This is only for my personal use and not an article.
The Bible and the Flag, Brian Stanley, England. Apollos[is an imprint of Inter-Varsity Press], 1990.
Ch. One. Christianity and the anti-colonial reaction
…More politically aggressive and racially polemical has been the variant of African theology known as ‘black theology’ which surfaced in South Africa in the early 1970s. Black theology was in fact even less indigenous to Africa than African theology, for the term and its theoretical framework were borrowed from the USA, where black theology was the (p.23) theological counterpart to the secular Black Power movement which arose in 1966…. Black theology has been consistent in its unqualified condemnation of Western missionaries for having been in the vanguard of colonial oppression. It has directed its most withering fire against the ‘cultural imperialism’ of white missionaries: missionaries brought to Africa ‘a cold and cruel religion’ which taught its converts to despise indigenous cultural values; missionary Christianity destroyed the psychological and cultural defences of the African and thus played an essential role in the ideological thrust of Western colonial aggression.—pp.23-24
1965 was also a land-mark in the emergence of Asian theology as a distinctive and autonomous theological movement. In that year M. M. Thomas, the Indian theologian whose writings in the 1950s and 1960s foreshadowed some of the themes of the new Third World theologies of the 1970s, delivered a series of lectures in Edinburgh and Glasgow on ‘The Christian Response to the Asian Revolution.’ Thomas believed that behind the current ferment of Asian nationalism lay a spiritual quest which Christianity alone could ultimately fulfil. The challenge confronting the Asian churches was to discover ‘a new self-hood’ and develop ‘their own confessions to Christ in their own historical situations’ so that the aspirations of Asian humanity might find their fulfillment in Christ…..—p. 24
…Asian theology, as much as its African counterpart, professes to liberate Christian theology from its paralyzing captivity to Western cultural norms, and associates the missionary movement with the history of colonial oppression in Asia.—p.24
Most significant and influential of all the Third World theologies is Latin American ‘liberation theology’. Even more than African or Asian theology, liberation theology claims to be a ‘theology of praxis’, formed (p.24) inductively from the realities of poverty and oppression rather than deductively from abstract theorizing…. In its bitter opposition to colonialism, liberation theology was necessarily also adopting an antagonistic attitude to the history of Christian missions in Latin America, for in Latin America as nowhere else Christian missions had provided the unacceptable Christian face of European colonialism. In both Spanish and Portuguese America the Catholic Church had been almost completely subordinated to the power of the Crown and closely identified with the landowning elite throughout the colonial period. Liberation theology is, in part, an exercise in repentance and judgment, seeking the liberation of the church itself from its historical complicity in colonial and capitalist oppression.—p. 25
With differences of emphasis and cultural perspective, the new indigenous theologies of Africa, Asia and Latin America all focus on the themes of liberating Christianity from its dependence on the ‘cultural imperialism’ of Western theology and from its compromising association with Western political expansion. These governing motifs of the Third World theologies derive from the wider political context of the reaction against all forms of colonial dependency and the accompanying surge of revolutionary Marxism in both the West and the Third World in the late 1960s….—p.25
…Even if not directly associated at a political level with the colonial power it [missionary movement] had consistently disseminated a culturally alien theology and destroyed indigenous cultural values, leaving the colonized (p.25) peoples with no ideological resources to resist the imposition of Western rule.—pp.25-26
The call for a moratoriusm on the sending of missionaries from the West to the Third World was first made explicit at a mission festival held at Milwaukee in the United States in 1971….—p.27
…The concept of a moratorium on both funds and personnel was now presented as the means of terminating the historical missionary movement, with its irredeemably colonialistic associations, in order to release resources for the liberating task of ‘new mission’….—p.28
…The call for a moratorium had become a rhetorical device for focusing the frustration of many African church leaders at the continuance of a massive missionary presence (and in particular a massive American missionary presence) into the post-colonial era. The subsequent history of the moratorium debate confirms that its significance was largely symbolic.—p. 28
By 1983 the specific issue of a moratorium on Western missionary funds and personnel had blown itself out….—p.29
Ch. Two. What is imperialism?
…Robinson and Gallagher argued that the contrast between the two epochs of British imperial history was more apparent than real, and suggested that a single motto held true for British expansion throughout the nineteenth century: ‘Trade with informal control if possible; trade with rule when necessary.’…. [J. Gallagher and R. Robinson, ‘The imperialism of free trade’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, VI (1953), pp. 1-15, reprinted in J. Gallagher, The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1982), p. 15]….—p.42
…the empire grew by a series of unpremeditated and apparently random responses to particular crises of stability in Asia, Africa and the Pacific….—p.46
…It was, strictly speaking, British colonialism which was reluctant; British imperialism, in the sense of a determination to maintain and extend Britain’s strategic and commercial pre-eminence in the world, was not. The Victorians discerned purpose as well as randomness in the growth of their empire, and historians ought to do the same.—p.46
More successful.…was the policy of employing Christian missions to ‘service’ the structure of colonial rule by the provision of medicine and supremely of education. Mission hospitals and schools enabled British colonialism to satisfy humanitarian obligations at minimum cost, and placed a premium on the maintenance of a co-operative relationship between the missionary societies and the Colonial Office….—p.48
…in India, as much as in Nigeria, British colonial rule depended on a small number of Europeans eliciting and sustaining the co-operation of a much larger number of indigenous authorities. It control was to be cheap, it was necessarily fragile.—p.48
…Current understandings of what imperialism is have been shaped as much by theory as by practice, and the continued existence of competing theories of imperialism is sure evidence that the ‘facts’ of imperial history are too complex to allow any one monolithic interpretation to gain universal academic acceptance. Argument about the meaning of imperialism has reflected argument about its interpretation, and argument (p.50) about its interpretation has reflected argument about its practice. It is imperative that evaluation of its practice should eschew the facile generalizations of propaganda, and recognize the extraordinary complexity of the phenomenon which produced the subjugation of so much of the glove to the European powers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.—pp.50-51
…The British empire, no less than any other empire, was the product of the pursuit of national self-interest, whether directly economic or strategic. British colonies were intended to be run on the cheap, and were expected to yield economic or strategic rewards which more than compensated for the expense of their administration: (p.51) whether, in actuality, the rewards of empire outweighed the costs remains a matter of some contention….—pp.51-52
…Cultural imperialism, the most hated of all forms of imperialism, in fact did more than any other to bring the empire to an end.—p.52
Ch. Three. The gospel for the globe.
…The missionary awakening had relatively little to do with the expansion of British imperial power, but it had everything to do with the shaking of the foundations of the old order in Europe caused by the French Revolution. The Europe which gave birth to the missionary movement was neither self-confident nor generally expansionist: rather it was a continent in the throes of political upheaval and anguish. British overseas interests merely shaped British missionary priorities: they cannot account for the birth of the missionary movement itself.—p. 61
The thought-world of evangelical missionaries and missionary supporters [in England in 19th century] was a strange amalgam of distinctively biblical preoccupations and other assumptions which owed more to Enlightenment philosophy than to Christian theology…..—p.63
…The absolute Old Testament condemnations of the idolatry which threatened Hebrew monotheism were taken to be directly applicable to Christian attitudes to other world religions. Christian interpretation of the biblical evidence on the human alternatives to revealed religion was refracted through a particular theory of the historical development of religion which became established in the eighteenth century…..—p.64
…Hudson Taylor’s burning vision of the ‘million a month’ in China ‘dying without God’ was the stimulus behind his formation of the Mission in 1865, and Taylor inserted into a new basis of faith for the CIM, adopted in January 1884, a clause requiring assent to the doctrine of the everlasting punishment of the lost. It is noteworthy, however, that by 1903 Taylor was expressing regret at this step and was far less certain about the fate of those who had never heard [the gospel].—p.67
…it can be asserted that the greater number of Protestant missionaries have been concerned more than anything else with the business of saving souls: their relationship to political forces has been to them a matter of subordinate importance. This rather obvious point needs to be balanced by a more subtle one. By the First World War it was fairly widely held in the older denominational societies that the relationship between Christianity and other religions ought to be seen as one of fulfillment rather than one of judgment and discontinuity. This approach became characteristic of liberal Protestant missiology in the twentieth century, although it was trenchantly criticized by neo-orthodox voices such as Hendrik Kraemer…..—p.67
…Nineteenth-century Christians reflected on the sheer immensity of the power and territorial possessions granted to Britain, and concluded that it was inconsistent with any ‘rational idea of a superintending and benevolent Providence’ that their country should be thus exalted among the nations merely in order to satisfy carnal motives of national pride and self-aggrandizement. The purpose behind the bestowal of such signal privilege and influence could be no other than the Britain had been uniquely commissioned by God to bring the gospel to the world. A double responsibility lay heavily on the nation’s shoulders. Since the Protestant Reformation, Britain had enjoyed to a unique degree the blessings of true evangelical religion and the civil liberties which it was believed to bestow. Now she had been given the further privilege of world power. The two together constituted ‘a high trust to be turned to God’s glory’. Formulated in this way, Christian belief in divine providence led by logical steps to the concept of Britain’s imperial role as a sacred trust to be used in the interests of the gospel.—p.68
…After the Indian mutiny of 1857 the notion of the empire as a God-given trust became increasingly accepted among a wider circle of opinion which took the liberty of re-interpreting the terms of the trust; by the late 1890s the nature of ‘the white man’s burden’ was frequently defined more broadly as the dissemination of a package of Christian civilization and liberal government in which Christianity itself was only one ingredient. In the twentieth century the language and ideology of trusteeship were shared even by the many imperial administrators and propagandists whose Christian commitment was minimal or non-existent. It should be noted in passing that a similar ideology of national mission entered the currency of American Protestantism in the 1880s and 1890s. Its most notable advocate was Josiah Strong, secretary of the Evangelical Alliance for the USA and a pioneer of the ‘Social Gospel’, who believed that America was called by providence to join Britain in spreading Christianity and Anglo-Saxon civilization throughout the globe.—p.69
…It was possible to be a persistent critic of many of the policy decisions which governed the growth and operation of the empire while at the same time retaining a profound theoretical conviction that the empire had a God-given destiny to fulfil. The apparently random and irrational nature of much British imperial expansion in the nineteenth century was as evident to contemporaries as it is to many modern historians, and Christian observers could rarely resist the inference that divine overruling was the hidden engine driving the process. Divine purpose seemed all the clearer when the purposes of human policy were either confused or professedly hostile to new colonial possessions. It was in India above all that British sovereignty appeared, in the words of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, ‘to have been put into our hands in a great measure against our will’; territorial expansion had been effected by those who ‘not only did not seek after, but really did not wish to possess’ territory which was ‘as it were, thrust into their hands’. [Speeches on Missions: By the Right Reverend Samuel Wilberforce, D.D., late Bishop of Winchester (edited by H. Rowley, London, 1874), p. 97]—p.69
Missionary attitudes to commerce were thus the result of an interplay (p.72) between the Enlightenment conviction that sound commerce would promote liberty and even religion, and the distinctively evangelical emphasis that Christianity alone was the key to health and happiness in society….—pp.72-73
…As evangelicalism moved into the twentieth century, it increasingly conceived of the world not as a harmonious system operating in the missionary interests of the church but as a dark arena of satanic domination in which the lamp of evangelical witness burned in lonely isolation. Christians continued to believe in providence, both in their own personal lives and as a theological interpretation of the fact of the [British] empire, but their understanding of providence had lost much of the mechanistic imprint which the legacy of the Enlightenment had previously stamped upon it.—p.74
Ch. Four The claims of humanity, 1792-1860
…Relations between colonists and missionaries were never cordial and were frequently antagonistic. Missionary Christianity was not a welcome ally for colonial oppression but a disturbing challenge to it. Yet it must be emphasized, in the second place, that neither the missionary societies nor their individual agents set out with the intention of challenging the structures of colonial society. They firmly believed that the spread of Christianity would enhance the stability of West Indian society as of all societies. Radical political change of a manifestly unjust social system occupied no place in their missionary programme, although most were confident that the gospel would so ameliorate the conditions of the slaves that slavery would ultimately wither away.—p.90
…Foremost among the issue of humanity until 1829 was the missionary campaign for the prohibition of sati—the Hindu practice of burning widows (theoretically with their consent0 on their husbands’ funeral pyres. To contradict allegations that the practice was rare, Carey conducted a survey which showed that in 1803, 438 satis took place within a thirty-mile radius of Calcutta. The Serampore missionaries’ publicity on sati was widely used by Wilberforce in the charter renewal debates of 1812-13. However, the majority view of Company officials and directors remained that to prohibit sati would constitute an unwarranted and politically dangerous interference with the religious practices of the Hindu population. This view could not be countermanded until there was an overwhelming sentiment in public opinion and in Parliament that sati was in effect ritual murder on a vast scale which no government could tolerate. The creation of just such a sentiment was very largely the achievement of the speeches and writings of two Baptist missionaries—William Ward from Serampore, and James Peggs, a General Baptist missionary from Orissa. Without their publicity, Lord William Bentinck’s prohibition of sati in Bengal in December 1829 would not have been possible. The governments of the Madras and Bombay presidencies followed suit in abolishing the practice in 1830.—p.100
….By 1841 the [pilgrim] tax had been discontinued, but annual government grants to the Jagannath temple and numerous other temples throughout India continued through the 1840s and 1850s. According to a memorial to the Court of Directors from the Bombay missionary conference in February 1858, no less than 26, 589 temples and shrines in the Bombay presidency alone were in receipt of financial support from the Company.—p.101
The widespread Christian belief that East India Company rule had been lukewarm in its support fro missions and continued to be compromised by its support for ‘idolatry’, forms the backcloth to an understanding of Christian responses to the Indian mutiny of 1857-58. Missionaries and their domestic supporters interpreted the mutiny as a divine judgment upon (p.101) Britain—not primarily for military aggression or territorial ambition, but for religious disobedience….—pp.101-02
….Despite the fact that the sepoy rebellion had been sparked off by fears of forcible conversion to Christianity, the missionary lobby stoutly maintained that the mutiny was the consequence of Britain having given India not too much Christianity, but too little….—p.102
…The temptation to identify British troops with the armies of God was all the stronger when so many of the officers responsible for the military successes of the campaign were known evangelicals and missionary supporters—the Baptist Henry Havelock was the best-known example. The military victories of Christian men were seen as God’s confirmation of the justice of the British cause in India—God had honoured (p.102) those who had honoured him through their open profession of Christian faith in public office, and had thus given the stamp of his approval to Britain’s role in India, provided that its true missionary objectives were adhered to.—pp.102-03
…the effect of the mutiny on government policy in India was to put the brake firmly on endeavours to regenerate India in a western image….—p.103
…However much their theologies of mission and empire stand open to criticism, the fact remains that nineteenth-century missionaries in India left an imprint on the political ideals of the sub-continent whose influence can be seen in the commitment of the Indian constitution of 1949 to the principle of the fundamental rights and equality of all Indian citizens.—p.104
Ch. Five From protection to annexation, 1860 to 1895
…Evangelistic success placed a premium on the protection of new converts from harmful indigenous or alien forces. Evangelistic failure built up the pressure of missionary frustration, and increased the temptation to ‘blow open’ obdurate pagan societies by forceful means.—p.111
…While remaining opposed to all state regulation of religion, Victorian Nonconformists increasingly looked to the state to promote legislation that would extirpate public wrongs and provide a framework for a just and righteous society. Nonconformists, as much as Anglicans, came to put their faith in the rule of law (and of British law in particular) as the means of enforcing Christian standards of justice and morality in society. The consequence, as far as foreign affairs were concerned, was growing Nonconformist support for measures which may appear to us as imperialistic, but were defended by many Victorian Christians as the simple dictates of justice and social order.—p.112
Ch. Six. Missions and the nationalist revolutions, 1895-1960
Missionary education produced many of the leaders of the nationalist revolutions. Missionary ecumenism helped to weld those leaders together into cohesive elites. The twentieth century witnessed the transformation of the informal interdenominationalism of the nineteenth-century missionary movement into actual unions or federations of churches on the mission field. National church leaders of different denominations were brought into closer contact and discovered common grievances and aspirations. United churches or councils of churches could speak with greater weight and forcefulness to missions or colonial authorities. Yet theological developments in the sending churches distorted this picture of growing ecumenical co-operation on the field. Between 1895 and 1930 the essential unity of nineteenth-century evangelical Protestantism fragmented as conservative and liberal evangelicals went their separate ways. The ‘faith’ missions distanced themselves from their more liberal denominational partners, and tended to hang back from ecumenical involvement and the devolution of authority towards the nationals churches; they were also comparatively uninvolved in advanced educational work. As a result, their missionaries were less sensitive to the mounting groundswell of opinion against imperialism and their converts less prominent in the growth of nationalist politics.—p.134
The [First World] was had two further consequences which were more fundamental still. In the first place, the ideals of Anglo-Saxon Protestant civilization which many national Christians before 1914 had imbibed enthusiastically from their missionary mentors, now became less compelling, thus making the search for Asian or African Christianities which were authentic to indigenous culture attractive and urgent. Secondly, the war marked the watershed between the era of British dominance in the missionary movement and the age of American missionary supremacy, which has continued to the present day. The shift in the balance of Protestant forces had its own independent causes, but the war hastened the process by its impoverishment of the European economies and relocation of the hub of Western economic power in New York.—p.135
…Few of the Chinese political and military leaders, who since the early 1980s had been advocating China’s ‘self-strengthening’, had included Christianity in their recipes for national recovery; rather Christianity appeared to be a contributor to China’s humiliation.—p.138
In mid-1927 it seemed as if the missionary era in China’s history was about to be abruptly terminated. In fact, the anti-Christian movement evaporated rapidly after 1927. threats of armed intervention by the Western powers compelled the new Nationalist government, formed in 1928, to pursue a more conciliatory line….Throughout the 1930s China’s nationalist government maintained a broadly conciliatory attitude towards the churches. The tradition of anti-Christian invective was kept up by the CCP, although even the Communists temporarily relaxed their opposition to Christianity during the years from 1937 to 1945, when the Japanese occupation of Eastern China relegated all other issues to a secondary place. Only after 1949 was the torrent of anti-Christian feeling, which had been dammed up since 1927, unleashed in its full force.
What took place in China between 1922 and 1927 set the agenda for the anti-religious programme adopted by the Communist regime after 1949. It was also decisive in alerting missionary opinion to the seriousness of the issues which Western imperialism had posed for the church in China. The clamour against the unequal treaties which followed the May 30 incident in 1925 precipitated some drastic rethinking by the missions: within a few months almost all the major British societies had endorsed resolutions prepared by the Conference of British Missionary Societies, expressing a desire that missionary activity in China should no longer by buttressed by the religious provisions of the existing treaties, and that extraterritoriality should be abolished; most of the American mission boards took the same view.
The crisis also prompted the missions to accelerate their existing programme of devolution of responsibility towards the Chinese churches. Both British and American Protestant missions had for some time been (p.144) committed in theory to the ‘Three-Self’ principles of building a self-supporting, self-governing and self-extending indigenous church. The ‘Three-Self’ formula can be traced back to the writings of Henry Venn in Britain and Rufus Anderson in the USA in the mid-nineteenth century; its use in China was pioneered in the early 1880s by the Presbyterian missionaries, John Campbell Gibson and John L. Nevius. Only in the critical climate of the 1920s, however, did missions take swift and decisive steps towards the creation of an autonomous church. The existing structures of ecumenical missionary co-operation made possible the establishment in 1922 of a National Christian Council, and the formation by 1927 of the Church of Christ in China, uniting churches of sixteen denominations. The partial missionary exodus of 1927, followed in 1928 by the crisis in missionary funding caused by the world depression, necessitated further devolution of authority to indigenous leadership. The Chinese churches were rapidly serving their damaging associations with Western imperialism, but new political associations were being forged in their stead which carried dangers of their own. The National Christian Council became the organ of pro-Nationalist Christian sentiment, and its modernist theological orientation soon led to the withdrawal of the CIM [China Inland Mission], many of whose missionaries belonged to the conservative evangelical Bible Union of China, formed in 1920. The Council survived to welcome the Communist revolution of 1949, although by 1954 its role had virtually been supplanted by the Committee of the China Christian Three-Self Patriotic Movement, whose chairman was Y.T. Wu, a former YMCA staff member and firm supporter of the Communist regime.
By 1927 Protestant missions had at least awoken to the gravity of the charges being leveled against them. But hasty attempts to devolve responsibility to the Chinese church were a superficial response to the crisis. Most of the missions had perceived belatedly that reliance on the protection afforded by the unequal treaties was ultimately counter-productive, but few afforded by the unequal treaties was ultimately counter-productive, but few missionaries seem to have grasped that the real problem lay at a deeper and more ideological level. Anti-foreignism was a long-standing and powerful element in China’s cultural make-up. Missionary Christianity, and especially its increasingly dominant liberal variant, had self-consciously and deliberately presented itself as the central ingredient of an integrated package of Westernization. It had thus played straight into the hands of Chinese anti-foreignism. Once Soviet influence had succeeded in detaching Chinese nationalism from its initial pro-Western stance after the 1911-12 Revolution, there could be no doubt that a version of Christianity so unashamedly wrapped in Western cultural and political values would ultimately be dismissed as incompatible with the aims and identity of the new China. That outcome was delayed until after 1949, but it was between 1922 and 1927 that the writing appeared on the wall. The events of the anti-Christian movement of those years ought to have been a warning, not just (p.145) to China missionaries, but to the missionary movements as a whole. The new nationalism of the non-European world would to a large extent follow the trail which China had blazed. All Western missions, whether British or not, now faced the challenge of a world which repudiated more and more of the premises undergirding even the most beneficent aspects of Western imperialism. Missionaries working within the boundaries of the formal British empire faced that challenge in a rather different way, but fundamentally the issues were the same.—pp.144-46
Missions in the twentieth century thus had to relate, both to the mature forces of Western imperialism which enveloped them, and to the emergent forces of indigenous nationalism which they helped to bring to birth. Whether operating ‘under the flag’ of formal colonial rule or not, missionaries had hard choices to make on questions which were essentially political, such as the use of treaty privileges in China, or the labour question in Kenya. But in Kenya certainly, and arguably in China also, the issues which did most to fuel the growth of anti-Christian sentiment were at bottom less political than cultural. In the final analysis the missions and imperialism debate is not about armies and governments, but about cultural assumptions and attitudes….—p.155
Ch. Seven. Christianity and culture.
The relationship of British missions to political or economic imperialism continues to provoke a good deal of scholarly debate and disagreement. But over the contribution of the missionary movement as a whole to cultural imperialism the academic consensus is overwhelming. Historians, anthropologists and theologians unite in their judgment that missionaries have been guilty of foisting their own cultural values on their converts. They have upset the stability of indigenous social systems, and saddled the younger churches o the Third World with a thoroughly ‘foreign’ Christianity. Few Christian commentators would disagree that one of the highest priorities for the Third World churches today is to unwrap the gospel from its alien cultural packaging and develop expression of the Christian faith which are genuinely indigenous to their particular cultural contexts. The charge of cultural imperialism is leveled against missionaries irrespective of their country of origin or their field of service…..—p.157
There can be little dispute that, for most of the nineteenth century, British Christians believed that the missionary was called to propagate the imagined benefits of Western civilization alongside the Christian message. It was assumed that the poor, benighted ‘heathen’ were in a condition of massive cultural deprivation, which the gospel alone could remedy….—p.157
[in the South Seas] Missionaries did regard Western clothing as a mark of civilization, and wrote home in shocked tones recounting the more striking instances of native immodesty in dress. But the strongest pressure to adopt full European dress came, not from the missionaries, but from the religious public in Britain and, significantly, from the islanders themselves. Western dress inevitably became a symbol of prestige and social advancement, and it is more common to find missionaries deploring the inhabitants’ insatiable appetite for European clothes than to find them deploring the immodesty of native dress.—p.159
The Baptists’ evaluation of Hindu sacred literature was scarcely more favourable. They had sufficient interest to translate the Ramayana epic into English, but they did so primarily in order to promote Christian understanding of the Hindu mind, with a view to more effective evangelism. The profits from the sale of the poem were devoted to the support of the Serampore Bible translations, thus giving Joshua Marshman the opportunity to reflect gleefully that Satan cannot have intended that his ‘vile and destructive fables’ should contribute to the circulation of ‘the oracles of Truth’. [E.D. Potts, British Baptist Missionaries in India, 1793-1837 (Cambridge, 1967), p. 91]—
Yet the moral aversion of the early Baptist missionaries to so many aspects of Hindu culture and society did not imply a principled hostility to all things Indian. At an early date they adopted the position that converts should be allowed to retain their Indian names, many of them names of Hindu deities. They observed that Gentile converts in the New Testament bore names derived from the Greek gods, and provided further justification of their decision by enunciating a general principle: (p.159)
We think the great object which divine Providence has in view in causing the gospel to be promulgated in the world, is not the changing of the names, the dress, the food, and the innocent usages of mankind, but to produce a moral and divine change in the hearts and conduct of men. [BMS Periodical Accounts, III (London, 1806), p. 208]—pp.159-60
….A ringing statement by William Ellis of the LMS summed up the missionary consensus of the early and mid-nineteenth century: ‘No man can become a Christian, in the true sense of the term, however savage he may have been before, without becoming a civilized man’.[D. Coates, et al., Christianity the Means of Civilization (London, 1837), pp. iii-iv, 174-175.]—p.160
The close association in missionary thinking between Christianity and (p.160) civilization depended on at least four prior assumptions. The first of these was the belief that the cultures which missionaries were penetrating were in no sense religiously neutral—rather they were under the control of the Evil One. ‘Heathen’ societies were the domain of Satan in all their aspects—not merely religion, but also economics, politics, public morals, the arts, and all that is embraced by the term ‘culture’….
The second underlying assumption was the supposition that nineteenth-century Britain constituted a model of Christian culture and society….The Bible had made Britain great. She was the archetype of the Christian nation, and God’s design was to create more Christian nations on the same pattern. To a twentieth-century observer, such assertions appear sanctimonious and willfully blind to the social evils of the first industrial nation. But they possessed this much truth: the culture of Victorian Britain was shaped by the Bible and by evangelical Protestantism to a degree which finds no parallel in any other period of British history (with the possible exception of the Cromwellian era), and very few parallels in world history. ‘Victorian England was religious’, as Professor Chadwick reminds us [W.O. Chadwick, The Victorian Church (3rd edn., 2 vols., London, 1971), I, p.1].13 As a result, the equation between Victorian culture and Christian values was by no means an implausible one to contemporaries.—pp.160-61
From the 1870s onwards, individual missionary voices in India began to conceive of the relationship between Christianity and Hinduism in terms of fulfillment rather than confrontation. The most complete statement of this view was made by the former LMS missionary, J.N. Farquhar, in his The Crown of Hinduism (1913), which presented Jesus as the embodiment of the highest ethical aspirations of Hinduism. Those who adopted this new theological approach tended also to view the caste system in a more favourable light than did the traditional missionary apologetics: it had preserved the vitality of Hindu civilization for centuries, and contained in embryo notions of human brotherhood that could now find their fulfillment in Christian ideas of the universal fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man. Admittedly, the demands of modern man for equality and justice could be satisfied only through the establishment of a Christian social order, but this would come in India by the transcending rather than the destruction of caste.—p.164
…Farquhar believed that educational progress in India would compel Hindus to acknowledge the religious and ethical superiority of Christianity. Hinduism was thus destined to wither away, to be replaced by the ‘higher’ religion of Christianity. The Christ whom Farquhar presented as the crown of Hinduism was the dogma-less Christ of social gospel liberalism, a teacher of ethical idealism and social justice who could command the devotion of all men….—p.164
…As early as 1888, W. Holman Bentley, the pioneering Baptist missionary in the Congo, warned against the danger of ‘denationalizing’ the first converts of the Congo church by dressing them up as ‘black white men’[ Holman Bentley to Baynes, 24 April 1888, BMS archives] Nonetheless, before the First World War, the fundamental self-confidence of British Christianity and national identity was such that few British missions questioned the basic theoretical premises that God intended non-Christian nations to follow a path of development towards civilization broadly similar to that pioneered by the Protestant West. Missionary magazines in the immediate pre-war years could still be found assuring their readers that ‘what God had done for English savages centuries ago, could He not do for these black men today?’ The Lightbearer, March 1911, p. 59, cited in J.H. Boer, Missionary Messengers of Liberation, p. 171]
However, the fist signs of missionary skepticism towards the values of Western civilization had appeared long before, not surprisingly in a context where Western identity was a distinct evangelistic liability—in imperial China. James Hudson Taylor horrified the foreign community in Shanghai in 1855 when he shaved his head, apart from the obligatory pigtail, and adopted Chinese dress. Taylor’s decision was primarily a strategic one, but it may also have reflected the influence upon him of a theological tradition (that of the early Brethren movement) which had little room for notions of the advance of Christian civilization….—p.165
…CMS missionaries in the Niger mission at the end of the 1880s adopted the dress and title of the recognized Muslim teachers of the Hausa country—the mallam—and followed the Hausa diet and lifestyle. By living alongside the people on totally equal terms, they were confident that the power of the indwelling Christ would be transparently evident to the Hausa. The tragic irony is that the advocates of such cultural flexibility were on the Niger the very same missionaries who showed an inflexible impatience with the deficiencies of African church leadership. Those who were losing faith in the virtues of European civilization were losing faith also in the capacity of indigenous leadership to fulfil the rigorous standards of holiness which the new evangelical spirituality set itself. Christians who had become disillusioned with the Enlightenment creed of progress were also more pessimistic about the potential for progress in the spiritual lives of their converts.—p. 166
…Christian nations had unlocked the secret of human progress—experienced mixed fortunes in the later years of the nineteenth century. At the one extreme were liberal missionaries, such as Timothy Richard, who took with them into the twentieth century a serene assurance of the blessings which Western science and political values would impart to the waiting world. They frequently regarded the civilizations of Asia with respect, even affection, yet at heart they were committed to the view that such civilizations were destined to give way to the Christian civilization of the West, which alone could guarantee technological and economic advance. The theological counterpart to their evolutionary optimism was the liberal hope that the great religions of the world would, under sympathetic missionary tutelage, locate the fulfillment of their highest ideals in the teachings of Jesus Christ. At the opposite extreme were those conservative evangelicals who had espoused a premillennial eschatology that removed the prospect of human progress beyond the parousia. They were prepared to divest themselves of their cultural identity for the sake of the gospel, but discovered that cultural identification was a more complex and painful business than the mere adaptation of dress and lifestyle. In between these two extremes lay a whole spectrum of theological positions that struck a variety of compromises between an underlying theoretical confidence in the fact of human progress and some degree of recognition that the reality of Western society fell short of Christian ideals.—p.166
…Between the 1930s and the 1960s this residual Christian confidence in the moral advance of humanity through the dissemination of Western values progressively evaporated. Many in Britain in 1939-40, whether Christian or not, saw the struggle against Hitler as ultimately a crusade for the defence of Christian civilization. But after the war, as the full enormity of the Nazi holocaust came to light, discussion of Christian civilization became less frequent and less confident, for it was hard to deny that Christian Europe stood in some sense responsible for the holocaust and for the horrors of the war itself. By the 1960s the defence of Christian civilization was a theme scarcely heard outside the white enclaves of South Africa and Rhodesia. Western culture had lost its self-confidence, and as a result missionary thinking entered the period of profound re-evaluation which has continued to the present day.—p.167
On the mission field the gradual disintegration of Christian confidence in Western cultural values was first evidenced by a new willingness on the part of missionaries to perceive that the cultures in which they were working were in many respects closer to the world of the Bible than were their own cultures. This was particularly so in Africa, where aspects of tribal society began to appear less ‘dark’ and indeed preferable to the secular modernity of the West.—p.168
…the hankering after all things European had too often led to a nominal Christianity devoid o true spiritual life. Thus when in the 1890s some of the Freretown converts took to wearing trousers, hats, boots and carrying walking sticks, the CMS missionary H. K. Binns determined to put his foot down. On the grounds that ‘many think our religion consists of wearing a pair of trousers’, Binns urged that all mission employees be compelled to wear loin cloths. Even though it might ‘shake the mission to its foundation’, he insisted on making willingness to renounce European dress a test of ‘who are truly on the Lord’s side’ [R. W. Strayer, The Making of Mission Communities in East Africa (London, 1978), pp. 14-20.]—p.168
…Africans taught by evangelical missionaries to regard the Scriptures as their final authority turned to the Old Testament when it became available in their own language, discovered that the patriarchs were polygamists without apparently being condemned for being so, and were not always convinced by their missionary mentors’ attempts to prove that the biblical norm remains monogamy. W. E. Owen actually urged a delay in the translation of the Old Testament into Luo in 1925 for fear that it would provide a justification for ‘backsliding’ into the ‘polygamy of the surrounding pagan society’ of the Nyanza district [R. W. Strayer, The Making of Mission Communities in East Africa (London, 1978), p. 86]. The Luo tribe has in fact proved fertile soil for the growth of African independent churches. It may not be entirely coincidental that the completion of the Luo Old Testament in 1953 was followed in 1957-58 by a major secession from the Anglican Church—the Church of Christ in Africa—which permits polygamists to be baptized and to receive communion, though not to hold church office.—p. 169
…Definitions of cultures are legion, but that adopted by the Willowbank Report on ‘Gospel and Culture’ in 1978 is as god as any:
Culture is an integrated system of beliefs, of values, of customs, and of institutions which express these beliefs, values and customs, which binds a society together and gives it a sense of identity, dignity, security and continuity. [Cited in R. R. W. Stott and R, Coote (eds.), Down to Earth: Studies in Christianity and Culture (London, 1980), p. 313]—p.170
…If it is accepted that the task of the Christian missionary is 9in the baldest possible terms) to induce people to renounce their existing religious (or irreligious) allegiance in favour of Christianity, then there can be no question that the missionary is in principle committed to the promotion of cultural change. This conclusion can be resisted with logical consistency only by repudiating the exclusive truth-claims of New Testament Christianity. To attempt to distil out a ‘pure’ Christian message, unadulterated by any cultural accretions, would, as Lesslie Newbigin points out, be not merely a hopeless quest, but an actual abandonment of the gospel of the word made flesh within a particular historical and cultural context. [L. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (Geneva, 1986), p. 4]—p. 170
…almost all cultures exist in a state of perpetual flux, and represent an amalgam of diverse and often contradictory influences. The choice confronting indigenous cultures has not been between change and no change, but between a (p.170) number of possible directions of change, some evidently more beneficial than others…..The appropriate basis for evaluating the missionary impact thus cannot be whether missionaries promoted cultural change or not, but whether the direction of that change was generally beneficial or not…..—pp.170-71
…To insist that missionaries should not have promoted cultural change is, at the very least, to insist that these improvements in the quality of human life in the societies which received them should have been withheld.—p.171
…British Christians accepted that non-Christian societies stood in need of a comprehensive regeneration—they needed to be transformed by the process of ‘civilization’. This transformation was not so much an independent process which ought to parallel the proclamation of the gospel as its necessary and inevitable consequence: the gospel in itself was held to be the civilizing agent. The missionary model of civilization followed the pattern set by the post-Enlightenment, industrialized West, and specifically, in the case of British missionaries, by Victorian society as perceived by the religious middle classes.—p.171
…However, two mitigating pleas ought to be heard in defence of this missionary tradition before final sentence is passed. The first is the fact that these missionaries had grasped that the gospel of Christ has reference to all areas of human life, and that there can be no exclusions from his claims to sovereignty. Despite Lesslie Newbigin’s insistence in The Other Side of 1984 and Foolishness to the Greeks that the post-Enlightenment Protestant tradition has relegated Christianity to the role of a private set of other-worldly beliefs for the individual, the mainstream of British Protestant missions before 1914 was in fact marked by intense enthusiasm to see the gospel leaven working its results in the fields of commerce, manufactures, government and family life. Whatever its defects, this theology of mission certainly did not sever all connection between the kingship of Christ and the contemporary world.—p.172
…The challenge confronting Christians today is to discover a ‘third way’ between the pursuit of Christendom (which must eventually lead back to medievalism) and a retreat into a purely private Christianity. That third way for Christian mission will involve the construction within each society of a Christian counter-culture to exemplify the absolute values of the kingdom of God within that particular cultural context. The error of nineteenth-century missionaries, as of so many other architects of a Christian social order, was to mistake the contingent values of one particular philosophical tradition—the Enlightenment—for the eternal values which the Christian counter-culture must seek to express. It was not that they abandoned the public sphere to current secular judgments, but rather that, in their anxiety to claim the public sphere for Christ, they intermingled distinctively evangelical insights with assumptions which Enlightenment thought had woven into the fabric of Victorian discourse about human social development. The most baneful of these confusions was the assumption that the regenerative power of the gospel would propel a society along essentially the same path of economic, technological and political ‘progress’ as Britain had herself followed. Missionaries proved unable to resist the temptation to push their converts and churches along that path which they believed the dynamic of the gospel had already selected for them.—p.173
…There are other features of Western culture—such as the insistence that all realty is ex;oicable by scientific, rational analysis—which are in principle antagonistic to the biblical world-view. Missionary experience has now compelled Western Christians to re-examine their rationalistic presuppositions, and to recognize that non-Western attitudes to such phenomena as spirit possession may be much closer to biblical conceptions than previous missionary generations have been prepared to admit. The temptation currently confronting some sections of Protestant Christianity may in fact be to run so fast in the flight from Western rationalism that they fall into the arms of non-Western world views which contradict biblical norms at other points. Thus to reject the Western assumption that all sickness or accident has a natural, material explanation should not entail an adoption of the contrary predilection of animist cultures for treating all misfortune as the result of malign spiritual influence, with the consequence that human moral responsibility is undermined.—p.174
Ch. Eight. Empires and missions under human and divine judgment.
…there were other contexts, such as nineteenth-century India, where annexation cannot conceivably be justified on any grounds other than Britain’s own commercial and strategic interests. Nevertheless, it would still be possible to argue that an imperial position built up by a series of morally unjustified annexations turned out in the long run to be for the ultimate relative good of the colonized people. It would be at least worthy of debate to claim that the benefits to India of British rule—in terms of the creation of national identity, the establishment of parliamentary democracy and the encouragement of economic development—ultimately outweighed the short-term cost in terms of exploitation and racial humiliation. Such an argument—whose essence was in fact put forward by nineteenth-century Christians in relation to India—would possess greater acceptability if founded on a Christian view of history which posits that God in his (p.178) providence brings good out of human evil.—pp.178-79
…British evangelical missionaries….believed that Britain’s imperial role had been thrust upon her by divine appointment in order to further the spread of the gospel, that Britain was called to be a faithful steward of her imperial trusteeship, and that unfaithfulness would be met by divine judgment on Britain as a nation. They only rarely questioned or opposed the fact of British imperial rule; but they consistently challenged and criticized the morality with which it operated, with particular regard to its treatment of subject peoples. ‘The missionary calling was to keep the flag in check, not to haul it down’.
It is clear that this theology of history was modeled quite self-consciously on Old Testament patterns. Evangelical Christians in imperial Britain had no doubt that God continued to work in history in the same way as he did in Old Testament times, raising up empires to promote his purposes of mercy and judgment. This may have been a false assumption, but the New Testament offers no specific grounds for believing that it was: although the historical nation of Israel is no longer the focus of God’s providential activity to the same degree that it was before the coming of the new age in Christ, the basic principle that political authorities are both instruments of God’s purposes and subject to his judgment s re-affirmed by the New Testament.—p. 179
…But no nation, however central to the purposes of God at a particular time, can claim the privileged, sacred status which now belongs to the new international people of God, the church. To be used by God, whether for judgment or salvation, ought to inculcate nothing but humility in those so used. Instead, the record of history suggests that ‘servant’ nations tend to become arrogant nations, either because they are unaware that their role is not of their own making—as with Assyria in Isaiah 10—or because they take undue pleasure in the consciousness that they are being distinctively used by God—as was the case in Victorian Britain. In the second half of the twentieth century, evangelicals in the USA have faced a similar temptation: conscious of the immense global influence exerted by their nation in both the political and the religious spheres, some have cast their country in the role of God’s chosen vessel for the defence of liberty and the propagation of biblical Christianity. It is not inconceivable that they are right, but the danger lies in the hubris which such a belief so easily encourages.—p.181
…What has made the greatest negative impression on the collective memory of Christians in the former colonies is not the role played by missionary opinion in the process of imperial annexation, but the countless instances where individual missionaries have displayed arrogance, insensitivity and lack of trust in non-European capacity to discharge responsibility in the church. These failings must be taken seriously by all involved in world mission today, for they are sadly still to be found among Western Christians working overseas….—p.182
…The failure of the missionary movement was less a failure in motivation than a failure in holiness: missionaries who were acutely conscious of their need to (p.182) be radically distinctive from the ‘pagan’ people to whom they were sent, were insufficiently aware of the equal need for them to be distinctive from the racial and cultural assumptions of their own social background.—pp.182-83
…The permanence, acceptability and indeed desirability of religious pluralism have become axiomatic for most Christian theologians. Wishing to affirm, not merely that god is at work in other faiths, but further that his activity therein must be deemed sufficient for salvation, they have been compelled to adopt one of two conclusions. Either they have concluded that the exclusivity of the New Testament’s presentation of Christ as the only way of salvation must simply be rejected as incompatible with reason and modern knowledge; or they have attempted to argue that almost all Christian theology from the early church to the modern era has been grossly mistaken in its reading of the Scriptures….—p.183
…The categorization by both Catholic and Protestant missionary traditions of other religions as idolatry can be defended from the Bible, but relatively few missionaries before the twentieth century followed the example of Paul in Athens in Acts 17 in combining that categorization with a non-confrontational evangelistic approach which acknowledges the seriousness of humanity’s quest for God.—p.184
The missionaries who have been the subject of this book had a clear and compelling grasp of the ‘imperial demands of the gospel. Their vision was frequently clouded by national and racial pride, and in certain essential respects was distorted by the mechanistic world-view which they had inherited from Enlightenment thought. As a result, they sometimes failed to apply the ethical demands of the kingdom of God as rigorously to their own nation as they did to the non-Western societies to which they wee sent. Their relationship to the diverse forces of British imperialism was complex and ambiguous. If it was fundamentally misguided, their error was not that they were indifferent to the cause of justice for the oppressed, but that their perceptions of the demands of justice were too easily moulded to fit the contours of prevailing Western ideologies. In this respect, our predecessors reflect our own fallibility more closely than we are to admit.
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