It proceeds on two levels. In the first instance, I want to suggest that the models of discourse proposed by postcolonial theorists (among others, Gauri Viswanathan, Homi Bhabha, and John and Jean Comaroff) fail to fully acknowledge questions about meaning because they represent missionary discourse as a self-referential totality. Following M. M. Bakhtin and H. G. Gadamer, I suggest that missionary discourses, inflected with multiple and often contradictory meanings as they were translated into African languages, must be seen as inherently hybrid precisely from the moment of their articulation. I lend substance to these claims in the second part of the paper, which is a hermeneutical discussion of dictionaries and missionary translation in early colonial Gikuyuland. Missionaries, I show, were not the only “authors” of these texts: instead, the dictionaries were produced out of a sustained and highly charged dialogue with Gikuyu interlocutors. By unpacking the contradictory definitions of authority and religion offered in the lexicographies of two early dictionaries, I shed light on the ways in which these texts reconstructed European and Gikuyu idioms of chiefship, sin, and self within a new language, arising out of the fused but uneven semantic horizon of missionaries and Gikuyu. This new language gave voice to meanings and ideas which neither language alone could express, and marked out a potentially radical interpretive terrain for Gikuyu converts and politicians.

I

Post-colonial theorists—at least the fellow-travellers of Edward Said— generally attend to colonial texts, highlighting the ways in which discursive representation created and naturalized “knowledge” of the colonizing self and the colonized other. This canon takes at least some of its theoretical coordinates from Michel Foucault, whose “genealogical” approach delegitimizes the present state of affairs by radically historicizing social and cultural practices (the body, morality, sexuality) that are generally taken for granted as enduring and timeless.3 3 Foucault’s “The Order of Discourse” (1970) here is exemplary. It is notable, though, that Foucault’s genealogy of power entails an examination of particular power regimes and how

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However useful they are, I want to suggest that the (re)constructive practices embraced by post-colonial theorists risk obscuring the limits and ambiguities integral to colonizing power. Because they insist that power is unitary and fundamentally monologic, theorists as diverse as Viswanathan, Bhabha, and John and Jean Comaroff screen off the interpretive “voices” of “native” others and ignore the ways in which these voices were embedded within the processual textualization of colonial power. As a result, the European subject emerges from these analyses as self-constituting, intextualized in the image of the theory by which, ironically, the theorist enacts the movement which she claims to be disabling. The native, the colonial “other,” is reduced to silence. Such a reading recreates the self-referential justification claimed by colonial power itself, and delegitimizes the suppressed knowledges which a more convincedly genealogical approach unearths. A brief appraisal of Viswanathan’s work will illuminate the critique which I want to make. Viswanathan’s important study seeks to historicize the political origins of modern English studies in nineteenth-century India. She argues that the ascendancy of literature as a means of moral and religious instruction for “degenerate” Indians arose out of a long debate involving missionaries, colonial officials, and Fabian utilitarians, in which study of the “classics” emerged as a compromise between the imperatives of the civilizing mission and the utility of political control. Significantly, Viswanathan argues that it is possible to study the development of this moralizing discourse “quite independently of an account of how Indians actually received, reacted to, imbibed, manipulated, reinterpreted, or resisted the ideological content of British literary education.”4 This is true because, for Viswanathan, the colonial subject was essentially an empty set, a production of colonial representation: “In the absence of direct interaction with the indigenous population … the colonial subject was reduced to a conceptual category, an object emptied of all personal identity to accommodate the knowledge already established and being circulated about the ‘native Indian.’” The native interlocutor, in this account, was screened off from the conversation of power; his reading of colonial pedagogy “was so removed from the colonizers’ representation system, his understanding of the meaning of they shape and naturalize given patterns of social practice. Foucault is also concerned to unearth and “rehabilitate” local and suppressed forms of knowledge. As I will suggest below in my outline of Bhabha and Bakhtin, the tradition generated by Said tends to efface these local knowledges, assigning an intentionality and unidirectionality to power—a position to which Foucault would not subscribe. 4 Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 11.

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events, that it enters into the realm of another history of which the latter has no comprehension or even awareness. That history can, and perhaps must, be told separately.”5 For Viswanathan, the relationship between colonialist discourse and the native other is essentially unmediated: it takes the form of A:B, the real, noncontradictory extremes postulated by Kant.6 Her reading, therefore, unifies European knowledge: missionaries and government officials seem to only listen to themselves, working within a hermetically closed sphere into which “native” discourses cannot penetrate. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that power and discourse are entirely the preserve of the powerful—a critique which has similarly been made of Edward Said.7 The native in this treatment becomes a voiceless “subaltern,” a powerless prisoner sealed in a “historically antagonistic universe.”8 In interesting ways, Viswanathan’s profoundly monologic account of knowledge production in India parallels John and Jean Comaroffs’ reading of missionary discourses in South Africa.9 They suggest that during the “long conversation” initiated by Nonconformist missionaries with their Tswana converts, Africans became subjects to colonial “hegemony,” a non-indigenous symbolic order which privileged the cultural and symbolic languages of colonial elites. By looking at themselves in mirrors, and by engaging in rational modes of debate, Africans were suborned to an invasive, modernist regime, a regime in which the “explicit, systematic faith” of the missionaries was reproduced, even within expressions of resistance.10 Like Viswanathan, the Comaroffs largely represent hegemony as a production crafted among Europeans. Missionary narratives in this analysis are interwoven to such an extent that they composed a “tightly-knit cultural cloth, 5 6

Viswanathan, 12. As recapitulated by Ernesto Laclau, “Populist Rupture and Discourse,” Screen Education 34 (1980): 88. 7 Particularly by Homi Bhabha. See Benita Parry, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” Oxford Literary Review 9 (1987): 27–59, for a review. 8 I quote here from Ranajit Guha, “Dominance Without Hegemony and its Historiography,” in R. Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies VI (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 220. Although Viswanathan does not cite Guha explicitly, her work is obviously in conversation with his. 9 John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 10 Comaroff and Comaroff, 152; see also Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Timothy Mitchell makes a similar argument in his Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

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its internal pattern seldom unraveled.”11 Africans’ roles in the weaving of this fabric are understated; their political and religious expression, in the form of voiced narratives, material practice or otherwise, rarely appear in the pages of the Comaroffs’ book.12 For the Comaroffs, as for Viswanathan, the “others” of powerful discourses are unimportant: their whispered conversations are closed off from the loud monologue of power, becoming the backdrop against which the politics of hegemony play themselves out. This formulation fails to draw attention to the dialogue between the creation of the colonial self and that which this creation disavows—namely, the knowledges and voices of native others.13 Homi Bhabha, in a critique of these monologic approaches, seeks to demonstrate the discursive limits of power, and to countermand the demand “that discourse be non-dialogic, its enunciation unitary.”14 Central to Bhabha’s formulation is the idea of hybridity, the problematic of colonial representation which arises from the displacement of value from symbol to sign.15 For Bhabha, the compelling authority of colonial texts like the Bible—the “insignia of colonial authority and signifier of colonial desire and discipline”—relies on commonly understood rules of recognition, reflecting consensual knowledge and opinion. In the transference of European symbols to the colonial situation, a slippage of meaning occurs: the symbolic book retains its presence, but it is no longer a representation of an essence. It becomes, Bhabha says, “a partial presence, a (strategic) device in a specific colonial engagement, an appurtenance of authority.”16 This is true because the enunciation of colonial authority relies on hybridization: the native readers of colonial texts read within disavowed frameworks 11 Comaroff and Comaroff, 125. 12 J. D. Y. Peel criticizes the Comaroffs for their failure to attend to Africans’ ways of narrating their pasts and futures in his “For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things? Missionary Narratives and Historical Anthropology,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (1995): 581–607. 13 The second volume of Comaroff and Comaroff, Revelation and Revolution, released in 1997 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), promises to address some of these criticisms. Unfortunately, the newer volume was not available to this author (located in Nairobi) at the time of writing. 14 Homi Bhabha, “‘Signs Taken for Wonders’: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 157. 15 Bhabha, 156. 16 Bhabha, 157. This reading is notably at variance with that of Comaroff and Comaroff, 237, who consider native appropriations of the Bible to be “misrecognition”, since Christianity and the Bible were “fundamentally antagonistic to their mode of existence.”

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of knowledge, mimicking English symbols with “native accents.” The native, the signified of colonial power, becomes the producer of signification in an act of discursive judo. For Bhabha, the native’s re-reading of colonial texts creates an autonomous, potentially radical space within colonial discourse: “When the words of the master become a site of hybridity—the warlike sign of the native—then we may not only read between the lines, but even seek to change the often coercive reality that they so lucidly contain.”17 The native’s ruse of recognition, says Bhabha, terrorizes authority, giving rise to a series of questions framed within a hybridized language which colonials cannot easily answer. This terror is finally uncontainable: it breaks down the symmetry and duality of the self/other, inside/outside, dualisms on which colonial discourse relies.18 In Bhabha’s formulation, hybridity arises out of the process of communication: the Kantian relationship between A and B is continually mediated as the native other interrogates and mimics colonial power. Like Stuart Hall, Bhabha works to highlight the alternative frames of interpretation through which native listeners decode colonial texts. The existence of these multiple frames of interpretation, say Bhabha and Hall, means that powerful speakers will not necessarily get the intended reading of their speech from their listeners: dominant meanings may be refracted or even opposed, as listeners interpret discourse according to what Hall calls the “relatively autonomous” codes of their own.19 Bhabha and Hall raise important criticisms of monologic readings of discourse. If Bhabha is correct, then it becomes difficult to reconstruct colonialist pedagogy apart from native reactions and readings, since the encoding authored by missionaries was necessarily and always decoded within competing and sometimes oppositional frameworks. The “other” postulated by Viswanathan and the Comaroffs, in this formulation, was not simply abjected or sealed off from power: rather, the enunciation of colonial pedagogy was split because it relied on the interpretation of native listeners.

17 Bhabha, 159. 18 Leon de Kock, in his fascinating Civilizing Barbarians: Missionary Narrative and African Textual Response in Nineteenth-Century South Africa (Witwatersrand: Witwatersrand University Press, 1996) has begun to apply Bhabha’s insights regarding dualism and mimicry to the study of native Christian newspapers in South Africa. De Kock seeks to understand the ways in which native interlocutors voiced criticisms of colonial power within the dualistic paradigms offered up in missionary discourse. 19 Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Stuart Hall et al., eds, Culture, Media and Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79 (London: Routledge, 1980), 136.

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I want to make a hermeneutical claim here which extends Bhabha’s formulation. The doubleness or “hybridity” of colonial texts was not only a function of native mimicry (Bhabha’s claim) or a product of decoding (Hall): rather, hybridity was embedded within (at least some) colonial texts themselves precisely because they emerged out of a sustained dialogue with native others. I suggest, following Bakhtin, that “native” readings can therefore be recovered from a close reading of colonial texts, not only from nationalist or other “native” literatures. This is true because some forms of colonial writing (such as dictionaries) were fundamentally dialogical. Bakhtin’s complex view of dialogism relies on a hybridized view of language. For Saussure and his followers, the word is a two-sided sign, emblematic of a language system which exists somewhere above the uncomfortable commerce of articulation. For Bakhtin, in contrast, the word is a two-sided act, determined equally by whose word it was and for whom it was meant. The word is territory shared by both the addresser and the addressee, by the speaker and his interlocutor. As Bakhtin writes: Language … lies on the border between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent … the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own.20 For Bakhtin, as for Bhabha, discourse is always hybrid: a conflictual heteroglossia pervades producers, texts, contexts, and readers. Each category is traversed by centripetal and centrifugal forces precisely because words do not simply belong to speakers/authors: words are “in the mouths of others,” and in order to speak, the author must take the word from alien contexts. This is Bakhtin’s response to those whom he calls the “stylists,” who pose a simple and unmediated relationship of the speaker to his unitary and singular language. Bakhtin, like Bhabha in his critique of Said, argues that the “stylist” approach acknowledges only a passive understanding of communication: the listener seems purely receptive, contributing nothing to the word under consideration.21

20 M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 293–4. 21 Bakhtin, 281.

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Bakhtin extends the critique of stylism by arguing that the word is born in dialogue, anticipating a living rejoinder within it. It is here that Bakhtin departs from Bhabha: unlike Bhabha, who locates hybridity in terrorizing answers of the native, Bakhtin says that dialogue is inscribed within the word of the speaker itself. In an argument which evokes Gadamer’s “fusing of horizons,” Bakhtin argues that the speaker strives to get a reading on his own word, and in his own conceptual system that determined this word, within the alien conceptual system of the understanding receiver; he enters into dialogical relationships with certain aspects of this system. The speaker breaks through the alien conceptual horizon of the listener, constructs his own utterance on alien territory, against his, the listener’s, apperceptive background.22 For Bakhtin, the word itself is dialogized, inextricably bound up in meanings which belong both to speaker and listener. Every speech act bears the mark of others’ ideas, inherited from historical traditions and infused through the process of conversation. To return to the metaphor of Kant’s oppositions: where Viswanathan understands the discursive relationship between the self and the other to be essentially unmediated (i.e., A:B), and where Bhabha sees A and B in continual and conflictual dialogue, Bakhtin argues that the words of others continually come into the language of the self. A and B here become fused together out of ongoing dialogue. Gadamer would modulate this argument to say that the product of this dialogue, this fusion, is “true” because it does not fully belong to either conversant. It is a new creation which evokes meanings and ideas arising out of the conversation itself, out of the linguistic performance.23 Textual translation is, for Gadamer, the fullest expression of this creative hybridity: in translation,

22 23

Bakhtin, 282. Gadamer would therefore not wholly agree with Bakhtin’s formulation above, finding it too close to the psychologist argument which wants those who understand to transpose themselves into the psyche of the other. Gadamer thinks that this sort of transposition is not only impossible, but also harmful because it disavows precisely that which allows genuine understanding to take place—namely, the “prejudices” of he who understands. All understanding, for Gadamer, takes place within a fused horizon in which ideas and discourse belonging to both conversants and to “being” (Dasein) meld in creative synergy; for which, see H. G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1996), 265–307.

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the translator must come to an understanding with the text, bringing to life new concepts and inviting readers to think through them.24 For Gadamer, as for Bakhtin, language is not the prison-house envisioned by post-colonials— rather, language is precisely the means by which understanding can occur. Bakhtin and Gadamer offer a compelling alternative to formalist theories of language—and, by extension, they may provide an alternative to the overly essential models of discourse posited by postcolonialists like Viswanathan. To delineate the salient points in brief: first, where discourse theory treats discourse itself as a praxis, and isolates the European speaker from the native other, Bakhtin and Gadamer argue that language does not pass easily into the private property of speakers’ intentions. Language is populated—indeed, over-populated—with the intentions and meanings of others because it is already “under way” when speakers enter into discourse. Second, in distinction to Bhabha, Bakhtin argues that the dialogism of language is embedded within the formation of communicative acts, as speakers and listeners circumvent the process of othering in their attempts to make communication meaningful. Third, Gadamer therefore insists on the relative autonomy of this new language from the intentions of either conversant, suggesting that it belongs to history, to being, rather than to those who speak. Bakhtin, too, would have us attend to historical moments of utterance, in distinction to discursive accounts which tend to homogenize power and to reduce discourses to the technologies by which they are articulated.25 The hermeneutic account offered by Gadamer and Bakhtin opens possibilities for a more radical model of interpretation. The role of such a radical hermeneutic would be to illuminate the multiplicity of meanings given voice in authoritative discourse, pointing toward evidence of debates that are muffled by monological readings of power. Such textualized arguments, I suggest, are very much in play in early Gikuyu language dictionaries.

24 Translation is emblematic of understanding, for Gadamer, because he thinks that all understanding involves a creative fusion between the ideas of others and of the self. Gadamer elaborates on this argument in Truth and Method, part three. 25 Bakhtin elaborates his concept of utterance in his essay, “The Philosophy of the Act”, taken up in Gary Morson and Caryl Emerson, Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989). For a critique of Foucaultian constructions of capillary power, see Frederick Cooper’s “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History,” American Historical Review 99 (1994): 1516–45.

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II

Dictionaries raise important questions of authorship, questions which postcolonial theories of discourse are not equipped to address. Who authors a text which is supposed to be a usable guide to another’s language? Dictionaries could plainly not come into existence out of the genius of creative missionaries. If they were to be helpful in the communication between missionaries and their Gikuyu converts, then the “authors” of the first dictionaries would have to enter into the play of Gikuyu language, into linguistic, cognitive, religious, and political narratives and debates already under way among those with whom they spoke. To treat missionaries as the essential authors of these texts would be to ignore the ways in which Gikuyu interlocutors shaped and crafted the language created in the dictionaries. Dictionaries were, of functional necessity, positioned at the point of fusion between the two linguistic traditions which they sought to render comprehensible. Dictionaries were sometimes quite literally authored by more than one person, since missionaries relied on the advice of native interlocutors in much of their work. Bible translation, the paradigmatic missionary activity which codified much of the language offered up in early dictionaries, was usually accomplished through the combined and consultative work of both African and missionary linguists. Their work was frequently refereed to outside readers for suggestions and advice.26 Harry Leakey, one of the missionaries who worked to translate the Bible into Gikuyu, described the process of compilation in terms which highlight the role of native translators: Mathayo has now got prepared for our work together a draft, or as I generally call it a skeleton translation of the remaining books between Leviticus and about Ezra VII … He is at present writing the above mentioned Genesis for me, and we have just in the last few days got the first three chapters in the form in which we would let them go to press.27 This critical question of authorship—which, as Leakey’s quote suggests, is integrally connected to the process of dialogization—is effaced in poststructuralist 26 The most recent and perceptive work on missionaries and Bible translation is Andrew Walls’s collection, The Missionary Movement in Modern History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996). 27 Leakey to Smith, 21 March 1934, quoted in John Karanja, “The Growth of the African Anglican Church in Central Kenya, 1900–1945” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1993), 151.

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readings of colonizing discourse. The problem is similarly obscured in historians’ recent readings of dictionaries in Africa, which tend to focus on the textualization of native vernaculars as a part of the larger “invention” of ethnicity in Africa.28 Neither literature takes the dictionary itself very seriously, preferring to examine its function within colonizing discourse. The two dictionaries on which I want to focus—one published in 1914 by Barlow, a sometime renegade Presbyterian, and the other in 1904 by A. W. McGregor, an Anglican—exhibit a range of sometimes incompatible meanings in their translation of important terms connoting power, authority, and religion.29 I suggest that these contradictions are not simply phenomenal “mistakes”: rather, the curious language offered up in these dictionaries was shaped by, and itself informed, ongoing political and economic debates raging in early colonial Gikuyuland. McGregor’s definitions of the Gikuyu word muthamaki (a title connoting power and wealth for its male holder) marks the ways in which missionaries’ location within Gikuyu debates informed the translation of political languages.30 An agent of the British-headquartered Church Missionary Society (CMS), McGregor first settled at Fort Smith, a trading encampment near the Kampala–Nairobi railway line, with the acquiescence of the Imperial British East African Company. In 1901, Karuri wa Gakure, the state-appointed chief of the newly created Fort Hall district, invited McGregor to open a

28

I refer here to Terrence Ranger’s important “Missionaries, Migrants and the Manyika: The Invention of Ethnicity in Zimbabwe,” in The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, ed. L. Vail (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), which argues that the textualization of vernaculars in missionary-produced dictionaries created the grounding for a hegemonic Manyika culture—that is, a culture which was used to suppress alternative formulations of ethnicity and language. I suggest that Ranger’s argument, useful though it may be, fails to ask important interpretive questions of the dictionaries, namely, what kind of linguistic meanings were being conveyed in the dictionaries, and how were these meanings created historically? Ranger’s piece does not examine the language contained within the dictionaries; as a result, these texts seem to be functional tools of the colonizing enterprise. 29 A. Ruffell Barlow, Tentative Studies in Kikuyu Grammar and Idiom (1914; reprint, Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1931), and A. W. McGregor, English–Kikuyu Dictionary, compiled for the use of the CMS mission in Eastern Africa (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1904). 30 Parts of the discussion which follows are formulated in my “Colonizing Language? Missionaries and Gikuyu Dictionaries, 1904 and 1914,” History in Africa 27 (1997): 257–72.

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mission station in Weithaga, a hilltop site some ten miles east of Karuri’s own home in Tutho.31 Karuri, McGregor’s patron, was one of the new class of Gikuyu “big men” created out of the growth of profitable long-distance trading in the late 1800s. The son of a medicine man (mundu mugo), Karuri had attached himself to the British adventurer and trader John Boyes in the late 1890s, helping Boyes obtain ivory and foodstuffs for trade with the European and Swahili caravans which crisscrossed the region.32 Karuri used his alliance with Boyes to great effect, deploying Boyes’s contingent of Swahili askari against his enemies and raiding surrounding people without discrimination. Karuri’s political position was strengthened during the disastrous famine of 1898, which hardened the implicit stratification of Gikuyu society by making traders with access to liquid capital—particularly in cattle—increasingly wealthy.33 The colonial conquest state, searching for effective African leaders in northern Gikuyuland to extend its control beyond the immediate reaches of Kiambu, capitalized on Karuri’s economic network and social position by naming him chief of the newly created Fort Hall district. Karuri reciprocated by assisting the government in its punitive expeditions in northern Gikuyuland, which continued until 1905.34 The colonial state’s administrative elevation of capitalist “big men” like Karuri was part of a larger crisis of leadership in Gikuyuland. At issue was the pivotal question of power. Gikuyu politics were parochial: there was no overarching political organization which united the different landholding lineages (mbari) into a cohesive “tribe.”35 Domestic virtue and open-handed wealth were the fertile grounds on which political power was built: wealthy men dispensed largesse (tha) in the form of land or food to clients and relatives, 31 Johanna Muturi and Paul Mbatia, “Weithaga Jubilee Report” (1953) in St Paul’s Divinity School archive, Limuru. See also Robert Strayer, The Making of Mission Communities in East Africa: Africans and Anglicans in Colonial Kenya, 1875–1935 (London: Heinemann, 1978), 44–5. 32 Karuri is pictured in Swahili dress in Cagnolo’s early memoir, The Agikuyu: Their Customs, Traditions and Folklore (Nyeri: Consolata Press, 1933), 230, highlighting his identification with the powerful caravaners. For Karuri’s involvement with the caravans, see Godfrey Muriuki, A History of the Kikuyu, 1500–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 160–1. 33 David Feldman, “Christians and Politics: The Origins of the Kikuyu Central Association in Northern Murang’a 1890–1930” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1978), 43. 34 Peter Rogers, “The British and the Kikuyu, 1890–1905: A Reassessment,” Journal of African History 20 (1979): 265–8. 35 Greet Kershaw, Mau Mau from Below (London: James Gurrey, 1997), 81. Anthropologist Richard Leakey argued differently, identifying a highly organized system of territorial councils up to the bururi, the nation of Gikuyu, in Mau Mau and the Kikuyu (London: Methuen, 1956). As I will suggest below, bururi as nation must be understood within the changing context of Gikuyu debates about politics and class.

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sometimes incorporating land-hungry clients as members of their mbari.36 Wealthy men could afford to accommodate many of these clients; they could also afford the goats required for their own membership in mbari and other councils of elders. Poor men, while they might not hope to become senior elders, could at least earn virtue through hard labour which gave them the access to land from labour-poor mbari landholders.37 “Big men” (sometimes called athamaki) therefore emerged out of long process of argument and negotiation, in which poor men and women continually demanded material proof of their wealthy virtue. By the late nineteenth century, however, this argued-out moral economy had begun to break down. The famine of Kirika, which lasted through much of the 1890s, made land more valuable in Kiambu district and caused mbari elders to begin to limit the amount of land offered to needy clients.38 Land-poor after Kirika rarely found mbari willing to incorporate them as equals; landholders now offered land to clients as ahoi, tenants, who reciprocated by giving livestock and produce to the landholding mbari.39 The hardening class divisions between landed and landless, wealthy and poor were exacerbated when, over the last decade of the nineteenth century, thousands of acres of Kikuyu land was alienated for the use of European settlers and colonial administrators. Kiambu lost the most land by far; Muranga (later Fort Hall) and Gaki (Nyeri district) suffered relatively fewer losses.40 Mbari elders, faced with increasingly demanding clients and holding scarce supplies of land, were compelled to repudiate clients. The poor were left with few options beyond wage labour in Nairobi or the settled areas, labour which was patently unproductive. No-one bought virtue with cash. The colonial creation of administrative chiefs like Karuri lent legal force to this crisis of morality. Where “big men” had previously earned power through patterns of clientage, in colonial thinking chiefs were supposed to be impartial arbiters of justice. Where athamaki had dispensed tha as a proof of their fitness for power, colonial chiefs were supposed to collect taxes and mobilize corvée 36

Those so incorporated were called agendi, visitors; once they joined the lineage they received full rights as landholders and, potentially, as elders. See Kershaw, 25–6. 37 See John Lonsdale, “The Moral Economy of Mau Mau: Wealth, Poverty and Civic Virtue in Kikuyu Political Thought,” in Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa, ed. Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale (London: Currey, 1992), 335–7, for an explication of the Gikuyu labour theory of value. 38 Kershaw, chap. 2. 39 For a fuller discussion of ahoi, see Muriuki, inter alia. Kershaw argues that the institution of ahoi in Kiambu came into existence only after Kirika: see Kershaw, 46–7. 40 Muriuki, 171–7; Lonsdale, 366.

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labor (gitati) in a most unforgiving fashion. Where athamaki had emerged out of a long process of debate, chiefs were chosen from among the younger, cattle-rich traders according to colonial realpolitik. McGregor, the Anglican missionary whose dictionary I wish to analyse, entered into this charged context as a muhoi, a client asking his patron, Karuri, for access to land. Johanna Muturi, one of the first three athomi (readers) at Weithaga, remembers that McGregor visited Karuri at his home in 1903 to ask for land on which to build a new station. Karuri complied, telling him to chose any site ten miles north of Mbomaini (Fort Hall).41 Karuri also supplied McGregor with his first students, sending two of his junior sons—Daudi Gakure, Joshua Karuri Ngari—and Muturi himself to study with McGregor.42 By 1905, McGregor had some fourteen boys living with him at Weithaga, several among them related to Karuri.43 McGregor’s dictionary, published in 1904, provides ample evidence that the rise of the newly wealthy had provoked considerable debate among Gikuyu. McGregor translated the term muthamaki in ways that bridged, uncomfortably, Karuri’s new title as the government’s chief to the Gikuyu idiom of virtue and power. Five of the words used to define muthamaki—“monarch,” “prince,” “emperor,” “ruler,” “king,” and “prince”—signalled the hierarchical meanings implied by the word, and themselves reflected Karuri’s position within the hierarchy of partially capitalist Gikuyuland. The other five defining words— “magistrate,” “officer,” “governor,” “minister (of state),” and “administrator”— are Weberian terms, evoking the administrative structure of the legal-rational colonial state. The meanings which McGregor’s dictionary attached to muthamaki are hybrid: the Weberian legalism of the colonial state and the new, capital-based Gikuyu authority meet, unmediated and conflictually, in one definition. A similar process of hybridization is at play in the definitions of key words which support muthamaki. McGregor’s dictionary offers hinya, a term which connotes male virility and strength, for “authority,” and suggests that the “yoke” of service is similarly hinya. So too does McGregor’s dictionary uncomfortably claim Gikuyu idioms of political organization for the new muthamaki: a mbari here becomes a “nation,” while muhiriga is simultaneously defined as “nation” and “family.” 41 42

Johanna Muturi, interview, transcript, St Paul’s Theological College archive, Limuru. Paul Mbatia Gakobo, who attended classes at Weithaga from 1904, interview, transcript, St Paul’s Theological College archive, Limuru. 43 Feldman, 76. Karuri did not limit his connections to the CMS but also assisted the Consolata Fathers, the rivals of the Anglicans, in settling close to his home near Murang’a town (see Strayer, 45).

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The vocabulary of power displayed in McGregor’s dictionary melds, unevenly, older Gikuyu terms of political debate with the new terms evoked by Karuri and others’ rise to administrative power. This dictionary suggests that Gikuyu lexicons of political legitimacy were themselves subject to the destabilizing tensions arising out of class formation: the mbari, previously the crucible of domestic virtue, had migrated to the new vocabulary of “nation,” while the muhiriga retained its local connotations uncomfortably with “national” overtones. If Gikuyu vocabularies of power are conspicuously unstable in McGregor’s dictionary, so too is the lexicon of poverty. McGregor’s definition of terms connoting dispossession and servitude bear evidence of the heated political debate which arose in the wake of British conquest. Hinya, McGregor’s term for authority, is also herein a “yoke,” and being yoked meant okombo, the state of “slavery” and “servanthood.” The new chiefs’ authority, McGregor’s Gikuyu interlocutors seem to say, meant slavery for the poor of Gikuyu. So too was the term onogi, a term which seems to have connoted tiredness, translated for “tyranny,” while the related verb konogia became “to trouble” and “to be cruel.” Mutheni, the most often used of Gikuyu terms for a poor person, in this dictionary became a “destitute person” and “hapless,” while the adjectival a otheni became “penury,” “poverty,” and “trouble.” Poverty here is blamed on the athamaki, who had compounded the tiredness of their clients and made them destitute. For the poor, sweated labour no longer earned wealth or virtue together with physical exhaustion: tiredness was bred by tyranny, by the unaccommodating power of the new athamaki. These new athamaki were blatantly ungenerous: tha, the term for largesse, does not appear in McGregor’s dictionary. “Gift” here becomes kiheo, a loan which was expected to be repaid to the giver. “Alms” is translated as kigongona, the ritual sacrifices by which the wealthy head of an mbari propitiated the ancestors and asked for blessings upon the land. Such alms were of little use to the landless ahoi, impoverished by their ungenerous patrons. The words used to translate “pity” and “compassion,” which the Gikuyu poor could reasonably have expected from wealthy patrons prior to the rise of the newly wealthy, were no longer tha. In a wild reversal of meaning, “pity” is here given as korakaria, connoting to cause anger, and komakaria—to cause fright. Demands for tha from the poor now met only with the angry rejection of their more privileged patrons. McGregor’s dictionary echoes with the arguing voices of poor and wealthy, arguments intensified by the agonizing process of class formation in which patrons steadily repudiated clients and in which the poor could no longer look to agricultural labour or generous land-sharing as a redemptive means to wealth and respectability. In comparison, A. R. Barlow’s 1914 dictionary seems a fairly

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placid affair. Barlow, a Presbyterian, had first come to Kenya in 1905 at the age of seventeen, working to begin a boarding school at the 3,000 acre Church of Scotland mission station at Thogoto.44 Barlow was expelled from the colony in 1907 for consuming Gikuyu food and beer and for dancing at initiation ceremonies, activities which the nascent European community found threatening to the integrity of its racial identity.45 By 1908, however, Barlow had returned to Kenya on the promise not to repeat his past activities. He was sent north, to the southern slopes of Kirinyaga (later Mount Kenya) to the new Presbyterian station called Tumutumu, in the eastern part of the new Nyeri district.46 The region in which Barlow settled had only recently been “pacified” by force of British arms: the last pockets of resistance to colonial authority in the region of Mathira had been wiped out late in 1904 at the cost of 1,500 Gikuyu lives.47 The colonial administration in the region was centred around the figure of Wangombe wa Ihura, a long-distance trader in ivory and food in precolonial times who, like Karuri, allied with the British administration during the conquest. Wangombe’s levies had raided as far as Karuri’s territories before the British arrived.48 As with Karuri, the British capitalized on Wangombe’s military and political power to further their administration of the northern parts of Gikuyuland. Compared with McGregor’s dictionary, produced in the charged context of Karuri’s new realm, Barlow’s 1914 grammar offers a reading of Gikuyu political language which lays emphasis on older, consultative meanings of social power. Barlow defines muthamaki as “one capable of leading others by advice and counsel,” and subdivides the authority of the athamaki into muthamaki wa ihi, the “head of the uninitiated boys,” and muthamaki wa riika, the “head of the 44 Brian McIntosh, “The Scottish Mission in Kenya, 1891–1923” (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 1969), 189; Robert MacPherson, The Presbyterian Church in Kenya (Nairobi: PCEA, 1970), 36. For a history of the Thogoto mission, which was modelled after the wellknown Blantyre industrial mission in Malawi, see MacPherson, The Presbyterian Church. For a history of land disputes surrounding the mission, see Nancy Uhlar-Murray, “The Need to Get there First: Staking a Missionary Claim in Colonial Kenya,” Journal of African Studies (Winter 1985–6), and John Lonsdale’s “The Prayers of Waiyaki: Political Uses of the Kikuyu Past” in Revealing Prophets: Prophecy in East African History, ed. David Anderson (London: James Currey, 1995). 45 Duane Kennedy highlights whites’ nervousness concerning racial mixing; see his Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1960 (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). 46 Tumutumu mission was founded in 1908 by Petro Mugo, a Gikuyu evangelist, and was later occupied by Barlow in 1909. See text below for a condensed history of the creation of the mission. 47 Muriuki, 164–5. 48 A description of one of these raids is in Cagnolo, 101–3.

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age set.” The myriad of administrative and political functions assigned to the muthamaki in McGregor’s dictionary are not articulated in Barlow’s rendition: he chooses not to define “prince,” “king,” “judge,” “administrator” or any of the Weberian terms offered by McGregor. Barlow’s closest equivalent to muthamaki is mutongoria, which he defines as “leader.” So too is hinya, McGregor’s term for authority, disabled in Barlow; here, hinya becomes simply “strength.” Barlow’s translation of terms of political organization similarly moves Gikuyu political lexicon away from the vexed bureaucratic vocabulary of McGregor. Barlow’s muhiriga is a “clan”; the bururi is “the community, the country”; mbari does not appear in Barlow. No “nation,” “kingdom,” or “tribe” is offered up in Barlow’s vocabulary. McGregor’s political nation, led by the muthamaki, finds no resonance in Barlow’s lexicon. If the vocabulary of political power is denaturalized in Barlow, so too are the most wrenching manifestations of agonizing class formation largely subdued. Mutheni is in Barlow, as in McGregor, a “poor person, a sufferer,” though she is not “destitute” or “troubled” as in McGregor. An ngombo in Barlow is not a “slave” as in McGregor: here she is a “servant, one provided for by another.” Barlow does offer minyamaro, which had not appeared in McGregor, as a term for “trouble” and “suffering”—but in Barlow’s vocabulary, the sufferer can at least appeal for tha, which here is translated as “pity, compassion.” Thus, while Barlow’s grammar bears ample evidence to demonstrate the salience of class as an idiom within northern Gikuyu lexicon, the poignancy of this vocabulary bears little of the animosity evidenced in McGregor’s dictionary. Though there are poor people in Barlow’s linguistic world, they could conceivably rely on being “provided for by another” as clients or as ahoi. This strategic open-handedness was not offered to the poor of Karuri’s region, where requests for tha earned only anger. How may we explain the obvious differences between these two vocabularies of class, given that they were authored within ten years of each other in locations separated by less than thirty miles? John Karanja’s important dissertation suggests that muthamaki took on meanings of “king” and “emperor” out of the process of Bible translation, as missionary and Gikuyu translators struggled to find adequate words to express the irreducible authority of the Hebrew kings.49 The Kikuyu Language Committee (KLC), a body of missionaries and Gikuyu converts, published the first complete Gikuyu translation of the New Testament in 1926 and followed with the Old Testament in 1950. The KLC chose muthamaki for “king” throughout, setting up a homologism between the 49 Karanja, chap. 5, inter alia. Karanja has expanded this argument, to great effect, in his paper, “Muthamaki for Kings?” (African Studies Association [U.S.A.] Annual Meeting, 1997).

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two terms which, Karanja argues, vitally shaped Kikuyu understandings of political power in the 1920s and ’30s. Bible translation, both formal and informal, undoubtedly played an important role in the creation of the king/muthamaki in McGregor’s 1904 dictionary. The Swahili language Bible was available in central Kenya from the early 1900s, and it is reasonable to expect that the first Gikuyu preachers were quick to translate the Swahili text, including the Old Testament, into their native tongue for all variety of evangelistic and political purposes. They were certainly doing so by the 1920s, when Jomo Kenyatta and other Gikuyu politicians offered a steady diet of Lamentations for the readers of the Kikuyu Central Association journal Mwigwithania.50 It is significant, however, that the earliest text taken up by missionaries was not Kings or Lamentations but The Gospel of John, translated by McGregor in 1903.51 McGregor’s 1904 Gikuyu vocabulary was shaped by his efforts to translate John: many of the terms which he translates (rabbi, high priest, herald, Lucifer, and messiah to name a few) can only have arisen out of the work of Bible translation. I do not have access to McGregor’s John—but I would note that John, among the four canonical Gospels, would seem to make the fewest demands on political vocabulary. In other Gospels, Christ makes frequent references to the “Kingdom of God” in parables, which stands as a trope for the meta-community (bururi or mbari?) of the elect. John’s Christology, in contrast, is other-worldly: a pre-existing son/Logos takes leave of his father in heaven, descends to earth, and then ascends to his father.52 John’s Christ is a stranger from another world—there is no birth narrative in John; Christ is incarnated in the flesh as the Word, not as an infant. When Christ speaks, he makes few political claims on his listeners: one of his few “Kingdom of God” references is to say that his kingdom is “not of this world.”53 John’s Christ, in other words, is an unlikely candidate for McGregor’s muthamaki. While the demand of Bible translation may have played a role in McGregor’s rendition of Gikuyu political vocabulary, that role must have been indirect. The unlikely range of muthamaki’s definitions can best be explained, I suggest, by positioning the two dictionaries squarely within locally specific debates over 50 See, for example, Kenyatta’s translation of Lam. 5:1 in Mwigwithania 4 (August 1928), in Kenya National Archives DC/Machakos/10B/13/1. 51 Karanja, 138. 52 This typology of John is taken largely from Dennis Duling’s The New Testament: Proclamation and Parenesis, Myth and History (Fort Worth: Harcourt-Brace, 1994). Some critics have considered John to be a Gnostic heresy, presenting Christ as other than fully human. 53 John 18:36, answering Pilate’s query about his political provenance.

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class formation and bureaucratic chiefship. McGregor’s dictionary, produced in the highly fraught regions of southern Fort Hall, provides ample evidence that new sources of political and chiefly power were subject to acrimonious debate among rich and poor, who were progressively drawn apart by the logic of colonial bureaucratic capitalism. Barlow’s translation, conversely, offers evidence that processes of class formation, while certainly in play in Nyeri by the 1910s, had not yet led to the same terrifying distancing between rich and poor as in the southern reaches of Gikuyuland. Class politics around Tumutumu may have differed from southern Gikuyu politics on at least four grounds. First, Nyeri had not experienced the same degree of land alienation as had the south; in north-eastern Nyeri, in fact, the eviction of Masai herdsmen had opened up new grazing land for Gikuyu cattleowners.54 Not until the late 1910s was the northern Gikuyu frontier of settlement thrown back by European settlers. Second, northern mbari landholders were not so pressed by land-hungry clients as were their southern counterparts. Kiambu, jostled against a growing Nairobi, had the fastest growing population in Gikuyuland at the beginning of the century; many of the migrants were young men from the north who sought out a plot of land while simultaneously working for wages in Nairobi.55 Third, Nyeri had not been subject to the same economic pressures arising out of the caravan trade as had the north: while Wangombe and other Nyeri aonjoria (traders) had been involved in the trade, British settlements in the south directed much of the trade to the Gikuyu who sold food and ivory to administrators and passing caravaners. As a result, Nyeri traders were not so quickly incorporated into market relationships as were their compatriots to the south, and hence their position was relatively less abetted by British economic and military power.56 Fourth, and perhaps most to the point, the two missions had entered into the Gikuyu politics of landholding in substantially different ways. McGregor had obtained land at Weithaga as a muhoi, a client asking his powerful patron Karuri for land. The Presbyterians who founded the mission at Tumutumu in 1908, in contrast, seem to have obtained their land not as clients but as partners, as (at least initially) allies of local landowners. One early convert, the grand-daughter of the senior elder named Gacece who controlled the land on which the mission was built, remembers that her grandfather’s mbari had left 54 Lonsdale, “Moral Economy”, 362; Muriuki, 174; Michael Cowen, “Differentiation on a Kenya Location” (Institute of Development Studies, Nairobi, 1965). 55 Lonsdale, “Moral Economy”, 366, citing Fazan’s survey of the Gikuyu reserves. 56 Peter Rogers has advanced this argument most effectively in his “The British and the Kikuyu, 1890–1905: A Reassessment,” Journal of African History 20 (1979): 255–69.

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much of their land as weru, pasturage for cattle. When the missionaries (John Arthur and Henry Scott, both of the older station at Thogoto) asked to buy a thirty-acre plot of the mbari flat land outright, her grandfather replied: If I sell that place to you, and you plant crops, if my cows will stray (into your land), you will say “Didn’t you sell this land? Pay for the damage.” … we prefer that people who border one another should stay in a loving (reciprocal) relationship. So when my cow strays to your place you will run and lead it back to my compound, and when yours come, I will also guide it, but there will be no counting of damage.57 Gacece’s call for a “loving relationship” with the missionaries does not evoke the calculus of clientage implicated in McGregor’s dealings with Karuri. Instead, the missionaries at Tumutumu seem to have been understood as agendi, visitors, according to a Gikuyu logic in which land-rich mbari holders sought out powerful allies to take up residence on their land.58 Such a relationship, for elders like Gacece, offered the mbari access to the wealth and power of their allies, and solidified their claim to the land which they occupied. Politics around Tumutumu, in short, were conducted within a different vocabulary than were politics in Fort Hall and the more southerly reaches of Gikuyuland. In the south, by the turn of the century, the progressive coarsening of class relations had fractured the tenuous moral language on which older political discourse had relied. The fragments of this political terror appear, in truncated form, in McGregor’s dictionary, in the echoed complaints of impoverished and disavowed tenants. At the same time, McGregor’s dictionary gives voice to the proud claims to power made by wealthy athamaki like Karuri, claims based on a bureaucratic rationale which belonged to the colonial state. Barlow’s dictionary voices a different political language, one which evokes an older model of morality wherein poor could still make tentative claims for largesse, tha, and in which the rich still sought out reciprocating means to make their wealth legitimate. The divergent political lexicons of McGregor and Barlow make sense in light of the rigorous but geographically specific Gikuyu debate about class and patronage. There is tantalizing but incomplete evidence in these dictionaries that a similar debate was conducted concerning religious language. The 57 Cecilia Muthoni Mugaki, interview, 8 August 1996, in Mathira division, Nyeri. 58 This point is made tentatively, pending further research on the history of land acquisition at and around Tumutumu. For a description of agendi landholding relationships in Kiambu, see Kershaw, 25–6.

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labyrinthine and contradictory etymology of the Gikuyu term ngoro, a term which came to mean the Platonic, rational “soul” in Christian praxis, offers a point of entry into this debate. “Soul” was first translated in McGregor’s 1904 dictionary in an open, fundamentally intersubjective language. McGregor offered ngoro for “heart” and “soul” and the adjectival a ngoro for “internal,” “inward,” and “mental.” Ngoro, in this lexicon, was a spatial, not an ontological category. “Mind” was not ngoro: “mind” was, significantly, thikererio, a term which has at its root the Gikuyu verb “to listen.” “Reason,” for McGregor, was similarly open to debate: he offered mbuguiro as one term for “reason.” Mbuguiro has at its root the verb igua, to feel or to hear. Gikuyus called themselves the mbari ya atiriri, the “clan of I say to you,” highlighting the argued-out dialogue in which Gikuyu ethnic and political idioms were rehearsed and made operative. It seems that McGregor’s Gikuyu could as easily have called themselves andu a atiriri, the “people of I say to you,” for debate seems to have informed subjectivity as much as it did politics. In McGregor’s rendition of “mind,” Gikuyu became themselves by listening, by hearing: cognition was a function of received knowledge, not a product of creative genius. Poor people must have spent much time listening to their more wealthy patrons: those who had only paid one or two goats were allowed to attend meetings of mbari councils but were not allowed to speak.59 Only the wealthy could afford the extensive fees required to assume the higher positions within councils. The wealthy were also privy to the deepest political and religious knowledge, kirira, knowledge of which marked the most powerful from others. Speech-making and knowledge of politics, in other words, was a privilege of wealth; those who were too poor or too young were compelled to listen. For McGregor’s interlocutors, many of whom were themselves junior men, self-hood took shape within communal debate, a debate which involved careful listening and which demanded wealth-producing labour of active participants. Later missionary lexicons, Barlow’s among them, were more convinced of the need to extract the Gikuyu “soul” from the debated narrative in which it took shape; by doing so, they helped to locate an essential spiritual centre liable for Christian conversion.60 The theological quandary for Barlow lay pre59 Kershaw, 65–6. 60 Paul Landau has made a homologous argument in his “Explaining Surgical Evangelism in Colonial Southern Africa: Teeth, Pain and Faith,” Journal of African History 37 (1996): 261–82. According to Landau, missionaries in Tswana societies sought to extract Christian subjects from their communal frame by pulling teeth, an act which located healing with

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cisely in the question of sin and self-ness. In translating “sin,” Barlow initially considered the term thahu, the dangerous “ritual cleanliness” which Gikuyus thought troubled them when they transgressed rules that kept life and sex separate from death and blood, bush out of the homestead, and wild game away from domestic stock.61 The idea of thahu regulated the Gikuyu social order, keeping dangerous substances within their proper places. “Unclean” people transgressed a fluid set of social and communally defined prohibitions, not an absolute set of laws. For Barlow, thahu ultimately failed as “sin” because it did not prescribe a sense of individual grievance toward God: uncleanness brought suffering on the transgressor and on the community, but not divine condemnation. Barlow compared the dangerously unrepentant Gikuyu to the Israelites before Sinai, and took it upon himself, as an ambitious Moses, to teach them the “law of God and responsibility to him.” Barlow’s inquirers class at Thogoto spent some six months reviewing the teaching on the law, from the fall to the exodus, in an effort to imbue them with a proper respect for individual sin.62 This formulation of thahu is at play in Barlow’s dictionary, which defines thahu as “impure in the Levitical sense.” The dictionary thereby located the Gikuyu language of uncleanness within a prior covenant of pollution and death, and introduced adherents to new languages of sin and grace. “Sin” became mehia, a word connoting “whispers” and “lies” which does not appear in McGregor’s earlier dictionary as a pejorative. If this personalized version of sin was to take hold, though, Barlow and his Gikuyu translators were compelled to locate some identifiable, individualizing language with which to identify the guilty sinner. They needed to extract sin, and the Gikuyu subject, from the communal frame in which moral pollution was located by ethnic thought: they needed a religious subject. Thus, where McGregor’s ngoro evoked an almost Hebraic conception of the self, Barlow offered ngoro as the definitive location of the Platonic self on display in the letters of Paul.63 Barlow defined ngoro as “chest, heart, mind, affections, whole the physical, as opposed to the social, body. I argue that a similar process of subjectification is at play in Barlow’s dictionary, below. 61 See Lonsdale, 344, for a discussion of thahu. 62 Ward, 85. 63 In Hebrew, the “soul” is usually rendered as ruach, which connotes “soul,” “breath,” and “wind,” and as nephesh, connoting “life,” “blood,” “mood,” “state of mind,” “whatever makes living beings.” Cf. Deut. 6:5: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul [nephesh] and with all your strength.” The passage goes on to enjoin ancient believers to “impress” the truth upon their children, to tie the word around their hands and foreheads. For ancient Hebrews, then, the “soul” took meaning out of a continually reinforced community of faith, and included (and transcended?) the whole body. This is

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‘inner man.’” Thikererio, which McGregor had offered for “mind,” is in Barlow simply defined in its verbal form, thikereria, “to listen to.” Neither mbuguiro, which McGregor had offered as “reason,” nor ogi, which McGregor had offered for “mind,” is translated in Barlow’s grammar. Barlow sought to modulate the potentially destabilizing ambiguities of McGregor’s reading of the soul by naming the spiritual centre of the newly created subject. Gikuyu subjects, for whom mind/ngoro/spirit were diffusely held at various points within and without the body, were here metamorphosed into reified moderns, imbued with language and consciousness out of an act of linguistic creativity. It is impossible to say with certainty which of the two renditions of ngoro rang more true with Gikuyu understandings of self-hood. As with muthamaki, different ngoro probably belonged to different groups of Gikuyu. Early Christian converts in Gikuyuland were usually younger men, the children of poorer families, who used their connections with the missionaries as licence to thumb their noses at the wisdom of the elders.64 Christian “readers” were known to sleep in graveyards, to drink out of “skulls,” and to destroy the divination tools of elders.65 Others refused to be initiated.66 All of these activities were serious violations of thahu, and marked early converts for the special opprobrium of elders, who were nervous about the doom which they and their families might contract from such licentious activities. Barlow’s dictionary bears incomplete evidence that this struggle over meaning was conducted in ontological as well as familial and political terms. Barlow’s ngoro may well have been a term engineered to suit the needs of missionary evangelism; it might also have been part of a larger effort by athomi in distinction to the Pauline definition (as it is usually exegeted), which inflects Platonic conceptions of “soul” to make the self into a “mind.” A Hebraic definition of soul would approximate McGregor’s thikererio. My thanks to Bob Clark for this insight. 64 Feldman, chap. 3; Lonsdale, 367–9. 65 For Gikuyu elders, the white cups that converts drank out of were “skulls,” an impression which rebellious athomi did little to allay. William Githaiga, for example, remembers that his father “wanted to go to school but they could not be allowed to go because their fathers thought that they would drink water with the human skull, and this human skull is the bowl” (interview, 15 August 1997, in Magutu location, Nyeri district). For skulls, see interview with Benjamin Mbugua (transcript in St Paul’s Divinity School Archives, Limuru), and Ward, 113; for graveyards and destroying divination implements, Sandgren, 45. 66 Canon Paul Mbatia, for example, remembers that when the time for his circumcision came and he refused to be initiated, “my father grew very wild with me and intended to kill those who taught me Christianity. They planned to have me by force for circumcision but McGregor calmed them down by threatening them that he would take them to Chief Karuri” (St Paul’s Divinity School Archives, Limuru).

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to free themselves of the ideological control of their elders. Rebellious young men would probably have found mehia useful as “sin,” since principled violation of thahu had become a mark of conversion. They might also have found the individualized ngoro liberating, since it freed them of the need to “listen” to their elders. Barlow’s dictionary suggests that debates over religious language and ideals of self-hood were as much at stake in Gikuyu debate as were terms like muthamaki, with its more overtly political implications. By the end of the colonial period Barlow’s ngoro had carried the field: Benson’s 1964 dictionary defines ngoro as “heart, spirit, conscience, mind, soul, inner man.”67 It is clear that this ngoro, like the various athamaki, emerged out of a long and tense dialogue between Gikuyu converts and missionary translators, in which Gikuyu debates played as much a role in determining key translations as did missionaries’ intentions. This reading suggests dictionaries were about more than rendering Gikuyu into the language of colonial administration. Gikuyu idioms were not merely “reduced” in these dictionaries into an instrumental code of phrases for the use of British colonial administrators and evangelists.68 Instead, the language conveyed in these dictionaries itself became an object of debate, as Gikuyu struggled over old questions of politics, age, self-hood, and virtue. They also argued about European institutions like the chiefship and the notion of the “soul,” bringing new vocabularies to bear on political and religious concerns. The language which missionaries and converts invented out of this long conversation was a hybrid, sitting uneasily at the intersection of coercive missionary discourses and Bakhtinian dialogue. 67 T. G. Benson, Kikuyu-English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 313. 68 I refer here to the Comaroffs, who argue that the missionary systematization of the Tswana languages gave rise to a rationalist model of culture, as the “capturing” of seTswana in dictionaries cemented the discursive boundaries between the colonial world and the African “other.”

The Gospel, Language and Culture: The Theological Method in Cultural Analysis Lamin Sanneh A central and obvious fact of the gospel is that we cannot separate it from culture, which means we cannot get at the gospel pure and simple. That is no more possible than getting at the kernel of the onion without the peel. The pure gospel, stripped of all cultural entanglements, would evaporate in a vague abstraction, although if the gospel were without its own intrinsic power it would be nothing more than cultural ideology, congealing into something like “good manners, comely living, and a sense that all was well,” the kind of genial, respectable liberalism that turns the gospel into a cultural flag of convenience. If Christianity could be turned into a pure platonic form then it would be religion fit only for the élite, whereas if it were just cultural reverence it would breed commissars of cultural codes and religious adjuncts as their subordinates, of both of which history has only too many unflattering examples. Yet, in spite of the difficulties, the gospel has its own integrity and speaks to us whatever our cultural or personal situation. The real challenge is to identify this intrinsic power without neglecting the necessary cultural factor.1 To begin to do that, it is important to call attention to the fundamental character of Christianity as a force for cultural integration. Several paradoxes point to this fact. The first is that Christianity is almost unique among world religions for being peripheral in the place of its origin. Ever since the birth of mission at Pentecost and the Antiochan breakthrough, Christianity has turned its back on Jerusalem and Bethlehem, regarding them as secondary signposts, with the consequence of the religion becoming preponderant in regions once considered outside God’s promises. The Christian religious psyche was purged of the “promised land” fixation, so that believers have almost to err to revert to any one centre to the exclusion of others.

Source: Sanneh, L., “The Gospel, Language and Culture: The Theological Method in Cultural Analysis,” International Review of Mission 84.332/333 (January 1995): pp. 47–64. Reproduced by permission of John Wiley and Sons. 1 This is relevant to arguments of Christianity as a subject of western cultural captivity. While the western “translation” of the religion domesticated the gospel, in its subsequent transmission and expansion abroad Christianity breached its western walls.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004399594_029

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The second paradox is that Christians are unique in abandoning the original language of Jesus and instead adopting Greek in its “Koine” and Latin in its “vulgar” as the central media of the church.2 Except in extremist sectarian groups, Christians never made the language of Jesus a prerequisite for faith or membership in the fellowship. It is this linguistic revolution that accounts for the entire New Testament canon being written in a language other than the one in which Jesus preached.3 Thus it is that translation, and its attendant cross-cultural implications, came to be built into the historical make-up of Christianity. Another striking paradox is the contention by Christians that God’s eternal counsels are compatible with ordinary, everyday speech.4 This view cuts across the tendency in some parts of early Christianity to cast the religion into an élitist gnostic discourse. Christianity in the mouth of Jesus was the divulging of the secret design of God,5 and Christian faith the public attestation to that fact. Of course, Jesus did not just turn plain speaking into expressive individualism, but rather made it the vehicle of his teachings. This view of religious language as belonging to the ordinary, commonplace world of men and women, and even of children,6 is not necessarily shared by the other religious traditions, which in fact are inclined to make a virtue of élitist secrecy, of a professional cultic language understandable only to the élite, initiated few. The Christian attitude to religious language places right at the heart of things the idea that people, especially ordinary people, should understand,7 a view with momentous consequences for social and cultural 2 For a scrupulous account of the language issue in the Bible see Matthew Black. “The Biblical Languages,” The Cambridge History of the Bible: Vol. I, From the Beginning to Jerome, eds., P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, repr. 1988, pp. 1–29. 3 Edward Gibbon writes, “The authentic histories of the actions of Christ were composed in the Greek language, at a considerable distance from Jerusalem, and after the Gentile converts were grown extremely numerous.” Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. i, 432. 4 Martin Luther is quoted as dismissing theologians as irrelevant to Bible translation. Instead the translator must “ask the mother in the home, the children on the street, the common man in the marketplace about this, and look them in the mouth to see how they speak, and afterward to our translating.” Cited in Jean Bethke Elshtain, review article, “The American Battlefield,” First Things, no. 23, May, 1992, pp. 69–72. 5 Mark 4: 22; Luke 8:17, 11:33; John 7:4; 18:20; W. Pannenberg, ed., Revelation as History. New York: Macmillan, 1969, pp. 141ff. 6 Erasmus wrote defending public and popular access to the scriptures. Erasmus, Christian Humanism and the Reformation, pp. 96–97. 7 Adolf Deismann, a scholar of the New Testament, argued that the old literary style of classical Attic differed markedly from the New Testament style in its elaborate and cultivated

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awakening, with people feeling that the social enterprise as such is not discontinuous with God’s universal plan.8 It is one of the great historical truths of our day that otherwise obscure tribes, without a claim to cosmopolitan attainment, should find in indigenous particularity the sole grounds for appeal to international recognition. It is the Christian promotion of this indigenous particularity with the vernacular translations of missions that laid the basis for the modern nationalist phenomenon. A final paradox, with practical implications for ecumenical relations, is the universal phenomenon of Christians adopting names for themselves without the explicit warrant of the founder of the religion or of the New Testament itself. The proliferation of denominational names and religious orders is the staple of all Christianity, whether from the left and low, or the right and high. This again is in sharp contrast to the other major world religions, and especially with those that have a missionary tradition, such as Islam. The name “Muslim,” for example, is shared by all the followers of Islam, whatever the real differences in culture, custom, history, language and nationality, with explicit Qur’anic sanction for the rule.9 Christians, on the other hand, identify themselves by a variety of religious labels, from Anglican to Zionist, with Methodists, Orthodox, Presbyterians and others making up the middle ranks. Instead of decrying this phenomenon, or applauding it in Islam, it is our duty to understand it within the general context of the translatability of Christianity. In these factors of paradox lies the central issue concerning the relationship between gospel and culture. In many quarters people assume that gospel and culture would make a right combination in the third world, that is to say, the “inculturation” or otherwise integration of Christian teachings with the culture, would be a healthy thing, while a similar combination of gospel and culture in the west is wrong or harmful. Consequently, western Christian refinement, whereas in the New Testament “the underground stream of the people’s language springs up powerfully into the daylight … Jesus spoke of the light and the candlestick, of the city on the hill, of father and child, bread and fish, egg and scorpion, of asking and giving, of seed and crop, of hunger and thirst. No long sentences, no speculative questions, transparent, pithy, plastic…. The linguistic estimation of the New Testament shows us that our Holy Book in its classical, creative period is in close contact with the middle and lower classes and in sharp contrast to the old artificial Atticistic culture which struggled for a new lease of life in the surrounding world.” The New Testament in the Light of Modern Research: The Haskell Lectures. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Coran & Co. Inc., 1929, pp. 80, 94. 8 Commenting on the revolutionary implications of the vernacular Bible, the English historian G. R. Elton noted the role it regrettably afforded the common folk. Reformation Europe 1517–1559. Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian Histories of Modern Europe, 1964, p. 52. 9 Qur’an 22:77–78.

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missions have come in for severe criticism because they bring this combination of gospel and culture into the third world where they suppress indigenous expression. A logical position, however, should see that the successful western cultural transformation of Christianity indicates a similar possibility for the third world, and, conversely, that the harmful consequences of the cultural adaptation of Christianity in the west will in time extend to the third world as well. This symmetrical argument brings us to what it is that makes culture both a natural ally and a natural foe for the gospel. It does not really matter whether we are speaking of culture in the west or in the third world in this regard. In all situations the gospel seems to find its natural congruence within the cultural stream while at the same time encountering there its most serious obstacles. I should like to expound this theme in terms of its religious and theological significance, and in terms of a missiology of linguistic and cultural symbols. My aim here would be to pioneer a methodology, not to produce a comprehensive statement.

Theology and the Cultural Symbols

In the heated and sophisticated discussion about religion and culture, there is a recurrent idea that religious truth is inseparable from culture, not just in the fortuitous way culture entangles religion but in the drastic sense that the cultural configuration of religion is also its final and essential form. In this view, cultural markers in the religious life signify not just religious reality but in fact constitute the reality itself, forms whose content is no more or less than how that content is symbolized. There is, however, something of a jump, or at any rate awkward transition, at this point, for if it is contended that on the one hand, religious traditions are themselves cultural refractions of God, and, on the other, that such refractions are symbols that do not hold anything independent of themselves, then we would have a reinforced circularity in which God is only a formal point of reference, useful for poetry and linguistic convention, perhaps, but otherwise superfluous as an independent reality. Thus to speak of God in terms exclusively as a form of human cultural encounter would be only an unnecessarily complicated, roundabout way of describing the human enterprise as cultural forms in different modes of apprehension. What is not clear in this procedure is whether “God” is a metaphor for the general principle of unity that cultural symbols signify, or whether the concrete forms of representation themselves undergo a sort of intrinsic mystical transformation at the same time as they refract and in other ways project the idea of God. Either

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way, material objects would acquire rather inconsistent powers: they would form and shape reality; they would emanate or otherwise reveal reality, and they would generate ideas and theories with which we apprehend, explain and in other important ways sort them out. This would be fetishism and would be clearly absurd: tobacco does not also contain grains that tell us about lighting, smoking or worshipping it, nor do mountains and streams from their mass and dynamism give us logical charts or catechisms about contours and scales. It is only in relation to specific religious ideas and ritual actions that material objects acquire symbolic meaning. Yet a good deal of the discussion of religion and culture is marked by a contradiction pretty close to this logical repetitiveness, and intelligent people have found themselves swept along by the sheer force of repetition. When we in turn strip and materialize cultural forms to construct our categories of the real and the ideal we exploit a procedure incapable of enlightening us about either, for the argument forces us to take as real ideal notions and their cultural configuration, with the result that cultural perceptions become philosophical conceptions, qualitative analogies literal facts, and representation identity. We do not stop to ask ourselves how cultural forms can be both modifiers and subjects, the path and the destination at the same time, how abstract or freely exchangeable forms of representation can also congeal as the incarnate substance and subject of what they represent. This is at the heart of the issue of cultural relativism, including the unwarranted step of inferring epistemological relativism from descriptive or ethnographic relativism. The great nineteenth century Sankritist and historian of religion, Max Müller, referring to this phenomenon of reducing religion to its cultural forms, once spoke of religion as “a disease of language,” a phrase that haunted him in later years. Müller meant by that the tendency of metaphorical language employed in a religious context to harden and obscure the original and concrete experience and its attributes that gave the initial impetus to language. For example, the striking idea that a memorable event once occurred at dawn may come down in metaphorical language as: “Apollo loved Daphne; Daphne fled before him and was changed into a laurel tree.” In this account Apollo is a solar deity, and Daphne, the Greek for a laurel tree, was dawn. The story would then reveal itself to be the sun chasing away dawn. It is called the Solar Myth. The process at work here, according to Müller, is the personification of experience and its attributes as deities. Thus nomina become numina. Or, to take another example, the king dying in a western battle may become mythologized as the symbol of the sun setting in the west, while Apollo killing the python would be an allegory of summer driving out winter. Müller believed, therefore, that philology (he was professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford) would be a

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necessary instrument to remedy the defect, or at any rate the natural tricks, of language. However, this theory sounds unconvincingly as if the disease and its cure are the same,10 which is another way of saying it is a form of reductionism. It is not only linguistic philosophers who lose their footing on this issue. In his valuable comments on Ernst Troeltsch, James Luther Adams, his distinguished American interpreter, for example, attempts gallantly to defend Troeltsch against the possible charge of reductionism, saying that Troeltsch maintained “a tension within his mind, asserting on the one hand that ‘the divine life is not one but many’ and on the other that ‘to apprehend the One in the many constitutes the special character of love.’ This paradox was for him ‘the icon of God.’”11 But this would appear to be a basic fault of identifying in a literal way the idea of the one God with its many cultural symbols and representations. Even as sensitive a scholar of religious phenomenology as John Oman trips badly on this point when he views particularity as the many tending to obscure and distort the true apprehension of “the unity of an undifferentiated awe of one sacred reality.” For Oman particularity casts a dark shadow over the “promise of a shining temple of unity,” which has made “religion to appear at times the supreme mother-complex of humanity.”12 It was this kind of procedure that vitiated Enlightenment studies of other cultures and religions, a failing from which we have still not recovered fully, although St Augustine had written cogently and instructively on the intellectual folly of religious reductionism.13 To proceed, it seems reasonable to say that cultural formulations of God are possible because God is available in the first place as the prior category, rather than that culture feeds on itself to produce a sacral category, like water and vapour. However we look at it, the mountain can scarcely worship the mouse of its own labour. G. K. Chesterton, with his penchant for playful, if revealing paradox, says the issue is not how nature, or culture for that matter, gave us our idea of God, but how God gave us our idea of nature and culture. He contends that much of our 10 On the general matter of religion as a cultural system, see the chapter by that title in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. On Max Müller see Evans-Pritchard, and his posthumous A History of Anthropological Thought, ed. André Singer. New York: Basic Books, 1965, 1981. 11 James Luther Adams, Introduction in Ernst Troeltsch, The Absoluteness of Christianity. Trans. David Reid. Richmond: John Knox Press, 1971, p. 19. 12 John Oman, The Natural and the Supernatural. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931, pp. 386–387. 13 Augustine, City of God, book vi, sections 8 & 9. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, and New York: Penguin Books, 1981, pp. 242ff.

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reductionist hostility to religion in general is fuelled by our prior commitment to deny Christianity in particular, so that with the same unilateral stubbornness we bring other religions and cultures to an equal fate. He writes: The god was never a symbol or hieroglyph representing the sun. The sun was a hieroglyph representing the god…. No human being … was ever so unnatural as to worship Nature. No man however indulgent (as I am) to corpulency, ever worshipped a man as round as the sun or a woman as round as the moon. No man, however attracted to an artistic attenuation, ever really believed that the Dryad was as lean and stiff as the tree. We human beings have never worshipped Nature; and indeed, the reason is very simple. It is that all human beings are superhuman beings. We have printed our image upon Nature, as God has printed His image upon us. We have told the enormous sun to stand still; we have fixed him on our shields, caring no more for a star than for a starfish. And when there were powers of Nature we could not for the time control, we have conceived great beings in human shape controlling them. Jupiter does not mean thunder. Thunder means the march and victory of Jupiter. Neptune does not mean the sea; the sea is his, and he made it…. Heathen gods mean nothing, and must always mean nothing, to those of us that deny the Christian God.14 Religious people may therefore respond that while they employ culture to represent God as transcendent being, the God who is so represented may not be identified with some cultural manifestations to the exclusion of others, so that partial cultural representation does not become the comprehensive criterion of God. Such a Christian position would allow cultural access and utilization without making end and means synonymous. Consequently, in the detailed and specific responses religious people make, it can be said that God is connected to culture, but, in the general scheme of salvation history, God is connected to culture not in the descriptive sense as a figure of identity but in the normative one where the plan is to bring everything under subjection to Christ.

14 G. K. Chesterton “The Priest of Spring.” In Stories, Essays and Poems. London: Everyman’s Library no. 913, 1935, repr. 1965, p. 163. With characteristic brilliance Chesterton develops the same theme in his book, The Everlasting Man. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1925, especially chapter V, “Man and Mythologies,” and chapter VI, “The Demons and the Philosophers.”

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This may sound at once threatening and inconclusive, threatening because it rejects cultural systems as in any sense definitive of truth, and inconclusive because it perceives culture as inseparable from the truth. However, we can reply that the truth of God is finally destroyed if it becomes absolutely synonymous with corresponding cultural forms. The fundamental question, then, is whether the truth of God has also to be capable of being conceived beyond—and through—all cultural systems if it is to amount to anything more than ethnocentrism, though if it bypassed culture altogether the truth would be nothing more (or less) than subjective idealism. This philosophical dilemma is in fact the paradox that made the crosscultural frontline the source of much creative innovation and religious practice, for in that context cultural forms are upheld in their plural diversity without their being absolutized in their unique particularity. The great historical forms of culture are thus refined and consummated through the milieu of mother tongue translation and set against the background of common ethical accountability. It was in this way that historical forms of culture became more than a multiplicity of disconnected episodes; they became coherent links in the chain all human beings depend on for communication, self-understanding and moral education. This is the soft instrumental view Christianity in its worldwide expansion has promoted with regard to languages and culture. It grows out of the Christian view of who and what God is and its effect has been to endow the religion with a pluralist ethos at the heart of the gospel. It is important to spell out what is the particular, peculiar Christian understanding of culture, and to do this from the perspective of the New Testament. The primitive Christians inherited from Judaism the Law and the synagogue as the exclusive standards of religious truth. However, from their subsequent understanding of the life and work of Christ, they came to a fresh view concerning God’s impartial activity in all cultures. The watershed for this new understanding was Pentecost as the birth of mission which set a seal on mother tongues as sufficient and necessary channels of access to God,15 a piece of cultural innovation that enabled the religion to adopt the multiplicity of geographical centres as legitimate destinations for the gospel. Christians continued to cherish their judaic roots in the context of growing pluralism within the church, a pluralism at the core of which is the principle that no culture is the exclusive norm of truth and that, similarly, no culture is inherently unclean in the eyes of God. So Jews, Gentiles, barbarians, Scythians, Cypriots, Arabs, Goths, Ethiopians, Copts, among others, were all to be found rubbing shoulders at prayer, worship 15

Acts 2:6, 8, 11.

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and in acts of mutual succour. In time, too, numerous intellectual streams discharged their share into the church, so that Aquinas could speak of the great advantage that accrued to the church from the fact that the fathers and early apologists had been pagans. The Christian movement confidently, if not always consistently, adopted many diverse kinds of materials, including Gnostic sources, placing early Christian thought within a pluralist context, and this kind of eclecticism was the natural outgrowth of the gospel having been translated out of Galilean Aramaic and Hebrew into country (Koine) Greek, so that, as I observed earlier, most of the early converts had no living knowledge of the primary language of the preaching of Jesus. Clearly the early Christians understood that the language issue may be detached from the question of faithfulness to the message of Jesus Christ and that gives us an important clue into culture as an instrumental possibility. Two major consequences for the religious status of culture may be characterized as, first, the relativization of all cultural arrangements, and, second, the de-stigmatization of all Gentile or taboo cultures. Thus would transcendent truth subsume cultures, and mobilize them at the same time. Taboo cultures, regarded through time and eternity as outside the pale of salvation, came thus to qualify as among the first fruits of God’s impartial dealings with humanity. These two consequences became the heritage that opened the way for teeming pluralism and diversity of view in the community, with Christians drawing on a complex assortment of cultural materials to define and undefine themselves, something that has relevance for issues of denominational identity. In a recently discovered letter written from Nicopolis on the Dalmatian coast to his friend Darius at Rome, for example, Severus draws attention to the character of the fledgling religion. The letter was written sometime in the early third century. Severus and his friend had been in the habit of comparing notes on the Christian movement, a hobby that blossomed into a genial rivalry between them, in which connection the enigmas from Nicopolis would be variations on a theme. “I have a tale to tell you,” Severus piques his friend’s curiosity, “that will surpass even your most fantastic account of Christians in Rome. Since our common fascination with this new and outlandish religion drew us together and we dedicated ourselves to chronicling the spectacle of these Christians, our competition for news of this curious fellowship has been played largely on a level field. But you must admit, my friend, that my posting to Nicopolis has put me at a decided disadvantage. Yet, despite the odds, I’ve topped you this time.” And then he went on promptly to recount the details of a debate attended by Christians about establishing a new seminary syllabus. He called the Christians “diverse and factious,” and the proceedings “such a circus.” He continued, “Open dissent had shattered the illusion of conformity, and

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the steady tone of authority was overwhelmed by buzzing more fierce than a thousand angry hornets. How these people could agree that the sky is blue, my friend, let alone what to teach their leaders, is beyond my powers of understanding…. What fun!” he added.16 All these materials suggest that in the early centuries the new religion moved forward like an oriental caravanserai, with its complex baggage of exotic teachings, baffling mysteries, colourful sounds and an eclectic ethical code, leaving the authorities to whistle in the dark about the unshakable foundations that have ordered the community, fixed the beliefs and set the common practices. In the jumble and tumble of social encounter, Christians spoke a bewildering variety of languages, with the new experience again and again exciting bursts of separatist fervour. In this respect, at least, Christianity was a major cultural as well as religious revolution whose force has endured into our own time. Its basic outline is extremely simple: from the point of view of God’s “plan of salvation,” all cultures are equally valid, if equally inadequate vis-à-vis God.

Vernacular Languages and Cultures under the Gospel

With the modern missionary enterprise we come upon spectacular examples of cultural pluralism in the church.17 To begin with, vernacular translations of the Bible began with the adoption of indigenous terms, concepts, customs and idioms for the central categories of Christianity. Second, vernacular criteria began to determine what is or what is not a successful translation, with indigenous experts rapidly moving to challenge western interpretations of Christianity.18 Third, the employment of the vernacular led to a proliferation of languages into which the scriptures were translated.19 Fourth, in numerous significant cases missionary translations were the first attempt to write down the language. Where this was the case Christian translators have had 16 “Ancient Letter Discovered: The Seminary Crisis at Nicopolis,” The Christian Century, 5–12 Feb. 1992, pp. 116–117. 116. 17 In his summary of the cultural and linguistic impact of the Bible, Eric Fenn points out the indigenizing potential of Scriptural translation. Eric Fenn, “The Bible and the Missionary,” The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. iii: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day, ed. S. L. Greenslade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963, repr. 1988, pp. 383–407. 18 A recent example of this shift of interpretation is given in Vincent Donovan, Christianity Rediscovered. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1979. 19 In 1984 more than 1,800 languages were involved in some form of Bible translating. In Africa alone some 522 languages were involved, with complete Bibles available in over 100 languages. Scriptures of the World. London, New York & Stuttgart: United Bible Societies, 1984.

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to produce vernacular alphabets, grammars, dictionaries and vocabularies of the language, supplementing these with compilations of proverbs, idioms, axioms, ethnographic materials, and accounts of local religions, customary practice and law, history and political institutions. Such a detailed and scrupulous inventory of the vernacular culture triggered unimaginable consequences in the wider society, resulting almost everywhere in arousing deep loyalties towards the indigenous cause. Often that was the seedbed of nationalism. It is impossible to over-estimate the revolutionary impact of Christian translation on hitherto illiterate societies and their now new encounter with the west. In addition, to bring this list to its final stage, there was a theological truth implicit in all this enterprise, and that concerns God’s prevenient grace which preceded the missionary and by which missionaries themselves proceeded to adopt existing forms and usage as if God was their hidden life. Thus could Newbigin say, In almost all cases where the Bible has been translated into the languages of the non-Christian peoples of the world, the New Testament word Theos has been rendered by the name given by the non-Christian peoples to the one whom they worship as Supreme Being. It is under this name, therefore, that the Christians who now use these languages worship the God and Father of Jesus Christ…. The name of the God revealed in Jesus Christ can only be known by using those names for God which have been developed within the non-Christian systems of belief and worship. It is therefore impossible to claim that there is a total discontinuity between the two.20 Behind (and before) all that consecrated labour lies the precious jewel of God’s impartiality towards all peoples and cultures, a truth that disarms culture by making it our possession instead of our determiner. In this way we resolve the endemic hostility of having a sword drawn between moral truth and culture, with the gap between the two filled with the unattractive alternatives of cultural capitulation or religious antagonism. Cultures inscribed with the idiom of the gospel are cultures made discarnate, de-absolutized, in the incarnate logos, and thus transformed from being our idol or exclusive ally, and our enemy or oppressor, to being our reconciled, rightful possession. It is clear that missionary translators saw a natural commensurability between indigenous cultures and the gospel, with the diversity and plurality of those cultures justifying commitment to the particularity and specificity of 20 Newbigin, The Open Secret, p. 192.

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cultural materials. Not only individual languages, but also minute dialectical differences were noted and preserved in translations.21 Mission seems to press to its logical conclusion the premise of the admissibility of all cultures in the general sweep of God’s “plan of salvation,” eager to witness to God in the words and names of other people’s choosing. Concerning the role of language, it is important to keep in mind that in traditional societies language and culture are closely intertwined, and that in religion both are promoted in an integrated, dynamic way. Therefore missionary translations appealed to the very roots of these societies, touching the springs of life and imagination in real, enduring ways. It would be appropriate to conclude this section of our discussion with a closer clarification of the vernacular issue in Christian missionary translation, and to do this in two interconnected stages. The first concerns the mildly instrumental view of culture, and, in particular, the question of language and its relationship to religion and culture in traditional societies. The second has to do with the question of the particular and the universal, of the general and the specific, of truth as one and of culture as many in its diverse manifestations and contingencies, and how in the final analysis that impinges on the theme of gospel and culture. With vernacular translation, missionaries introduced a new level of complexity into Christian usage. In the multilingual setting of tribal societies, concepts of God resonated with ancient usage, with refinements taking place in incidents of ritual observance and customary practice. Often it is not the jealous God of Calvinistic clericalism that translators had adopted, or thought they were adopting, for the vernacular scriptures, but the polyonymous deity of the tribe, resplendent with theophorous titles. Furthermore, the very pluralism in vernacular translation created increased local awareness and forced practical comparisons across tribal boundaries, showing how the “God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ” of apostolic preaching came to be invested with a plurality of names, none of which excludes the others. This theological inclusiveness had its counterpart in the social sphere where in many places inter-ethnic encounter became possible for the first time outside the constraints of tribal blood-feud and fratricidal grudge.22

21 In the Chinese translations, for example, some forty seven versions were employed by missionaries, with eight additional ones for Taiwan. Scriptures of the World, map 15. A similar detailed attention was given to Arabic and its local variants. 22 I have described aspects of social and theological inclusiveness in my article, “Christian Missions and the Western Guilt Complex,” The Christian Century, 8 April, 1987.

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In turning to the second part of our analysis, I should like to recapitulate at the same time the problem of the one and the many, of the particular and the universal. It is clear that in employing vernacular languages for translation, missionaries saw these languages as more than arbitrary devices. On the contrary, they saw them as endowed with divine significance, so that they may substitute completely for the language of revelation. The fact that all languages are, for the purposes of Christian translation, interchangeable, makes them instrumental in a practical sense, so that in their very differences they all serve an identical theoretical purpose. A certain general view came to undergird and persist in the plurality of languages, with the important point that vernacular particularity is commensurate, rather than in conflict, with such a general idea. Languages were seen as the many refractions in which believers testified to the one God, so that particular cultural descriptions of God might convey in concrete terms the truth of God without in any way excluding other cultural descriptions.23 The question then arises as to whether what is said in any language totally exhausts the meaning of God, or whether languages, any or some languages, have to be augmented to improve their intrinsic capacity. As an alternative view, it may be maintained that language—indeed all languages—is inherently inadequate and that religious truth ultimately, if not immediately, transcends human words. This view has respectable advocates in many sections of Christianity, although the question for us is its implication for the culture that is thus transcended. Whatever the case, insofar as the history of mission is concerned, such a transcendent view of religious truth does not seem to have induced in missionaries an indifference to culture. In that sense we are back to the question regarding the intrinsic adequacy of language. The missionary view was that all languages may be regarded as complete autonomous systems, and that, where it was possible to determine, purer forms of the language, however puzzling and unfamiliar, served best the purposes of translation. So linguistic investigations were mounted to erect as authentic an indigenous system through which God might be mediated with all the nuances and specificity of cultural originality.

23 In his Introduction to Troeltsch’s The Absoluteness of Christianity, James Luther Adams says of Troeltsch that he maintained “a tension within his mind, asserting on the one hand that ‘the divine life is not one but many’ and on the other that ‘to apprehend the One in the many constitutes the special character of love.’ This paradox was for him ‘the icon of God.’” Troeltsch, The Absoluteness of Christianity, 1971, p. 19. This is not so much a tension in Troeltsch as a lack of analytic consistency, resulting from a tendency to contrast and then to identify the one with the many.

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A working principle of language and culture was implied in this procedure. Missionaries were confident that once they made a successful conjunction between a linguistic symbol and what it brings to mind, then the religious process could commence meaningfully, and we can say that much of what has been said against missionaries overlooks this vernacular confidence of theirs. Three theoretical notions may be identified in their operational view of language and culture. The first is that language furnished elliptical statements that enable people to define instrumental relationships, and in religious language elliptical statements refer to those things in which God reveals Godself, especially as effects. The second is that language enables people to make symbolical statements to the effect that what in itself is not God but represents the idea of God to certain persons is in fact God for those persons in those contexts. That is to say, such language or symbols achieve the end of directing attention to the symbolic character of the idea of God to the exclusion of whatever other qualities language or symbols may possess in another context in relation to God. Two brief examples may suffice. Kissing the crucifix was considered an act of reverence by early Catholic missionaries, whereas in certain parts of Africa kissing as such was considered an act of defilement, repugnant to the instinct of the people. To take a second example, for a mystical religious group the bat is considered a symbol of initiation and divine wisdom, and occurs as such on the coronation robe of King Roger of Sicily. Yet in the different context of popular western culture the bat is a symbol of ill-omen. The two contexts share in common a recognition of the categories of divine wisdom and ill-omen, but they employ contrasting cultural symbols to signify this. A third theoretical notion is when language encourages the use of figures of identity so that a close enough relationship is conceived between the thing spoken of with what it is said to be, with the result that virtual metamorphosis, a symbolic mutation, takes place. This clearly happens in most cultures: the sound and tones of Hebrew, Arabic and Sanskrit, for example, are in their respective religious contexts the embodiment of the divine or ultimate reality, while in certain sections of Christianity the bread and wine of the communion are the transubstantiated body and blood of Jesus Christ. Among the Yoruba of West Africa the orita, the auspicious crossroad, is a symbol of power, while for the Nuer rain, thunder, lightning, sun and moon, as well as consecrated cattle, are not God exactly, but gaat Kwoth, “children of God,” and so on. Now it is a different matter to claim that, while God may be in these various things as symbols, these things as representation are themselves God, or else portrayed as such, precisely how cultural relativism elides the descriptive into the normative, and how theological demythologizing undercuts scripture by representing it as a stock projection of the religious imagination.

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A version of that relativism occurs readily in secular culture. Politicians cultivate a certain media image in the belief that with time image will preponderate and subsume reality. Even if people started out knowing the difference between fictive construction in image and literal facts, the argument goes, in time the construction will prevail and assimilate reality. Presentation or packaging, by trading on fantasy, displaces substance. Thus would occur a literal mutation in which historical facts are sabotaged, or at any rate transcended, through the illusory power of surface construction, allowing virtual reality to assume ascendancy over literal fact. This kind of traffic in image as virtual commodity we regard as Leviathan’s due and call political realism, but we would call it fraud in commercial law. It is no less fraudulent in the moral law. Now even in this crass political sense, although image-making may redefine the idea of the person, it is the reality of the person who gave us, and benefits or suffers, from the idea of image-making as such. An idea, such as political appeal, is fixed on the individual to the exclusion of other ideas about him or her, so that an identity is put to the service of a cause, like a flag of convenience. To make the one the literal representation of the other, however, would be absurd. It is what would be involved if John Smith in general became Commandant Smith in particular. “Or, as the name first came from the function, it is as when the ancestral anvil is forgotten in the name of Smith and the owner is on his way to a peerage.”24 Hollywood might traffic in that kind of counterfeit, but it behooves us not to exchange it for historical realism. Yet in the social analysis of religion we resort to a procedure very similar to that, whereas in actual fact it is religious truth that allows us to drape and hoist material objects as sacred emblems and symbols. It follows, then, that in the religious sphere, a missionary tradition like Christianity has to face the challenge of embracing numerous material forms and their corresponding symbols in terms meaningful to target audiences, and thus of rejecting literalness. Bread and wine in China or Japan,25 for example, would have a vastly different understanding, if they have any at all, while the Good Shepherd theme would confound rather than enlighten an Eskimo congregation, or, as Nida and Reyburn have suggested, the pig-keeping communities of Polynesia.26 Furthermore, a missionary Christianity would have to make 24 Oman, The Natural, p. 390. 25 For a detailed account of this issue in Japan see Masao Takenaka, God is Rice: Asian Culture and Christian Faith. Geneva: World Council of Churches, Risk Book Series, 1986 and for China George Minamiki, S. J., The Chinese Rites Controversy: From Its Beginning to Modern Times. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1985. 26 Eugene A. Nida and William D. Reyburn, Meaning Across Cultures. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1981.

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room for new cultural symbols, such as the Peace Pipe of the Lakota Indians,27 the Wisdom Fire of the Cherokee Indians,28 the communal medicine and riverain oracles of African religions,29 or the avatars of Hindu religion. Making room for these new cultural materials also requires relativizing them so they do not become new sources of ideology themselves.30 It is this incredible complexity that Christianity encountered, and in fact promoted, in its non-western expansion. The specificity of vernacular usage was reflected in indigenous names for God and in idiomatic forms grounded in local life and experience. Missionary translators tried to get at authentic local forms and in the process documented the result of their investigations, giving meticulous accounts of procedures and principles of research that went far beyond the narrow issue of Bible use. Such detailed attention to indigenous particularity fostered unprecedented cultural pluralism within the general scheme of world Christianity. For example, indigenous hymns, prayers and invocations, heavily freighted with older religious attitudes, sentiments and ideas, were now transcribed and incorporated into Christian use where ecumenical interest gave them international range. It turns out then that missionary translation expanded and enriched the Christian religious repertoire, and it did this by eschewing uniformity as its norm. The operative view of language in Christian translation assumed a close relationship between language and the God spoken of, so that in any cultural representation God can be detached in the mind from the things said to be God, even if these peculiar cultural forms, be they the peace-pipe, the bread and wine, the wisdom fire, the orita, or what have you, cannot in those specific situations be so easily detached from the idea of God as such. This gave culture and language a penultimate character, allowing them to be viewed in their 27 See Paul B. Steinmetz, S.J., 1980, Pipe, Bible and Peyote among the Ogala Lakota, Stockholm Studies in Comparative Religion Stockholm: University of Stockholm, 1980. 28 Dhyani Ywahoo, Voices of Our Ancestors: Cherokee Teachings from the Wisdom Fire. Boston & London: Shambhala Publications, 1987. 29 E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azende. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937; revised abridged edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. 30 Commenting on this matter, Gordon Kaufman affirms: “If indigenization were to mean that the idea of God became so completely adapted to the concepts and norms and practices of a new culture that it no longer could serve as a radical standard of criticism for that culture … full indigenization of the idea of God would be its destruction. For the concept of One who is at once truly absolute and truly human is never completely “at home” in the relativities and imperfections…. of any culture….” Gordon D. Kaufman, “Theological Method and Indigenzation: Six Theses,” in Samuel Amirtham, ed., A Vision for Man: Essays on Faith, Theology and Society. Madras: Christian Literature Society, 1978, p. 59.

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instrumental particularity.31 In insisting on particularity, for example, Christian missionaries did not wish to imply that God is other than what God is, but that in particular cultural contexts and circumstances God has definite, particular qualities and attributes that do not belong to God in other contexts and circumstances. It is not that these qualities and attributes are incompatible with God generally defined, but that something more, in respect of the pool of qualities and attributes, is added by each particular context.32 Those qualities and attributes become the modes and individual ways in which God becomes real for particular people in particular situations and circumstances even though those situations and circumstances by their nature do not repeat themselves for everyone anywhere else or to the same degree. The psalmist may declare that God is a shield or a rock, or Luther that God is a mighty fortress and bulwark, or a western existential liberal that God is the God of motivation without any of them excluding other descriptions of God, such as the dewy-nosed One of a cattle-owning culture, the One of the sacred stake of a pig-herding people, the nimble-footed One of the sacred dance, and the long-necked One of a hunting group. Furthermore, this rule makes it possible not only to approach God as the One and the Many, but allows for indefinite polarities in descriptions of God. As such, apparently contradictory things may equally validly be said of God, such as that God gives life and that God takes life, that God creates and that God destroys, guides and leads astray, fills us with abundance and afflicts us with adversity at the same time, brings terrifying judgement upon us and also surrounds us with tender care and love, strikes us blind but also unseals the eyes of understanding, and so on.33 As such the Nuer speak of God being in the new moon and in the hurricane.34 In this way the totality and range of human experience can be postulated of God’s infinite manifestations, 31 A kindred theme is treated in Aubrey R. Johnson, The One and the Many in the Israelite Conception of God. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1961, pp. 14, 15–16, etc. Johnson is inclined to conceive a dialectical opposition between the One and the Many as between monotheism and polytheism. 32 Something like this idea may offer an escape hatch for Hocking who writes wistfully in this regard about the bewildering religious pluralism in Protestant Christianity. “My own feeling about the multiplicity of sects,” he confesses, “is that most of them that have become a factor in contemporary society have had some reason for existence; most ‘reforms’ have been needed. But that function of reform should be a function provided for within the church, not calling for schism, but for self-searching and reconception, in the persuasion that variety of expression which is not hostile to the essence may contribute to the life of the church.” Hocking, World Civilization, p. 134. 33 See, for example, Isaiah, 9:21; Revelations, 2:8; Deuteronomy, 29:1–5. 34 Evans-Pritchard deals with this subject in his book, Nuer Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956.

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refractions and visitations without courting the awkward rationalist nemesis of admitting God on the explicable but not the inexplicable side of life. On the cultural level a similar plurality and polarity is possible from this approach. The context of western mission provides as good an example as any. Between Europeans and native populations, on the one hand, and, on the other, among tribal groupings themselves, there are differences on the cultural and linguistic levels. These differences are unique and particular even though all these many groups represent the one idea of humanity. What unites them, however, is more than a question of species but their common relationship in respect to God. For this reason, the cultural signs and symbols that differentiate them in their respective particularities unite them in relation to God. It is God as this third term who thus normatively unites what cultural forms descriptively differentiate. Now it seems to me an important matter not to confuse differentiating and unifying, by treating the first, in terms of cultural autonomy, as the source of the second in terms of theological ideas and principles, which is to say, to boil down “cultural signs and symbols” into a warm, genial construction of the idea of “God.” It is this difficulty, I suggested, that Christian realism can help resolve. Consequently Christian commitment to this God has necessarily involved commitment also to cultural forms in their historical instrumental potential. In conclusion, no discussion of this topic is complete without more than a polite nod in the direction of H. Richard Niebuhr, whose work more than a generation ago set the pace for us.35 Niebuhr cuts through the liberal cultural transformation of Christianity into an enlightened, humanizing but essentially this-worldly philosophy, with social belief and action replacing human sinfulness, spiritual reality and eternal judgement. In taking up cudgels on behalf of a threatened and waning orthodoxy, Niebuhr was responding to particular cultural pressures in his day and age. Thus neither in his methodology and 35 H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1951, repr. 1975. Compare also the same author’s Radical Monotheism and Western Culture, the Montgomery Lectures. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960, 1967. In Radical Monotheism, Niebuhr argues that the central conflict in western culture is between monotheist faith and henotheism, especially henotheist nationalism. He distinguishes between monotheist faith and henotheism, saying the faith present in religious loyalty is the same as that present in other forms of faith commitment in the secular sphere. The conflict arises between the two types of faith, Niebuhr argues, because henotheism makes a finite society the object of trust and loyalty. In a different connection, but still related to the issue of radical pluralism and religious integrity, Gordon Kaufman has written about the radical effects of the principle of God’s absoluteness. “God is the great relativizer of all false absolutes,” he writes. Kaufman, “Theological Method and Indigenization,” p. 58.

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language nor in his general conclusions did Niebuhr propose something that his contemporaries would not have recognized as natural developments from the stock and branch of western culture, especially the form neo-orthodoxy might take as the analogue of cultural respectability and intellectual sobriety— cool, rational, moderate and eminently affordable. Its songs would be stolid, its hymns intrepid and its prayers hard-nosed. And that made him a powerfully effective voice for his time and circumstance. Nevertheless, Niebuhr was not concerned with the worldwide phenomenon of Christian cultural practices where he would have seen the outlines of fresh permutations and new combinations emerging under explicit Christian aegis. It is reasonable to speculate that such evidence might have affected his work on the western religious crisis in a different way. Lesslie Newbigin was saying something like that when he paid tribute to Niebuhr for his Christ and Culture, and went on to say that Niebuhr, as well as theologians like him, “had not had the experience of the cultural frontier, of seeking to transmit the gospel from one culture to a radically different one.”36 In other words, even when we think we are free of the constraints of culture, we are still in unsuspecting ways chained down by countless minute links, hooks and clasps, including the terms in which we express our formal autonomy. At any rate, Niebuhr’s concern for not reducing Christ into a mere cultural protagonist is a valid one, although in this paper I have tried to advance different grounds for making the same distinction. The conclusion I have reached, therefore, is a slightly modified version of his own formulations. I am concerned not only to safeguard the authority of Christ but the authenticity of culture as well. The connection between Christ and culture, to stick to the Niebuhrian formulation, is much closer than either what Niebuhr calls the “conversionist” or the “dualist” position, and more susceptible to cultural manipulation than the liberals might think. It is thus pertinent to observe that it is not only religious sensibility that leads Christians to distinguish between Christ and culture, it is sensibility also for what promotes authentic culture. When we conceive the matter in these terms, it is obvious that the one gospel becomes meaningfully mediated through the many refractions of culture and historical contingency, as well through the many and diverse channels that constitute our individual and collective gifts and talents. It would be well to remember that Plato made the many incompatible with his design of the ideal

36 Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture. Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1986, p. 1; also the same writer’s The Open Secret, p. 164.

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city state in which occupational specialization in terms of “one man one job” would operate to enable “the whole city to be one and not many.”37 Compared to that, Paul seems to represent a breakthrough, with abiding significance for all projects of multiculturalism. The apostle’s view of gospel and culture blunts considerably any sharp dualist notion. The incipient radical pluralism we have identified in Paul helps us to moderate any endemic conflict between gospel and culture. For instance, when he admonishes the believers not to allow the rules of food to destroy the work of God,38 Paul is not proposing that eating and praying are in conflict, or even that the one is done from a lower motive and the other from a higher one, but that God and food in any exclusivist combination nourish neither spirit nor body. It is the worst form of addiction, and it is not only Christians, but especially Christians, who deserve better. So Christian pluralism in its compromising, rigorous form, is not only a committed state of mind with regard to God’s Oneness in sovereignty and power but a committed style of living with respect to the many-sidedness of culture. In that convergence we may find strength for the critical relationship between the gospel and the contending cultural ideologies of our time. The question was raised at the outset about the cultural captivity of the gospel at one end, and, at the other, its cultural emasculation, remains a formidable one for Christianity as a translated and translatable religion. The following conclusion may be stated as the crux of the issue and would seem to follow from the nature of the evidence: Christianity affects cultures by moving them to a position short of the absolute, and it does this by placing God at the centre. The point of departure for the church in mission, as we saw at the outset, is Pentecost, with Christianity triumphing by relinquishing Jerusalem or any fixed universal centre, be it geographical, linguistic or cultural, and with the result of there being a proliferation of centres, languages and cultures within the church. Christian ecumenism is a pluralism of the periphery with only God at the centre. Consequently all cultural expressions remain at the periphery of truth, all equal in terms of access, but all equally inadequate in terms of what is ultimate and final. Thus while we cannot conceive of the gospel without its 37 Plato, 1961, Republic, Book. iv, 423, in The Collected Dialogues, eds. Edith Hamilton & Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books for Bollingen Foundation, p. 665. Also The Laws, Book. viii, 846f., Collected Dialogues, pp. 1410f. Cf. John Stuart Mill d. 1873, Essays on Philosophy and Classics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. xi 1978, pp. 94–95. There is more than a hint of Plato’s civic ethics in Paul’s conception of the ideal fellowship in Romans 12 and I Corinthians 12, though Plato’s functional exclusivism is undercut by Paul’s understanding of one body made real in its many members and their multiple functions. 38 Romans 14:15, 20.

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requisite cultural expression, we cannot at the same time confine it exclusively to that, for that would involve the unwarranted step of making ends and means synonymous. Such was the double caution missionary translation introduced into the cultural project, though we are in only the early stages of comprehending its full theological significance.

Women and Cultural Exchanges Patricia Grimshaw and Peter Sherlock Robin Winks complained in volume V of the Oxford History of the British Empire that women’s studies had made a negligible impact on imperial history. Scholars of gender and women’s experience had done little to transform the broader field. Moreover, their debates had been conducted ‘in a side area, as though the issues had been marginalized’. Nonetheless, he predicted that the quantity and scope of the work on women was bound to grow—as indeed it has.1 Certainly the first four volumes of the Oxford History of the British Empire are barely touched by contemporary feminist scholarships (a fault partially repaired by the companion volume Gender and Empire).2 Mainstream histories of Christian missions have paid even less attention to women and the insights of feminist scholars. Even academic mission histories have slighted women’s experiences. This absence is remarkable, for since the proliferation of feminist critiques of humanities and the social sciences in the 1970s, much groundbreaking work has been completed on the role of women in missions and Empire. This chapter maps the trajectory of historical writing about women in missions from its origins in hagiography to current work informed by postcolonial theoretical insights. It delineates key findings, points to omissions requiring attention, and attempts to evaluate the significance of such studies for the field as a whole. Resources for the history of missionary women over the last two centuries are diverse and dispersed, reflecting the wide variety of experience depending on marital status, age, personal capacity, and the possibilities for women’s work offered by different denominations. Recent scholarship on women enhances our understanding of missions as a whole, probing the complex ways by which women within the mission household economies promoted the conversion, education, and training of indigenes in Western forms. Another part

Source: Grimshaw, Patricia and Peter Sherlock, “Women and Cultural Exchanges,” in Norman Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 173–193. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear. 1 Robin W. Winks, ed., OHBE V, Historiography (Oxford, 1999), p. 665. 2 Philippa Levine, ed., Gender and Empire, OHBECS (Oxford, 2004). A notable exception is Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Gender in the British Empire’, in Judith M. Brown and W. Roger Louis, eds., OHBE IV, The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999), pp. 379–97.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004399594_030

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of the story is the gradual emergence of white women as professionals deriving satisfactions as salaried workers, albeit not among their own compatriots but among indigenous peoples in exotic sites. The recognition of both women’s agency and the fundamentally gendered nature of the mission enterprise is integral to the future of imperial history and the history of missions.3 In 1907 a British schoolmaster, Charles Hayward, compiled a volume on missionary heroines as examples to the Christian faithful. One vignette described the tragic but triumphant life of Mrs Johnston, wife of the Wesleyan Methodist missionary George Johnston, who served among African slaves on plantations of the West Indies from 1807 to 1811. On the eve of her voyage from England, Mrs Johnston declared herself yearning ‘to carry the Glad Tidings to the slaves and may God bless my labours’. She cheerfully faced the trials she knew were in store, confident that in God’s sight the soul of one man, however wretched and despised, was equal to any other. She found hardship beyond her imaginings. On her deathbed, stricken in Dominica with ‘swamp fever’, she urged her husband to persevere in the grand cause: ‘My motto is: “A sinner saved by grace. A brand plucked from the fire’.” George Johnston informed his mission society that his deceased wife had contributed valiantly to the mission, including ably filling his place when he was away on Sundays: ‘both the Church and myself have suffered’. She had been ‘a true help-meet for me in body and in soul’.4 From the outset of the expansionary era of British missions in the late eighteenth century missionaries and mission organizations acknowledged the significant work of women. By the late nineteenth century white women outnumbered the men in imperial missions as wives, teachers, nurses, and nuns, not only from Britain and British ex-colonies such as Canada and Australia, but also from the United States and continental Europe. Hayward’s collection was designed to show how women like Mrs Johnston worked heroically until old age or death, converting, educating, and ministering to the bodily needs of non-Christian people the world over. Although married women were not officially commissioned as missionaries, they were all expected to work where and when they were able. They are under-represented in archives, because, unlike their husbands, they had no obligation to submit reports and journals. Single women, on the other hand, sustained the same commitments as the men. Mission journals printed news about them and mission wives as a means of interesting the Christian public, especially fundraisers, in the broader work. 3 For an overview of gender and missions, see Patricia Grimshaw, ‘Faith, Missionary Life and the Family’, in Levine, Gender and Empire, pp. 260–80. 4 Charles F. Hayward, Women in the Mission Field (London, [c.1907]), pp. 12, 16, 18.

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Although women figured in anecdotal fashion in early institutional and popular mission histories like Hayward’s, their activities were not subjected to serious scholarly analysis before the Second World War, and the writing of mission history was largely left to educated Christian laymen outside academia. From the mid-twentieth century, when professionally trained scholars took an interest, the absence of women from mainstream accounts was notable. A recent historiographical survey of mission histories notes that most historians ignored women’s experiences.5 It was acknowledged that male missionaries had wives, who kept house, entertained visitors, taught local women, and often died prematurely; despite single women’s greater potential agency, their special concerns were often presented as anomalous, and in any case they often married and disappeared from view into the marital household. Because women’s letters went mainly to relatives rather than to society headquarters, they are under-represented in mission archives, a problem compounded by a lack of conceptual frameworks for representing the wives’ existence. Women’s daily work was relegated to the margins and divorced from the broader narrative of the establishment of missions, which centred on conversion and the nurturing of new churches. Two developments in humanities research outside the area of mission history aroused scholarly interest in the domestic arena of missionary work. These were the rise of a new kind of feminism and a shift within anthropological scholarship away from examining non-European cultures to the study of cultural exchanges. From the 1970s feminists promoted the case for the inclusion of women in mainstream history to a sceptical male-dominated profession. Rather than studying exceptional ‘women worthies’, the new generation of scholars sought to centre women in their disciplines. Mainstream history focused, they suggested, on a taken-for-granted search for meta-narratives dealing with political and economic transformations and the actors—almost always men—associated with them. Feminist scholars countered this paradigm on a number of fronts: women were often closely connected to these stories but were ignored; most of the significant questions about how and why changes took place and their outcomes relied on inappropriately marginalized cultural and social histories in which women figured equally with men; finally, gender, or the relationships of men and women, constituted an analytical category concomitant with class and race, and should substantially inform any history. The new women’s history would offer a usable past not only to women, but also to men, as the discipline transformed the meta-narrative to develop inclusive human perspectives. 5 Norman Etherington, ‘Missions and Empire’, OHBE V, pp. 303–14.

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Mission history remained largely unaffected by this movement until the 1980s, as few scholars in the area had been affected by feminist theory. Moreover, some new works on female missionaries perpetuated the mode of missionary propaganda by seeking to rescue forgotten women from obscurity and demonstrate their significance. Thus, in her 1988 overview Guardians of the Great Commission, Ruth Tucker wrote: ‘it is a credit to women missionaries around the world that the influence of Christianity on the family and on the role of women in the home has had significant impact—especially in some non-Western cultures, where women have traditionally had a very low status in society’.6 The first works to argue that the missionary enterprise had played a critical role in transforming the whole of society emerged from the United States, whose feminist historians took a greater interest in women and religion than those of other Western nations. Jane Hunter’s The Gospel of Gentility and Patricia Hill’s The World their Household were particularly influential in exploring the attraction of missions and laying out a framework for research. North American scholars such as Dana Robert have continued to lead the field in examining white women missionaries as historical agents.7 Also in the 1980s, anthropologists and a new breed of social historians began to write about missions as a prime site wherein the records of daily behaviour could be studied. Those with an ethnographer’s eye set about examining women’s daily rounds, their support for male missionaries, and single women’s agency, as dramatizing European ideas of femininity to local people. These scholars established a narrative of women in the mission field to set beside the general male accounts. This work sees missions as a key site for observing cultural conflict—one in which gender relations and the household were crucial battlegrounds. Much of this ethnographically driven historical work has focused on British, Australian, and American missions in the Pacific. Diane Langmore’s 1989 study of missionaries in Papua focused on men and women, both Protestant and Catholic, in order to expose the gendered underpinnings of missions. In the same year Patricia Grimshaw’s Paths of Duty: American Missionary Women in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii appeared together with an influential collection of historical and anthropological chapters, Family and Gender in the Pacific edited by fellow Australians Margaret Jolly and Martha 6 Ruth A. Tucker, Guardians of the Great Commission: The Story of Women in Modern Missions (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1988), p. 118. 7 Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility (New Haven, 1984); Patricia Hill, The World their Household: The American Women’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870–1920 (Ann Arbor, 1985); Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission (Macon, Ga., 1996); id., ed., Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers: Missionary Women in the Twentieth Century (Maryknoll, NY, 2002).

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Macintyre. A most significant collection on women and missions with a strong focus on Africa emerged in 1993 from collaboration between historians and anthropologists—one that accorded equal weight to missionaries and to the indigenous subjects of mission.8 Six years later a similar collection demonstrated in its statement of purpose how the field of study had developed: We focus on missions first because missionaries usually worked closer to local communities than other colonial agents, often with a moral agenda that provided a broad critique of local gender regimes. Further, because of their concerns with women, children, and family, missionary groups were more likely than others to include Western women among their workers and thus to face more immediately the destabilizing challenges that colonial experience posed to their own ways of organizing relations between women and men.9 This collection also reflects a third development in the study of women and missions, which is the use of mission archives to explore the relation between gender, race, and Empire. Since the late 1980s feminist scholars have been forced to respond to post-colonial critiques questioning the role of white women as agents of mission enterprises. Were women’s historians bent on discovering white women’s significance in Empire-building to valorize their roles? Should they not instead be engaged in teasing out white women’s complicity with white men in sustaining colonial power structures at the expense of indigenous people? Post-colonial historians linked mission women directly to the exercise of colonial power and the treatment of colonized peoples. Missions as a whole were recast as a destructive enterprise in which white women played a part. The influence of post-colonial studies can be seen in Ruth Compton Brouwer’s study of Canadian Presbyterian women in Indian missions, where success in conversion and cultural transmission was directly related to exploitation of local crises such as famine or disease and the subsequent removal of children to mission stations. Similarly, Myra Rutherdale’s magisterial Women and the White Man’s God shows how ideas and practices determined by competing 8 Diane Langmore, Missionary Lives: Papua 1874–1914 (Honolulu, 1989); Patricia Grimshaw, Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii (Honolulu, 1989); Margaret Jolly and Martha Macintyre, eds., Family and Gender in the Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial Impact (Cambridge, 1989); Fiona Bowie, Deborah Kirkwood, and Shirley Ardener, eds., Women and Missions: Past and Present: Anthropological and Historical Perceptions (Oxford, 1993). 9 Mary Taylor Huber and Nancy C. Lutkehaus, eds., Gendered Missions: Women and Men in Missionary Discourse and Practice (Ann Arbor, 1999), p. 1.

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concepts of gender and race affected all those involved in the mission encounter in Canada, not only white female missionaries.10 Inspired by the theoretical work of Edward Said and other studies of the impact of colonialism on the colonizers, historians such as Antoinette Burton, Judith Rowbotham, and Susan Thorne focus on linkages between events in the metropole and the overseas Empire, for example, between British women’s attempts to advance their own emancipation through a slanted representation of the colonial ‘others’ who were to be ‘liberated’ and converted.11 Catherine Hall’s Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 (2002) casts a fresh light on the work of humanitarians in Britain, and the interactions between British and colonial vested interests. Her study stresses the racialized and gendered grounding of missions in the metropole and in the West Indies, in ways that foreshadow a complete reintegration of mission history into imperial history. Each of these revisionist historians has emphasized that women’s contributions to missions were an integral part of the wider movement whereby women of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries asserted the significance of domesticity and the private sphere, while striving for greater autonomy. Thus, women missionaries carried a European feminine and domestic agenda of Western modernity to indigenous peoples, exemplifying new knowledge, technologies, and practices that were revolutionizing their home societies. Women’s historians justify singling out women as a discrete subject in history by pointing to the distinctive trajectory of their lives and the need for a wholesale revision of our notion of what topics are appropriate objects of historical study. These objectives are amply illustrated in studies of the life experiences of married women in mission households. Although, from the earliest days of the missionary enterprise, women believed they were called to enter the mission field by the same evangelical imperatives that prompted men to leave the British Isles, they were not treated in the same manner. White middle-class women across the Empire were prompted to consider missionary service by the growing body of literature on ‘missionary heroines’, which 10 Ruth Compton Brouwer, New Women for God: Canadian Presbyterian Women and India Missions 1876–1914 (Toronto, 1990); Myra Rutherdale, Women and the White Man’s God: Gender and Race in the Canadian Mission Field (Vancouver, 2002). 11 Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley, 1998) and Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994); Judith Rowbotham, ‘“Soldiers of Christ?” Images of Female Missionaries in Late Nineteenth Century Britain’, Gender and History, XII (2000), pp. 82–106; Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford, Calif., 1999).

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simultaneously encouraged the raising of funds by women to support the missionary cause. This literature frequently constructed the subject of missionary efforts as savage, depraved, and ignorant, while portraying the white woman as an adventurous and brave soul who overstepped the boundaries of home and hearth, sacrificing family life to bring the light of the gospel to the unenlightened. Indigenous girls were represented as in desperate need of moral rescue through the provision of domestic education and basic literacy. Meanwhile, the representation of women who died on the mission field in tragic circumstances constructed a valiant image of martyrdom that further confirmed the validity of female missionary work. Women missionaries thus made a substantial impact upon the imaginations of generations of children in Britain and the settler colonies.12 Only in the nineteenth century did women begin to enter the mission field in significant numbers, first as mission wives, and then in their own right, reluctantly accepted by the major missionary societies (sometimes in the hopes that they would marry widowers in the field and hence retain valuable men in place) or through small, single-purpose societies. By the middle of the nineteenth century a wife was considered a necessary asset for the would-be missionary, even though married women were neither directly commissioned by the societies nor paid a separate wage. Furthermore, single women missionaries in organizations such as the London Missionary Society (LMS) were expected to resign their commission upon marriage, even as they carried on as voluntary workers.13 Wives were expected to work, and work they did, but the method and mode of their work distinguished them from male missionaries, who pursued conversion through preaching, teaching, and negotiation: work more easily recognized in a capitalist society as deserving financial remuneration. The work of missionary wives took place within a household economy of pre-industrial times, work designated as auxiliary to that of men, but which was nevertheless essential to the maintenance of European domestic family life, to the creation of a Christian community, and to the wider cause of proselytization. Missionary wives performed manifold duties in respect to sexuality, childbearing, and child-rearing; housewifery, ranging across obtaining food, cooking, cleaning, sewing, nursing the sick, maintaining a vegetable garden, keeping 12 Burton, Burdens of History; Judith Rowbotham, ‘“Hear an Indian Sister’s Plea”: Reporting the Work of Nineteenth-Century British Female Missionaries’, Women’s Studies Inter­ national Forum, XXI (1998), pp. 247–61, and ‘Soldiers of Christ’, pp. 82–106. 13 Deborah Kirkwood, ‘Protestant Missionary Women: Wives and Spinsters’, in Bowie et al., eds., Women and Missions, pp. 25–31.

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poultry, and growing vegetables to training and supervising others to assist in these tasks; and furthering the mission work which brought in their husbands’ stipends. Mission societies also expected wives to take on the additional tasks of teaching local women and children the skills of European domesticity (however foreign to their own culture) and to teach reading, infused, of course, by spiritual truth. This burden is well represented by the life of Marianne Williams, an exemplary missionary wife who worked with her husband, Henry, at the Paihia mission in New Zealand (established in 1823). Prior to departure she had studied nursing, as well as the Moravian missionary principles of education. Once located in the Bay of Islands, she exemplified European family ideals, raising eleven children of her own, dispensing medicine and hospitality, and attempting to domesticate indigenous women by running a school for Maori girls, bringing them into her home to learn cooking, needlework, and the art of housewifery. Yet her attempts to impose her version of womanly behaviour met with resistance: Maori simply walked out of her home if she berated them verbally, leaving her without aid in what was a large household even for missionary families. Although Williams could control her own body and those of her children, she had to battle, cajole, and frequently acknowledge complete failure in her attempts to get Maori women to dress and behave as Europeans in accordance with her vision of the outward signs of Christian belief. As Kathryn Rountree observes, at the core of her work as a missionary wife was the colonization of the bodies of Maori as a preparation for the colonization of their souls.14 The perceived need of male missionaries for companionship and domestic support, together with underlying fears of sexual misconduct, quickly made a wife a necessary asset, leading some mission societies to provide men with suitable companions just prior to departure. The controversy surrounding the early nineteenth-century LMS missionaries who married or had liaisons with indigenous women in southern Africa was a reminder of the perils single men posed for missionary societies, which relied for finance upon a culture increasingly intolerant of interracial marriage.15 And if single women faced one major threat to their independent work in the early phases of a mission other than finding themselves swiftly transformed into wives, it was their co-option to the role of right-hand help to the hard-pressed mission wife and mother whose 14 Kathryn Rountree, ‘Re-making the Maori Female Body: Marianne Williams’s Mission in the Bay of Islands’, Journal of Pacific History, XXXV (2000), pp. 49–66. 15 Julia Wells, ‘The Suppression of Mixed Marriages among LMS Missionaries in South Africa before 1820’, South African Historical Journal, XLIV (2001), pp. 1–20.

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urgent need, in the absence of sisters and mothers, for Western skilled help was bottomless. Moreover, single women who arrived at mission stations against all odds in the period prior to the 1880s found the alternative of marriage quickly pressed upon them since few men ever contemplated staying in the field unless they could marry there. Single women often released single or recently widowed men from the labour of returning to the home base to acquire a wife, or the disappointment of abandoning their calling altogether. James and Matilda Ward arrived on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait as Moravian missionaries in 1890. Before long their colleague Nicholas Hey had married Mrs Ward’s sister Mary Ann and the two women could model European gender order; although after James Ward’s death Matilda continued on, working in her own right under the auspices of the Victorian Presbyterian Women’s Missionary Union alongside her sister and brother-in-law.16 Because childbearing frequently undermined their constitutions, the health and energy of wives were more deeply affected than their husbands by migration to new and challenging communities and cultures. Wives were held responsible for sustaining a model household and an exemplary family, which increased their personal insecurity. Missionaries had to cope with difficult living conditions, often at odds with their socio-economic background, and come to grips with being self-reliant in every matter from erecting a suitable house to finding food and water. Improvements to their residences might come at the cost of goodwill, however, if local people viewed them more as wealthy and powerful masters rather than as the mere purveyors of the gospel. But improved conditions were the basis of good health for women and young children if they were to be anything other than a burden and worry for the mission. Mortality of wives and their babies was high, and those who survived the early years could be plagued by ill health for decades. Mary Hill and her husband, Micaiah, worked for the LMS at Berhampur in Bengal from 1824 to 1847, during which time two of their children died. Mary suffered from exhaustion owing to her work as a nurse and schoolteacher and the hardships of finding suitable accommodation in an unaccustomed climate.17 Raising children according to European custom was very difficult. The lack of money, food, the trappings of domesticity, and the company of other Europeans imposed a constant strain on mothers who sought to communicate British culture to their own children as well as to the objects of the missionary enterprise. Servants might be employed in the mission house, who spoke 16 E. C. Dawson, Missionary Heroines in Many Lands (London, n.d.), ch. 8. 17 Valentine Cunningham, ‘God and Nature Intended you for a Missionary’s Wife’, in Bowie et al., eds., Women in Missions, pp. 85–105.

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their own language to missionary children, and might win greater affection than their parents could. For these reasons missionary parents often sent their children to boarding schools in their country of origin to assure a successful future—good marriages for the girls, and professional employment for the boys. The pain of separation from children imposed another burden on wives like Mary Hill, who felt compelled to send her eldest son back to England on account of his frequent illnesses. The mission field severely strained the gendered division of labour between husband and wife thought appropriate in British societies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While men might occasionally take on temporary roles as carers for children and the sick in the absence of women, their wives frequently left the domestic realm for more public activities. This was especially so prior to the arrival in the 1880s of large numbers of single women missionaries, as wives ran schools and instructed indigenous women on the skills of European housewifery from cooking to sewing. At times any semblance of Victorian domestic ideology disappeared in practice, despite the belief that this was the model that Christian converts should imitate. Some wives found themselves alone in charge of entire missions stations. The British Columbian bishop William Ridley was forced to go to Ottawa in 1884 and then to England to deal with a disobedient Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary. His wife, Jane, stayed behind to run the vacant Hazelton mission station through the Canadian winter. After death she was eulogized for her bravery in stepping outside the boundaries of feminine activity, and for her apparent success in working among the Tsimshian people.18 The pattern was repeated across the Empire, as husbands departed for extensive periods of itinerant preaching, leaving wives to replace them in mission churches. In the 1890s two Fiji missionary wives, Minnie Burns and Lydia Brown, even went so far as to preach in their husbands’ absence.19 Wives quietly contributed to these activities, even when beset by pregnancies, miscarriages, and the need to nurse the sick. No matter their skills or load, if wives were to gain official approval, however, they needed to maintain a modest, self-deprecatory demeanour that translated into virtual invisibility in mission reports and that might one day be praised in the obituary columns. By proving they could survive both physically and culturally on colonial frontiers, missionary wives helped pave the way for the employment of women as missionaries in their own right. There was, however, stiff resistance to the concept of appointing women missionaries throughout the 18 Rutherdale, Women and the White Man’s God, pp. 54–6. 19 Claudia Knapman, White Women in Fiji 1835–1930: The Ruin of Empire? (Sydney, 1986), pp. 65–6.

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nineteenth century, which restricted the opportunities available to most unmarried women. In the 1840s Bishop Wilson of Calcutta famously objected ‘in principle to single ladies coming out unprotected to so distant a place with a climate so unfriendly, and with the almost certainty of their marrying within a month of their arrival … the whole thing is against apostolic maxim, “I suffer not a woman to speak in the church”’.20 While the major missionary societies continued to debate the subject of women as professional evangelists throughout the late nineteenth century, a range of smaller organizations did offer opportunities. The Society for Promoting Female Education in the East, founded in 1834 as a response to the concern of both missionaries and the Ladies’ Society of Calcutta, and the Indian Female Normal School and Instruction Society (1859) were two such groups, employing women as schoolteachers, while the unmarried relations of male missionaries might accompany their brothers and fathers to the mission field. A major change in mission policy on women occurred in 1878, when, despite public criticism, Hudson Taylor engaged single female missionaries from Britain and the colonies to work in teams for his China Inland Mission.21 Once women had been admitted to the major missionary institutions, their numbers rapidly multiplied. It is a central if unacknowledged fact of mission history that by the end of the nineteenth century the largest group of missionaries were not clergy or married couples, but single women. In 1909 the CMS had 1,390 European staff on its books, 414 of whom were clergymen, 152 laymen, 386 missionary wives, and 438 single women.22 For these latter women, missionary work offered a viable alternative to marriage, based on the same principle of self-sacrifice to a higher cause, while for would-be doctors and teachers, missions offered career prospects not available at home. Two factors gave missionary organizations compelling reasons to facilitate women’s participation in proselytization in the second half of the nineteenth century. First, a large number of single women felt called to leave Britain, the United States, and the British settler colonies to spread the Christian gospel; and they were able to call upon the particular support of other white women as fund-raisers. Secondly, the major missionary societies recognized that

20 C. F. Pascoe, Two Hundred Years of the S.P.G. (London, 1901), p. 617. 21 Margaret Donaldson, ‘“The Cultivation of the Heart and the Moulding of the Will …”: The Missionary Contribution of the Society for Promoting Female Education in China, India and the East’, in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood, eds., Women in the Church: Studies in Church History, XXVII (London, 1990). On debates over female missionaries, see Sean Gill, Women in the Church of England (London, 1994), pp. 174–81. 22 G. Gollock, The Story of the Church Missionary Society (London, 1909), p. 46.

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women could go to places inaccessible to men and thus attempt new forms of proselytization. The catchphrase of women’s missionary endeavours from the midnineteenth century to the First World War was ‘women’s work for women’, as both a justification for and description of their work in the field. The female missionary organizations pursued the ideology of separate spheres of activity, focusing on the tasks of teaching girls, domestic training, modelling Victorian and Edwardian womanhood, providing medical care in the form of nursing, and entering exclusive female spaces. Recruitment of female missionaries could be class-based in a way that selection of male missionaries generally was not. The LMS Ladies’ Committee interviewed applicants for mission service and discriminated between them on the basis of educational qualifications and the ability to maintain ladylike qualities in a foreign land.23 ‘Women’s work for women’ and the educational ideal behind the civilizing mission were most clearly articulated in the various attempts to gain access to the zenana in colonial India. Here missionary strategy shifted, as the belief that women needed to be ‘rescued’ was replaced by the view that women were the key to changing the whole moral system of a society. If missionaries could enter the zenana— forbidden to European men—then Christianity and civilization would filter down to the peoples of India through their elite women, paralleling the role assigned to middle-class women by Victorian evangelical ideology. One result was the establishment of mission organizations solely for women, such as the Baptist Church’s Zenana Missionary Society (1867) and the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society (1880). Not only did their special work justify the recruitment of female missionaries, it also positioned them as crucial to the spread of the gospel and required them to be drawn from the middle classes of the British Empire.24 The sign of success for female missionaries—and the imperial ideal—could thus be reduced to the extent to which they planted European ideals of gender behaviour. On the one hand, practices such as polygamy or widow-burning would be attacked by male administrators and female activists in both the colonies and Britain. On the other, women would introduce female education to secondary level. Heather Sharkey has demonstrated how the CMS mission 23 Jane Haggis, ‘“A Heart that Has Felt the Love of God and Longs for Others to Know It”: Conventions of Gender, Tensions of Self and Constructions of Difference in Offering to Be a Lady Missionary’, Women’s History Review, VII (1998), pp. 171–92. 24 David Savage, ‘Missionaries and the Development of a Colonial Ideology of Female Education in India’, Gender and History, IX (1997), pp. 201–21; Maina Chawla Singh, Gender, Religion and the ‘Heathen Lands’: American Missionary Women in South Asia, 1860s–1940s (New York, 2000), pp. 118–22.

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in northern Sudan received continuing support from Britain despite achieving only one convert in sixty years as it was seen to have successfully established girls’ schools and improved the status of women.25 Nevertheless, the path for white women’s employment in the mission field was not always smooth. In the late nineteenth century the emphasis on zenanas made it difficult for many women to take up mainstream mission work with the Baptist Missionary Society.26 Scottish male missionaries in South Africa opposed the education of girls in mission schools beyond basic domestic training, thus obviating the need for female teachers as their own wives could undertake this duty.27 Similarly, the fund-raising efforts of British women were more often directed towards supporting all missions, not just activities of women. The New South Wales Presbyterian Women’s Missionary Association initially desired to raise money for female missionaries, but as they could not identify specifically feminine objectives, they had to divert their efforts to supporting all Presbyterian missions.28 Women seeking opportunities for careers in teaching or medicine that did not exist at home often met frustrating obstacles. Jane Waterston, the Scotswoman who became South Africa’s first female doctor, complained in the 1870s about being relegated to ‘women’s work’ despite having studied at Sophia Jex Blake’s London School of Medicine for Women for the specific purpose of practising medicine on the mission field.29 Just as single male missionaries posed a potential threat to the moral codes and domestic arrangements promoted by the churches, single females could provoke debate. This ranged from the perennial accusation that single women were likely to get married and cease the mission work they were originally employed to do, to the thornier problem of authority. While women could work with other women, what authority might they exercise over men? Marion Fairweather’s experience with the Canadian Presbyterians’ Central India Mission illustrates the problem. After she arrived at Indore in 1877, her involvement in a wide range of activities, including visiting and socializing with the local Hindu elite women, meant she was effectively doing work equal 25 Heather Sharkey, Christians among Muslims: The Church Missionary Society in the Northern Sudan’, Journal of African History, XLIII (2002), pp. 51–75. 26 Brian Stanley, The History of the Baptist Missionary Society (Edinburgh, 1992), p. 232. 27 Natasha Erlank, ‘“Raising up the Degraded Daughters of Africa”: The Provision of Education for Xhosa Women in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, South African Historical Journal, XLIII (2000), pp. 24–38. 28 Judith Godden, ‘Containment and Control: Presbyterian Women and the Missionary Impulse in New South Wales, 1891–1914’, Women’s History Review, VI (1997), pp. 75–93. 29 L. Bean and E. van Heyningen, eds., The Letters of Jane Elizabeth Waterston 1866–1905 (Cape Town, 1983).

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to any male lay missionary. However, she was recalled to Canada in 1879 and dismissed in 1880 after rumours that she had had an affair with the mission’s male founder. The fallout from this incident led to a preference for married males in this mission, not only because of the security in matters of morality this apparently offered, but also because Fairweather’s operational independence had unbalanced the precarious negotiation of authority between male and female missionaries in favour of the women.30 A few exceptional women were able to take charge of their own missionary activities successfully by citing evangelical imperatives. ‘Missionary heroines’ such as Amy Carmichael in India and Florence Young in the Pacific founded entire organizations and institutions, travelled beyond the frontiers of colonial settlements, and negotiated with indigenous peoples independently of male administrators or missionaries. The most celebrated of these women (her image appears on a Scottish banknote) was Mary Mitchell Slessor, who went to Calabar with the Scottish Presbyterian Mission in East Nigeria in 1876. Unusual in her working-class background, she qualified by studying at night school while teaching in Dundee. Her work focused on building schools for African students and encouraging what would now be described as community development. She believed that Christianity would be received when people had acquired the educational skills and economic freedoms necessary to enable them to appreciate the Bible. She raised the eyebrows of male missionaries and colonial officials because of her close relations with indigenous peoples; the local Efik leaders encouraged her to carry her work beyond the colonial frontier. She maintained an unusual degree of autonomy through her ability to raise money in Britain independently of her mission organization. Simultaneously, she confronted the Efik over what she perceived to be abusive treatment of women, children, and slaves, urging the abolition of polygamy and establishing refuges for women and children who left their husbands and fathers. In 1883 she adopted the first of many Efik girls, and, despite being a single white woman, was by the 1890s known as Ma Akamba (Great Mother). Despite the claims of some missionary propaganda, Slessor’s achievements lay not so much in numbers of converts as in her communication of knowledge that helped the Efik respond more effectively to the impact of British colonialism.31 Other single women might be less adventurous, but, as mission culture changed in the twentieth century, gained recognition by male colleagues. Female missionaries were finally able to develop an established professional 30 Brouwer, New Women for God, pp. 131–5. 31 W. H. Taylor, Mission to Educate: A History of the Educational Work of the Scottish Presbyterian Mission in East Nigeria, 1846–1960 (New York, 1996), ch. 7.

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identity which expanded beyond the private sphere after the Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910 created guidelines for their selection and training.32 This was a profound change, as the work undertaken by male and female missionaries was now much less differentiated. In previous generations the cultural exchanges embodied in the missionary encounter had been far more focused on the communication of knowledge from men to men and women to women. Brouwer’s study of three Canadian women working in different arenas of mission work demonstrates their increased recognition by male missionaries compared to their nineteenth-century predecessors, together with their new role in transmitting knowledge and culture from Western to non-Western societies. The new, professional missionary frequently held authority over indigenous men as well as other women, and, rather than communicating domestic practices alone, might pass on medical technology and skill or theological learning as part of a broader process of modernization.33 An increasing sense of professional identity empowered some women to determine for whom they would work, what they would do, and where they would do it. Miss Corbett, who worked in Darjeeling for the Scottish Presbyterian mission in the eastern Himalayas, was the only qualified teacher at the mission, and by 1908 had expanded her school to 300 students. She therefore asked for her work to be confined to the primary school, where she felt her expertise lay, exempting her from instructing at the mission’s teacher-training institute. When the Women’s Association for Mission denied her request, she joined another mission where her vocation could be fulfilled.34 From the 1920s, as part of the new responsibilities formally accorded to women, some missionaries were now ordained as ministers in the Protestant churches or deaconesses in the Anglican Church. Depending on the beliefs and attitudes of their superiors, some were allowed to act as the sole minister in charge of new congregations, a role they could not usually take up at home. This was especially the case in southern China, Hong Kong, East Africa, and some remote rural areas of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Yet the authority of missionary women remained as contested as it had been in the nineteenth century, and in turn affected the role of women in the churches of Britain, North America, and the settler colonies, as female missionaries with wide experience in preaching and leadership were effectively demoted upon 32

Rhonda Anne Semple, Missionary Women: Gender, Professionalism and the Victorian Idea of Christian Mission (Woodbridge, 2003), p. 2. 33 Ruth Compton Brouwer, Modern Women, Modernising Men (Vancouver, 2002). 34 Semple, Missionary Women, pp. 148–9.

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repatriation. Many Australian women who trained for the CMS at Deaconess House in Sydney were sent to places such as the Anglican missionary diocese of Central Tanganyika, where in the 1930s and 1940s the Australian bishop George Chambers used his authority to promote women’s work on the mission field. Yet when these women returned to Sydney, they could no longer preach or take up representative roles on decision-making bodies, leading to an anomalous gap between white women’s authority at home and abroad.35 One of the less understood areas of research in missionary history is the work undertaken by Catholic female religious around the world. Like single women and missionary wives, nuns did not conform to established structures of domestic life, but at the same time they could not perform European household ideals of marriage, housewifery, and child-rearing. Unlike members of male orders, they had to overcome restrictions on movement outside their communities, which made mission work impossible until the nineteenth century, when new orders for women were instituted. Well into the twentieth century financial dependence and subordinate status constrained the work of missionary nuns.36 The most challenging new research on women and missions has centred on the activities of indigenous women, both as subjects and as agents of mission, and their gradual emergence as leaders in the new churches. Three areas of research have arisen as the voices of Third and Fourth World women begin to be heard in the halls of academia. First are studies of exceptional women who converted to Christianity or used mission education to proceed to leadership positions in their own and in other societies. Secondly, attention is being to be paid to the crucial role of Christian women in expanding and leading new churches in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Finally, historians are beginning to write accounts of how indigenous women might respond to and resist the interventions of white missionary women, being variously compelled to live under foreign conditions, or adapting knowledges that were useful to them and rejecting those which were not. Within all these fields, the outcomes of the missionary enterprise for indigenous women have varied with the nature of colonialism in each region and the dynamics of power between colonizers and colonized. Like much of the earlier work on women and missions, interest in the role of women of colour as agents of mission was first taken up in North America with study of African American women who travelled from the late

35 Muriel Porter, Women in the Church (Melbourne, 1989), p. 53. 36 Hilary Carey, ‘Subordination, Invisibility and Chosen Work: Missionary Nuns and Australian Aborigines, c.1900–1949’, Australian Feminist Studies, XIII (1998), pp. 251–67.

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nineteenth century to southern and western Africa to spread Christianity.37 In the British imperial context, early studies of indigenous women missionaries focused on India, where educational efforts combined with class dynamics to produce female leaders within Church and government. One of the most notable was Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922), a Brahman woman known as a scholar of Hinduism who famously converted to Christianity in 1883 while living at the female religious community at Wantage, in Berkshire. For the remainder of her life she promoted education for women and preached a distinctive version of Christianity in India as a way of enhancing the status of women in patriarchal societies of any kind.38 Like the maverick Mary Slessor, however, Ramabai has been singled out because she was exceptional, at times obscuring other stories. As the explosive growth of Christianity in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific is better studied, the role of women as grass-roots supporters and leaders is coming to be acknowledged, although much more work remains to be done on this topic. Enabling the numerical rise of Christians has been the work of Bible Women and the adaptation of organizations such as the Mother’s Union, now a backbone of the Anglican Church in Africa and a key social institution.39 Just as indigenous men began to emerge as leading clergy and bishops in the 1950s, so too women followed twenty years later. Some of the earliest Anglican female clergy in the world appeared in Africa when Bishop Festo Kivengere ordained four women as deacons in Uganda in 1972. During the 1980s in the Torres Strait Islands and northern Australia, senior indigenous women were appointed as church elders or ordained as clergy largely to work among other women.40 Perhaps the most significant new histories of women and missions are those that focus on the diverse active responses made by indigenous women to the missionaries. In the Pacific, for example, missionary women’s attempts to impose European domestic behaviour met with mixed results. Mrs Gunn’s efforts to teach sewing and home-making to women in Vanuatu in the 1880s and 1890s were successful in terms of imparting skills, but her desire that they should 37 Sylvia Jacobs, ‘African-American Women Missionaries and European Imperialism in Southern Africa, 1880–1920’, Women’s Studies International Forum, XIII (1990), pp. 381–94. 38 Padma Angol, ‘Indian Christian Women and Indigenous Feminism, c.1850–c.1920’, in Clare Midgley, ed., Gender and Imperialism (Manchester, 1998), pp. 79–103; Meera Kosambi, ‘Multiple Contestations: Pandita Ramabai’s Educational and Missionary Activities in Late Nineteenth-Century India and Abroad’, Women’s History Review, VII (1998), pp. 193–208. 39 Deborah Gaitskell, ‘Whose Heartland and Which Periphery? Christian Women Crossing South Africa’s Racial Divide in the Twentieth Century’, Women’s History Review, XI (2002), pp. 375–415. 40 John Harris, ‘Anglicanism and Indigenous Peoples’, in Bruce Kaye, ed., Anglicanism in Australia: A History (Melbourne, 2002), p. 243.

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produce artefacts that could be sold or otherwise used to support the mission work was wholeheartedly rejected.41 In Kenya missionary efforts at evangelization through schooling met some success in the early twentieth century as women and men perceived education as a means of social mobility, yet were reversed from 1929 when missionaries attacked female circumcision outright. Ninety per cent of Kikuyu adherents left the mission until a variety of compromises were reached including some communities in which new Christians themselves provided church circumcisers.42 Recent works on this aspect of missions are necessarily based on painstaking oral history. Some make use of family connections to the subjects of mission education. Maina Chawla Singh’s account of American women in South Asia is informed by an awareness of how Indian and Bengali women were selectively adopting and adapting the knowledge taught by the missionaries to their own ends, an awareness derived from her own mother’s schooling in a mission-run college.43 Others use oral narratives to uncover otherwise unrecorded stories about the integration and adaptation of European Christianity to indigenous cultures. The work of Christine Choo has thus revealed the existence of a remarkable Aboriginal order of nuns, the Daughters of Our Lady, Queen of the Apostles, at Beagle Bay in Western Australia in the 1940s. This demonstrates the variety of outcomes for indigenous women who attempted to maintain a traditional identity while converting to Catholicism, who negotiated oppressive mission structures on the one hand, yet also had to cope with loss of lands, forced relocation, and the stringencies of hostile state legislation on the other.44 Given the substantial body of work on women and gender concerns in missions, we might in conclusion reflect further on their relative lack of impact on mainstream narratives of mission histories. First, many of the women who have written these accounts have turned to the topic not because they are centrally engaged in religious or mission history generally, but because they are pursuing paths that women took per se. They did not therefore engage with the central concerns of the main practitioners for whom mission history was a priority. Many such scholars took different questions as their starting point, about women’s position in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modern history. They linked women missionaries to examinations of women and colonialism, 41 William Gunn and Mrs Gunn, Heralds of Dawn: Early Converts in the New Hebrides (London, 1924). 42 Tabitha Kanogo, ‘Mission Impact on Women in Colonial Kenya’, in Bowie et al., eds., Women in Missions, pp. 165–86. 43 Singh, Gender, Religion and ‘Heathen Lands’. 44 Christine Choo, Mission Girls: Aboriginal Women on Catholic Missions in the Kimberley, Western Australia, 1900–1950 (Perth, WA, 2000).

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and saw mission women as the bearers of ideas of modernity both in the careers they pursued and in the skills they attempted to transmit to the protégés they adopted. They themselves, while by no means consciously feminist, exemplified how ordinary middle-class women might adapt the opportunities that modernity presented to their own benefit, how the imposition of domestic ideals, the creation of institutions and organizational structures involving women, their education and medicine, their lessons in the authority of men reveal that Western activities in the East were not solely about white men conquering the world. The impact of modernity on colonialism, and on women as agents and subjects, has not been a major interest of mission historiography; hence this whole strand of missionary history remains marginal. Work on women and gender in mission contexts still has the capacity to inspire continuing research and encourage other historians to consider ways towards greater inclusiveness. Meanwhile, indigenous scholars from the excolonies will themselves increasingly command their own voices in the field, through methodologies of their own choosing, and the historians of the West, female and male, will in turn learn more fully from them of the nature of the mission project and the understandings of new churches. Select Bibliography Bowie, Fiona, Deborah Kirkwood, and Shirley Ardener, eds., Women and Missions: Past and Present: Anthropological and Historical Perceptions (Oxford, 1993). Brouwer, Ruth Compton, Modern Women, Modernizing Men (Vancouver, 2002). Brouwer, Ruth Compton, New Women for God: Canadian Presbyterian Women and India Missions 1876–1914 (Toronto, 1990). Choo, Christine, Mission Girls: Aboriginal Women on Catholic Missions in the Kimberley, Western Australia, 1900–1950 (Perth, WA, 2001). Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, I, Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago, 1991). Grimshaw, Patricia, ‘Faith, Missionary Life and the Family’, in Philippa Levine, ed., Gender and Empire, OHBECS (Oxford, 2004), pp. 260–80. Grimshaw, Patricia, Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii (Honolulu, 1989). Hall, Catherine, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 (Cambridge, 2002). Huber, Mary Taylor and Nancy C. Lutkehaus, eds., Gendered Missions: Women and Men in Missionary Discourse and Practice (Ann Arbor, 1999).

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Jolly, Margaret and Martha Macintyre, eds., Family and Gender in the Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial Impact (Cambridge, 1989). Langmore, Diane, Missionary Lives: Papua, 1874–1914 (Honolulu, 1989). Robert, Dana L., ed., Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers: Missionary Women in the Twentieth Century (Maryknoll, NY, 2002). Rutherdale, Myra, Women and the White Man’s God: Gender and Race in the Canadian Mission Field (Vancouver, 2002). Semple, Rhonda Anne, Missionary Women: Gender, Professionalism and the Victorian Idea of Christian Mission (Woodbridge, 2003). Singh, Maina Chawla, Gender, Religion and the ‘Heathen Lands’: American Missionary Women in South Asia, 1860s–1940s (New York, 2000).

Understanding the World-Christian Turn in the History of Christianity and Theology Paul Kollman In December 2012, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released “The Global Religious Landscape: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Major Religious Groups as of 2010.”1 Notable data included: – Europe having more Christians than any other continent (558 million), with South America and Africa gaining ground; Asia remains far behind; – the Christian median age worldwide is 30 (compared to 23 for Muslims), with large geographic disparities—for example, European and North American Christians are far older than those in Africa, Latin America, and Asia; – Christians are by far the most evenly distributed religious group; Asia houses the majority of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, members of “folk religions” and the religiously unaffiliated. Such findings explain the prevalence of the term “world Christianity” and near-equivalents like “global Christianity.” These terms aim to recognize major transformations in the “world Christian movement,”2 highlighting, for example, the movement of Christianity from “the West” (North America, Europe, and Oceania) toward the “Global South” (the “Majority World” of Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Caribbean and Pacific islands). Christianity is no longer a “Western” religion—if it ever was.3

Source: Kollman, P., “Understanding the World-Christian Turn in the History of Christianity and Theology,” Theology Today 71.2 (2014): pp. 164–177. Copyright © 2014 by SAGE. Reprinted by Permission of SAGE Publications, Ltd. 1 See “The Global Religious Landscape: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Major Religious Groups as of 2010,” accessed December 21, 2012, http://www.pewforum.org/ uploadedFiles/Topics/Religious_Affiliation/globalReligion-full.pdf. 2 This is the term used in Dale T. Irvin and Scott W. Sunquist, History of the World Christian Movement: Earliest Christianity to 1453 (vol. 1) and Modern Christianity to 1900 (vol. 2) (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001, 2012). 3 Volume 1 of History of the World Christian Movement displays Christianity’s global past.

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Beyond the phenomena itself, “world Christianity” denotes an academic sub-field predicated on grasping the significance of such changes. Dale Irvin defines the discipline this way: an emerging field that investigates and seeks to understand Christian communities, faith, and practice as they are found on six continents, expressed in diverse ecclesial traditions, and informed by the multitude of historical and cultural experiences … It is concerned with both the diversity of local or indigenous expressions of Christian life and faith throughout the world, and the variety of ways these interact with one another critically and constructively across time and space. It is particularly concerned with under-represented and marginalized communities of faith, resulting in a greater degree of attention being paid to Asian, African, and Latin American experiences; the experience of marginalized communities within the North Atlantic world; and the experiences of women throughout the world.4 As Irvin suggests, new realities on the ground motivate this scholarly imperative to better understand Christian persons and communities whose distinctive experiences were previously overlooked. Signs abound of world Christianity’s growing importance. More faculty positions in seminaries, divinity schools, and the religion and theology departments of colleges and universities include “world Christianity” in their titles. Since the 1990s journals and book series with “world” or “global Christianity” affixed to their titles have appeared, as have academic courses with “world Christianity” or globalized framing in their titles.5 One’s biography usually positions one’s attentiveness to world Christianity. I am no exception. I have lived about 10 percent of my life in eastern Africa— studying, teaching, and undertaking research—while pursuing a US-based academic career. As a Catholic priest belonging to a global congregation, I have visited and taught at seminaries in the Global South. I have taught courses entitled “World Christianity” in my department at a US Catholic university and have partaken of institutional processes marking the field’s growth: attending 4 Dale T. Irvin, “World Christianity: An Introduction,” Journal of World Christianity 1.1 (2008): 1–2. 5 Peter C. Phan, “World Christianity: Its Implications for History, Religious Studies, and Theology,” Horizons 39.2 (2012): 171–75.

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book series discussions and journal launches, cooperating in collaborative research, and developing a doctoral-level specialization in world Christianity. In this essay I consider implications of the emergence of world Christianity as a phenomenon and as a field. I contend that the increasing acceptance of the term marks a “turn” similar to other “turns” discerned in humanistic and social-scientific disciplines over the past decades: for example, the postmodern, post-colonial, or feminist turns; or turns associated with seminal figures like Kant, Freud, or Wittgenstein. The metaphor of “turn” captures what has happened to the study of Christianity under the influence of “world Christianity.” We are moving—unevenly but steadily—“beyond the turn,” where scholars of Christianity will be expected to consider the world or global implications of their work. To ignore such implications will place one’s scholarship outside of an emerging consensus. I focus here, therefore, not on major figures in the discipline but on understanding how world Christianity is transforming the study of Christianity itself.

Witnessing World Christianity: The Turn in the History of Christianity

Charles Farhadian identifies three paradigms for exploring world Christianity.6 First there have long been efforts to map Christianity’s changing demography, culminating (for now) in the 2009 Atlas of Global Christianity7 and continuing in the World Christian Database.8 Without ceasing, these initial efforts were accompanied by the emergence of a second paradigm in the late twentieth century when the increasingly polycentric nature of Christianity fostered attention toward diverse examples of Christian-inspired local agency. Farhadian discerns the most recent paradigm moving beyond these earlier demographic and historical approaches to engage new disciplines to describe Christian growth and development. He embraces this new paradigm: “To complement the breadth of historical analysis, we need the depth of what can be unearthed through social scientific investigation, since social scientific perspectives help 6 Charles E. Farhadian, ed. Introducing World Christianity (Chichester, UK and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 1–4. Regarding the title of this section, see Gerald H. Anderson, with John Roxborogh, John M. Prior, and Christopher H. Grundmann, Witness to World Christianity: The International Association of Mission Studies, 1972–2012 (New Haven, CT: OMSC, 2012). 7 Todd M. Johnson and Kenneth R. Ross, eds., Atlas of Global Christianity, 1910–2010 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University, 2009). 8 See http://worldchristiandatabase.org.

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us see Christianity as events that have transformed cultural, social, religious, and political domains.”9 Much of the recent work on the world-Christian turn reflects this third paradigm by joining together historical with social-scientific methodologies. When I first analyzed studies in the history of Christianity that were seeking a global perspective ten years ago, I argued that “world” or “global” in those works had three interrelated foci: first, expanded comprehensiveness designed to capture a fuller story; second, localized histories focusing on how faith arrived somewhere (“mission history”) and its subsequent developments; and third, new perspectives creating innovative comparative insights. Noting the mission-studies background of leading figures in the field, I acknowledged the decline of “church history,” a term with assumptions increasingly foreign to scholars and, moreover, deemed inadequate to encompass how the history of Christianity was being addressed.10 These three foci have since become established areas of inquiry for historians of Christianity. These trends anticipate analogous changes embodying the world-Christian turn: that it expands the breadth of how the history of Christianity is presented, shapes narrative structures of historical accounts of particular Christian bodies, and discloses new comparative perspectives on Christianity’s regularities.

Increasing Breadth in Comprehensive Histories of Christianity

One aspect of the world-Christian turn is greater inclusiveness manifest in the ongoing temporal and geographic decentering in comprehensive historical studies. Previously accepted highpoints of Christian history—the formation of the so-called “Great Tradition” in Christianity’s first six centuries, events linked to Rome and Constantinople before mutual excommunications in 1054, the fracturing of Christianity in Western Europe linked to the Protestant Reformation and its aftermaths—no longer enjoy such centrality. Normative assumptions focused on theological and institutional formations of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism have given way to the call for a more complete story.

9 Farhadian, Introducing World Christianity, 2. 10 Paul Kollman, “After Church History? Writing the History of Christianity from a Global Perspective,” Horizons 31.2 (2004): 322–42.

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While this shift is linked to a broader trend toward social history, the impetus for increasing breadth is rooted in Christianity’s changing demographics. If 60 percent of the world’s Christians live in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, scholars shaped by the world-Christian turn ask whether theological and political issues driving past historiography ought to dominate. This has fostered interest in Christian experiences arising from within long overlooked faith communities and individuals. One consequence of the world-Christian turn has been growing appreciation for non-Chalcedonian Christianity apart from the Great Tradition and peripheral to the splits between Orthodox East and West as well as to those later among Western Christians. After all, non-Chalcedonian forms of Christianity represent the earliest forms of the faith in Africa and Asia, places where Christianity now burgeons.11 This “other Eastern” Christianity deserves increased historical appreciation as it continues to affect ancient and newer Christian communities in Africa and western and southern Asia. Mainstream historians of Christianity have taken notice. The subtitle of distinguished historian Diarmaid MacCulloch’s massive Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2010)12 deliberately shocks a reader, since the calendar orienting our lives is predicated on the assumption that Christianity is only two-thirds that old. MacCulloch’s point derives from two instincts in the world-Christian turn—first, locating Christianity within larger global processes of religious change and development; and second, new periodizations that reflect changing Christian demographics. MacCulloch’s re-periodization emphasizes Christianity’s roots in the Judeo-Hellenistic cultural matrix linked to Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Axial-Age religions. After that, the book’s subject matter covers research on Christianity in myriad times and places. MacCulloch treats the three great originating traditions as the Syriac East (primarily non-Chalcedonian after 451 ce), the Latin West, and Orthodox East— and prioritizes them in that order. Robert Wilken’s 2012 The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity13 also evinces the world-Christian turn. Wilken’s work hitherto focused on early Mediterranean Christianity. In The First Thousand Years his compass widens considerably as he foregrounds the earliest Christianities in 11

For one succinct introduction to their variety, see Lois Farag, “Middle East,” in Christianities in Asia, ed. Peter C. Phan (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 233–54. 12 Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York: Viking, 2010). 13 Robert L. Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale, 2012).

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Africa and Asia. Wilken highlights his long-standing desire to “show the wide geographical reach of Christianity in the first millennium.” Then he admits, But only as I read more broadly and learned about Christianity in such regions as Armenia, Persia, Ethiopia, Central Asia, India, and China did I realize how energetic and enterprising the mission to spread the Christian gospel was and what vast reach it had in the early centuries.14 Indeed, Wilken’s thousand-year compass reveals his broadened perspective. Its range includes the achievements of the Carolingian West, with two key time spans of non-Chalcedonian, non-Western Christianity: China, where Christianity halted after the early tenth-century fall of the Tang dynasty, and Persia, where non-Chalcedonian Christian communities faced Islamization of the government and declined precipitously.

Local Histories of Christianity in Light of World Christianity

The world-Christian turn also sparks new studies of Christianity in particular places and times. As Farhadian notes, these studies deploy a range of new metaphors to capture the dialectical relationship between how Christianity first arrived and how it was received and transformed.15 Censorial implications of terms such as “syncretism” and “conversion” yield to new descriptors, many linked to the emerging field of the anthropology of Christianity: transmission, reception, translation, localization, indigenization, hybridity, inculturation, contextualization, accommodation, resistance, incarnation, naturalization, encounter, appropriation, domestication, internalization, and creolization.16 These new terms point to the subtle and complicated ways in which Christianity makes itself at home in myriad settings. Farhadian’s third paradigm stresses the social sciences; here especially socialcultural anthropology sharpens historical analysis. Historian Pier Larson’s work on historical identities in Madagascar is exemplary. His Ocean of Letters: Lan­ guage and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora (2009)17 shows how the 14 Ibid., 4. 15 Farhadian, Introducing World Christianity, 2–3. 16 For an early typology, see Steven Kaplan, “The Africanization of Missionary Christianity: History and Typology,” in Indigenous Responses to Western Christianity, ed. Steven Kaplan (New York and London: New York University, 1995), 9–28. 17 Pier M. Larson, Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2009), building on his History and Memory in the Age

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Indian Ocean world, shaped by slave-trading, global capitalism, missionary Christianity, and colonialism, affected Malagasy identity formation in the eighteenth century. Central to that identity were the emerging Madagascan language, shaped by missionization, and Merina elites’ reactions to Christianity, pro and con. Anthropologist Brian Howell’s 2008 Christianity in the Local Context: Southern Baptists in the Philippines18 moves in the other direction. He shows how three different congregations take global faith and indigenize it differently. Howell avoids any “meta-narrative of modernity” that might valorize some particular outcome for the indigenizing process in what he calls “post-missionary Christianity.” Rather, he argues that localized Christianity is paradoxically enacted through believers’ self-conscious efforts to harness what they see as a global religion. The three cases show diverse ways in which Filipino Christians construct globalized Protestantism to organize their sense of themselves as distinct yet linked to a worldwide faith.19 Robert Houle’s Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faith in Colonial South Africa also exemplifies an account of local Christianity shaped by the world-Christian turn. Houle calls “naturalization” the way Zulu Christians took control of their religious identity, deploying theological tools brought by American missionaries. For Houle, conversion fails to capture the process: “the really important changes occurred long after that initial moment as slowly, across generations, African believers molded their faith to local realities during the colonial era and beyond.”20 That process was neither a functional search for power amidst political struggle nor for comforting orientation amidst social change. As Houle notes, aspects of Christianity were used in pursuit of “respectability,” a notion related to Zulu cultural expectations grafted onto late nineteenth-century revivals that promulgated collective Christian ideals. Houle admits, “Part of this process lay outside of South Africa, for just as the conditions of individual believers changed over the years, so too did global Christianity.”21

of Enslavement: Becoming Merina in Highland Madagascar, 1770–1822 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann and James Currey, 2000). 18 Brian M. Howell, Christianity in the Local Context: Southern Baptists in the Philippines (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008). 19 Ibid., 5–7, 221. 20 Robert Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faith in Colonial South Africa (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University, 2011), xxi. 21 Ibid., xxii. See also 73–75 and 145–88.

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New Comparative Perspectives from the World-Christian Turn

The world-Christian turn has also encouraged innovative comparative approaches to Christian manifestations across time and space. One is a move beyond continent-based studies of Christianities to study comparatively emerging faith communities linked through regional, often nautical, connections. For example, John Catron explores Evangelical networks forged by AfroCaribbeans in the eighteenth century.22 Catron builds on studies such as Jon Sensbach’s Rebecca’s Revival, which shows how a Caribbean former slave’s life linked Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe already in the eighteenth century.23 Historian James Sweet provides another example. Using an eighteenth-century African-born healer in Brazil, Sweet unveils the interactions of African and indigenous American religious elements with Christian discourses and authorities in the Atlantic world.24 Social scientific approaches mobilize these new comparative perspectives, especially the anthropology of Christianity, a subfield that has emerged along-side world Christianity.25 Self-conscious practitioners like Joel Robbins, William Hanks, and Birgit Meyer have produced outstanding studies revealing Christianity’s multiple possibilities in different times and settings.26 Christian interactions with preexisting religions often feature in such studies, fostering productive comparisons around topics such as Christian meaning-making in relationship to the Bible and Christian constructions of religious authority. James Bielo’s work on Bible study groups in the US builds on earlier research into biblicism to understand Christian practices connected to sacred texts.27 Webb Keane employs semiotic ideology—understood as assumptions 22 John W. Catron, “Evangelical Networks in the Greater Caribbean and the Origins of the Black Church,” Church History 79.1 (2010): 77–114. 23 Jon Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2005). 24 James H. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and Intellectual History in the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 2011). 25 For a programmatic early statement, see Joel Robbins, “What Is a Christian? Notes toward an Anthropology of Christianity,” Religion 33 (2003): 191–99. 26 Joel Robbins, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in Papua New Guinea (Berkeley: University of California, 2004); William F. Hanks, Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross (Berkeley: University of California, 2010); Birgit Meyer, Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana (Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 1999). 27 For a representative essay collection, see James S. Bielo, ed., The Social Life of Scriptures: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Biblicism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2009). Bielo’s own ethnographic study is Words upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical Group Bible Study (New York: New York University, 2009).

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about how to approach religious signs—to consider missionary evangelization in Indonesia, while Matthew Engelke uses the term to explore distinctive Zimbabwean Pentecostal approaches to the Bible.28 Anthropologists of Christianity also examine the dialectical relationship between continuity with one’s past and the novelty of one’s Christian identity when new believers embrace the faith.29 Liana Chua’s studies of conversion among the Bidayuhs in Malaysian Borneo pursue this question. Situating changes in religious identity within social worlds composed of believers and nonbelievers, she foregrounds how conversion is both process and “temporal and relational [repositioning.”30 Still others link personal transformations via Christianity to moral questions. In a study of Pentecostal healers in Botswana, Richard Werbner uses “alternating personhood” to describe their “holy hustling” as they oscillate between being compassionate interrogators of others’ affliction and self-interested exploiters of credulity and weakness.31 Werbner’s study foregrounds the strategic employment of a certain form of Christianity and the ethical issues it raises. In another study of Botswana’s Pentecostals with moral overtones, Frederick Klaits shows how widespread AIDS deaths, far from undermining social cohesion, foster practices of social care under a female pastor’s direction.32 Finally, other social science approaches also accompany the world-Christian turn. Sociologist of religion Martin Riesebrodt’s theory of religion, in prioritizing interventionist religious practices, fosters fruitful comparisons between and among religions. This approach is common among those committed to

28

Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Missionary Encounter (Berkeley: University of California, 2007); Matthew Engelke, A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church (Berkeley: University of California, 2007). 29 The seminal article remains Joel Robbins, “Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture: Belief, Time, and the Anthropology of Christianity,” Current Anthropol­ ogy 48.1 (2007): 5–17. 30 Liana Chua, “Conversion, Continuity, and Moral Dilemmas among Christian Bidayuhs in Malaysian Borneo,” in American Ethnologist 39.3 (2012): 511, 522. Also see her “To Know or Not to Know? Practices of Knowledge and Ignorance among Bidayuhs in an “Impurely” Christian World,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 15.2 (2009): 332–48. 31 Richard Werbner, Holy Hustlers, Schism, and Prophecy: Apostolic Reformation in Botswana (Berkeley: University of California, 2011). 32 Frederick Klaits, Death in a Church of Life: Moral Passion during Botswana’s Time of AIDS (Berkeley: University of California, 2010).

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world Christianity.33 Fellow sociologist Slavica Jakelić’s study of what she calls “collectivist religions”—those one is born into—redresses a long-standing scholarly bias. Studies of world Christianity have skewed toward voluntaristic religions such as Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianities even though nonvoluntaristic religiosity continues to be the most common way to be religious, and Christian, in the world.34 Scholars outside the history of Christianity are developing innovative approaches to religion that are applicable to Christian materials. For instance, Jonathan Schofer’s studies of early rabbinism draw on contemporary virtue ethics and critical theory to explore religious practices developed in close proximity to—and often in competition and/or dialogue with—contemporaneous Christian practices.35 Equally promising is Jonathan Boyarin’s work on the evolution of Western Christian identity in Europe. Boyarin argues that as Europe became coterminous with Christendom, its identity was always-already in relation to Judaism, and was later shaped in relation to new “others”: first Muslims, then after 1492, “Indians.”36 As more of the world’s peoples come to see themselves as Christian, Boyarin’s cautious tale seeks better self-awareness of such implicit othering, potentially inspiring more ethically mindful identity formation. Such studies place pluriform Christian phenomena within even larger comparative perspectives, encouraging appreciation both of Christianity’s distinctiveness and its commonalities with near religious others. Challenges remain in embracing the world-Christian turn in historical research on Christianity. Missionary archives, for example, seldom receive the critical attention they deserve though they reveal much about emerging Christianities. In many places of burgeoning Christianities, missionary archives reveal how peoples now firmly seen as Christian became so. Collective Christian identities often emerged through complex processes in which a changing sense of self and community evolved in relationship to a variety of historical forces, including colonialism, economic exploitation, agitations toward self-determination, the scripting of local languages, and recent globalization. 33

Martin Riesebrodt, The Promise of Salvation: A Theory of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010), xiii, 16, 44, 87. 34 Slavica Jakelić, Collectivistic Religions: Religion, Choice, and Identity in Late Modernity (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010). 35 See Jonathan Schofer, “Ethical Formation and Subjection,” Numen 59.1 (2012): 1–31. 36 Jonathan Boyarin, The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009).

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The World-Christian Turn in Theology

Beyond the discipline of the history of Christianity, the world-Christian turn is also transforming Catholic theological reflection. However, this transformation is not as readily apparent. Like Christian theology more generally, Catholic theology has been slower to embrace implications deriving from world Christianity. One explanation for this delay is the relative inattention paid to Christian mission in theological reflection until quite recently. In 1995, William Burrows presciently compared the academy’s inattention to theology to theology’s own failure to appreciate the importance of missionary activity.37 A year later, mission-studies scholar Wilbert Shenk asserted, “We are at the point where every Christian community ought to be able to perceive and affirm its relationship with every other Christian community around the globe.”38 Another factor slowing theology’s response to the world-Christian turn is the denominational orientation of much theological reflection, naturally angling itself toward existing communities of faith. Unsurprisingly, many leading figures whose theological work reflects the world-Christian turn come from a mission-studies background.39 One Catholic precursor was Joseph Donders’s Non-Bourgeois Theology, an essay collection published in 1985. Donders, a Dutch missionary who served in Kenya, reflected theologically on the intercultural circumstances he faced.40 More recently, Stephen Bevans and Robert Schreiter, along with many others following their lead, spearheaded what they term “contextual theology”— what Europeans usually refer to as “intercultural theology.”41 Many of these contextual and intercultural theologians have roots in mission studies. 37 William R. Burrows, “Needs and Opportunities in Studies of Mission and World Christianity,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 19.4 (1995): 172–78. 38 Wilbert R. Shenk. “Toward a Global Church History,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 20.2 (1996): 50. 39 For three Catholic perspectives, see Felix Wilfrid, “From World Mission to Global Christianities: A Perspective from the South,” Concilium (2011): 13–26; Robert Schreiter, “Christian Mission in a ‘New Modernity’ and Trajectories in Intercultural Theology,” Concilium (2011): 27–36; and Norbert Hintersteiner, “From Cultural Translation to Interfaith Witness: The Intercultural Transformation of Missiology,” Concilium (2011): 85–94. 40 Joseph G. Donders, Non-Bourgeois Theology: An African Experience of Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985). 41 Earlier works include Stephen B. Bevans, Models of Contextual Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1st ed. 1992, 2nd ed. 2002), and Robert J. Schreiter, Constructing Local Theologies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985). On intercultural theology, see: Frans Wijsen and Peter

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A commitment to missionary activity need not lead to an embrace of the theological assumptions associated with the world-Christian turn or vice versa. For example, comparative theology, an emerging subfield in which US Catholic theologians have taken the lead, usually disavows mission-linked commitments. In his introduction to Francis Clooney’s The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation, James Fredericks explains the aims of comparative theology without reference to mission: “Comparative theology, as we [Fredericks and Clooney] have proposed it, entails the interpretation of the meaning and truth of one’s own faith by means of a critical investigation of other faiths.”42 Along with other scholars such as Catherine Cornille and Hugh Nicholson, Fredericks and Clooney have engaged Hindu and Buddhist texts and teachings to reconsider Christian theology, while eschewing any missionary motivations.43 Conversely, some of the most enthusiastic mission-minded Evangelical and Pentecostal theologians have little interest in dialogical and comparative approaches linked to world Christianity. While Catholic theologians are deeply involved in globalizing theological reflection through comparative and contextual theology, they do face challenges in embracing the world-Christian turn. Some arise from deeply rooted Catholic anthropological assumptions about a univocal human nature. Needless to say, Catholic appeals to a universal human nature have had salutary effects at times on missionary practice, as certain missionaries protected local peoples vulnerable to colonial exploitation. Yet, attempts to articulate a universal theology, that is, one that speaks to all times and places, often conflict with the comparative study of religion. Calls to contextualize theology clash with a singular approach to the human person and to God’s revelation

Nissen, eds., “Mission is a Must”: Intercultural Theology and the Mission of the Church (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002); Martha Fredericks, Meindert Dijkstra, and Anton Houtepen, eds., Towards an Intercultural Theology: Essays in Honor of Jan A. B. Jongeneel (Utrecht: Centre for Intercultural Theology, 2003); and Mark J. Cartledge and David Cheetham, eds., Intercultural Theology: Approaches and Themes (London: SCM, 2011). 42 Francis X. Clooney, ed., The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation (London: T&T Clark, 2010), ix. 43 See for example: James L. Fredericks, Buddhists and Christians: Through Comparative Theology to Solidarity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004); Francis X. Clooney, Comparative Theology: Deep Learning Across Religious Borders (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Catherine Cornille, The Im-Possibility of Interreligious Dialogue (New York: Crossroad, 2008): Hugh Nicholson, Comparative Theology and the Problem of Religious Rivalry (Oxford: Oxford University, 2011).

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through creation, covenant, incarnation, paschal mystery, and the ongoing life of the Spirit. The previous pope’s theological stances epitomize this tension. No doubt Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, has long been concerned with maintaining—even strengthening—the church’s missionary mandate. Indeed, his evolving theological opinions over past decades suggest that his most decisive and controversial criticisms of others arose because he found their views softening or undermining mission. Thus Ratzinger and others found that Karl Rahner’s “anonymous Christianity” putatively drew upon openness to the wisdom of other religions so much that it compromised the need to proclaim the gospel to non-Christians. Liberation theology, chastened by Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the 1980s, also drew criticism for allegedly secularizing the gospel through promises of an earthly kingdom, obviating the need to proclaim Christ’s transcendental salvation. More recently, calls for more dialogical or pluralist theologies, many from theologians attentive to Christianity’s interactions with Asian religions like Jacques Dupuis and Peter Phan, generated warnings from Ratzinger that they watered down Christ’s soteriological centrality, suggesting other possible “incarnations” of the divine. Benedict XVI’s frequent cautions about relativism invoked the danger that accepting others’ beliefs may encourage disinterest in achieving salvation through Christ. My point here is simple: though the world-Christian turn among Catholic theologians has arisen historically in connection with missiology, commitment to mission does not automatically coincide with an embrace of the world-Christian turn, either for comparative theologians or those who stress the ecclesial centrality of salvation through Christ.

Conclusion

I see three paradigmatic reactions to the dynamism of world Christianity today.44 First, enthusiasts laud the proliferation of theological creativity and inspiring discipleship as social and cultural differences generate new Christi­ anities. Second, pessimists see some combination of chaos, secularist disaffection with Christianity, deepening syncretism, and what one observer has called 44

These are inspired by Frederick Cooper’s framework with regard to globalization found in Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California, 2005), 93–94. His terms are the Banker’s Boast, the Social Democrat’s Lament, and the Dance of Flows and Fragments.

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“the globalization of superficiality.”45 Third, others acknowledge the multitudinous ways to be Christian today and try to understand them, withholding judgment. Those committed to world Christianity tend to options one and three: theologians to option one, and historians of Christianity, who are professionally inclined to reserve assessment, to option three. That dichotomy itself represents a challenge for an emerging field where different disciplinary approaches strive to unite a bewilderingly dynamic subject. For example, the historian’s appreciation for a given people’s theological creativity in claiming Christian identity can call into question the validity of labeling that same people, in fact, as Christian. In response to this kind of challenge, Darren Marks describes a “global theological mind” as operative “in the present Christian time in response to the pressures and issues of this global world with all of its ‘scapes’ and integration/ fragmentation.”46 Marks offers a challenge to a field like world Christianity—to operate “in the present Christian time” with a critically informed faith mindful of the gifts and burdens of the Christian past, and an awareness of the present complex world. In light of this diagnosis, Marks sees the two future primary theological tasks as pneumatology and missiology. While I agree with this assessment, I would emphasize the value of missiology, at least as it is construed by leading practitioners in the field today. Contemporary missiologists have loosened missionary practice from negative historical associations linked with the term “mission.” The field is ecumenical, engages theological subfields (including pneumatology), embraces the social sciences, and attends to Christian manifestations everywhere. Missiology seems uniquely situated to serve as a master discipline for world Christianity, poised to capture the phenomena this increasingly familiar term seeks to name. Historical and theological understanding of the diversity and vitality of the world Christian movement will be well served by deeper attention to contemporary missiology.47 45

Adolfo Nicolás, SJ, “Depth, Universality, and Learned Ministry: Challenges to Jesuit Higher Education Today,” Keynote Address for International Meeting on Jesuit Higher Education, Networking Jesuit Higher Education for the Globalizing World, Mexico City, April 23, 2010. See: http://www.ajcunet.edu/Jesuit-Superior-General-Adolfo-Nicolas-SJ-Keynote -Address-Available-on-AJCU-Website. Nicolás is the Jesuit Superior General. 46 Darren C. Marks, ed. Shaping a Global Theological Mind (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), xi. 47 For a fine overview of missiology, see Stanley H. Skreslet, Comprehending Mission: The Questions, Methods, Themes, Problems, and Prospects of Missiology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2012).

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Acknowledgments

This article began as a lecture given at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University. I thank my hosts for the invitation to speak there and for the rich conversation that ensued. I also thank Pam Foltz for help in editing the text, and especially Joy McDougall for her original invitation to contribute to this issue and her repeatedly generous editorial assistance over some months. Finally, I thank Jeania Ree Moore and Rachelle Brown for their careful copy-editing.

Transcontinental Links, Enlarged Maps, and Polycentric Structures in the History of World Christianity Klaus Koschorke The new global situation of Christianity requires new historiographical approaches. But in spite of many efforts and remarkable progress in the last twenty-five years, we are only in the first stages of drawing up an integrated history of world Christianity. An important contribution has been made by the members of the “Munich School of World Christianity,” which will be presented in the current issue of this journal. Three leading principles guide its program: (1) the urgent need for new, and enlarged, maps of the global history of Christianity—which will enable us to describe the different denominational, regional, and cultural expressions of Christianity as part of a greater whole; (2) an awareness of “polycentric structures” throughout the history of world Christianity—not only in its most recent period but from its very beginnings; and (3) paying proper attention to transregional links and the resulting concept of a global history of Christianity as a history of multidirectional transcontinental interactions, which include early instances of South– South connections. 1

Need for New and Enlarged Maps

In the year 1493 the cartographer and explorer Martin Behaim from Nuremberg (Germany) created the oldest globe still preserved today. It represents the geographic knowledge of his time, showing Europe, the outlines of Africa, and the then-known Asian regions. Quite unfortunately, however, one continent was missing on Behaim’s globe: America, which had just been “discovered” by Christopher Columbus in 1492. This was not only due to the short time

Source: Koschorke, K., “Transcontinental Links, Enlarged Maps and Polycentric Structures in the History of World Christianity,” Journal of World Christianity 6.1 (2016): pp. 28–56.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004399594_032

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span between the Genoese’s expedition and the creation of the globe. Even Columbus, in search of an alternative, western route to the magnificent treasures of Asia, once described so impressively by Marco Polo, did not realize the relevance of his own discovery. He, too, still had approximately the same image of the world as was presented on Behaim’s globe. It was only later that others (such as Amerigo Vespucci, whose name would eventually be given to the continent) realized that Columbus had, indeed, discovered an unknown continent. But even so, the “New World” was to stay for considerable time in the shadows of the old world’s political and ecclesial debates. The discussions of the Council of Trent (1545–63), for example—a crucial event in the Catholic world of the sixteenth century—did not mention the Americas at all. Decades would pass before the map in people’s minds had adapted to the changed reality. 1.1 Behaim’s Globe as a Metaphor In some ways, Behaim’s globe may serve as a metaphor for the state of historical research on Christianity as a global movement. “The new world situation for the Christian religion demands a new history of Christianity,” says, among others, religious historian Mark A. Noll.1 But the maps currently used in academic research and teaching still reflect only to a limited extent the dramatic changes that have taken place in the last fifty years. Some of these maps are outdated or cover only shrinking segments of the expanding field of world Christianity. Others attempt to respond to “the new world situation” of Christianity and underline its global dimensions. But they are composed of various regional maps of heterogeneous origin and different quality and reliability. In spite of much progress achieved in recent times, we are still at the beginning of an intensive search for new maps that can provide orientation in dramatically changed religious landscapes. Crucial aspects of the “new world situation” of Christianity include – the often cited “shift of the center of gravity” (Andrew F. Walls)2—in terms of numerical strength, geographic extension, and dynamics of intercultural encounter 1 Mark A. Noll, The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 9. 2 Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1996), 8.

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– an increasing majority (currently ca. 62 percent) of the Christian world population living in the “global South”—compared with the case in 1900, when 82 percent were to be found in countries of the Northern Hemisphere. This has been the result both of demographic growth in Christian-majority societies (e.g., in Latin America, with a total population of sixty million in 1900 and 520 million in 2000) and of rapid church growth in regions and cultures where Christianity was unknown or marginal before (specifically in sub-Saharan Africa) – the spread of new types of churches and “inculturated” forms of Christian presence in Asia, Africa, and Latin America – global changes in religious geographies as a result of transcontinental migration movements, affecting both Christian and non-Christian communities One important aspect of the new situation is the dissolution of traditional patterns of geographic presence. Nowadays, one does not have to travel far to encounter the cultural, denominational, and regional varieties of world Christianity. One can easily find Coptic Christians, Nigerian Aladura churches, Bolivian Pentecostals, Korean Presbyterians, Chinese Lutherans, or other migrant communities in the immediate neighborhood. This applies both to metropolises in the West, such as New York, London, and Frankfurt, and to other metropolitan regions, such as Cape Town, São Paulo, and Singapore. This changed situation emphasizes in a new way the need for a “shared history” of the different branches of the worldwide Christian movement. Some problems in current historiographical approaches and curricula include the following: 1.

Highly specialized maps of church history continue to present Christianity as a primarily Western religion. In recent times, the German-speaking academic context, for example, has seen various, quite remarkable projects on an “ecumenical” church history that have tried to do justice to the denominational plurality of world Christianity. The traditional ecclesial geographies, however, have been left more or less unchanged. They do not include the growing presence of Christians in the global South. This may partly be the unconscious result of the traditional dichotomy of “church history” and “mission history” as academic disciplines in the German context—the former relating to the churches in Europe (and North America), and the latter, to Christianity “overseas.”

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“Bookbinder’s synthesis” (to use a term borrowed from Jürgen Oster­ hammel). Some recent and current projects carried out in various places seek to develop a global perspective primarily by adding more or less unconnected regional or confessional histories. They (unevenly) knit together maps designed under different circumstances, varying methodological presuppositions, and heterogeneous academic or ecclesial contexts—some of them resulting from an intensive interdisciplinary discourse, others limited more or less to some kind of missionary hagiography. Thus, there is an urgent need to relate in a new way “understudied” and “overstudied” areas in the history of world Christianity. Other insufficient attempts append a few isolated southern paradigms to the traditional, West-oriented curricula and do not realize the need for a new integrated understanding of Christianity as a worldwide movement. Similar observations can be made, by the way, also with regard to some quite encouraging initiatives in Asian countries such as China. Here, on the one hand, Chinese Christian history, far too long neglected since the proclamation of the People’s Republic in 1949, is increasingly detected by secular historians in various academic contexts as a constitutive part of national history. On the other hand, they repeatedly describe the global context of the relevant Christian movements in quite traditional terms and hardly relate them, for example, to comparable developments in Asia. Different research traditions in different regional or continental contexts. One crucial theme in the study of the history of African Christianity has been the rise of African independent churches. They emerged, quite spontaneously and simultaneously, in various regions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Without them, the explosive church growth in the postcolonial period cannot be understood. Little attention has been paid, however, and hardly any systematic comparative study has been undertaken, regarding the fact that an analogous constellation existed also in Christian Asia at that time—as the conflict between missionary paternalism (and racism) and increasing movements for emancipation among the indigenous Christian elites on the spot. This led partly to comparable and partly to dissimilar developments in Asia and Africa at that time.

What we still need are new, and enlarged, maps of the history of global Christianity that will enable us to perceive our own specific—regional or denominational—history as part of a greater whole. Such extended maps will

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help to develop an awareness of a common past in order to shape a common future. Simultaneously, they will enable us to ask in a new way for interdependencies between various parts of the Christian world. The following point is especially important: global perspectives in the history of Christianity are not limited to the most recent period since the end of World War II, which has been repeatedly labeled as “postcolonial” and “postmissionary.” “World Christianity” is not identical with “contemporary Christianity,”3 and the Protestant Missionary movement in the early twentieth century should not be described as “the first globalization.”4 By contrast, the Christian movement, from its very beginnings in the first and second centuries, has defined itself as a community transcending the barriers of geography, language, ethnicity, and culture. Its history can be conceived as a history of successive waves of global expansion (and contraction) and of far-reaching integration (and fragmentation). In this process, which lasted many centuries, the Christian movement progressively expanded within the horizon of the then-known world. Paying close attention to these global dimensions in various epochs from the early Church to modern times has been one of the distinctive marks of the “Munich School of World Christianity” and its extensive work.5 This research area is filled with surprising discoveries. 1.2 Comparative Studies One important instrument to develop global perspectives in the history of world Christianity consists in comparative studies. By posing the same questions to divergent contexts, both analogous and differing developments in geographically separated places and heterogeneous political, cultural, and religious settings can be analyzed. The goal is both to sharpen the profile of specific regional developments and, at the same time, to identify overarching trends and issues that are relevant for an “integrated” understanding of Christian history. 3 See Sathianathan Clarke, “World Christianity and Postcolonial Mission: A Path Forward for the Twenty-First Century,” Theology Today 71, no. 2 (2014): 192–206. 4 Dana L. Robert, “The First Globalization? The Internationalization of the Protestant Mis­ sionary Movement Between the World Wars,” in Interpreting Contemporary Christianity, ed. Ogbu U. Kalu (Grand Rapids: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 93–130. 5 The Fifth International Munich-Freising Conference dealt with paradigms from the medieval period till the early twentieth century, published as Klaus Koschorke, ed., Epochen der Globalisierung in christentumsgeschichtlicher Perspektive/Phases of Globalization in the History of Christianity, Studies in the History of Christianity in the Non-Western World (Asia, Africa, Latin America) 19 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2012).

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This comparative approach has been the guiding principle of various research projects of the “Munich School of World Christianity.” For example, the International Munich-Freising Conferences have examined fundamental aspects of a future historiography of world Christianity. With this intention, the first of these conferences focused on the theme enshrined in Vasco da Gama’s famous quote “Christians and spices.” It dealt with the issue of “confrontation and interaction of colonial and indigenous forms of Christianity.”6 The central question was: To what extent did Western Christians during the successive waves of missionary expansion meet older forms of Christianity in different regions outside Europe, which patterns of encounter were developed, and what did these encounters mean for the subsequent history of Christianity in the respective regions? In the sixteenth century, for example, the Portuguese met in both Asia (India) and Africa (Ethiopia) ancient oriental churches and already-existing local Christian communities. The result of this encounter, however, was very different in each region, as will be shown later. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch replaced the colonial rule of the Portuguese in various regions, where they encountered a former Catholic presence—which they combated bitterly in one place (as, for example, in Ceylon) and supported only as the religion of the Afro-American slaves, not of the white rulers, in other colonies (such as Curaçao). Likewise, later, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Protestant missions were challenged in various regions and continents by church independency movements, to which they responded differently. The Fourth International Munich-Freising Conference, held in 2009, explored the theme “The Year 1989/90 as a Turning Point in the History of World Christianity.”7 The decisive point here was to discuss the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire not only on the hitherto persecuted churches and Christians in Eastern Europe—which had already been widely studied—but also on other regions. Therefore, the conference was structured according to regions, with sections on Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and North America. An important result of this conference consisted in the following insight: the collapse of the Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War 6 Klaus Koschorke, ed., “Christen und Gewürze”: Konfrontation und Interaktion kolonialer und indigener Christentumsvarianten, Studies in the History of Christianity in the Non-Western World (Asia, Africa, Latin America) 1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1998). 7 Published as Klaus Koschorke, ed., Falling Walls: The Year 1989/90 as a Turning Point in the History of World Christianity/Einstürzende Mauern: Das Jahr 1989/90 als Epochenjahr in der Geschichte des Weltchristentums, Studies in the History of Christianity in the Non-Western World (Asia, Africa, Latin America) 15 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009).

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deeply influenced the religious landscape not in a uniform manner but with specific regional peculiarities and differences. In South Africa, for example, there existed a close connection between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakdown of the apartheid system, which no longer needed to be supported by Western powers as the supposed “bulwark” against the Communist threat. Similarly, in numerous African countries autocratic regimes collapsed, which had previously been supported by the rivaling superpowers. During the subsequent “second wave of democratization,” African churches and Christian leaders played an important role as mediators and organizers of “roundtables.” In various Asian regions, the breakdown of Soviet rule was accompanied by the reemergence of different forms of religious nationalism, which in some places (Armenia, Georgia) strengthened and in other places (primarily with Muslim majorities) endangered Christian communities. In Latin America, proponents of Liberation Theology were forced to cope with the loss of the socialist model of reference. In geographically distant regions (such as South Africa, Korea, and Brazil), “prophetic” types of theology—resulting from the confrontation with autocratic regimes—increasingly were replaced by the search for “public theologies” that responded to the democratic changes in these countries. Another vital Munich project has been the groundbreaking source book entitled Documentary History of Christianity in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, 1450–1990, which up to now has been published in German, English, and Spanish versions (others will follow).8 This book presents primary documents arranged according to the continents of Asia, Africa, and Central/South America and in each of its three parts follows the same chronological order. Thus, it enables researchers, academic teachers, and students to connect the history of one specific region with simultaneous developments in other parts of the world. Specialists of European Reformation history can look at debates about the Spanish conquista overseas. Historians of Christianity in India, West Africa, or Mexico can examine the contemporaneous events in other regions of their respective continent. The rise of African independent churches in the early twentieth century is documented for West, South, and East Africa, along with indigenous church movements and related endeavors in India, Sri Lanka, Japan, and the Philippines.9

8 English version: Klaus Koschorke, Frieder Ludwig, and Mariano Delgado, eds., A History of Christianity in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, 1450–1990: A Documentary Sourcebook (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007). 9 Ibid., 100–106, 216–27.

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Polycentric Structures

Historical research tends to equate globalization in the past five centuries with the process of Europeanization. Similarly, the worldwide spread of Christianity since the early modern period has traditionally been described as the result of successive waves of Western missionary activities—first by various Catholic orders (since the sixteenth century) and later by an increasing number of different Protestant groups and societies, specifically in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But as important as the Western missionary movements may have been, at least in certain regions and times—and specifically when the first contacts between Christians and non-Christians took place—they were just one factor, among others, in the global diffusion of Christianity. In order to understand the polycentric history of world Christianity, one has to take into account the variety of regional centers of expansion, plurality of actors, multiplicity of indigenous initiatives, and local appropriations of Christianity. This principle applies to different epochs—not merely to the current period since World War II but also to Christianity’s early beginnings in Galilee, Jerusalem, and Antioch (from where the Apostle Paul started his missionary journeys). Already in the New Testament period, prominent Christian congregations, like the one in Rome, were founded by anonymous Christians. The ancient Church had no one religious or institutional center at all, and early attempts, for example, by the Roman bishop to claim ideological or jurisdictional superiority failed miserably. Even in medieval times there existed, apart from Latin Christianity in the West and Byzantine Christianity in the East, a third center of contemporary “world Christianity”—the “Nestorian” East Syriac “Church of the East.” It extended, at the peak of its expansion in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, from Syria to East China and from Siberia to South India and Ceylon, thereby, in geographic terms, surpassing by far contemporary Roman Catholicism in Western Europe.10 2.1 India and Ethiopia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Polycentricity constitutes one of the characteristic marks of Christian history also in the sixteenth century, the age of Iberian overseas expansion and the 10 See Roman Malek and Peter Hofrichter, eds., Jingjiao: The Church of the East in China and Central Asia (Sankt Augustin, Germany: Institut Monumenta Serica, 2006); Klaus Koschorke, “‘Ob er nun unter den Indern weilt oder unter den Chinesen …’: Die ostsyrischnestorianische ‘Kirche des Ostens’ als kontinentales Netzwerk im Asien der Vormoderne,” Jahrbuch für Europäische Überseegeschichte 9 (2009): 9–35.

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beginnings of Europe’s colonial dominance. Certainly, it was exclusively in the context of the Spanish (and Portuguese) conquest that Christianity first reached the Americas. But even here, quite early an indigenous and “native Indian” Christianity arose—without which the subsequent spread of the new religion across the continent cannot be understood. As already mentioned, the Portuguese met ancient Christian communities in Asia (India) and in Africa (Ethiopia), which had existed there uninterruptedly for more than one thousand years. This encounter between the Portuguese newcomers and the traditional oriental Christians was one of the most exciting events in the religious history of the sixteenth century. In addition, it was to have an enormous impact on the future of Christianity in these regions and far beyond. In India the Portuguese entered into an ambivalent relationship with the local Thomas Christians. A famous eyewitness account narrates the first steps of the Portuguese on Indian soil. When Vasco da Gama arrived by sea in India in 1498, which his rival Columbus had missed a few years earlier by taking the alternative Atlantic route, he met two Arab merchants on the beach of Calicut in the current state of Kerala, who greeted him in Genoese and Castilian with the friendly words, “What the devil are you looking for?” Vasco da Gama gave his famous answer, “Christians and spices.” Spices—and ending the Arabic monopoly on trade—were actually the economic motive of the Portuguese overseas expedition, and their search for “Christians” constituted the ideological one. Already in the European Middle Ages, there had existed a vague knowledge about the oriental churches in faraway Asia; and Vasco da Gama landed by chance exactly in that part of India where native Christians had indeed been living for centuries, calling themselves Thomas Christians. The subsequent story of the Portuguese and the Thomas Christians was marked by a series of partly bizarre misunderstandings. Thus, for example, the first worship of the Portuguese newcomers on Indian ground took place in a Hindu temple, which they mistook for a Christian church. Later, they got in touch with the “real” Thomas Christians. Initial joy about the new Christian friends, on both sides, was gradually replaced by mutual distrust. The Jesuits increasingly criticized the Thomas Christians for their lack of orthodoxy, according to Roman Catholic standards. Finally, at the notorious Synod of Diamper in 1599, the time-honored “Syrian” church of the Indian Christians was more or less forcefully integrated into the Portuguese colonial church. In 1653, a small section of the Thomas Christians managed to get free again from this forced union. Split into various branches, they still exist today. But the events around Diamper produced a trauma that was to last for centuries. On the other hand, at the beginning of the twentieth century and in the wake of

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Indian nationalism, the Syrian churches attracted the attention of the Indian public in a new way because the Thomas Christians symbolized a noncolonial type of Christianity and a model of an Indian church that was not divided by European missionary “sectarianism.” Additionally, besides the Thomas Christians and the colonial Catholicism of the newly arrived Portuguese, a third version of Christianity emerged in sixteenth-century India. It resulted from the self-Christianization of the Paravas, a fishing community in South India that was socially marginalized within Hindu society and oppressed by Muslim merchants. As soon as they heard of the arrival of the Portuguese, the Paravas took the initiative to contact them and asked them to send priests. As a result, starting in 1535, mass movements happened among the Paravas, and many of them embraced the Catholicism of the Portuguese and joined Christian congregations. When Francis Xavier—later to be celebrated as the “Apostle of Asia” in Catholic historiography—came to their region in 1542, he encountered already existing Christian communities. In addition, the Paravas became agents of an autonomous regional expansion. As fisherfolk dependent on the monsoon winds, they used to change their location according to the season and circulated regularly between the southern coast of India and the northern coast of Sri Lanka (in the region around Mannar), where they spread their new faith. This happened long before the Portuguese entered that region. Persecutions, swiftly carried out by local Hindu rulers (in 1544 by the princes of Jaffna), could not stop the growth of the emerging Christian community. Still today, the region around Mannar counts as one of the strongholds of Sri Lankan Catholicism; and in South India, Christian Paravas became firmly established as a separate group within the regional caste system.11 11 See Georg Schurhammer, “Die Bekehrung der Paraver (1535–1537),” in Gesammelte Studien, vol. 2 (Rome: Institutum Historicum, 1963), 215–54; Stephen Neill, The History of Christianity in India, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 140ff.; Susan Bayly, “A Christian Caste in Hindu Society: Religious Leadership and Social Conflict Among the Paravas of Southern Tamilnadu,” Modern Asian Studies 15, no. 2 (1981): 203–34; Patrick A. Roche, Fishermen of the Coromandel: A Social Study of the Paravas of the Coromandel (New Delhi: South Asia Books, 1984); Markus Vink, “Church and State in Seventeenth-Century Colonial Asia: Dutch-Parava Relations in Southeast India in a Comparative Perspective,” Journal of Early Modern History 4, no. 1 (2000): 1–43. The Paravas in the sixteenth century are just one example of Indian initiatives in the history of Sri Lankan Christianity. Further examples are the Goanese Oratorians of the seventeenth/eighteenth centuries, who—since the days of Joseph Vaz (1651–1711)—revitalized Ceylonese underground Catholicism under Dutch colonial rule; and, in the nineteenth century, South Indian indentured laborers, or “coolies,” who worked on the tea estates

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An analogous history unfolded in Ethiopia in the sixteenth century. Here too, the Portuguese encountered a very ancient Christian church with independent traditions dating back as far as the fourth century. The Ethiopians themselves trace their Christian beginning back to biblical and even Old Testament times. Here too, the Iberians came first as invited friends, heartily welcomed as allies against Muslim invaders. Here too, step-by-step a sharp conflict arose between the local Christians and the Catholic missionaries, due to their attempts to latinize the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Quite different from the case in India, however, in Ethiopia the Portuguese were forcefully thrown out of the country in 1632—with the result of a self-imposed “splendid isolation” of the African kingdom vis-à-vis Christian Europe that was to last for centuries.12 This again turned out to be a major factor in the genesis of Ethiopianism as an emancipatory movement among black Christians on both sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth century. Ethiopia was outstanding in various respects. It was the only African country able to defeat in 1896, at the high noon of European colonialism, an Italian invasion army. Thus Ethiopia was free, it was black, and it was Christian. As a symbol of both political and ecclesial independence it inspired emancipatory tendencies among African elites in West Africa, in South Africa, in the Caribbean, and in the United States. Thus it was not only the representative of a very ancient type of Christianity that had survived in modern times. It also gave birth to a new type of transatlantic churches and religious movements without which current world Christianity cannot be understood. 2.2 Sierra Leone A similar constellation can be observed also in other locations such as Sierra Leone (West Africa). This region plays a central role in the history of West African Protestantism. Traditionally, the beginnings of the Protestant presence here have been traced back to the activities of British missionaries (from the Anglican “Church Missionary Society”) and Swabian Pietists (from the Basel Mission) at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In significant measure, however, these beginnings were also the result of an African American in the Sri Lankan highlands and established a Christian presence in regions that were not yet reached by the missionaries. Cf. Klaus Koschorke, “Dutch Colonial Church and Catholic Underground Church in Ceylon in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Koschorke, Christen und Gewürze, 95–105. 12 See Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa, 1450–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 3–45, 130–72; Verena Böll, “Von der Freundschaft zur Feindschaft: Die äthiopischorthodoxe Kirche und die portugiesischen Jesuiten in Äthiopien, 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” in Koschorke, Christen und Gewürze, 43–48.

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initiative: the remigration efforts by members of the African Protestant diaspora on the other side of the Atlantic, as Andrew F. Walls, Adrian Hastings, Lamin Sanneh, and most recently Jehu J. Hanciles have impressively demonstrated. “African Protestant Christianity was then, by the 1780s, very much a reality”—so begins A. Hastings’s section “West African Protestant Beginnings and the Foundation of Freetown” in his Church History of Africa. He continues: “The one place it did not exist was in Africa”—apart from some trading stations of the Dutch, English, and Danes along the West African coast. On the other side of the Atlantic, however, and especially in Nova Scotia (in modernday Canada), there were numerous freed blacks, many of whom had previously been in British service, who—with the Bible as their Freedom Charter in hand—wanted to return to Africa. And despite all setbacks and unfulfilled expectations, this initiative led in 1792 to the founding of a Christian settlement in Sierra Leone.13 The newly established port city, programmatically called “Freetown,” was, from its very beginning, a Christian city; and the emerging polyglot black elite of Sierra Leone would serve as a bridge in the further course of the Christianization of West Africa. To quote from Andrew F. Walls’s paper at the Second International Munich-Freising Conference: “In this way, in November 1792 the first Protestant church in tropical Africa was established”—as the result of an African American initiative from the other side of the Atlantic. “It was a ready made African church, with its own structures and leadership.”14

13 Hastings, Church in Africa, 177: “Thus in 1792 the already existing African, English-speaking, Protestant society which had come into existence in diaspora over the preceding half-century established a foothold in Africa” (181). Andrew F. Walls, “Sierra Leone, Afroamerican Remigration, and the Beginnings of Protestantism in West Africa,” in Transkontinentale Beziehungen in der Geschichte des Außereuropäischen Christentums/ Transcontinental Links in the History of Non-Western Christianity, ed. Klaus Koschorke, Studies in the History of Christianity in the Non-Western World (Asia, Africa, Latin America) 6 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002), 45–56; Lamin Sanneh, Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Jehu J. Hanciles, Beyond Christendom: Globalization, African Migration, and the Transformation of the West (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2009); Jehu J. Hanciles, “The Black Atlantic and the Shaping of African Christianity, 1820–1920,” in Polycentric Structures in the History of World Christianity/Polyzentrische Strukturen in der Geschichte des Weltchristentums, ed. Klaus Koschorke and Adrian Hermann, Studies in the History of Christianity in the Non-Western World (Asia, Africa, Latin America) 25 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014), 29–50. 14 Walls, “Sierra Leone, Afroamerican Remigration, and the Beginnings of Protestantism in West Africa,” 55.

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These characteristics persevered to a great extent, even after Sierra Leone became a British Crown colony in 1808 and turned into a center of European mission activity. Simultaneously, the demographic composition of the black population in Sierra Leone also changed. Instead of the African American returned settlers from the United States, it was then increasingly the so-called recaptives—freed slaves—from various regions of West Africa who reached land in Freetown. The most famous of these “recaptives” was Samuel Ayaji Crowther (ca. 1808–1891), from current-day Nigeria. He was freed by a British squadron from a Portuguese slave ship in 1822 and was entrusted to the care of English missionaries in Freetown, where he was baptized and later ordained and played an important role in the translation of the Bible into Yoruba. In 1864 he became the first African in the modern age to be installed as an Anglican bishop in British Equatorial West Africa. As “the slave boy who became bishop,” he had already in his lifetime become a legend and symbol of the hopes of advancement and social uplift of African Christians. 2.3 Korea Change of location: Korea. Today one finds Korean missionaries everywhere— in the Red Square in Moscow, on the subway in Budapest, or in remote villages in the Peruvian Andes. In many Asian countries they have taken up the position previously held by European missionaries. According to a recently published survey, currently circa fourteen thousand Korean missionaries are active in about 180 countries all over the world.15 The churches of the country themselves are the result of a self-Christianization, to an extent that is quite unique even in the Asian context. This applies especially to the beginnings of Catholicism in the year 1784. They go back to an initiative of Confucian scholars at the end of the eighteenth century, who in hermetic, closed-off Korea first came into contact with Christian teaching, or “Western knowledge,” through Chinese-language Jesuit tracts. They wanted to learn more about this and sent one from their group—named Seung-Hoon Lee—in 1783 as a member of the yearly Tribute Commission to Beijing. Here he obtained more texts and information from the Catholic fathers who were active there and eventually was baptized in the “North Church.” After his return 15 For Korea, see the contributions by Sebastian Kim, Kyo S. Ahn, and Kirsteen Kim in Koschorke and Hermann, Polycentric Structures in the History of World Christianity, 73– 130; see also Choi Young-Woong, “The Mission of the Presbyterian Church of Korea in Shangdong, North China, 1913–1957,” in Koschorke, Transcontinental Links in the History of Non-Western Christianity, 117–30.

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to Korea in 1784, he himself then converted and baptized his colleagues, who at once spread the new teaching in the land. They began producing theological literature, first in Chinese and then in the Korean language. Despite rapidly enacted bloody persecution, the number of Catholics had already reached four thousand in 1794. This occurred approximately fifty years before the first European missionary, the Frenchman Pierre Maubant, set foot in the country in 1836. As a congregation of martyrs, the Catholic Koreans survived underground until the edict against Christians was lifted in the 1880s. The beginnings of Korean Protestantism one hundred years later have also been described as the result of self-evangelization.16 Before the arrival of American missionaries in 1884, there were already Protestant communities in the country, which had come into existence, above all, through the distribution of the New Testament. Korean Christians in the diaspora (Manchuria, Japan) played an important role in this development. Furthermore, the principle of congregational autonomy and native leadership was applied from the beginning on. The newly established congregations had to be “self-extending, self-supporting, and self-governing”—according to the famous “Three-Selves” Formula. Another important factor for the rapid spread was the leading participation of Korean Christians in the anti-Japanese national movement. In contrast to other Asian countries, Korea did not have to deal with Western colonialism but, rather, with the Japanese, who gradually occupied the country. So of the thirty-three signers of the—unsuccessful—independence declaration of 1919, sixteen were leaders in the Korean church, although Korean Christians made up no more than 1 percent of the country’s population at that time. Early on, Korean Christians concerned themselves with the spread of the Christian faith among their compatriots living abroad. Already in 1901 (just fifteen years after their own formation), the Presbyterian congregations in the north of the peninsula began to send out their own evangelists to migrants in Manchuria. In Hawaii, the majority of the first Korean group of immigrants in 1903 were already Christian, and immediately after their arrival they founded there a Methodist church. In 1906, thirty-six Korean churches existed on the islands. A document from 1910 names Korean Christian communities in Siberia, China, Manchuria, Hawaii, California, and Mexico as the goal of the

16 “It is striking that Korean Christianity began virtually as a self-evangelized church”: Joon-Sik Park, “Korean Protestant Christianity: A Missiological Reflection,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 36 (2012): 59.

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foreign activities of Korean evangelists. But also outside of their own community Koreans became active quite early, as in the Shandong region of northern China, where the Presbyterian Church of Korea sent missionaries starting in 1913 with the goal of founding a native Chinese church. This occurred just shortly after the catastrophic year of 1910, when Korea was formally annexed by Japan. This occurrence was not at all random. If Korea had already lost its national sovereignty, it should—according to the convictions of many Korean Christians—at least make itself known as a member and one of the sending centers of the international Christian community. The “Three-Selves” Formula and the Emergence of Regional Centers of Expansion in the Late Nineteenth Century As is well known, the “Three-Selves” Formula was originally a missionary concept, developed in different contexts by pioneers such as Henry Venn (Church Missionary Society) and Rufus Anderson (American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions). It aimed at the establishment of self-supporting, selfextending, and self-governing native churches, whereas the Euro-American missionaries were supposed to move to other, as-yet unevangelized regions (“euthanasia of missions”).17 Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, the “Three Selves” increasingly became the watchwords for emancipatory tendencies among indigenous Christian elites from Asia and Africa. The bygone nineteenth century—said the Christian Patriot (Madras), the organ of the Protestant intelligentsia of South India, in 1901—had been the “century of [Western] missions.” In contrast, the twentieth century would be the century of the “native churches” and “native Christians”—and would be characterized by “the self-support, the self-government and the self-extension of the native Churches,” in India and elsewhere.18 And it was especially this demand for “self-propagation” that was increasingly regarded as a proof of religious emancipation and characteristic mark of the new era. One consequence was the foundation of indigenous mission societies in various parts of Asia starting in 1900, independent of European control. A prominent example is provided by the Indian “National Missionary Society” (nms), which originated in 1905. It followed the principle “Indian men, Indian money, Indian 2.4

17 See C. Peter Williams, The Ideal of the Self-Governing Church: A Study in Victorian Mis­ sionary Strategy (Leiden: Brill, 1990); Jehu J. Hanciles, Euthanasia of a Mission: African Church Autonomy in a Colonial Context (Westport: Praeger, 2002). 18 Christian Patriot, September 28, 1901.

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leadership” and was active not only in the “unoccupied fields” in India itself but also in neighboring countries such as Ceylon, Burma, and Malacca: “To awaken in our people a national consciousness, to create in them a sense of true patriotism, and to unite in the cause of the evangelisation of our country the Indian Christians of all denominations and provinces, it has been placed in the hearts of many of our brethren to organise a National Missionary Society of India.”19 One of the leading persons in the nms was V. S. Azariah, later to become the first Indian bishop. The nms was inspired by, among others, the example of the “Jaffna Student Foreign Missionary Society,” which was established in 1900 and sent its evangelists “to Tamil-speaking people in neglected districts of other lands, such as South India, the Strait Settlements, and South Africa.”20 Either as the result of explicit evangelistic activities or, more often, simply as the by-product of migration of Indian indentured laborers within the British Empire, congregations of Tamil Christians emerged in Ceylon, Burma, Malaya, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Mauritius, South Africa, Uganda, British Guyana, Trinidad, and Fiji.21 Already in 1880, Indian Christians had declared: “The day will come when the Indian Church will send the Gospel to the different countries of Asia.”22 Analogous developments can be observed from the turn of the twentieth century in other Asian countries as well. I have already mentioned Korea and the early activities of Korean Christians in Northeast Asia, Hawaii, and California. A special dynamic emerged from the churches in Japan—the Asian nation that, after centuries of self-imposed isolation, had only quite recently taken the leap into modernity and, after its victory over Russia in 1904/5, became a shining model for the anticolonial elites of the whole continent. In 1906, a delegation of Japanese Christians visited India, “at the special request of the Indian ymca [Young Men’s Christian Association].” There they gave much-celebrated presentations about the theme: “What can Indian learn from Japan?” One of their answers: Asia can be evangelized only by its own

19 George Thomas, Christian Indians and Indian Nationalism 1885–1950 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1979), 147–48. Cf. Donald Ebright, “The National Missionary Society of India, 1905–1942” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1944); Susan B. Harper, In the Shadow of the Mahatma: Bishop V. S. Azariah and the Travails of Christianity in British India (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 83ff. 20 Christian Patriot, July 28, 1900. 21 Norman Sargant, The Dispersion of the Tamil Church (New Delhi: ISPCK, 1962). 22 Indian Christian Herald, November 5, 1880.

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sons—“Japan by the Japanese, China by the Chinese, and India by the Indians.” In addition, they stressed the mutual responsibility of the “oriental” churches for each other.23 In 1907, a conference organized by the Japanese branch of the World Student Christian Federation (wscf) took place in Tokyo, which was described in contemporary publications as the first international conference ever held in Japan. Above all, however, it was the first Christian-ecumenical gathering with a majority of Asian delegates, who made up approximately 500 of the 627 participants. There declared the Japanese delegates: “The recognition of the responsibility of the Christians of Japan for the evangelization of Formosa, Korea, Manchuria and North China has been strengthened by the developments of the last year, until now it is generally shared by all intelligent Christians (sc. of Japan).”24 Students from various Asian countries, now living in Tokyo, were looked at as possible multipliers of Christianity in their respective homelands. This applied specifically to the circa fifteen thousand students from China; and the Chinese ymca in Tokyo, established in 1906, was to play an important role in providing Christian personnel for the future government of Republican China. Similar developments also took place in Africa. It is quite remarkable that in Indian debates about a “native Church organization” in the early 1900s the Uganda church was repeatedly presented as an “object lesson to Indian Christians”—because the people there “have made great success in the direction of self-support, self-extension, and self-government.”25 “The Church of Uganda is a self-extending Church” and sent its own evangelists to neighboring regions.26 In the already-mentioned Ethiopianist movement, African agency in the spread of the Gospel was regarded as a matter of crucial importance. Among other biblical references, the story of Acts 8 served as a powerful biblical lesson to reiterate this principle: Philip—interpreted as the prototype of a Western missionary—was “taken away” by the Spirit. By contrast, the eunuch alone returned to his home country and founded the Ethiopian church. Looking finally at the various Christian networks around the “black Atlantic,” special mention must be made of movements such as the “African Orthodox Church.” Established in 1921 in New York, it was present in South Africa already

23 Christian Patriot, April 28, 1906, 6. 24 Report of the Conference of the World’s Student Christian Federation at Tokyo April 3–7, 1907 (New York, n.d. [1908]), 224–25. 25 Christian Patriot, March 11, 1905. 26 Christian Patriot, September 6, 1902, 6.

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in 1921 (and a little later also in Uganda and Kenya). This was achieved, as its members proudly stated, “without any [Western] missionary agency.”27 3

History of World Christianity as a History of Multidirectional Transcontinental Interactions

The perception of polycentric structures corresponds to the concept of a global history of Christianity as a history of multidirectional transcontinental interactions. Unlike former missionary historiography, this concept does not deal primarily with traditional North–South connections—focusing on Euro-American mission activities overseas—or with South–North relationships—which have recently been discussed in detail, for example, in the context of African immigration and “reverse mission” endeavors in Europe. Rather, it points to the plurality of cross-links in the so-called global South that in a new way have to be taken into account. Some of these South–South connections—such as the Sierra Leone example mentioned above—have been intensively studied in recent times and turned into classical paradigms of the non-Western expansion of Christianity. The challenge will be to identify and analyze further examples and to integrate them into a wider perspective, which will help us to describe the global history of Christianity as a history of multidirectional, transregional, and transcontinental interactions. A basic requirement for such an approach is “enlarged maps” on which various regional, continental, and denominational histories—previously looked at as isolated entities—can be placed and analyzed in regard to their reciprocal connections. Transatlantic Interactions and South-South Connections in the Sixteenth Century The sixteenth century provides an impressive example for bringing those diverse developments together, which until now often have been studied as separate, disconnected entities. Two major events characterize this century: first, the Reformation movement in Central Europe, which produced the confessional divisions and denominational plurality of Western Christianity. The second issue was associated with the Iberian overseas expansion, which for the first time established a Roman Catholic presence on four continents and in various previously unknown cultures. Both developments have had a lasting 3.1

27

For details and the full quotation, see Ciprian Burlacioiu, “Within Three Years the East and the West Have Met Each Other in the African Orthodox Church”: Die Genese einer missionsunabhängigen schwarzen Kirche im transatlantischen Dreieck USA-Südafrika-Ostafrika (1921–1950) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2015), 4.

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impact on world Christianity until today. In historical research, however, at least in the German academic context, they have been looked at separately, as unconnected movements, and within different disciplinary contexts. Thus the latter is usually ignored, as a rule, in the curricula of church history in Protestant faculties of theology. This happens in spite of the fact that often the very same persons have been active in both contexts: – So, for example, Emperor Charles V was not only the monarch before whom Luther had to appear at the Diet of Worms (1521) and who became a perhaps even more determined opponent to the Reformation movement than the changing renaissance popes in Rome. As Spanish king, he also ruled over an extensive empire with possessions in Europe, North Africa, America, and later Asia, where “the sun never set.” – Thomas de Vio Cajetan was the cardinal and representative of the pope who questioned Luther at the Diet of Augsburg in 1518. At the same time, however, he was also general of the Dominican Order and thus the superior of Bartolomé de las Casas—the strong-voiced critic of the Spanish conquista and defender of the native Indians’ rights who was later labeled as “father of Latin American Liberation Theology.” – Leo X was not only the pope (1513–21) to whom Luther addressed his treatise on “Christian liberty” in 1520 and who nevertheless excommunicated the Wittenberg monk. He also entertained correspondence with a Christian monarch from sub-Saharan Africa—King Afonso I (Mvemba Nzinga, r. 1506–43) of the Congolese Empire, who promoted the Christianization of his country even against the resistance of the Portuguese (who were much more interested in the slave trade) and thus established “a distinctly Congo version of Christianity.”28 His son was consecrated as the first (and for centuries only) black African bishop; and Afonso became the founder of a Christian dynasty that existed until the late eighteenth century and was proud of the title “Fidei defensor” awarded to him by the curia in Rome. Most important, however, in our context is the fact that this self-induced process of Christianization in the Congo region had an impact also on the introduction of Christianity among Afro-Americans in both Americas. This happened through the agency of numerous Congolese slaves who already were baptized Christians when they were carried off to America. They not only adhered to 28 Louis Jadin and Mireille Dicorato, eds., Correspondence de Dom Afonso, roi du Congo 1506–1543 (Brussels: Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre Mer, 1974); Hastings, Church in Africa, 79ff., 635ff.; John Thornton, “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo: 1491–1750,” Journal of African History 25 (1984): 147–67.

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their new Christian identity but also even became agents of evangelization among their fellow African slaves in the New World. “Black Christians from the Congo” were to play an important role in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in, among others, South Carolina, Haiti, Cuba, and Brazil. “The conversion of Africans actually began in Africa, and modern scholarship has largely overlooked this aspect of the problem,” as John Thornton put it: “Much of the Christianity of the African world was carried across the seas to America. In addition to the Africans who were Christians themselves, there were also the catechists who helped to generate an African form of Christianity among the slaves who were not Christians.”29 David Daniels adds the following: “The transporting of Congolese Christianity to the Americas by these Congolese occurred through various means, including ways of behaving, belonging, and believing.”30 Special importance has to be attributed to black confraternities, often under Congolese leadership. They played “a crucial role in the emergence and development of Christianity in the Americas among people of African descent.”31 One major actor in the sixteenth century’s developments was the Society of Jesus—a newcomer on the religious scene of the time. There is no other movement in this period where the interplay between Christian developments in Europe and overseas can more easily be observed. Founded in 1540, to combat the (Protestant) heresies in Europe and to spread the Catholic faith in the lands of the “infidels,” the Jesuits became famous as the spearhead of the Counter-Reformation in the Old World and, at the same time, as pioneers of remarkable intercultural experiments especially in Asia. A central motive for their missionary activities can be found in the “compensation theory” formulated by, among others, Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621). Losses in the Old World were to be compensated by gains in the New World. The newly established “universal” presence of the Catholic Church on all “four continents” known at that time was thus presented, taking up Saint Augustine’s argument against the regional schism of the Donatists, as proof of truth against the Protestant heresy restricted to a small “angle of Europe.” Mission activities in the “New” and confessional debates in the “Old” World thus become closely interconnected.32 29 John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 254, 262. 30 David Daniels, “Kongolese Christianity in the Americas of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Koschorke and Hermann, Polycentric Structures in the History of World Christianity, 215–26, at 217. 31 Ibid. 32 See the contributions by Markus Friedrich, Claudia von Collani, Niccolo Steiner, and Verena Böll and Ronny Po-Chia Hsia in Koschorke, Phases of Globalization in the History of Christianity, 83–182.

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Transcontinental Processes of Confessionalization in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries Confessional controversies between the rival factions of Western Christianity became a major theme in the subsequent period. Not confined to Europe, they also had a deep impact on the emerging churches overseas. On the other hand, developments in Asia, Africa, and America influenced the course of events in the Old World. The Council of Trent—a crucial event in the Catholic history of the sixteenth century—not only played an important role in the reorganization and Counter-Reformational remake of European Catholicism. It also had a deep and lasting impact on the emerging mission churches overseas, although these were not represented at all at the council—not in terms of its organization, or its membership, or its agenda. This impact can be seen by looking at the overseas reception of Trent on the various provincial councils in Spanish America and Portuguese Asia in the second half of the sixteenth century. They ended a phase of remarkable experiments and of relative tolerance toward local traditions and forms of Christianity. Thus, in India the reception of Trent on successive Goanese councils was closely connected with the process of increased latinization of the time-honored church of the Thomas Christians. It found its first climax in the already-mentioned Synod of Diamper in 1599. At the same time, the attitude toward Hindu subjects in regions under Portuguese control also hardened. A similar development took place in Ethiopia, where, however—and differently from in India—the encounter between Portuguese Catholicism and Ethiopian Orthodoxy led to xenophobic reactions and finally to the expulsion of all Roman Catholic missionaries in 1632. In Mexico (and in other regions in colonial Spanish America), the reception of the Council of Trent was accompanied by, or went parallel to, the prohibition or repression of a remarkably extensive ecclesial literature in various Indian languages, which had emerged until 1570.33 One of the reasons was the growing mistrust of vernacular languages, which had intensified together with resentments against the Reformation (and 3.2

33

Considering Mexico alone, from the years between 1524 and 1572 more than one hundred works of ecclesial literature in different indigenous languages are known, whereas afterward a considerable decline has to be observed; cf. Jakob Baumgartner, “Evangelisierung in indianischen Sprachen,” in Conquista und Evangelisation, ed. Michael Sievernich, Arnulf Camps, and Andreas Müller (Mainz: Grünewald, 1992), 313–47. For the adoption of the Concilium Tridentinum beyond Europe, see the contributions by Hans-Jürgen Prien and Teotonio de Souza in Koschorke, Transcontinental Links in the History of Non-Western Christianity, 163–203; Josef Wicki, “Die unmittelbaren Auswirkungen des Konzils von Trient auf Indien (ca. 1565–1585),” in Missionskirche im Orient (Freiburg: Immensee, 1976), 213–29. For an overview, see Klaus Koschorke, “Konfessionelle Spaltung und weltweite Ausbreitung des Christentums im Zeitalter der Reformation,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 91 (1994): 10–24.

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its Bible translations) as the “mother and source of all heresies.” At the same time, various experiments in developing an “Indian” native “church” (iglesia Indiana) came to an end. Even though access to the Spanish properties in the New World was denied to Luther’s adherents during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Protestantism had a visible impact on religious developments in Latin America. As already mentioned, the Jesuits played a significant role in these transcontinental connections. Combating Protestantism effectively in parts of Europe and becoming increasingly intolerant against local forms of Christianity in India and Ethiopia, they served at the same time as missionary pioneers in other regions and established channels of cultural, religious, and scientific exchange between East and West. But their obvious successes also inspired numerous missionary initiatives in the Protestant world. This happened in Lutheran Germany, Anglican Britain, and Puritan New England. Cotton Mather (1663– 1728) from Boston, for example, repeatedly referred to the Jesuit enterprise. In addition, these debates had an impact not only on the ecclesial elites but also on local believers in different regions. Events such as the suffering of the Japanese martyrs of Nagasaki in 1598 (belonging to the Jesuit and Franciscan orders and canonized in 1627) were impressively presented on the stages of the Jesuit theaters in many cities in Central Europe and also in Spanish America. Thus, they were communicated to a wider public and strengthened confessional awareness on the European home front.34 As Ronnie Po-chia Hsia put it: “Overseas missions and Catholic confessionalization in the Old World were part of the same struggle.”35 The process of “confessionalization” in the mission churches, however, cannot be reduced simply to the export of European confessional identities overseas. In extra-European contexts, they became elements of an intercultural process of exchange, mixed with local traditions. In Cuzco (Peru), for example, three paintings by the Indian Christian artist Marcos Zapata (1710–1773) can be admired in the cathedral and in the Jesuit church that represent three crucial motives in the history of Latin American Christianity during the colonial period. The first picture shows the wedding of a Spanish capitano and an Incan princess—symbolizing the social fusion between the old indigenous and the new colonial elite of the country. The second picture has been titled 34

See Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, “Mission und Konfessionalisierung in Übersee,” in Die katholische Konfessionalisierung, ed. Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling (Münster: Aschendorff, 1993), 158–65; Renate Eikelmann, ed., Die Wittelsbacher und das Reich der Mitte: 400 Jahre China und Bayern (Munich: Hirmer, 2009), 92–223. 35 Po-chia Hsia, “Mission und Konfessionalisierung in Übersee,” 158.

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Saint Ignatius Defeats the Heretics—depicting the founder of the Jesuit Order as victor over some persons writhing on the floor who are identified as Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and other heads of the European Protestant movement. It represents the issue of confessional conflict in a region where there had been no physical presence of Protestants at all at that time. The third picture—Cena ultima—shows the Last Supper, placed in a European setting, together with Andean fruits and a guinea pig as food. Guinea pigs up to today are appreciated in Peruvian culture as a delicacy. This painting adds the topic of enculturation to the selection.36 Repeatedly, confessional identities introduced in a given colonial context developed a dynamic of their own in subsequent history quite independent of their origins. In Ceylon (Sri Lanka), for example, at first glance the country’s mission history runs parallel to its colonial experience—Catholicism was introduced during the Portuguese period (1505–1658); Calvinism, under Dutch rule (1658–1796); and the various branches of the English Protestant missionary movement, in the British era (1796–1948). Looking more closely at the Dutch period, however, the picture is very different. At that time, both ecclesial and colonial authorities of the island noticed with great concern that Roman Catholicism—introduced by the Portuguese and erroneously believed to have disappeared with the end of Portuguese rule—had reemerged as a kind of underground movement of religious and political protest. Catholics made their presence increasingly felt also in the colonial public, supported by Indian Oratorian priests from Goa. Already in 1750, their numbers surpassed by far those of the Dutch Reformed Church, which totally collapsed with the end of Dutch rule on the island. Up to today, Catholicism has remained the strongest branch of Sri Lankan Christianity.37 The Chinese Rites Controversy and Its Impact on Europe in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Another quite remarkable event of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, significant for a multidirectional history of global Christianity, is provided by the so-called Chinese Rites Controversy. For the purpose of this article, the relevance of this long-lasting debate lies in its effects on Christian Europe. It presents an early example of Europe not setting the agenda of exchange with 3.3

36 37

This painting can be found at http://www.aecg.evtheol.lmu.de/cms/index.php?id=33&tx_ gooffotoboek_pi1[srcdir]=zFreisingV&tx_gooffotoboek_pi1[fid]=2&cHash=46e2de8114, archived at http://www.webcitation.org/6WmmGnvAO, March 3, 2015. See Koschorke, “Dutch Colonial Church and Catholic Underground Church in Ceylon in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.”

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non-Western cultures. By contrast, Europe here merely reacted to the developments and the debates overseas. Originally, the “Rites Controversy” was an internal dispute among competing Catholic orders in China about various aspects of their mission strategy and the compatibility of certain Chinese traditions (such as the veneration of ancestors and rites conducted in honor of Confucius) with the Christian message. Yet gradually it developed into a global debate and raised considerable interest in Europe—not only in ecclesial circles but increasingly also among the wider and “enlightened” public. The often contradictory statements on this issue by the Roman curia, as well as the contributions by prominent philosophers such as G. W. Leibniz and especially the representatives of the French Enlightenment, illustrate this development. This debate also fueled tendencies in Europe to criticize the church and Christian religion in general. News from the Middle Kingdom, particularly information about Chinese chronology, philosophy, and social order, questioned the traditional Christian perception of the world in the West. Thus the missionary encounter between Christian belief and Chinese culture in the Far East had far-reaching effects on Europe itself. Processes of Exchange and the “Black Atlantic” in the Sixteenth to Twentieth Centuries The concept of the “black Atlantic” has been widely discussed, and its relevance for a polycentric history of Christianity is increasingly being acknowledged. The paradigm of sixteenth-century Congolese Catholicism, with its impact on the emerging Afro-American Christianity in the New World, already has been mentioned. The same applies to the case of Sierra Leone, discussed above, and the transatlantic beginnings of West African Protestantism, resulting from the remigration by freed slaves first from Nova Scotia and later from other places in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These events also “proved most decisive for the [further] spread of Christianity in Africa and beyond,” as has been underlined by Jehu J. Hanciles.38 Already earlier, in the midst of the eighteenth century, transcontinental marriages like that between the two black Moravian missionaries Rebecca and Christian Jacobus Protten Africanus—she from the Caribbean, he from the Gold Coast (today’s Ghana)—had been an important element in “the making of black Christianity in the Atlantic World.”39 In the Catholic context, black 3.4

38 Hanciles, “Black Atlantic and the Shaping of African Christianity,” 29. 39 John Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), IV. See John Sensbach, “Transcontinental Marriages: The Evangelist Christian Jacobus Protten Africanus (West Africa) and

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confraternities played a major role. They not only arose in numerous Brazilian towns in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as “semi-autonomous organizations”40 but often also operated across the Atlantic. The mission of Lourenço da Silva de Mendouça, an Afro-Brazilian probably of royal Congolese descent and procurator of the black community in Madras, who traveled to Rome in 1684 to complain successfully about the institution of “eternal slavery” in Brazil, provides the most famous example. In the nineteenth century, Afro-American missionaries in Africa deserve special mention. Though never very numerous, they played a significant role and became active in different regions. Their numbers increased toward the end of the century—being sent first primarily by white mission bodies and later, after the Civil War and especially in the 1890s, increasingly also by black organizations. In West Africa, the Christian elite, closely linked to the Caribbean, as the biographies of Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832–1912) and other leaders show, initiated manifold developments. These range from the beginnings of the black press, to early voices of nationalist sentiment, up to the first church independency movements. It was partly through these transatlantic channels that the ideas of Ethiopianism spread in Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Gold Coast, and modern Nigeria. Subsequently, black churches were established on both sides of the Atlantic. A prominent example was the “African Methodist Episcopal Church” (ame). Having been founded in Philadelphia in 1816, as the first African American denomination organized in the United States, it was present around 1900 also in South Africa and in other regions of the “Black Continent.” A visit by ame Bishop H. M. Turner to South Africa in 1898 excited Africans and infuriated Europeans. The “African Orthodox Church” (aoc) provides another quite remarkable example. Having been established in New York in 1921, it existed in South Africa already in 1924 and a few years later also in East Africa (Uganda, Kenya).41 The aoc served as a model for many other transregional and transdenominational black churches that followed later. The “black Atlantic” is not the only space of transcontinental interaction relevant for a future polycentric history of world Christianity. Similar observations can be made about the Pacific (and the exchange, in colonial times, between Mexico and the Philippines) or the Indian Ocean. Christian Oceania, the Former Slave Rebecca Freundlich Protten (Caribbean),” in Koschorke, Phases of Globalization in the History of Christianity, 239–54. 40 Daniels, “Kongolese Christianity in the Americas of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” 219. 41 Details in Burlacioiu, Within Three Years the East and the West Have Met Each Other in the African Orthodox Church. Cf. also Lloyd A. Cooke, The Story of Jamaican Mission: How the Gospel Went from Jamaica to the World (Kingston, Jamaica: Arawak Publishing, 2013).

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being primarily the result of evangelization by indigenous missionaries from the region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, provides another example of multidirectional polycentricity in Christian history. Here “only rarely the agents of this spread of Christianity were Europeans; rather, Christianization was mostly due to Pacific islanders leaving their recently Christianized homes in order to spread Christianity to additional islands. Thus, Christianization in Oceania was much more a result of the work of indigenous missionaries than it was in other regions of the world.”42 Christian Diasporas as Transregional and Transcontinental Networks in the Nineteenth Century Many contemporary missiologists and social historians intensely discuss the decisive impact that immigrant groups will have in shaping the world Christian communion. That migration played an enormous role already in the past in the global spread of Christianity is equally well known. Yet much research still needs to be done. So far, whole regions and important examples have gone unnoticed or have been treated just as isolated events. From the very outset ethnic, and religious, diasporas marked transregional networks of communication that became relevant also for the diffusion of Christianity. In the New Testament period, the rapid spread of the Gospel would not have been possible without the Jewish Diaspora, scattered all over the Roman Empire. The Apostle Paul wrote his letter to the Romans to an already-existing community, not founded by him but by anonymous Chris­ tians. The church in Armenia provides another early and classical example. Armenia was one of the first countries to be governed by a Christian ruler (in the fourth century); later, it was repeatedly divided and for centuries exposed to foreign rule. Constant emigration to other places became a crucial issue. Already in the time of the European Middle Ages, strong Armenian communities existed outside of the country, in the Near East, in Central Asia along the Silk Road, in India, and in Eastern and Southern Europe. Nowadays they are to be found all over the world. In the nineteenth century, global migration movements increased considerably. They changed the global face of Christianity and altered the religious and denominational landscape in many regions. Some of these movements 3.5

42 Hermann Hiery, “Island Missionaries: Spreading Christianity Within and Beyond the Pacific Islands,” in Koschorke and Hermann, Polycentric Structures in the History of World Christianity, 205–13, at 213. See also Raeburn Lange, Island Ministers: Indigenous Leadership in Nineteenth Century Pacific Island Christianity (Sydney: Pandanus Books, 2002).

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have been intensively studied—such as Protestant European immigration to traditionally Catholic Latin America or the Irish Catholic presence in the United States. Another prominent example of transcontinental mobility and exchange—through Afro-American networks in the context of the “black Atlantic”—has been mentioned above. Less attention has been paid to other movements of—voluntary or involuntary—migration that changed religious geographies and led to new forms of Christian presence in various places. Within the British Empire, for example, one characteristic institution in this period was the system of “indentured labor,” replacing traditional slavery. It led to an increased fluctuation between the different British colonies and resulted, among other developments, in an Indian presence in far distant regions (such as the Caribbean) where it had been unknown before. This affected not only Hindus but also Indian Christians. Tamil indentured laborers moved to South Asia, South Africa, Fiji, and other places and founded their own congregations. They established a Christian presence in some places—such as on the tea estates in the Sri Lankan highlands—long before Euro-American missionaries had entered the spot. Similar developments can be observed in other Asian countries. Korea lost its independence in 1910. At the same time, Korean evangelists were active in Manchuria, Siberia, Japan, Hawaii, California, and Mexico, usually among their Korean compatriots. They started work in the Chinese province of Shandong as early as 1913 and constituted a cross-cultural mission among the local Chinese people. The Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia is a third example worth being mentioned in this context and deserving intensified studies, specifically in a more comparative approach. The beginnings of Protestant Christianity in China are quite instructive in this respect. It was outside the Heavenly Kingdom, which until 1843 was closed to Protestant missionaries, in Malacca (and in other places with a strong Chinese presence, in a great arc from Siam to Malaysia, from Singapore down to the Indonesian archipelago), that the first Chinese Christian journals were published and Chinese evangelists could be trained. Similar was the situation in the early twentieth century, before the collapse of the Manchu dynasty in 1911. Chinese Christians—such as Sun Yat-sen, later to become the first president of Republican China—lived in exile outside the country, and it was in Japan that Chinese students who later assumed positions of responsibility in the new government converted to Christianity.43 43 On the Chinese diaspora in the nineteenth century, see also Joseph Tse-Hei Lee, “The Overseas Chinese Networks and Early Baptist Missionary Movement Across the South China Sea,” Historian 63, no. 4 (2001): 752–68.

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3.6 Christian Internationalisms around 1910 I conclude my treatment of this subject with the multiplicity of Christian international, transregional, and transcontinental networks around 1910, the year of the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, which has often been described as both the peak of the missionary movement of the nineteenth century and the birth hour of the ecumenical movement of the twentieth. Far too little attention has been paid, however, to the extent to which Edinburgh responded to the debates and developments in the “younger” churches in Asia and Africa. It was the “awakening of great nations” in Asia (and Africa) and the need for intensified cooperation and new forms of Christian presence in these regions to which the conference reacted. Thus Edinburgh received key impulses from the emerging churches overseas and, in a ping-pong fashion, returned them there in a reinforced way.44 This aspect, by the way, highlights a crucial difference between the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh and the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) fifty years later: the latter was global in its reception but purely European in its preparation. Around 1910 a broad variety of transregional and transcontinental Christian networks existed. Some of them were mission-controlled; others, nonmissionary or even antimissionary in character; and others, somewhere in between. To the nonmissionary (or even explicitly antimissionary) networks belong panAfrican and Ethiopianist movements in the context of the “black Atlantic,” such as the aforementioned aoc and the ame, with a strong presence both in the United States and in southern Africa. In Asia, it was the regional branches of the ymca and of the wscf that quite early served as a training ground for indigenous leadership and as a platform for communication between Christian

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For Edinburgh 1910 as a “relay station,” see Klaus Koschorke, “Edinburgh 1910 als Relais­ station: Das ‘Erwachen großer Nationen,’ die nationalkirchlichen Bewegungen in Asien (und Afrika) und die Weltchristenheit,” in Koschorke, Phases of Globalization in the History of Christianity, 273–84; David Daniels, “Reterritorizing the West in World Christianity: Black North Atlantic Christianity and the Edinburgh Conferences of 1910 and 2010,” Journal of World Christianity 51, no. 1 (2012): 102–23. The identification of the variety of “Christian internationalisms” around 1910 is closely connected with a research project on indigenous Christian journals from Asia and Africa in the early twentieth century, undertaken in Munich in cooperation with Hermannsburg, and other projects located at the Munich chair. For more details, see Klaus Koschorke, “‘What Can India Learn from Japan?’ Netzwerke indigen-christlicher Eliten in Asien und christliche Internationalismen um 1910,” in Europa jenseits der Grenzen, ed. Michael Mann and Juergen Nagel (Heidelberg: Drapaudi Verlag, 2015), 19–42.

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elites from various parts of the continent. One important event was the Tokyo conference of the wscf held in 1907. It was the first ecumenical gathering with a majority of Asian delegates. Indian Christians hailed it as a “unique” event that “will bring together, for the first time in the history of the Church, the leaders of the forces of Christianity from all parts of Asia.”45 They expected that this conference would strengthen the “sympathy” and “mutual responsibility” of the Asian churches. Another transregional network was provided, inter alia, by the “Native Christian Associations” formed in various Indian centers by laypeople and members of the “educated” Christian elite. They aimed “to promote the communal consciousness of Indian Christians, so widely scattered over India and so sadly divided by denominational and other differences.” At the same time, they also intended “to bring the various Christian organisations throughout India, Burma, Ceylon, Straits and South Africa [and Great Britain], in close touch with one another.”46 Thus, they established a global network of Indian Christians in the diaspora. Missionary channels of communication were being used not only by the missionary headquarters in the West but increasingly also by African and Asian Christians. This development is reflected, for example, in the National Missionary Councils (or National Christian Councils) in various Asian countries that sprang forth originally from the Edinburgh Continuation Committee conferences in the region in 1912–13. From 1922, they formed the nucleus of the future self-government of the former mission churches and staging posts of the emerging ecumenical movement in Asia. The World Missionary Conference at Tambaram in 1938, held for the first time in an Asian country, was also the first ecumenical conference with a majority of delegates from the global South— from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.47 Transcontinental networks, such as those described above, demonstrate that while Christianity has been global from its beginnings, it rediscovered its globality in a new way around the turn of the twentieth century. Early South– South links played a crucial role in that rediscovery of the global dimensions of Christianity. A future history of world Christianity will have to pay close attention to these different transregional and transcontinental connections,

45 Christian Patriot, March 9, 1907, 5. 46 Christian Patriot, February 19, 1916, 4. 47 See Frieder Ludwig, Zwischen Kolonialismuskritik und Kirchenkampf: Interaktionen afrikanischer, indischer und europäischer Christen während der Weltmissionskonferenz Tambaram 1938, Studies in the History of Christianity in the Non-Western World (Asia, Africa, Latin America) 5 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000).

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specifically among the churches in the global South, and the manifold forms of Christian internationalisms that developed at that time. In order to understand current world Christianity we will need new maps of its history. Such new maps can only be drawn up through intensified interdisciplinary and cross-cultural cooperation.

World Christianity as a Theological Approach: A Reflection on Central and Eastern Europe Dorottya Nagy

Introduction*

This chapter argues that the term ‘World Christianity’ represents a multidisciplinary theological approach in researching Christianity worldwide. This is instead of regarding it as a new field, discipline or phenomenon, as is more usually done by scholars. In order to sketch out the ways in which a theological World Christianity approach could be understood, the chapter takes Central and Eastern Europe as its field of reference, particularly Hungary and Romania. In doing so, it seeks to problematise both normal scholarly perspectives in existing studies in World Christianity and a number of ecclesial and theological assumptions commonly made about Christianity in Central and Eastern Europe. Furthermore, this chapter’s focus on Central and Eastern Europe illustrates the complexity inherent to the study of Christianity worldwide. In a scholarship densely populated by theories of ‘global South shift’ (Robert 2000; Jenkins 2011 [2002]), literature on Christianity worldwide tends to neglect Central and Eastern Europe, with only a few exceptions (see, for example, Farhadian 2012; Goodwin 2009). Before delving into a proposed new World Christianity approach, however, the chapter explains the problems of terminology that have made this rethinking so necessary.

The Need for an Approach

The study of Christianity worldwide under the name ‘World Christianity’ is densely populated by religious studies scholars, church historians and theologians. The term appeared in academia during the last twenty years or so and Source: Nagy, D., “World Christianity as a Theological Approach: A Reflection on Central and Eastern Europe,” in J. Cabrita, D. Maxwell and E. Wild-Wood (eds.), Relocating World Christianity: Interdisciplinary Studies in Universal and Local Expressions of the Christian Faith, Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2017, pp. 143–161. * I wish especially to thank Martha Frederiks for challenging me to engage in discussions on World Christianity. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004399594_033

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reflected a dissatisfaction about our current state of knowledge of Christianity worldwide. Researchers now interrogate questions of whether an abstract notion of ‘Christianity’ adequately reflects the complexity of the faith’s expression worldwide, and whether our knowledge of World Christianities includes both dominant and subordinate voices. New methods are required to support research on Christianity and to provide new ways of doing anthropology. New historiographies and genealogies of Christianity are needed (Koschorke 2009; 2014), and even new ways of doing theology may be necessary, such as Kollman’s ‘world-Christian turn’ (2014; see also Phan 2008; Bevans 2009). Scholars identify the necessity of researching Christianity in its global implications, with comparative perspectives across time and space, with an inclusive attitude, and with attention to the interconnected nature of Christianity. Yet the same scholars who call for a new approach continue to use the term ‘World Christianity’ as if it merely captures a single unitary phenomenon (Kollman 2014; Koschorke 2014; Phan 2012). A related or similar problem is also evident in studies that continue to adopt a basic division of the world according to the so-called Western/non-Western dichotomy, and either implicitly or explicitly prioritise the so-called nonWestern world as the object of their study (for example, Akinade 2010; Walls 1995; 2001; Jenkins 2011 [2002]; Koschorke 2014; Yong 2014; Burrows 2014). Even such outspoken scholars as Sathianathan Clarke, who are forthright in expressing the need for a shift away from Western-derived categories, seem to drift easily between advocating for the need to define more rigorously the term ‘World Christianity’ and at the same time somewhat taking for granted its straightforward meaning as ‘an international movement fuelled by the local embrace of the gospel in indigenous cultural forms’ (Clarke 2014: 195). As Namsoon Kang contends, even progressive views of the diversity of nonWestern Christianity continue to build arguments around the division between ‘Christianity-the West’ and ‘world Christianity-the rest’ (Kang 2010: 35). Attempts to distinguish between World Christianity—as an indigenous response to Christianity outside the European Enlightenment frame—and Global Christianity—as a ‘faithful replication of Christian forms and patterns developed in Europe’ (Sanneh 2003: 22)—do not necessarily aid our comprehension. This is not least because the ‘two forms often mutate and merge into each other’ (Jenkins 2007: xiii). This chapter proposes discarding ‘World Christianity’ as a term claiming to represent the empirical reality of Christianity worldwide, and suggests instead that the label is invoked merely as a way of indicating a broad theological project for researching Christianity across the world, requiring a global awareness and a wide perspective. This broad project needs to consider four factors: it

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must address both the Interconnected and diverse nature of Christianity, while still envisioning unity and being concerned with the importance of localities (Phan 2008; 2012; Robert 2000; Irvin 2008; Stanley 2011). The remainder of this chapter explains how these concepts form a World Christianity approach as well as it argues for its interdisciplinary utility. First, however, I briefly clarify key terms and the theological discipline before offering a short discussion of Eastern Europe and its significance for a World Christianity approach.

Terms, Disciplines and Regions

The terms ‘Christianity’ and ‘world’ both require further explanation. ‘Christianity’ indicates the plural and diverse confessions of faith relating to the person of Jesus Christ, which have been manifest in communities, organisations, networks, groups, churches and individuals since the early first century ad and in a continuous geographical reconfiguration. It implies agents—‘Christians’—and everything to which the adjective ‘Christian’ is applied, including broader ideological, political and historical discourses. The term indicates that there is a ‘central (albeit mutable) core’, around which any diversity and plurality ‘must circle’ and through which core believers can speak about and live out their faith (Berglund and Porter-Szűcs 2013: 12). This expansive definition of Christianity includes groups often excluded by traditional theological definitions, as noted throughout this chapter. The term ‘world’ indicates the inclusion of all regions around the globe that can profitably be studied in their relation to Christianity. This global perspective rejects previous interest in only the ‘non-Western world’, ‘Third World’ or ‘majority’ world, and includes European regions typically not taken into consideration when the analytical lens of ‘world’ is employed. There is also an implication that the term ‘world’ can be used to describe conceptual, ritual and virtual domains: the digital world, or the overlapping ‘worlds’ of particular confessions or movements, for example. Furthermore, this holistic ‘world’ approach includes interdisciplinarity, and anticipates extensive communication and cross-fertilisation between multiple theories and disciplines. A World Christianity approach, then, is interested in everything that relates to Christians and their relation to their surroundings, over time and throughout the globe, as well as in their study, both within and beyond disciplinary borders. A brief definition of my own discipline of theology needs to be given as well. In common with a historical theological tradition, I assert that ‘theology is the business of all God’s people’ (Moltmann 2000: ii). Theology is an act of faith and faith is dynamic. Theologising can take place on many levels, with

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academic theology being but one form of the discipline. Theology studies the beliefs of Christians throughout the ages, the demonstrations of these beliefs in daily life, and the relationship and interaction of beliefs with all other aspects of human existence and social organisation. Theology is ‘faith seeking understanding’ (Sölle 1990; Norman 2007; Bevans 2009), where faith is not a fixed category resting on definite knowledge; where understanding is iterative; where its motivation is the ultimate concern formulated as ‘love God and love your fellow human being’ (Tillich 1951); and where its praxis is existential (Moltmann 2000; Kritzinger 2008). As will become apparent, my theology is influenced by the missiological and ecumenical traditions that have played an important role in informing the study of Christianity worldwide. Theologians studying Christianity worldwide most often begin their enquiries with an analysis of lived experience—‘a context’—which is further examined in the light of scripture, philosophical tradition, ethics and so forth. These theologies are often interdisciplinary but they could be more intentionally so by using a threefold schema (Tötösy de Zepetnek and Vasvári 2011). Firstly, theologians should place issues relating to Christianity worldwide into dialogue with the large spectrum of approaches within theology, asking which theological sub-disciplines (systematic, biblical, church history, missiology, practical theology, for example) should be consulted to more adequately answer specific research questions (intra-disciplinarity). Secondly, theologians should consult the social sciences, cultural studies, literature studies, philosophy and religious studies to broaden their understanding of research questions (multi-disciplinarity). Thirdly, theologians should actively work together with scholars from different disciplines (pluri-disciplinarity). In the case of Central and Eastern Europe, this would involve different languages, thereby adding much needed nuance to World Christianity studies mainly conducted in English. This chapter’s reference to Central and Eastern Europe invokes the region not merely as a straightforward geographical label for fixed territorial units, but rather as a term to denote complex social worlds. The usual tendency in World Christianity studies is to use ‘Central and Eastern Europe’ as simply the counterpart of ‘Western European’, a term as problematic and heavily contested as the former (see, for example, Farhadian 2012). However, ‘Central and Eastern Europe’ provides a conceptual framework in which questions of identity can be articulated, although this does not obviate the need to rigorously examine the exact content of the term. ‘Central and Eastern Europe’ has meant different geographical areas at different times for different people. ‘Central and Eastern Europe’—or its variations ‘Eastern Europe’, ‘East Central Europe’ and ‘Central Europe’—goes beyond any topographical definition, has no legal status, and remains a quasi-geographical category ‘often employed

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to contextualize and establish cultural, political and ideological narratives’ (Tötösy de Zepetnek and Vasvári 2011: 23). Whether one agrees with Larry Wolff’s theory about the invention of Eastern Europe by Western Europe in the supposed Age of Enlightenment (Wolff 1994: 4) or takes earlier controversial sources such as Oskar Halecki (1944) as evidence for a fundamental East–West division, ‘Central and Eastern Europe’ continues to be a contested idea in both academic and popular discourse (Esterházy 1993: 11–12). Since the political turbulence of 1989–1991, Central and Eastern Europe has once again gained new layers of meaning, both for those within the region and for those outside it. For example, the so-called West continues to reinforce the notion of Central and Eastern Europe as a region with an independent existence through debates on its role in the extension of the European Union (EU). Central and Eastern European migrants are increasingly invoked in discussions about migration in Europe (see, for example, Mole et al. 2014). The ten Eastern and Central European nation-states that recently joined the EU are grouped under one regional label and are viewed with suspicion in other European countries. Similarly, Central and Eastern Europe functions as a technical term when it comes to the issue of refugees within the EU. A World Christianity approach needs to give attention to the complex layers of meaning attached to any geographical label.

The Approach

Having clarified the conceptual apparatus for using World Christianity as an approach, I now turn to the four concepts mentioned above. Locality, diversity, unity and connectivity are terms that are often present in the theologically informed literature of World Christianity. They form a contrast with older missiological terms such as ‘culture’, ‘indigenous’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘mission’ and ‘identity’, labels that have not always proved helpful in the creation of a new research agenda for the study of Christianity worldwide. These concepts are all interrelated, creating overlapping webs of meaning. For example, unity and diversity gain meaning only through their connection to specific locations where these characteristics are expressed. In this sense, a single locality may contain multiple worlds, demonstrating complex change over time (chronology is also a key factor). Furthermore, these interactions are moderated through various types of power relations, which regulate all interactions in which humans are involved. Perceiving the world as constituted by multiple contexts in which humans interact with each other and with God (Nagy 2009: 6), the researcher can define the context of a concrete research area only by pinning down the specific locality.

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Locality

Space, location and context are at the heart of a World Christianity approach. Their analysis runs counter to usual ideas of locality within the discipline of theology that prioritise territorialisation. A specifically theological analysis of locality might emancipate the church from an overriding concern with ‘territorialising’ space and make it more sensitive to the exclusionary processes that often accompany this act of claiming space. Territorialisation refers to the process of humans occupying particular locations over time, thereby transforming pieces of earth into territories over which human ownership is declared. Territorialising the earth in this sense means creating places that bear the mark of certain dynamics of human coexistence—above all, reflecting humans’ endeavours to build communities reflecting certain beliefs and values. Territorialisation—both building up and destroying localities (places)—has been present throughout the history of Christianity worldwide. The long history of Christian empires and kingdoms (Lupieri 2011) or of Christian nations and nation-states1 thus stands in continuity with more recent traditions of Charismatic movements proclaiming ownership over or ‘conquering’ ungodly lands through prayer and exorcism. Territorialisation also implies humans’ desire to pin God down to a piece of land that is identified as a ‘holy’ space, and is thus contrasted with other sites that are cast as profane. Territorialisation, therefore, became an ecclesiological matter and was introduced in reflections on the nature and work of the church. To counter assumptions that the church required territory to carry out God’s work, Dietrich Bonhoeffer underlined the ethical importance of critical theological reflection on what I have here called locality and territorialisation. The space of the church is not there in order to fight with the world for a piece of its territory, but precisely to testify to the world that it is still the world, namely, the world that is loved and reconciled by God. It is not true that the church intends to or must spread its space out over the space of the world. It desires no more space than it needs to serve the world with its witness to Jesus Christ and to the world’s reconciliation to God through Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer 2005: 64

1 See the ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803).

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Bonhoeffer emphasises the importance of perceiving locality in ways that go beyond a simple desire on the part of religious groups to stake out their exclusive ownership over a territory. A World Christianity approach would seek to contribute to such an ethical endeavour by making explicit the processes by which such territorialisation occurs. It does so by first widening the concept of locality: it includes geographical location or place but it is not restricted to this. Christians find their place in villages, states, regions, cities, or indeed throughout the entire globe, in the case of institutions with worldwide reach. But the scale of Christian presence can also be much smaller as well as territorially unmoored, being located in the realm of the private, a small institution, a family network, a loose movement of individuals, or a formal organisation such as a church. Localities never stand alone; they are connected and interconnected with other localities. Mission theologians have often referred to localities as ‘context’. Secondly, a World Christianity approach contests the meaning of any named locality. For example, when studying Christianity worldwide in light of the seismic political events of 1989–90 (Koschorke 2009), the location under study is usually the unit of the nation-state. Nation-states underwent significant political change in this period—for example, the satellite states of the former Soviet Union—and yet their names often evoke an assumed knowledge. The same can be said for particular cities or rural settings. The fact that this knowledge is not coherent for everyone, that all geographical places witness unsettled histories, is usually not addressed. Examining a region known by the ambiguous term ‘Central and Eastern Europe’ foregrounds the shifting social world in which identities are contested. Furthermore, making Central and Eastern Europe into a locality entails consideration of the theological and political discourses of the Cold War, hitherto marginalised in studies of Christianity worldwide. Thirdly, the proposed World Christianity approach focuses on both the visible means of claiming a particular space as God’s own—for example, religious architecture or published material such as billboards—and invisible means such as the various ideologies circulating about the sacrality of a particular location. It also seeks to comparatively analyse this process by examining evidence of the ways in which other religions also evince such acts of spiritual territorialisation (for example, folk traditions identifying a particular spirit with a village, a mountain or a forest). An example of a World Christianity approach would be to focus on the revitalised acts of territorialisation that occurred in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe (Krawchuk and Bremer 2014; Hryniewicz 2007), as competing groups attempted to claim particular sites as their own, and as God’s. These

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acts included competition between Greek Orthodox churches and Romanian Orthodox churches for public visibility as well as the recent boom in missionary enterprise in Central and Eastern Europe—missionaries have arrived from all parts of the world (not only from the so-called West) and are attempting to reclaim the former heartland of Communism for God. These dynamics go far beyond the obvious division into Christian and non-Christian camps. A close examination of the interactions between Christian groups and post-1989 political leadership is instructive. In an interview given twenty-five years after the political changes in Romania, Gheorghe M. Stefan, the former minister of education, retrospectively legitimated his choice of introducing religious education into public schools. Stefan, who claims to be ‘fundamentally atheist’, was convinced that in the post-communist ideological vacuum, the church (primarily the Romanian Orthodox Church) would be able to act as an agent of moral education for the young.2 Stefan saw the church as an institution with which the state could co-operate for social well-being. The reintroduction of religion into schools, however, was contested because, while the state was expecting purely moral education from the church, the church could not and was not willing to provide education free of doctrinal content. In some cases, allowing the church re-entry into public schools meant that former lessons on communist ideology were now simply replaced by instruction on Orthodox moral values. This reclaiming of secular ‘territory’ on the part of religious educators was accompanied in many schools by the replacing of official portraits of the former dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, by a Christian cross and later by the country’s restored coat of arms, in which the cross also figures. This phenomenon led to political and legal proceedings in Romania, some of which are still not settled. Drawing insights from the discipline of political studies, in this case the World Christianity approach could help analyse disputes between competing ideologies as debates for visibility in public space in the so-called post-communist Central and Eastern Europe. Furthermore, using insights from the area of urban studies, the phenomenon of new religious space springing up throughout the region could be theologically analysed as a process of territorialisation. This would include the booming religious construction business, and in particular major church-building enterprises in Central and Eastern Europe. Romania takes the lead in this area, with more than 4,000 churches newly constructed since 1989, at least half of which 2 See ‘School, After Twenty-five Years: The Minister Who Introduced Religion. “Catechism You Are Doing in the Church!”’ (English translation of article title), http://www.realitatea .net/scoala-dupa-25-de-ani-ministrul-care-a-introdus-religia-catehizare-faceti-la-bise rica-i_1445205_foto_1396331.html, accessed 28 January 2015.

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belong to the Romanian Orthodox Church (Andreescu 2007; Stan 2014). In Protestant communities in Hungary, the expression ‘scaffolding-worshipping clergy’ (Guóth 2010) fittingly captures the territorialising business of Christian communities in building new properties and renovating old ones over which they have regained possession. It is important to note that such processes of territorialisation frequently exclude certain groups of people. Countless missionaries, both Christian and non-Christian, and not only from the ‘West’ but also from the East, North and South, flooded into Central and Eastern Europe after the political changes of 1989–90. To counter this perceived intrusion into their territory, many of the older churches in the region simply claimed that missionaries did not belong in a particular area, or that they had no rights to the canonical territories of the parishes and dioceses of the multiple national churches. Nevertheless, missionaries persisted in their efforts to plant churches in these areas because they themselves saw good reason to ‘occupy’ territory they perceived as marked by religious decline and characterised by the loss of piety. Understanding locality in this way underscores the importance of conflict, competition and debate in religious groups’ efforts to assert themselves and gain followings and public legitimacy.

Diversity

Diversity is best demonstrated by returning to two examples of Christianity in post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe. The first connects locality with diversity. A single public square in Budapest offers one visually arresting example of how different religious groups compete for visibility and presence. The square is dominated by a historic building, topped by a biblical figure of Mary carrying the child Jesus in her arms. But rather than being a church, this structure is in fact the largest Buddhist meditation centre in Budapest. The centre was started by Lama Ole Nydahl (born in Denmark), who, in 1969, together with his wife, became one of the first Buddhist missionaries to Hungary sent from the Western school of the sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa of the Karma Kagyü School. This community in Budapest bought a listed historic building for their headquarters. The building’s façade required restoration, and therefore the statue of Mary and Jesus just above the main entrance, along with a statue of Saint Florian and a cross on the top of the chapel, were all preserved. The square in which the Buddhist meditation centre is based also features a Greek Catholic church and a Lutheran school. This relatively small, confined ‘locality’ would provide a rich research site for a study of Christian diversity in competition and co-existence conducted using a World Christianity approach. Data relating

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to the square, and even the city’s architectural and planning strategies, as well as the commentaries of residents and passers-by could all function as primary sources. The second example examines public discourse and Christian movements. In many ways, communist ideology aimed at total social homogenisation and levelling (Bíró 2013). Some scholars have argued that the communist regimes silenced the unsettled ethnic and cultural conflicts that had long characterised the region throughout earlier centuries (Louthan et al. 2011). Even during and shortly after the 1989 collapse of Communism, diversity was usually perceived as highly problematic, conformity was valued, and there was unease about the relativism of pluralistic societies. Yet socio-religious diversification had already occurred during the communist system. Evidence of this could be seen in the so-called underground churches and movements, which, after the fall of the communist system, ‘suddenly’ became visible to the broader public— although, in reality, they had long existed in the region. The post-communist diversification of Christianity in Central and Eastern Europe only intensified through increased migration to these areas. After 1989, former communist countries became simultaneously regions of emigration, immigration and migration, in which new religions, religious groups and forms of Christianity rapidly appeared (Borowik 1997). Existing Christian bodies reacted to and interacted with these multiple new arrivals. Religious diversity—and Christian diversity in particular—has captured the attention of social scientists but remains theologically under-researched. In Central and Eastern Europe at least, this is because the churches regard with suspicion any diversity in their life and doctrine. A theological World Christianity approach has first to acknowledge this mistrust within its discipline. Academic theology in Central and Eastern Europe is usually practised in institutions closely related to or even owned by churches. Provided that academic theology implies serving the church, its close relationship to churches should not be a problem for its involvement in methodology and transformation. The issue, however, as is the case in all academic contexts, becomes sensitive when theologies enter into conflict with each other, and especially when theologies represented by church leadership and theologies from the academic context use divergent resources, concepts and intellectual traditions, frequently resulting in mutual misapprehension. One recent example of mutual miscommunication was the proposed introduction of feminist theology into the curriculum of a Protestant faculty of theology in Hungary. It was rejected by the leadership of the church, who argued that the inherently inclusive nature of the Hungarian language made feminist theology irrelevant for Hungary, not recognising the very different theoretical

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background and concerns of those who argued for its inclusion (Kovács and Schwab 2014). Another example of miscommunication between different intellectual traditions is the refusal to ordain women in the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Poland, despite a seventy year-long discussion of the subject. A World Christianity approach could put this question in a comparative setting by also investigating, for example, the processes that led the Georgian Evangelical Baptist Church to elect a female bishop in the person of Rusudan Gotsiridze. A theological World Christianity approach could address this example of diversity by adopting a threefold methodology (Meissner and Vertovec 2015) from migration studies. This begins with a description of the phenomenon and its context, followed by an iterative method that critically revisits existing ecclesiological practice, and culminates in an orientation towards policy change. For theological research practice and policy, this would also imply changes made to the theological curriculum of institutions such as seminaries.

Unity

Christian movements often anticipate some level of common accord or bond in their worship of God. This commonality has been expressed historically through doctrinal agreements, institutional membership and ecclesial practice. This goes some way to explain the theological nervousness (identified above) that sometimes surrounds diversity. Two broad strands of theological thought influence theologians studying Christianity worldwide, and in particular their reflections on the issue of Christian unity. First, World Christianity studies are part of an ecumenical tradition that has prized unity within the Christian tradition alongside diversity. Ever since the Faith and Order Movement’s 1927 Lausanne Conference, ecumenical dialogues and encounters have sought to spell out unity in diversity and have aimed for the realisation of visible fellowship among adherents of different traditions within Christianity. Indeed, the first use of the term ‘World Christianity’ arose within this context of ecumenical dialogue. Henry P. Van Dusen, for example, dedicates his book World Christianity: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1947) to ‘Colleagues in Every Phase of World Christianity’, implying that, in time, the ‘unity in diversity’ project would unfold worldwide. Van Dusen optimistically believed that diversity would inevitably be resolved into a harmonious state of unity: when the ‘movement of Christian missions and the movement for Christian unity’ came together, the ‘one single world Christian movement’ would become visible (ibid.: 106–7). One of the ways used by theologians to

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approach the issue of Christian unity has been to search for a minimal common denominator upon which all agree. Yet the tension—hopefully a productive one—in the World Christianity approach lies between the extent to which Christian unity is realised at the grassroots, in terms of organic fellowship among diverse groups of Christians, and the extent to which there is a need for organised engagement in order to achieve unity among formal, institutionalised forms of Christianity. A new approach would regard unity as a dynamic process—shot through with continuous diversity and even disagreement— rather than as an end result to be necessarily achieved. For this approach, the early twentieth-century Pentecostal revival of pneumatology is relevant: the Spirit, ‘blowing where it wills’, is the dynamic, creative coherence of diverse ecumenical movements (Körtner 2012: 466). Theology, engaged in World Christianity discourses, becomes a method for perceiving the Spirit and for listening to and rethinking articulations of faith in terms of grassroots practice rather than official recommendations for church unity. The second strand that is relevant to a World Christianity approach emerges as a critique of theology that has historically prioritised ecclesiology as a rubric for the being and behaviour of the institutional church. Within current World Christianity discourses, some call for caution, at least in historical studies, in considering the concept of ‘church’ as central in the study of Christianity worldwide (Kollman 2004; Thangaraj 2011; Phan 2011). Instead, they wish to provide a more holistic approach to the history of Christianity worldwide than that offered by the church history framework. These scholars rightly argue that an exclusive focus on institutionalised forms of ‘being church’ may result in a somewhat blinkered view of the diversity and richness of forms of Christian life occurring outside institutional settings. The meaning of ‘Christianity’ is broader than the meaning of the church, states Catholic theologian Peter Phan (see Chapter 4 in this volume), arguing that there are Christ-confessing communities that do not identify themselves as ‘church’ (Phan 2012: 179). Phan’s approach suggests that all those who self-identify as Christian have a place in the study of Christianity worldwide. Many theologians working within World Christianities increasingly focus on grassroots, non-institutional forms of Christian identity. In an interesting contrast with this position, the anthropology of Christianity school makes a case for the ongoing relevance of ‘church’ in the World Christianity approach. The scholarly study of churches, denominations and schisms is undergoing something of a revival within the discipline of anthropology. Joel Robbins, for instance, expresses his dissatisfaction with ‘idealist definitions of Christianity as something like a culture to tie together disparate ethnographic cases in a single bundle … focused on Christian cosmological conceptions and values more than on Christian institutions’ (2014:

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162). For Robbins and other anthropologists, the concepts of ‘church’ and other church-related Christian institutions, such as schools, universities, hospitals and homes for the elderly, continue to function as important units of analysis. There may be a fruitful interaction of these insights with Bonhoeffer’s idea of a worldwide church mingling with all dimensions of social life. Furthermore, ‘indigenous’ theological understandings of ‘church’ provide primary sources for such anthropological and non-theological engagements with the concept. A World Christianity approach in Central and Eastern Europe, then, is primarily interested in the envisioning, understandings and experiences of unity of everyday Christians, where discrepancies between everyday Christianity and the formal doctrines and teachings of the churches point to different realities. Furthermore, the issue of unity in Central and Eastern Europe also brings us to the often denied disunity—one may even say conflict—within one’s own tradition. The theologian Stanley Hauerwas (2013: 266) has observed simultaneous unity between representatives of different Christian traditions and disunity within individual traditions; these conflicts are everyday experiences in Central and Eastern Europe. One of the most striking phenomena in discussions of unity in post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe is the strong populist divide between communists and non-communists, which creates an imagined Christian unity through ‘we anti-communist’ slogans. Often it is the convergence between populist political discourse and institutionalised forms of Christianity that propagates anti-communist slogans. In 2013, during a church service in the historical Reformed church in the city of Debrecen (nicknamed the ‘Calvinist Rome’ or ‘Hungarian Geneva’), the Prime Minister of Hungary offered 10 billion Hungarian forints (approximately €30 million) for the restoration and maintenance of the Reformed College in Debrecen and its educational units. The gift was to be provided as preparation for celebrating the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation worldwide. The Prime Minister’s justification for offering such generous financial aid to the church was that his government was only returning what the communists had stolen from religious institutions. This example shows how the state and the institutional church collaborate within a shared moral agenda by asserting their unity in the face of a communist past. However, populist unity formations based on the communist versus anti-communist divide are not as sharp in the minds of the public as their proponents would like to assume. In place of these simplistic dichotomies, Central and Eastern Europe needs a more profound understanding of the ways in which theology and church leaders have interacted with socialist ideologies, both during and after the period of so-called communist regimes worldwide.

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‘Unity’ within a World Christianity approach is thus about experiences of unity in everyday Christianity, expressed through diversification in particular ecclesiologies limited to concrete places and visible in the complex webs of interconnections between these places. A pragmatic, grassroots focus on ongoing tensions and conflicts that co-exist alongside the more official push for institutional unity is pertinent to a World Christianity approach seeking to better understand specific examples of Christians crossing confessional or religious boundaries.

Connectivity

The final concept of connectivity enters theological discourse through network and complexity theories, which propose that systems (real-world systems as well as intellectual systems) are more than a simple set of multiple parts. It is the connectivity, or the interrelatedness, between the multiple parts that gives identity to a system. These theories, together with various globalisation theories, have become increasingly influential due to the worldwide political changes of the years 1989 and 1990, as well as the ever more networked and connected nature of societies across the globe, the latter development in no small part due to the role of the internet. There has been a rediscovery of the world’s interrelatedness, making it evident that knowledge formation happens through relationships, through connections over shorter or longer distances (physical or otherwise), which, when transposed to temporality (or chronology), can be called genealogies or histories of connectivity. The concepts of diversity, locality and unity as elaborated in this chapter have already touched on the issue of connectivity in time and space. Connectivity therefore invites us to study Christianities worldwide in their geographical and chronological embeddedness within the larger context or locality. Wilbert Shenk observes that ‘every Christian community ought to perceive and affirm its relationship with every other Christian community around the globe’ (Shenk 1996: 50), noting too that the Christian movement needs to be examined within ‘the vast network of multilateral connections that operate at local, regional, national and global levels’ (Shenk 2002: xv). The World Christianity approach adds to this observation that connectivity also needs to be explored beyond the Christian-to-Christian context, in the whole complexity of worldwide connections. It is through connections and interrelations that diversity changes, places are created or destroyed, and fragile experiences of unity occur.

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The dynamics of migration have created new kinds of connectivities between Christians in Central and Eastern Europe and elsewhere in the world. Christians who once imagined the worldwide unity of their denomination have questioned the nature of that unity after encountering believers of the same Christian tradition elsewhere on the globe, many of whom espouse radically different doctrinal positions. In many cases, imagined unities seem to be undermined by experiences revealing profound differences in Christian ethics. Issues such as homosexuality, euthanasia and abortion, to name only the most discussed, have become major topics through new connections brought about by the increased flow of people across borders via migration. Furthermore, the complexity produced by connectivity allows researchers to formulate fresh and important avenues of enquiry into the transnational nature of Christianity worldwide. For example, how did Billy Graham connect with communist leaders in Central and Eastern Europe? And how did those connections provide him with contacts with Orthodox clergy? How was the very concept of Central and Eastern Europe shaped by Evangelical discourses on the Cold War in the United States of America? Through which connections did Bishop Ting from the People’s Republic of China receive an honorary degree at a Reformed theological university in Hungary during communist times? What effects did that connectivity have on Reformed Christians in the country? A focus on connectivity in a World Christianity approach avoids essentialising the characteristics of any locale by examining the intrinsically interrelated nature of locality. For example, it does not ask what is unique about Christianity in Central and Eastern Europe. Rather, it asks through which connections, in the region and outside it, are continuity, difference and change all observable.

Conclusion

This chapter began with the observation that the increasing popularity of World Christianity as an area of study for theologians and missiologists demonstrates the necessity of elaborating new methods through which its complexity could be addressed. This chapter has argued that the term ‘World Christianity’ is too hastily being made into a field of study, or even a new discipline, allowing for confusion about its definition and the persistence of unhelpful dichotomies between the West and the non-West. In order to address these methodological problems, this chapter has proposed to use the term as an approach, rather than as an empirical area of study. Locality, diversity, unity and connectivity are the keywords of this approach. Locality here refers

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to the scholar’s engagement with a particular context of Christian practice. Within this locality, the issues of diversity, unity and connectivity address complexity and create awareness of issues connected to power relations and exclusionary tactics. The World Christianity approach proposed is also interdisciplinary in character. While dialogue with other theologian-missiologists (intra-disciplinarity) and scholars from other disciplines (multi-disciplinarity) has been prioritised throughout the chapter, its pluri-disciplinarity also invites us to actively work with a range of colleagues from multiple disciplines, both within and outside the academy. Multidisciplinary engagement is promising because it asks how the disciplinary ‘other’—that is, a colleague from another discipline—analyses Christianity, and by using which premises. The proposed World Christianity approach discovers how unity and connectivity appear in other disciplinary analyses of Christianity and which other social worlds can be discovered or detected through the practice of multi-disciplinarity. This chapter has proposed an agenda for theologians that allows us to learn from others interested in Christianity worldwide. It has done so by identifying a methodological direction that critiques theological certainties developed over generations and provides new perspectives on our interaction with God and with each other (Nagy 2009: 6). Those who deploy the proposed World Christianity approach will engage in new methods of knowledge construction about Christianity worldwide. They will do so with a desire to know the Christian other and the other who interacts with, reacts to and acts on Christianities or Christianity and Christians, and to see how this knowledge can bring about a transformation within academia—and, through this, in and beyond Christian communities worldwide. References Akinade, A. E. (ed.) (2010) A New Day: Essays on World Christianity in Honor of Lamin Sanneh. New York NY: Peter Lang. Andreescu, L. (2007) ‘The Construction of Orthodox Churches in Post-communist Romania’, Europe-Asia Studies 59: 451–80. Berglund, B. R. and B. Porter-Szűcs (eds) (2013) Christianity and Modernity in Eastern Europe. Budapest: Central European University Press. Bevans, S. B. (2009) An Introduction to Theology in Global Perspective. Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books. Bíró, G. (2013) ‘Advancing the Mandate in Post-communist Countries’ in H. Malloy and U. Caruso (eds), Minorities, their Rights, and the Monitoring of the European Framework Convention for the Protection of the National Minorities. Leiden: E. J. Brill.

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