The Missionary Task of Theology: A Love/Hate Relationship?

By Harvie M. Conn

Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia

An address delivered by the author on the occasion of his inauguration as Professor of Missions at Westminster Theological Seminary, 23 April 1982.

The last six decades have not been the happiest of times for professors of missions in the American theological seminary. The previous century had been a history of seminaries running to catch up with student missions interest. Samuel J. Mills had set the pattern. In August 1806 he and four companions sought refuge under a Massachusetts haystack in a thunderstorm and gave themselves to prayer for world missions. They carried that vision to Andover Seminary and in 1811 launched the Society of Inquiry on the Subject of Missions. In 1813 students at the year-old Princeton Seminary founded a similar organization. Society after society was founded within one to three years after the opening of a new seminary. By 1857, there were seventy of them around the country.

The backbone of the world mission movement became those societies in the seminaries.

There was no recruiting of missionaries by secretaries of the mission boards and societies during the nineteenth century. Throughout the century and well into the next the Societies of Inquiry and related organizations in the seminaries spontaneously brought forth volunteers in abundance.[1]

Boards were swamped with applications from seniors about to graduate.

By the close of the century the picture had not changed. A new organization, the Student Volunteer Movement, had been formed in 1886 at a student conference in Mt. Hermon, Massachusetts, sponsored by Dwight L. Moody. Before the year ended, 2106 volunteers had been enrolled for “the evangelization of the world in this generation.” By 1935, the movement had sent over 13,000 volunteers abroad from North America. They poured into seminaries, looking for help.

From the 1920s, the picture began to change. 1921 was the peak year for the volunteers: 2783 were newly enrolled, and 637 sailed for the field. In 1934 only 38 left North America. And 1938 saw only 25 enrolled in the movement.[2]

Again, the theological seminary has reflected, and not altered, that pattern. Even in the nineteenth century, missions as an academic discipline had taken its time to enter the curriculum. During the first half of that century only Princeton Theological Seminary in 1811 had made plans “to found a nursery for missionaries.”[3] And the plan was only a plan for eighteen years till a faculty member could be found. He lasted for three years and no successor was provided. The subject disappeared from the curriculum in 1855 and did not return until 1914. Meanwhile missions kept up its steady pressure, creeping into the curriculum in the form of part-time and special lectureships at such places as Yale, Auburn, McCormick, Austin, Garrett, and others. By 1900 a report at the Ecumenical Missionary Conference in New York could comment, “the study of missions is slowly rising to the rank of a theological discipline.”[4]

In all this, seminary professors produced very little of the literature used in mission study and promotion on the campuses. Secretaries of the boards remained the major writers.

With the 1920s mission agencies began to be concerned about the lack of volunteers and pressed for the establishment of chairs of missions in the seminaries. “It was widely believed that by placing a professor of mission in a seminary the waning tide of missionary interest and zeal might be stemmed.”[5] The economic depression which ended the 1920s ended also further multiplication of teaching posts. By the mid-1930s the whole Protestant missionary enterprise had been thrown into reverse. World War II sealed the downslide.

The future of mission as an American seminary discipline is still a question. In 1950 there were a total of seventy-one professorships of missions in the world; no less than fifty-one of those seventy-one were in the United States. But everywhere people wondered. The Association of Professors of Missions came into existence in 1950. But Pierce Beaver remarks, it was created “not as an expression of the old missionary triumphalism, but as an attempt to construct a lifeboat for floundering brothers and sisters.”[6] Scholars in the 1950s were writing books on missions with titles like Christian Missions and the Judgment of God (David Paton); The Unpopular Missionary (Ralph Dodge); The Ugly Missionary (John Carden); Missionary, Go Home! (James Scherer); Missions in a Time of Testing (R. K. Orchard); Missions in Crisis (Arthur Glasser and Eric Fife); Missions at the Crossroads (T. Stanley Soltau).

In the meantime, the seminary as the source of American missionary candidates has diminished radically. In its place mission agencies have turned to Bible institutes and colleges. Today the great majority of North American missionaries now serving overseas are graduates of these institutions.

I. The Lessons of History

It would be easy at this stage to point with hope to America’s current evangelical renaissance and say the rest of our century will be different. We could appeal to the growth of our theological schools in the past decade, the matching increase in the number of lectureships in missiology at evangelical seminaries. After all, we are here today to hear the inaugural address of a professor of missions at Westminster.

In self-defense we could argue, as we have before, that if there is a current crisis in the church’s understanding of missions, it is not our evangelical fault. When Charles W. Forman of Yale Divinity School in 1974 speaks of “a subordinate strain of malaise and uncertainty which needs to be recognized,” we assume that he could not possibly mean us. He describes a survey taken among seminary students as “most disturbing…. Half the graduate seminaries replying state that current student attitudes toward the subject [of missions] are negative or indifferent. Words like ‘apathy’ or ‘reluctance’ occur frequently in the reports.”[7] And then, adds Forman,

The most obvious reason for it, seemingly, would be the uncertainty about many traditional Christian beliefs that exist in the churches today. The recent debates about ‘Salvation Today’ revealed some of that uncertainty among older Christians and the great interest in Oriental mysticism reveals it among the youth. It would seem reasonable to expect that where there is uncertainty about beliefs there will be less interest in making beliefs known and hence less readiness to consider missions. [This is supported by the fact that the Bible schools and colleges which represent on the whole a greater degree of assurance regarding traditional beliefs also represent in their reports a more secure place for the study of missions and a clearer determination to maintain the subject in the future.] The insecurity prevails chiefly in the graduate Protestant theological seminaries where there is usually more questioning of beliefs.[8]

A growing number of evangelical studies focusing on the missionary theology identified with the World Council of Churches would seem to point in the same direction.[9] Bad theology produces missionary decline.

I have no general disagreement with this kind of argument as a formal reason. Forman himself comments that the assurance in Christian beliefs doubtless has a relation to the assurance about interest in missions. The problem is that we make the argument into an excuse, a brief experiment at covering up personal problems by pointing to those of others. Our subterfuge as evangelicals shows up in making a complete correlation at this point. After all, “uncertainties can be a reason for interest in and a desire to study a field rather than a reason to ignore it.”[10] And by contrast, strong Christian beliefs can even militate against missions and the study of missions. They certainly did for example among those Calvinists resistant to William Carey’s global theology.

David Bosch issues a very pertinent warning to the evangelical at precisely this point. He writes:

Evangelicals would, however, be well advised to refrain from boasting or from using statistics to prove they are right and the others wrong. Since most evangelical missionary work is considerably younger than that of the Roman Catholic and so-called ecumenical churches, the evangelicals may face problems in the future similar to those of other churches, particularly as what they now call missions increasingly becomes interchurch relations.[11]

The tenure of missiology thus appears somewhat precarious even in evangelical circles.

Surely the history we have just sketched warns also against putting all our missiological hang-ups in one theological basket. It was not, after all, good seminary training that motivated mission volunteers in the nineteenth century. It was the reverse. Mission volunteers pushed a recalcitrant and slow-moving seminary curriculum into a growing world vision. Not all seminary professors, and hardly all evangelical seminary professors, were zealous for the cause of missions. A curious document published in 1836 underlines this. The document bore the title, An Appeal From the Missionaries at the Sandwich Islands to Their Friends in the United States. It notes that twenty out of twenty-eight missionaries of that mission to Hawaii were discouraged from becoming missionaries by sixty-eight seminary professors, college presidents, and ministers.[12] And, to add to the shame, when mission agencies, in the face of declining volunteers, turned to the seminaries for recruiting in the 1920s and beyond, we entered a worse decline, Now the Bible colleges and institutes provide what the seminaries do not.

We are not helped either, at this stage, in comparing the status of missions as a theological discipline in the United States with its status in Europe and Great Britain. It is true that

apart from the United States of America, up to 1950 the study of Missions had been admitted, not to the temple of theology itself, but only to what may not inappropriately be described as the Court of the Gentiles. In Great Britain, no university had recognized our subject as an independent discipline. With one exception, the same was true of the theological colleges. On the Continent of Europe, fifteen institutions of university standard had accorded to this particular subject the right of representation in the civitas theologica. In almost all of these, however, Missionary Science was taught, not as part and parcel of the ordinary work but as an ‘optional extra.’ …In most universities the subject of Missions had no official place in the curriculum.[13]

Neither the North American nor the European continental traditions of mission studies come off well in this comparison. In contrast to the “practical” Anglo-Saxon, the Continental maintains that science, strictly so-called, is synonymous with theory. As a result of this conception of science, a sharp line has been drawn in Continental theological education between “theoretical” and “practical” subjects. The “theoretical” constitutes the “real,” the scientific, study of theology. The “practical” matters are an “appendix.” Thus the “practical” preparation for the ministry forms no part of the “proper” theological course in the university. For this one goes to a separate institution, a Predigseminar or pastoral institute.[14] It is no wonder then that Gustav Warneck, the father of modern missiology, had to write his Das Studium der Mission auf der Universität in 1877. And the object of his attention were those who disparagingly asked, “What could possibly be scientific about missions?”

The American approach has not challenged this background. It has only chosen another side of the dualism. The “practical” American has placed missions in “practical theology.” The basic “four great theological disciplines” remain OT study, NT research, church history, and doctrine. And missions maintains its toolshed appearance behind the “stately mansions” of theology. The board administrator continues to fear missions will be “theorized” out of reality by the seminary professor. And too often the professor, electing for his discipline as “practical theology,” spins church growth strategy with only the slightest backward glance at “theology.” The end result remains reflected in the frustrated words of a missions professor spoken in 1956:

We in the field of missions are lost sheep, scattered among the folds of history, theology, comparative religions, and education, wandering from the theological field to the practical field and back again…. We proclaim in our lectures and sermons that the world mission is the central task of the church, yet we have all too often allowed it to become peripheral in our curriculum.[15]

All of this may sound very depressing at this stage of the game. And this then usually is the place where we turn to develop a redefinition of the aim of mission and of missiology.

To me, such a step is only part of the solution and perhaps even the smallest part of the solution. The question is not simply, or only, or largely, missions and what it is. The question is also theology and what it does. The time has come, we are saying, not to talk about the biblical basis of missions but about the missionary basis of theology. I am excited by a number of things that seem to indicate the time is opportune for raising the question in this particular way.

II. Pressures for a New Direction

In December 1978 Stanley Gundry, as president of the Evangelical Theological Society, put on his prophetic robes and inquired, “Evangelical Theology: Where Should We Be Going?” He sees missiologists addressing issues that many feel make the inerrancy question pale into relative insignificance. And yet, he continues, with only a few notable individual exceptions North American evangelical theologians seem to be unaware of and unconcerned about the missiological discussion and literature. He sees missiology and its questions as one way for the scholar to avoid theological provincialism. High on his proposed agenda is contextualization. “I wonder,” he asks, “if we really recognize that all theology represents a contextualization, even our own theology? We will speak of Latin American liberation theology, black theology, or feminist theology, but without the slightest second thought we will assume that our own theology is simply theology, undoubtedly in its purest form.”[16]

Others in the evangelical community are recognizing that theology and missiology need to interact. Trinity Evangelical Divinity School has carried on for several years now a series of consultations bringing together theologians, mission administrators, and missiologists.[17] The consultations to me clearly demonstrate we have a long way to go by way of interaction. But at least somebody somewhere is trying to create an apparatus for what is, at this point, still largely the pooling of our ignorance.

But even this step forward cannot be described as a “new direction.” Ernst Troeltsch and Gustav Warneck were dialoguing or at least shooting at one another several decades ago. It is the emerging of a new dialogue between theology and missions that is exciting today. Several things seem to be combining to create the new shape for this exchange.

1. There is the newness of the background that now shapes or prepares to shape the discussions. It is the background of missiology, the context of global evangelization and discipleship.

The agenda is not simply a metaphysical one supplied by philosophy. We are not primarily interested in purely ontological or epistemological topics, questions of formal theological encyclopedia. These questions need to be dealt with. And those answers will have a deep effect on what we do in missions and in theologizing. But, rightly or wrongly, the background is more urgent and pressing.

There is the shift in the Christian axis. The new center of ecclesiastical gravity by the end of the twentieth century will have moved from the northern to the southern regions of the world. This is not a threat to the North American church but the fruit of 150 years of our gospel endeavor. “The old centers of theological influence in Europe and North America are becoming the new peripheries, while the new centers of vitality and importance in church growth and theological construction are in Asia, Africa and Latin America—where the majority of Christians will be living in the year 2000.”[18]

There are the political dimensions to the missionary task which increasingly demand our attention. A political scientist has observed that nearly every Third World nation today is under an authoritarian government. The only difference among them will be those who will benefit from the structures—the elite few in the society or the masses. How will we prepare the church for that awesome day? How do we live and witness to our faith under conditions of oppression and authoritarianism? What is the mission of the church in the People’s Republic of China and in the Philippines, in North and South Korea? How should Christian discipleship face the suppression of human rights, the torture of dissidents, the strictures against baptism and church building?

The vast scale of human poverty in traditional “mission fields” presses us.

The numbers of the poor are increasing in the world today…. It is generally accepted that up to two billion people—one half of the world’s population of four billion—are now poor. The World Bank describes one billion of these people as “individuals (who) subsist on incomes of less than $75 a year in an environment of squalor, hunger and hopelessness. They are the absolute poor, living in situations so deprived as to be below any rational definition of human decency…. It is a life at the margin of existence.” For the other billion who are living slightly above this absolute poverty level, life is nearly as joyless and has improved little if at all through decades of “development” efforts.[19]

Should missions alone address the intolerable fact that two-thirds of the human family go to bed hungry every night? What will our theology say to, and about, 15,000 people who starve to death every day? To what part of our theological curriculum will we send the 20 percent of the human family who control 80 percent of the world’s resources?

There is the awesome size of the world’s non-Christian population. In Jesus’ time it numbered 250 million. Today with 4.2 billion total population, it is estimated that 2.8 billion are non-Christians—eleven times as many non-Christians as when Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount. By the year 2000 world population will have increased fifty percent and Christians will constitute only fifteen percent of that vast multitude. Is this only a missiological concern? There are over 700 million Muslims in our world. How shall we explain biblically to them the Trinity, the substitutionary atonement of Christ as the Son of God? How shall we overcome the cultural blockades that are raised up against our confession, “There is no God but Allah and Jesus is His prophet”? The first question is traditionally called theological, the other missiological. Are they really two questions or one?

It is also missionary frustration that calls for dialogue between missions and theology. Too many evangelists, expatriate and national, are struggling with the problem of old wineskins and new wines. They have been taught in our seminaries that theology is the wine and culture our wineskins. But they have found something in the ghettos of Philadelphia and the favelas of Rio. They are afraid that the theology they have learned resembles the wineskins more than the wine. Western, white theology’s post-Christian orientation has taught them about proofs for the existence of God and left them skeptical about God’s healing power. And they go to minister in a pre-Christian world which wants to hear about the reality of Christ’s authority over evil spirits. In classes they have heard terms like “common grace” and “general revelation.” But lectures on common grace have been abstracted from questions like redemptive analogies. And general revelation is a term we do not identify with Sawi mythologies of a Peace Child or Korean animistic understandings of God as Hananim, the Exalted One. Our global evangelistic obligations not only demand a new shift in the dialogue. They are creating its agenda.

2. There seem also to be signs that the evangelical community, and even the Reformed world, is beginning to engage in serious self-evaluation. It is asking itself harder questions than it has in many decades. And it is asking them in areas traditionally staked off as either theological or missiological. And, in this process of inquiry, the questions frequently converge.

The debate over the Bible grows. And, as it does, the complexities of the question grow, even for the Calvinist. Theologians ask about the metaphysical presuppositions that have gone into shaping our paradigms. Scholars like John Vander Stelt[20] and Jack Rogers[21] raise angry questions over the distorting influence of Scottish Common Sense Realism on the old Princeton view of Scripture. I find it easier to trace these relationships to Charles Hodge than to Warfield. And C. Van Til has warned us of the influence of rationalism on the old Princeton school repeatedly. It is the questions raised at this stage to which I draw attention, not the wisdom of the answers.

Similarly, the very recent report of the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands on the nature of the authority of Scripture begins with a philosophical discussion of “changes in the concept of truth.” With many others, I am concerned over the “relational” idea of truth the report leaves with us.[22] What is meant when we are told that our past conceptions of Scripture must attempt to transcend the dilemma between the objective and the subjective? Will all of this really accomplish the avowed purpose of promoting a better listening to Scripture? It is not my purpose to answer that question now. I only note the significance of a Reformed church asking again about metaphysical presuppositions. As Herman Ridderbos notes regarding the discussion, “all Reformed theology, wherever it is done, …ought to be more critical than it is of its own position.”[23]

And from the missiological side, Charles Kraft challenges us on the same issue from another direction. He demands we rethink the question of inspiration in terms of anthropological models and see the Bible as an inspired, classic casebook, “ongoing dynamic revelation.”[24] He refuses to allow the debate over the Bible to become a question of self-sealing justification. The missiological dimension is put in the foreground as an essential key to progress.

Authority, be insists, must be defined in terms of that which is addressed by authority—human cultures.

Out of this community of interests come new questions. Have we propositionalized revelation into an acultural vacuum? Can our confidence in the “bearing along” work of the Spirit (2 Pet 1:21) lift the Bible up, over, and around human cultures without ever going through those cultures? What do we mean by anthropomorphism in revelation? Is this thelogical category ultimately a missionary method of God himself? There is always the danger that truth will be lost in cultures. And many have fears that Kraft’s views could lead us, either wittingly or unwittingly, in that direction.[25] At the same time, is there also the danger that cultures will be lost in truth?[26]

Again, there are new questions raised by both theologians and missiologists in the area of hermeneutic. In the evangelical theology camp, Anthony Thiselton presses upon us the urgency of the concerns of “the new hermeneutic.” How may the NT text speak to us anew? How must we understand understanding? If a text is to be understood there must occur an engagement between two sets of horizons, namely those of the ancient text and those of the modern hearer or reader. How does this happen?[27]

In an evangelical atmosphere traditionally hostile to the methods of Heidegger and Bultmann, Thiselton has forced us to look at the seriousness of their questions. Some are already entering the debate,[28] a sure sign of more yet to come.

From the missiological side, one of the major concerns in the contextualization debate is an amplification of this very question. It adds a third horizon, that of the communicator speaking the ancient text to the receptor. And it asks, how does understanding take place in this process of conveying a message written in one culture by the bearer of a second culture to the receptor who lives in yet a third? We remember that Bultmann’s motivations behind the method of demythologization arose out of his concern for a non-Christian, shattered Europe. We have labored to critique Bultmann’s method correctly. But have we labored with equal concem to see how much deeper our own grasp must become of the problems he and others force us to face?

How distant are these concerns from the liberation theologians who struggle with this same question of the two horizons and end up defining theology as “reflection on praxis”? Third World evangelicals like René Padilla and Samuel Escobar are not at all satisfied with the answers of either Bultmann or Gutiérrez. But they are also angry over the cultural interference from Western evangelical theology that has distorted the airwaves between the two horizons. They criticize past methods of hermeneutics and remind us that “neither our understanding of the text nor our understanding of our concrete situation is adequate unless both constantly interact and are mutually corrected.”[29]

There are other indications of change in our midst. But these should be enough to allow me now the liberty of suggesting a new collaboration between missiology and theology. I do it by proposing a missiological agenda for theology, not a theological agenda for missions.

III. Missiological Agenda for Theology

In one sense, asking for a new collaboration is misleading. It can imply there was no collaboration before. That is not true. In its times of greatest glory, theology was nothing more than reflection in mission, in pilgrimage on the road among the time-bound cultures of the world. It was also reflection on mission, on Jesus as the good news for the world, on the church as salt and light and leaven for the world.

John Calvin’s theological methodology exemplifies that combination for us par excellence. His battle cry of sola Scriptura was not simply the demand that we approach the Bible with a tabula rasa. As a pastor, he, and we, approach the Bible through the history concomitant to our own situation. With a missionary dimension to his work, he tried to apply the gospel to his own time and place. As a “physician of memory,” he reached back into another time and place through the Scriptures and, through the insights gained, sought to transform the present. He “translated” the gospel without benefit of morphology or phonemics and recovered for the church the covenant dimension of theologizing. In the infinite gap between Creator and creature, God baby-talked to his creation and we responded in covenant responsibility. That response was missionary theology. “Calvin, having first established what stands in the text, sets himself to re-think the whole material and to wrestle with it, till the walls which separate the sixteenth century from the first become transparent! Paul speaks, and the man of the sixteenth century hears.”[30]

The uniqueness of Calvin’s missionary theologizing is particularly awesome when we remember the scholastic origins of theology as an academic discipline that preceded him. Theology as a scholarly study had gone hand in hand with the slow development of the twelfth-century schools into the first universities. Its ingredients included more than simply the study of the Bible. Increasingly it defined itself as a metaphysical science of speculation, dependent to a considerable extent upon the secular concepts of philosophia. It saw its task as a universal one of ontology. And flowing from that ontological self-understanding it spent its time on abstracted definitions, affirming God as Being with a capital B. It transmuted the Aristotelian distinction between an object’s “essence” and its “accidents” into the assumption that subjects can gain “objective knowledge” of given objects, in this case God.[31]

The danger of this abstractionist thought has always been that things are viewed as existing in themselves without taking into consideration the relationships in which they stand to other things What is God in himself? it prefers to ask. No movement can be applied to God, therefore we confess that he is immutable and eternal. No limitations can be applied to God. Therefore we hold that he is infinite, almighty, and invisible. No composition can be ascribed to God, therefore he is simple and good. Finally, no essential multiplicity can be ascribed to God, therefore God is one.[32] A third ingredient was part of this scholastic approach to theology. G. R. Evans calls it “a missionary theology.”[33] But that designation seems inaccurate to me. “Polemical” would be more appropriate. The “polemical” approach betrays the danger of ontologizing thought. In this case, its concern is with the truth as it exists in itself. It minimizes the truth in relationship to its hearers. The unbelievers are transformed from covenant creatures needing the covenant renewal which only Christ can bring. They become infideles, haeretici, increduli, those who dispute the true knowledge. In the twelfth century, the church had begun again its dialogue with the Jews. But the dialogue was polemical, not missionary. The goal of the church was not simply conversion, but elimination by the pen or by the sword. The scholastic polemicist pursued the truth and not sinners. And he pursued not simply to woo hearts to Christ but to do battle with the irrational philosophi in the defense of truth.

Calvin’s contextualization of the gospel confronted that approach in a radical way. His covenant theology admitted no realm of “objective,” outsider knowledge of God as object. The path of knowledge always began with the Creator and ended with self-understanding as creature. And in this recognition, Calvin’s polemical training in the law was modified by the missionary intent of the pastor. His use of the rhetorical discipline was transmuted by the pastoral calling of the theologian.[34]

Evangelical theology, in the years following Calvin, lost those insights. And the contemporary crisis in the seminary’s place for missions may be traced back in large part to this failure. It is a delayed symptom of a disease that has been endemic to evangelical theologizing.

In keeping with the scholastic shape of our past, even Reformed theology can sometimes be characterized as a quest for pure essentials. So divine election in the approach of a Louis Berkhof may be seen as a logically inferred corollary of the doctrine of the divine decrees.[35] It resembles an “accident” of grace logically consequent to the “essence” of divine sovereignty. Against this view has risen what some now call the “functionalism” of G. C. Berkouwer. He has no desire to leave any believer in the dark as to the ultimate and prior question of his election. And this pastoral concern of his theology may be much more than simply pastoral in the academic sense of “practical.” Is it the setting free of theology from the bondage of deduction that is linked to an essentialist approach to theology? “He does not seek to arrive at theological definition…. Rather he seeks to arrive at an understanding of problems by viewing them in the context of their relationships.”[36] Is Berkouwer’s method signalling a new way to do theology, one that is missiological in a good sense and not simply essentialist?[37] Behind what appears to many of us to be a fuzziness over distinctions can we sense his struggle over methodology?

Do I sense a similar struggle over method, but with far more useful formulations, in John Frame’s definition of theology as “simply the application of Scripture to all areas of human life”?[38] Frame says, “We do not know what Scripture says until we know how it relates to our world. The question of interpretation and the question of application are the same. To ask what Scripture says, or what it means, is always to ask a question about interpretation.”[39]

Surely we can all identify in this kind of language the missiological concerns of contextualization. Questions about the meaning of Scripture do not arise simply out of essentializing concerns. This is not to ignore or minimize the definitional characteristic of all theologizing that is done by covenant. It is simply to recognize that such questions are also missiological—our calling to relate the words of Scripture to our world views, our cultures, our homogeneous units of world “peoples.”

Related to this struggle is the evangelical’s perception of theology as some sort of comprehensively universal science. Theology becomes functionally the Queen of the sciences, the watchdog of the academic world, the ultimate universal. Combined with Western ethnocentrism, it produces the tacit assumption “that the Christian faith is already fully and properly indigenized in the West.”[40] Our creedal formulations, structured to respond to a sixteenth-century cultural setting and its problems, lose their historical character as contextual confessions of faith and become cultural universals, having comprehensive validity in all times and settings. The possibility of new doctrinal developments for the Reformed churches of Japan or Mexico is frozen into a time warp that gnosticizes the particularity of time and culture. The Reformation is completed and we in the West wait for the churches of the Third World to accept as their statements of faith those shaped by a Western church three centuries before in a corpus christianum.

In all this, there is no desire to diminish the place of the creed as the expression of the progressive understanding of truth conveyed by the Holy Spirit. Nor do we want to minimize or question the system of doctrine found in the Reformed creeds of these centuries. Our concern is over how we have diminished their historical, contextual character. The creed as a missionary document framed in the uniqueness of an historical moment has too often been remythologized by white paternalism into a universal Essence for all times. Contextualization, as a missionary demand of theologizing, is relegated to the non-Western “mission field.”

Herman Bavinck objected to this process of universalization in 1894. In the strongest of language, he commented,

All the misery of the Presbyterian Churches is owing to their striving to consider the Reformation as completed, and to allow no further development of what has been begun by the labor of the Reformers…. Calvinism wishes no cessation of progress and promotes multiformity. It feels the impulse to penetrate ever more deeply into the mysteries of salvation and in feeling this honors every gift and different calling of the Churches. It does not demand for itself the same development in America and England [and, I add, Africa and Asia] which it has found in Holland. This only must be insisted upon, that in each country and in every Reformed Church it should develop itself in accordance with its own nature, and should not permit itself to be supplanted or corrupted by foreign ideas.[41]

Today the Bavincks of the Third World churches speak even more stridently. Borrowed Western creeds have been accepted by them as testimonials to the catholicity of the gospel. They make them their confessions to affirm their place in the theological continuity of the past. But in doing so, they find also they are saddled to sixteenth-century definitions of the church concerned with what happened inside the church: on preaching, the sacraments, and discipline. “In these historic creeds, the church was a place where something was being done (passive voice), and not a people who did something.”[42] Stephen Neill says that the Reformation pronouncements in England on the church

call up a vision of a typical English village…where all are baptized Christians, compelled to live more or less Christian lives under the brooding eye of parson and squire. In such a context ‘evangelization’ has hardly any meaning, since all are in some sense already Christian, and need no more than to be safeguarded against error in religion and viciousness in life.[43]

The objections of Third World churchmen are not to theology per se, but to the Western nature of their borrowed systems. Does the gospel require them to become Berkhofs and Murrays before they can be themselves? Their agony is not usually so much over theology as the construction of a logically coherent system. It is over its organization around a Western historical agenda insisted upon as universal by the Western church. They cry out for the missiological dimension to creed making. The mission of the gospel to their cultural worlds demands creedal attention to ancestor worship, polygyny, the Islamic state, group movement conversions and how to shepherd them. How will the Three Standards of Unity and the Westminster Confession help them? Intuitively the Third World church is making a discovery. Systematic theology is not simply a coherent arrangement of supra-cultural universals. It is a compilation from the Western history of dogma. And that history, in the process of compilation, has lost its missiological thrust.

The effect of this process on the Western churches is similarly destructive of mission. Seeing theology as a science, and the creeds as the product of that kind of theological reflection, inhibits us as well from our own contemporary missiological risk. We assign all the problems of contextualization to distant, exotic places, and worry about how others will avoid syncretism with this view of theology. We assume such risks and such challenges are absent, or less pressing, in the West. We let our theologizing slip into a naive sort of idealistic pride in “our” model. We become less aware of the presuppositional rosy glasses with which we look at our rosy theological world. And our theology loses its evangelistic edge.

Will this missiological thrust destroy the uniqueness of Reformed theology? Not when we are willing to see that uniqueness, as Fred Klooster does, in the Reformation slogans, sola Scriptura et tota Scriptura (Scripture alone and all the Scripture).[44] Rather, missiology’s task then becomes that of a gadfly in the house of theology.

It must exert itself in and out of season to help theology—especially Western theology—find its way back down from the upper regions of the towers of academia to the ground floor of human reality…. By the same token missiology also has a mission to the church. The church, too, must ever be reminded that its raison d’etre lies in the gospel of the kingdom. The fellowship of the new covenant must be urgently summoned to obedient covenant response, to live its covenant life. The congregation must be called to become what it is in Pentecost, to reaffirm its being and existence by living in mission.[45]

Reformed theological orthodoxy alone is no guarantee that the world perspective of the Scriptures will receive the attention it is due. Missiology stands by to interrupt at every significant moment in theological conversation with the words, among the nations.

Where will such a missiology go in the theological curriculum? It is a latecomer to the traditional encyclopedia, and three solutions have been offered. One could make it a completely separate discipline. One could incorporate it within one of the already established disciplines. Or one could hope the other disciplines would occasionally throw in a good word for “missions.” None of these alone has proved satisfactory.

Perhaps we need a combination of all three, as David Bosch suggests.[46] It is possible if we remember there is a distinction between missionary intention and missionary dimension. We have spent most of the time in this lecture on the missionary dimension in distinction from intention. Everything the church is and does must have a missionary dimension. But not everything has a missionary intention. To put it another way, the church’s entire nature is missionary. But she is not, in all her activities, explicitly aimed at the world’s cultural borders. In the promotion of the church’s missionary intention, let us commend missions as a completely separate discipline. And in the promotion of the church’s missionary dimension, let us incorporate the global vision in all the areas of our traditionally parochial and provincial curriculum.

Missiology, in this spirit, seeks to irritate the Herman Ridderboses of the world who can write a 586-page outline to the theology of Paul and not even include the mission of the church in any of its 80 separate headings. It will aim for unrest in a church history department which divides the history of missions from the history of the church or teaches as if the world were still flat. It will rebel against a practical theology department which offers only domesticated information for the church “at home” in white suburbia.

And, while all this is going on, it will continue to ask other equally embarrassing questions of itself as well. How are the two horizons of hermeneutic to be merged when one of the horizons is that of a white member of Krishna Consciousness? Or an “illiterate” Tucuman Indian of Argentina? Does the current discussion of hermeneutic really incorporate those outside of Christ in their thinking about the issues? How will we preserve the cross-cultural, border-crossing nature of missions in a culture where only three percent of all undergraduate college students are enrolled in any studies dealing with international affairs or foreign people and cultures? Even if we achieve again a missionary dimension to theology, how will it function in a country where, according to a UNESCO study of 30,000 children in nine countries, American students ranked next to last in their comprehension of foreign cultures?[47]

How will we remind the church that it is more dangerous to be cautious than to be daring? And what does this axiom mean for those of us who are asking how we can do theology for the poor and mission out of affluence?

And, beyond all these, will our agenda of concerns overwhelm us again with a new “Babylonian captivity of the Christian mission”? Will we go on writing our books about the relation of evangelism to social action or homogeneous units? And the 2.8 billion people in the world who do not know Christ continue to die with their noses pressed against the windows of our studies.

Notes

1. R. Pierce Beaver, “The American Protestant Theological Seminary and Missions: An Historical Survey,” Missiology 4 (1976) 77.
2. For a history of this movement, consult Cindy Smith and Joseph L. Cumining, Rebuilding the Mission Movement (Pasadena: The National Student Missions Coalition, 1982) 305–521.
3. O. G. Myklebust, The Study of Missions in Theological Education (2 vols.; Oslo: Egede Instituttet, 1955–57) 1.146.
4. Ecumenical Missionary Conference, New York 1900 (2 vols.; New York: American Tract Society, 1900) 1.100.
5. Johannes Verkuyl, Contemporary Missiology: An Introduction (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1978) 14.
6. Beaver, “Seminary and Missions,” 85.
7. Charles W. Forman, “The Role of Mission Studies in Theological Education,” Missions in Theological Education. Proceedings: Twelfth Biennial Meeting of the Association of Professors of Missions (Chicago: Association of Professors of Missions, 1974) 39.
8. Ibid.
9. For samples of such judgments, consult Harvey Hoekstra, The World Council of Churches and the Demise of Evangelism (Wheaton: Tyndale House, 1979); Arthur Johnston, The Battle for World Evangelism (Wheaton: Tyndale House, 1978).
10. Forman, “The Role of Missions,” 40.
11. David J. Bosch, “Theological Education in Missionary Perspective.” Missiology 10 (1982) 14.
12. Quoted in Beaver, “Seminary and Missions,” 78.
13. O. G. Myklebust, The Study of Missions 2.287–88.
14. Ibid., 302-5.
15. Quoted in J. Leslie Dunstan, “What is the justification For a Chair of Missions in This Situation?” Our Teaching Responsibility in the Light of the De-emphasis of the Words “Missions” and “Missionary.” Proceedings: Sixth Biennial Meeting, Association of Professors of Missions (New York: Association of Professors of Missions, 1962) 1.
16. Stanley Gundry, “Evangelical Theology: Where Should We Be Going?” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 22 (1979) 11.
17. The published papers of the first two such gatherings are available in Theology and Mission (ed. David J. Hesselgrave; Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1978); and New Horizons in World Mission (ed. David J. Hesselgrave; Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979).
18. Gerald H. Anderson, “Facing the Realities of the Contemporary World in Mission,” Educating for Christian Missions (ed, Arthur L. Walker, Jr.; Nashville: Broadman Press, 1981) 50–51.
19. John G. Sommers, Beyond Charity: US Voluntary Aid for a Changing Third World (Washington, D.C.: Overseas Development Council, 1977) 2.
20. John Vander Stelt, Philosophy and Scripture: a Study in Old Princeton and Westminster Theology (Marlton, N.J.: Mack Publ. Comp., 1978).
21. Jack Rogers and Donald McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach (New York: Harper and Row, 1979).
22. Al Wolters, “Truth as Relational,” RES Theological Forum 9 nos. 3–4 (January 1982) 7.
23. Herman N. Ridderbos, “Evaluation,” RES Theological Forum 9 nos. 3–4 (January 1982) 56.
24. Charles Kraft, Christianity in Culture (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1979) 178–202.
25. This is the basic concern of Carl F. H. Henry in his extensive review of Kraft’s book in Trinity Journal 1 NS (1980) 153–64.
26. This is, by contrast, the fear expressed by Donald Dayton of Carl Henry’s view in “The Church in the World: The Battle For the Bible Rages On,” TToday 37 (1980) 81.
27. Anthony Thiselton, The Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1980) 10–17.
28. See the reactions of Walter Kaiser in “Meanings From God’s Message: Matters For Interpretation,” Christianity Today 22 no. 23 (5 Oct. 1979) 30–33 and Toward an Exegetical Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1981) 29–40.
29. René Padilla, “Hermeneutics and Culture—A Theological Perspective,” Down to Earth: Studies in Christianity and Culture (ed. John R. W. Stott and Robert Coote; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1980) 76–77.
30. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (London: Oxford University Press, 1953) 7. For a fuller exposition of this view of Calvin, consult Jim O’Brien, “Ford Lewis Battles: 1915–1979, Calvin Scholar and Church Historian Extraordinary,” Calvin Theological Journal 15 (1980) 168–83.
31. Alfred Krass, “Contextualization For Today,” Gospel in Context 2 (1979) 27.
32. John Timmer, “G. C. Berkouwer: Theologian of Confrontation and Co-relation,” Reformed Journal 9 no. 10 (December 1967) 17.
33. G. R. Evans, Old Arts and New Theology: The Beginnings of Theology as an Academic Discipline (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980) 38, 137–66.
34. Ford Lewis Battles, “God Was Accommodating Himself to Human Capacity,” Int 31 (1977) 20.
35. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1949) 109.
36. Timmer, “G. C. Berkouwer,” 20.
37. A full discussion of Berkouwer’s hermeneutic methodology will be found in J. C. DeMoor, Towards a Biblically Theological Method (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1980).
38. John Frame, Van Til: The Theologian (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Pilgrim, 1976) 25.
39. Ibid.
40. Bosch, “Theological Education,” 16–17.
41. Herman Bavinck, “The Future of Calvinism,” Presbyterian and Reformed Review 5 (1894) 23.
42. Bosch, “Theological Education,” 17. Compare also Lesslie Newbigin, “Theological Education in a World Perspective,” Ministerial Formation 4 (1978) 5–6.
43. Stephen Neill, The Church and Christian Union (London: Oxford University Press. 1968) 75.
44. Fred H. Klooster, “The Uniqueness of Reformed Theology,” Calvin Theological Journal 14 (1979) 32–54. I find it intriguing that Klooster sees this principle as needing elaboration in at least two major areas to which we have devoted so much time in this essay—the nature of theological science and the problem of hermeneutic.
45. Jerald D. Gort, “The Contours of the Reformed Understanding of Christian Mission: An Attempt at Definition,” Calvin Theological Journal 15 (1980) 46.
46. Bosch, “Theological Education,” 26–27. He is commending the distinction made by H.-W. Genichen, Glaube für die Welt (Gerd Mohn: Gutersloher Veriagshaus, 1971) 80–96, 168–86. For similar conclusions, consult O. G. Myklebust, “Integration or Independence? Some Reflections on the Status of the Study of Missions in the Theological Curriculum,” Basileia. Walter Freytag Zum 60. Geburtstag (ed. Jan Hermelink and Hans J. Margull; Stuttgart: Evang.-Missionsverlag GMBH, 1959) 330–40.
47. Anderson, “Facing the Realities,” 55–56.