• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Vol. 18, No.4 nternatlona• October 1994 etln• Can Historians Learn front History? goodmanyyearsago the GermanmissiologistJohannes the service of American national identity. Or to undertake mis­ A Rommerskirchen, O.M.I., raised the question, Can mis­ sion studies without due attention to the two-way cross-cultural sionaries learn from history? The major article of this issue, interchange that accompanied American endeavors. "From Missions to Mission to Beyond Missions," by Dana L. In any case, the contemporary cadre of historians of nine­ Robert, can be viewed as an answer to another question: Can teenth- and twentieth-century American Protestant missions historians learn from history?-in this case, the history of Ameri­ includes women, blacks, Europeans, and Third World scholars, can Protestant missions. with the latter writing from their viewpoint as recipients of Sophisticated observers of human affairs no longer accept mission. It is a whole new world, with lessons for us all! anyone's research-whether in science or history or religion­ without asking about the author's presuppositions. "Objective" scholarship is understood nowadays as a concept that must be carefully qualified. On Page Robert's probing essaybegins by noting the ecumenical bias of mission historian R. Pierce Beaver, which led him, thirty years 146 From Missions to Mission to Beyond Missions: ago, to project a vision for mission-in-unity, while he underval­ The Historiography of American Protestant ued the evangelical legions that were already well on the way to Foreign Missions Since World War II numerical if not qualitative leadership in the cause of Christian Dana L. Robert overseas ministries. But at leastBeaverapproached the historyof 156 Noteworthy Christian mission with a sympathetic historian's discipline. Not always so the secular historians. Chary of religious 162 My Pilgrimage in Mission phenomena and other-worldly interpretations of human activ­ Eugene Hillman, C.S.Sp. ity, gurus of American intellectual history have been prone to 166 Dandeson Coates Crowther and the Niger reduce the engine of Protestant missions to unidimensional Delta Pastorate: Blazing Torch or Flickering enthusiasm for propagating the American way. And attention Flame? was almost exclusively focused on mainline missions, while Jehu J. Hanciles evangelical missions, women's missions, and ethnic missions 172 The Legacy of William Taylor from America were bypassed. David Bundy But historians are learning, even from the history of Ameri­ can Protestant missions. Robert documents the contemporary 177 The Legacy of Henry G. Appenzeller renewal, and the breaking out from old molds, of the historiog­ Edward W.Poitras raphy of American Protestant missions. We have moved "be­ 181 Book Reviews yond missions" to a new reality that acknowledges the Christian 187 Dissertation Notices movement as a pervasive global factor in human history. Ameri­ can Protestant missions of the nineteenth and twentieth centu­ 188 Index, 1994 ries had morethana littleto do withthecontemporaryglobalface 192 Book Notes of Christianity. It will no longer suffice for scholars to write off the spirituality of American missionary women-to take one outstanding example--as a "screen for domesticity," or to take religious piety less than seriously on its own terms. It is no longer plausible to read the missionary impulse as merely a hireling in of issionaryResearch From Missions to Mission to Beyond Missions: The Historiography of American Protestant Foreign Missions Since World War II Dana L. Robert n 1964,R. Pierce Beaver, professorof historyof missions at unity. Similarly, American secular historians were captivated by I the University of Chicago Divinity School, wrote From an interpretation of Protestant missions as a symbol of American Missions toMission. In his book, this eminent American mission identity. Importantto both secular and churchhistorians was the historian reviewed the early part of the twentieth century and transition from missions to mission, from a pluralistic enterprise saw a Christianity that had ridden to success on the coattails of to the symbol of either national or ecclesiastical cooperation. But, Euro-Americanimperialismandprestige. Two worldwars,how­ as the social changes that Beaver described in 1964 accelerated ever, had demonstrated to growing nationalistmovements in the throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, both the religious vision developing world that Christianity was not part of a superior and the secular vision narrowed. By the late 1960s, there was culture and that, furthermore, it was an agent of colonialism. scarcely a work written on American Protestant missions that Beaver wenton to analyze the currentclimatefor world missions, did not focus on their role in promoting imperialism. Historical which included militant nationalism, urbanization, seculariza­ concernfor mission died like the chairs of missiology in mainline tion, repudiation of the West, and revivals of non-Christian Protestantinstitutions: interestwaseithergoneor confined to the religions. To move forward in such a context, he said, missions negative. must begin to cooperate among themselves and with younger, The 1980s witnessed an explosion of renewed scholarly non-Western churches on behalf of Christ's mission. Beaver saw interest in the history of American Protestant missions. The embodied in the World Council of Churches the beginning of acknowledgment of pluralism both in American society and new approaches to mission that would stress reconciliation over within American Protestantism freed mission history from its competition, and peace and justice issues alongside proclama­ captivity to unity. Intellectual historians discovered a full range tion. Missions from the West should become a common world­ of American mission theory that had lain forgotten in mission wide enterprise; pluralism must give way to unity. libraries for decades. Feminist historians recognized the domi- Beaver's small volume, its prescience notwithstanding, il­ lustrates the danger of historians drawing on the past in order to predict thefuture. The ecumenical movement that Beaver touted as the source of new forms of mission had within ten years so For many seminaries and modified the definition of mission that confusion over its mean­ ing was Widespread in mainline churches. When Beaver retired churches, "foreign missions" from the University of Chicago in 1971, his post was eliminated, became "universal mission," a practice followed in numerous mainline institutionsduring the only to evaporate 1970s. "Foreignmissions" had become "universalmission," only to evaporate into generalizations. Oddly enough, the North into generalizations. American evangelical missionaries whom Beaver described in 1964 as "sectarian and partisan," and as disrupting the unity of mission "for the first time in three hundred years" (p. 98), nance of women in the missionary movement and used the surpassed mainline missionaries in number and vigor. Today, ample documentation provided by mission sources to uncover with pluralism celebrated and competition among religions hidden angles on the history of American women. The "sectar­ fierce, with nondenominational missions dwarfing the efforts of ian" evangelicals that Beaver had excoriated in 1964 reached the old mainline, with indigenous Pentecostalism exploding in such a level of institutional maturity and ecclesiastical domi­ nooks and crannies around the world, theprospect for mission in nance that critical historical analysis became both possible and the twenty-first century is dynamic and diverse but bears little necessary. Church historians realized that missions were a cen­ resemblance to the top-down, unified witness Beaverenvisioned tral preoccupation not only of the mainline but of ethnic Ameri­ in 1964. It is the thesis of this essay that we have moved from cans, women, assorted subcultures, and Roman Catholics as "mission" to "beyond missions." welL From the ashes of "mission" reemerged "missions," a lively The road from "missions" to "mission" and "beyond mis­ and diverse enterprise, no longer able to fit comfortably into the sions," traveled so painfully by American Protestantism since outgrown garb of denominational history, Christian unity, or World War II, has been trod as well by the historians of North American identity. American missions. Mission history prior to World War II was Before the historiographic trail from mission singular to largely a denominational affair, told from the perspective of missions plural is explored, a caveat is in order. This article seeks efforts by individual denominations to spread their form of to cover only "foreign" missions, defined as those efforts to Christianity around the globe.' Beaver and other mission histo­ spread Protestant Christianity from North America to cultures rians of the post-World WarII generation envisioned the Protes­ and contexts outside its borders. The United States as a mission tant foreign mission enterprise through the lens of ecumenical 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 Ca­ Dana L. Robert, a contributing editor, is Associate Professor of International tholicism. Arguments can be made that foreign missions should Mission, Boston University School ofTheology, Boston. include missions to native Americans prior to the conquest of 146 INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH their territory

Load more

  48

Copy Link