Missionaries and Modernity

I am contemplating a new research project tentatively entitled “Missionaries and Modernity: Christian Proclamation in a Colonial and Postcolonial World.” My interest in such a project is at least fivefold.

First, I am deeply intrigued by the relationship between religion and European imperialism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Second, I am equally fascinated by the rise of missiology –what the Germans called Missionswissenschaft–as a branch of theology within the Western academy during the same period. Third, I find the encounter between Western missionaries and the religious alterity of the non-Western world to be a subject of immense interest, some of which I broached in a previous book, The Faiths of Others: A History of Interreligious Dialogue (2021). Fourth, given that so much Christian proclamation during the colonial era left much to be desired (to say the least), I wonder what can be learned from those experiences and how mission might be pursued more faithfully and prudently in our postcolonial world. Finally, like many others, I hope to gain a better grasp of the dramatic shift in global Christian demographics from the North Atlantic to the Global South.

Authors I have found especially helpful in my preliminary reading—and whom many Anxious Bench readers will already know—include Dana Robert, Andrew Walls, Lamin Sanneh, Kwame Bediako, and Brian Stanley. Of course, I should also mention my esteemed co-blogger on Anxious Bench, Philip Jenkins, including his landmark book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (2002) and his more recent Kingdoms of This World: How Empires Have Made and Remade Religions (2024).

For now, permit this gem from Andrew Walls’s The Missionary Movement form the West: A Biography from Birth to Old Age. The topic is how difficult it is for Western theology today—shaped as it has been by the Enlightenment—to “get” the types of Christianity flourishing in Africa today:

“The trouble is that the Enlightenment theology, conservative just as much as liberal, is theology for a small-scale universe, and most people in most of the world live in a larger, more populated universe than the Enlightenment allows for, with permanently open frontiers between the empirical world and the world of spirit, constantly being crossed in either direction. In other words, Western theology, Enlightenment theology, is too small for Africa and Asia. It has nothing to say on some of the matters of most practical concern. It is has nothing to say for instance about witchcraft or sorcery: in an Enlightenment universe, witchcraft and sorcery do not exist. It has nothing useful to say about ancestors other than in a historical sense. In many areas, Western theology, coming out of its little universe, is disabled, lame, limping in face of the problems those who live in a larger universe. It is has no answers, because it has no questions. I have never seen in any textbook of pastoral theology an answer to the question, “I am a witch, I kill people, I have killed three babies; how do I stop?” It certainly is no use saying, “Witchcraft is an imaginary crime” (p. 238).

Also, with respect to the normative dimension of this project—a theology of mission, we might say—I have found enormously useful the often-overlooked Catholic encyclicals on mission, including Maximum illud (1919), Rerum Ecclesiae (1926), Evangelii Praecones (1951), Fidei Donum (1957), Ad Gentes (1965), and Redemptoris hominis (1979). To be sure, there is much in these documents that non-Catholics will chafe at, but there is much that is instructive and edifying too.

If Anxious Bench readers have other suggestions for my reading, whether works of theology or history, do not hesitate to reach out at [email protected]