Transcript
Good evening. For the past several years, Princeton Seminary has enjoyed the presence of Dr. Andrew Walls, guest professor of ecumenics and mission, and one of the world's most distinguished missiologists. We are also privileged to have his wife Doreen here as well. Dr. Walls has come to Princeton after service at the University of Bristol, the University of Sierra Leone, the University of Nigeria, the University of Aberdeen, and the University of Edinburgh. And I have not listed his
visiting appointments. Professor Walls' involvement in public service and in cooperative academic projects complement the superb scholarship he has produced individually. Those who have read, for example, his missionary movement in Christian history know the qualities of that scholarship, an encyclopedic knowledge rendered accessible by a deft style and sage observation tempered by gentle wit. His topic this evening is Weighing the Baggage, Missions and Western Culture. Please join me in welcoming him. Thank you, Dr. Moorhead. Though for a
second time, I have gone through an identity crisis in the course of listening to an introduction and wondering who it was who was going to start speaking. I do thank you, and I do thank you all for your welcome. And not just the welcome tonight and for this series, but for the great generosity of spirit which has met me over the four years, or thereby, that we have been here. We are accounting for missions, and tonight
we're weighing the baggage of Western culture. There's a mid-Victorian dinner table, Jeu d'Esprit, attributed to Bishop Wilberforce, which runs, I dreamt I saw a cassowary on the plains of Timbuktu, eating of a missionary, hat and coat and Himbuktu. The verse, of course, was designed not to make a theological statement, but to achieve an outrageous rhyme. But at the heart of it is an image of cultural incongruity. Clerical dress appropriate for the high street of
Oxford is transferred to Timbuktu, a place which, though few could say anything else about it, stood for the exotic, for the other. Only a missionary could so ludicrously reproduce the familiar in the midst of the exotic. Even in mid-Victorian times, the missionary was a figure of cultural incongruity. On Monday, we considered how, in the period since this lectureship on missions was first established, the Christian world has been transformed. With missions, one of the principal agents
of transformation. In 1893, the first lecturer in this series could take for granted that the West was secure in its possession of the Christian gospel, that the world as a whole, under Western influence that was in general benign, was essentially safe and stable and increasingly accessible. As he looked closer, he could see heartwarming evidence that Japan, China, India were beginning to respond to the gospel. On the other hand, work had hardly started in Korea. Latin America
was a neglected continent in which little in the way of vital religion was noticeable. And even an inveterate optimist like himself could describe the results of mission work in Africa only as less discouraging than might have been expected. By contrast today, we can look back on a century of recession in the West from the Christian faith, washing over the Christian base in Western Europe that in 1893 was still providing the majority of the world's missionaries. Meanwhile,
a parallel accession to the faith in other parts of the world has left Christianity a predominantly non-Western religion, with Africa and Latin America as the outstanding Christian heartlands and important Christian communities in Asia, among which Korea is particularly noteworthy. In other words, there's been a century long process of cross-cultural diffusion of Christianity with the Western missionary as connecting terminal. And the most curious feature of the process in that period in which the Christian faith
cross-cultural frontiers into Asian and African communities is that it lost its hold on much of the West. This is not an unprecedented event. It has been a recurrent feature of Christian history. The process by which Christianity spreads is not progressive, but serial. Long ago, Kenneth Scott Latterette pointed out that the history of Christianity has not been one of steady progress, let alone of resistless triumph. There have been periods of advance and periods of recession, falling
back, withering and decay. Islam can make a much better claim than Christianity for progressive expansion, for steady numerical increase and geographical growth. Generally speaking, there are some exceptions. Lands that became Islamic have so far stayed Islamic. The Arab lands seem now so inalienably Muslim that it's hard to remember that the Yemen was once a Christian kingdom. Contrasts Jerusalem, home of the first Christian church, or Syria and Egypt and Asia Minor and North Africa, which once provided
the brightest examples of Christian devotion, scholarship and witness. Or take my own country, where John Knox and John Wesley once preached, now full of unwanted churches, turned into furniture stores, garages or nightclubs. In each of these latter cases, a place which had been a Christian heartland, a shining center of Christian devotion and activity, ceased to have this function. The light burned down or burned out, and the candlestick was taken out of its place. But in none
of these cases, did this decline mean the disappearance of the Christian faith or the end of Christian witness, rather the reverse. By the time the Jerusalem church was scattered to the winds, the gospel had taken hold in the Hellenistic world of the East Mediterranean. When the literate civilization of the Roman Empire broke up, the gospel was making its way among the barbarians, north and east of that empire. As the modern recession began to accelerate in Europe
and to wash into North America, the churches of Asia, Africa and Latin America came into their own. The Christian story is serial. Its center moves from place to place. No one church or place or culture owns it. At different times, different peoples and places have become its heartlands, its chief representatives. Then the battle passes on to others. Christian progress is never final, is never a set of gains to be plotted on a map. The rhetoric of
some of our hymns and many of our sermons about the triumphant host streaming out to conquer the world is more Islamic than Christian. Christian history reveals the faith often withering in its heartlands, in its centers of seeming strength and importance to establish itself on or beyond its margins. It has vulnerability, a certain fragility at its heart. The vulnerability of the cross, the fragility of the earth and vessel. In other words, cross-cultural diffusion has been necessary
to Christianity. It's been its life's blood, and without it, the faith could never have survived. It does not, like so many religions of India, belong to a particular soil, nor does it, like Islam, produce a distinctive and immediately recognizable form of civilization. The missionary movement from the West, seen in the context of the total history of Christianity, is one of a series of major cross-cultural diffusions. The first recorded is in the 11th chapter of Acts,
which tells how some Jewish believers in Jesus who had been driven out of Jerusalem decided that their Messiah had something to say to the Greek pagans by whom they were surrounded in Antioch. The pattern of cross-cultural diffusion thus initiated means that since that time, the church has in principle been not only multiracial, but multicultural. The earliest believers were devout, observant Jews, maintaining circumcision, delighting in the Torah, devoted to the worship of the temple, understanding Jesus
and his work in terms of Jewish history, destiny, and the salvation of the nation of Israel. The new Antioch believers were not circumcised, did not keep the Torah, could not, for the most part, keep the Sabbath, ate pork without turning a hair, maintained social relations with their pagan neighbors, were excluded from the temple, and, so far as we know, did not dwell much on the political destiny of Israel. In order that they should come to faith
in Christ, Christ had been presented to them in a way wholly different from that in which he had been presented as Messiah among Jews. In order that they should maintain that faith, they had to develop a totally new style of life adapted to Hellenistic social and family conditions. But this had to take place within a church of old-style believers, retaining the Torah-keeping way of devotion to the Messiah that had been characteristic of the Jerusalem
church. Issues of culture, then, are at the heart of Christian faith, because Christianity is about conversion. Conversion means turning. Conversion to Christ is turning towards him. There's a vital difference between converts and proselytes. Before the time of Christ, Jews had designed ways of welcoming Gentiles who recognized the God of Israel and wanted to serve him. Proselytes were circumcised, baptized, entered into the life of Israel by seeking to obey the Torah. It would have been very natural
for that first, entirely Jewish community of believers in Jesus to maintain this venerable system. But the council described in Acts 15 deliberately rejected the time-honored model of the proselyte. It was an astonishing decision. Hitherto, all believers in Jesus had been circumcised and kept the Torah, just like the Lord himself. It was the standard lifestyle for believers in Jesus. But the early church decided that Gentile believers in Jesus, though ex-pagans without the lifelong training in
doctrine and morality that Jews had, should not be circumcised, should not keep the Torah, and should be left to find a Christian lifestyle of their own within Hellenistic society under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. They were not to be proselytes, but converts. If the first Gentile believers had become proselytes, living exactly the style of life of those who brought them to Christ, they might have become very devout believers, but they would have had virtually no
impact on their society. They would effectively have been taken out of that society. In fact, it was their task as converts to convert their society, convert it in the sense that they had to keep turning their ways of thinking and doing things, which of course were Greek ways of thinking and doing things, towards Christ, opening them up to his influence. In this way, a truly Greek, a truly Hellenistic style of Christianity was able to emerge, and
Christianity was able to penetrate the Hellenistic intellectual and social heritage. Hellenistic thought, Hellenistic social and family life, Hellenistic civic organization were challenged, purged, modified, put to new uses, but from the inside, by people whose own inheritance they were. The fact that cross-cultural diffusion is so characteristic of Christian history, leaves the Christian faith with tensions that may be creative or destructive. Cultural diversity is built into the church. So is the ecumenical sharing of its diverse cultural
communities. Even the greatest problems of the church are therefore often ecumenical. Even after the Council of Jerusalem appeared to settle the matter, some of the Jerusalem believers in Jesus were still sure that a form of faith which did not include the precious traditional items of Torah and circumcision must be defective. It's been a recurrent problem. Those who brought others to Christian faith have quite frequently insisted that the new Christians should follow exactly the way of life
of their teachers, in effect, adopt their own Torah and circumcision. Of all the heresies in Christian history, it is Judaizing that has been the most persistent. There's plenty of Judaizing to be found in the story of cross-cultural diffusion of the Christian faith through the missionary movement, but it would be hugely misleading to treat the issue of Western culture solely in terms of Torah and circumcision. We'll be engaged tonight with the development of missionary attitudes towards
culture, their own and that of others, making due allowance for the fact that the concept of culture in the sense used here is itself the product, and one not manufactured till the end of the 19th century, of the encounter between Western and Christian faith. This is true both of individual missionaries over their period of service and of the missionary movement as a whole as accumulated experience built up over generations. Let's deal with the issue of missionaries
with the crude but popular notion that missionaries as a whole, utterly confident of the righteousness of all they represented, denounced all other cultures and religions and their social institutions as utterly evil. Missionaries in recent years have had such a bad press that anything derogatory said about them will be believed. A trivial example may be interpolated here since it's a topic of recent research. The term the missionary position has passed into common speech. It's found in novels,
in newspapers, in the Reader's Digest, in postmodernist symbolism and even since 1976 in the Oxford English Dictionary. Not to mention innumerable smutty jokes and everyone knows what it means, as has become obvious. An article in the most recent issue of the journal Current Anthropology investigates the origin of the idea which turns out to be in that factory of myth the Kinsey Report on the sexual behaviour of the Cuban male and to rest on a conflation of
misremembered passages of the anthropologist Malinowski and echoes of medieval Catholicism. The missionary position is a legend invented in 1948 which has nothing to do with missionaries at all but which depicts them as cultural chauvinists. As a race they were undoubtedly a confident people or they would never have undertaken what they did or persisted in it if they had. Confident in their message usually in their own calling from God to declare it and commonly about their theology
too coming as they usually did from sectors of the church where assurance over particular theological issues had been dearly bought. The initial encounter with another culture especially in its religious aspects often brought shock and not uncommonly revulsion. But equally missionaries were required by the nature of their work to engage the other culture at a more fundamental level than was necessary for other western residents. And developing acquaintance regularly brought developing respect and an acknowledgement of the gaps
in western understanding, learning and even theology. We see this process going on as early as the 1640s in the Massachusetts Puritan John Eliot. In his circles it was widely recognized that America was Satan's peculiar domain hence the special significance of the Puritan arrival and the establishment of gospel churches. But Eliot, one of the few preachers who established close relations with the Native Americans and got competence in the language found there were aspects of Native American life
and belief and religion that were incompatible with the blind idolatry to be expected from people under the unchallenged rule of Satan. They had true notions of God. So many that Eliot began to speculate about the sources of their knowledge. So much of it belonged to the realm of revelation. Could it be that the Native Americans were a fragment of the lost tribes of Israel? And if so, how momentous was the fact that in response to his
own preaching so many were exhibiting the signs of true conversion. Had the ingathering of Israel begun was the fullness of the Gentiles at hand? Or consider a century later the experience of David Brainerd preacher of the gospel, son in law designate of Jonathan Edwards himself. Brainerd describes his reaction on seeing a Native American shaman with mask, skins and rattle engaged in a ceremonial dance of all the sights I ever saw among them or anywhere else none
appeared so frightful so near akin to what is usually imagined of infernal powers. No one could have imagined from his appearance or actions that he could have been a human creature. When he came near me I could not but shrink away. Here in this evocation of the infernal powers was the very embodiment of Satan's dominion. And yet conversing with this same shaman Brainerd found a conscientious high-minded reforming prophet who had undergone an experience which he
described as coming to know God following which he devoted himself to the service of God and found a love of humankind he'd not known before. He was trying to turn his people from the alcoholism that had engulfed them since their contact with the whites and back to the ancient worship of God from which they declined. Brainerd spoke to him of Christian doctrine Now that I like so God has taught me was the shaman's response to some
of the discourse not to all of it particularly on the existence of the devil he said which Native Americans had never known about. Some of his sentiments seemed very just remarks Brainerd and there was something in his temper and disposition which was more like true religion than anything I ever observed amongst other heathens. The fellow feeling between the evangelical missionary and the reforming shaman is clear. Both are in their different spheres converted men. Both recognize a
vocation to the service of God. Both are seeking to turn others back to God. Both are outsiders in their respective communities rejected as fanatics or in Brainerd's phrase precise zealots. An example from a later time here's David Livingston giving a sample of the sort of conversation a missionary doctor like himself might have with a Chuan rainmaker. He begins the conversation Hail friend, how many medicines you have about you this morning you've every medicine in the country
here. Very true my friend says the rain doctor and I ought to the country needs the rain I'm making. You really believe that you can command the clouds. I think that can be done by God alone. We both believe the very same thing says the rain doctor. It's God that makes the rain but I pray to him by means of these medicines and the rain coming of course it's mine. It was I who made it rain
for the Buquena for many years when they were at Chokwani through my wisdom too their women became fat and shining. Ask them they'll tell you the same as I do. But says the missionary we are told in the parting words of our savior that we can pray to God acceptably in his name alone and not by means of medicines. Truly says the rain doctor but God told us differently. He made black men first. He didn't love
us as he did the white men. He gave you clothing and guns and gunpowder and horses and wagons. To us he had no heart he gave us nothing but the asagai and cattle and rain making. God has given us this one little thing which you know nothing of. He's given us the knowledge of certain medicines by which we can migraine. We don't despise those things you possess though we are ignorant of them. We don't understand your
book but we don't despise it. You ought not to despise our little knowledge though you are ignorant of it. To which the missionary replies I don't despise what I'm ignorant of. I only think you are mistaken in saying that you have medicines that can influence the rain. That's just the way people speak when they talk on a subject they know nothing about. When we first opened our eyes we found our forefathers making rain and we follow
in the footsteps of our forefathers. You who sent a curaman for corn and irrigate your garden may do without rain. We can't manage in that way. I quite agree with you says the missionary as to the value of the rain but you can't charm the clouds by medicines. You wait till you see the clouds come and then you use their medicines and take the credit which belongs to God only. I use my medicines, you use yours.
We are both doctors. You give a patient medicine. Sometimes God is pleased to heal him by means of your medicine, sometimes not. He dies. When he's cured you take the credit of what God does. I do the same. Sometimes God grants us rain sometimes not. When he does we take the credit of the charm. When a patient dies you don't give up trust in your medicine nor do I when the rain fails. If you wish me
to leave off my medicines why continue your own? I give my medicine to living creatures within my reach and I can see the effects. You pretend to charm the clouds which are so far above us that your medicines never reach them. The clouds usually lie in one direction your smoke goes in another. God alone can command the clouds. Only wait patiently. God will give us rain without your medicines. I always thought white men were wiser this
morning. Whoever thought of trying South Starvation? Could you make it rain on one spot and not on another? Wouldn't think of trying. I like to see the whole country green and all the people glad and the women clapping their hands and giving me ornaments for thankfulness. I think you deceive both them and yourself. Ah well then said the rain doctor There's a pair of us meaning we're a couple of rogues. This passage comes from Livingston's Missionary
Travels and Researchers in South Africa a bestseller in its day and it's offered as an example to the British people of the logical reasoning and dialectical skill of the Swana people. It's clear that the Missionary relishes the encounter both parties enjoy it the atmosphere is quite relaxed and in his commentary on it Livingston explains that anger or denunciation of such practices would just give the impression that the Missionary didn't want it to rain. We must now
attempt more precision about Missionary attitudes to Western culture. Over the five centuries that the Missionary movement has been in existence Western culture changed and developed substantially so there's no purpose in speaking of it as a single entity and I won't tonight. There are some excellent studies of how the mental world of Missionaries was constituted and I hope it's not invidious to mention what is probably the most recent of these the excellent doctoral dissertation of S.K.
Kim sustained a week or so ago in this institution on the great China Jesuit Matteo Ricci. I would like tonight however to concentrate on Protestant thought in the 19th century partly because this is where the infrastructure of modern missions was set up that led eventually to the demographic transformation of the church that we spoke of on Monday. It's also helpful in that for at least the first half century there was what might be called a missionary
theory of Western culture or as they called it civilization. The Protestant movement of the time first was evangelical. The inspiration came from evangelical sources and though the movement was adopted by most forms of Western churchmanship, evangelicals remained prominent among the theorists and the practitioners. And evangelicalism was itself a statement about culture. It was protest religion, asserting the failures of a society that claimed the Christian name but didn't live by Christian norms or understand Christian doctrines. It
assumed the existence of Christendom, a civil society acknowledging Christian worship and Christian standards. But evangelicals saw their society and its leaders as having fallen short of the profession they claimed. Failing to understand the cardinal doctrines, the nature of sin, the meaning of the atonement, the necessity of holiness. Personal response to the gospel marked the difference between nominal or formal and real Christianity. This distinction between nominal and real Christianity built social criticism into evangelical thought. Evangelicals were
social nonconformists, witnesses to the derelictions of society. They didn't reject the idea of a Christian civil society. Indeed, they saw it as their duty to awaken the nominally Christian society to the implications of what it already professed. But they did not idealize it and were very conscious of the corruption of contemporary culture. Evangelical doctrine also posited the universality of human sinfulness and the universal scope of Christ's redemption. The effect of this was that the careless, unregenerate
person in Christian society, even a peer of the realm, was in the same spiritual position as an African idolater or a Hindu. They were alike heathen. You have nothing to do at present in Africa, wrote John Wesley, to one of his preachers who had expressed a desire to become a missionary. Convert the heathen in Scotland. In evangelical terms, there were plenty of heathen in Scotland. On the other hand, all that the Gospel offered in Scotland in
terms of salvation was equally available in Africa. People of all races stood under the same judgment, were comprehended in the same salvation. There was an important corollary. All races, including those subject to slavery, were open to the operations of grace and thus to the development of Christian character and to the highest reaches of human attainment. Nineteenth-century evangelicalism may have been culturist, but it was not racist. The second strand in 19th-century Protestant missionary movement was
humanitarian. Evangelicals as a whole were fervently opposed to slavery, and the missionary movement and the anti-slavery movement grew up together with closely related constituencies. Anti-slavery was the chief humanitarian concern, but the alliance of humanitarian with evangelical interest made missions alert to what now would be called human rights issues. It was evangelical concern that set up a House of Commons committee on aborigines' rights, particularly concerned with land seizures by white settlers. Missions were also eloquent
on what were called barbarous practices in the countries in which they worked. The practice of sati in India, for instance, the burning of widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Or the Bengal devotional right of swinging from hooks placed in the flesh. Or the killing of slaves for the funeral rights of an important person in West Africa. Or human sacrifice anywhere. Slavery, however, was the defining issue. And Thomas Fall Buxton's The African Slave Trade and
its Remedy, which influenced mission thought greatly, argues that far from being the natural state of Africa, violent practices were introduced or exacerbated by the slave trade that had been introduced by nations said to be civilized. Which calls us to look more closely at what was meant in this context by the term civilization. And here I look at a series of lectures given in the earliest days of the YMCA in London by celebrated evangelical spokesmen. There's one,
for instance, on ancient Rome and modern London, a point-by-point comparison where the speaker finds London wins on most points, with the notable exception of architecture. But the crowning difference is that old Rome stands for an essentially military form of civilization. London stands for a civilization that's essentially commercial, whose military forces exist not for conquest, but to prevent war and permit free commerce. It's not accidental that it starts with Rome, because the idea of civilization
has this very strong historical component, the sense of European continuity from the Roman Empire. Europe inherited the distinction of Greeks and barbarians. Western Europeans were themselves, for the most part, descendant of the peoples that the Romans called barbarians. But there was an important qualification. It was to the classical world converted that they looked back, the Roman Empire conquered by Christ. Most of the Western barbarians absorbed Latin culture along with Christianity. The second, besides this historical component,
is what one might call a developmental component. Civilization is not a static acquisition. It's a fund on which you have to draw. It needs constant application. It's a sort of intellectual digging and maneuvering. And it has a technological component that includes literacy and the use of books. And the 19th century developments, which by improving agricultural production and making manufactured goods widely available were making life easier for numbers of people, reducing mortality, and by making more leisure
available for intellectual digging and maneuvering, spreading the refinement of civilization. Civilization also had a moral element. Salvation not only implied the cultivation of the intellect, letters, and the investigation of nature, but of the moral faculty, the reformation of manners. Here's another of the speakers to the YMCA. His subject is the extent and moral statistics of the British Empire. And this is 1843. The whole point of the lecture is we don't know which way British influence is
going yet. All these immigrants going to America and Australia, will they be rapacious and unprincipled? Will the noble Aborigines in New Zealand go the way of the Incas? Will settlers and Maori till the soil side by side and kneel together in the same congregations? Which is the other possibility. Civilization then has a sharp moral edge. The evangelical conviction that Africans were open to all the operations of saving grace meant that the heights of intellectual as well
as religious and moral achievement were open. What Africans lacked was opportunity. Let the gospel take root and all the Christian virtues underlying civilization would flourish. So evangelicals had a vested interest in Sierra Leone and other models of Christian civilization. Their whole credit and their understanding of the ways of God were wrapped up in that demonstration. And the detractors of Africa and the apologists for slavery had a vested interest in demonstrating that they were inadequate and corrupt.
The all missionary experience seemed to support the connection of Christianity with civilization. Sierra Leone was a Christian state and it had a higher proportion of pupils at school and a higher rate of literacy than most European countries. It was already producing numbers of missionaries. It had its grammar schools for girls as well as boys. When English audiences heard Samuel Ajai Crowther dressed in clerical black, discoursing eloquently in faultless English, it seemed to encapsulate the justification for
missions. Southern Africa offered nothing so dramatic, but the settlements, said Gennadendal and Bettelsdorp, were models of industrious, orderly, literate Christian communities developing agriculture, handicrafts and light industry among the koi as once as broken and oppressed a people as the world had seen. If not many black Africans there had turned to the gospel, those who had included such people as the Reverend Teo Soga with seven years of arts and divinity in Scotland behind him. He was just
about the best educated person in the colony, defending the rights of his people in the papers, translating the pilgrims' progress into cause and urging his people to acquire education, acquire money, buy land so that they wouldn't become clients of the whites. And Boston's great point is that most African Christians live in America, but they're part of Africa and demonstrating all the virtues of an African Christian civilization. Thank you. Thank you. The developmental aspect of civilization meant
that there could be white communities which, whatever their technological capacity and racial composition, were fundamentally uncivilized. The outstanding examples were the plantation owners of the Caribbean who behaved like savages while the African slaves in their neighborhood displayed the characteristics of an orderly civilized community. There was every hope that Sierra Leone would be a beacon of civilization radiating through tropical Africa. Civilization theory allowed for the development of an indigenous church. The theory that the work of mission
should issue in self-governing, self-supporting, self-propagating churches arose in the middle period of the century when churches were still relatively small and relatively few. The theory was entirely compatible with civilization. Experience suggested that civilization was the regular fruit of the gospel, so faithful preaching of the gospel would produce competent indigenous leadership, ministerial and lay. The theory encouraged economic development. David Livingston's whole career reflects unwavering belief in the doctrine that the economic and spiritual approaches
must be combined, the Bible and the plow together will regenerate Africa. It was missionaries who introduced cotton growing to Nigeria. The prime reason was to give the state of Abbeokuta, where missions had begun work, an economic incentive to keep out of slave trading. But it was also recognized that a self-supporting church had to have an economic basis. The logic of such steps was followed through. Cotton growing called for cotton processing, so a major donor to
the missionary society was induced to supply processing machinery to Abbeokuta. Complex machinery needed proper operation and maintenance, so young men were sent from Sierra Leone to train as technicians in Britain and then sent to missionary posts in Nigeria. This was in the 1860s. The foundations of Ghana's cocoa industry were laid by another mission, and for that the mission looked to Jamaica, a bastion of civilized Africa, for the people to develop it. Civilization theory encouraged educational development.
We've seen the grammar schools in Sierra Leone and they're an interesting story in themselves. There were problems. A new generation of young African ministers arose in the 1860s who'd been to grammar school and college and often studied in England. Some of them were better educated than the senior missionaries under whom they were working. Pious artisans who'd received their missionary call and worked their way up as catechists. Missionaries grumbled about this useless education that they had needed.
Civilization theory was also non-colonial. The even in colonies it assumed that Africans might attain high responsibility. In 1841, for instance, the governor of Sierra Leone, the chief justice, and the next high official were all African or Afro-West Indian. Civilization was a commodity which, like Christianity itself, could be expected to spread by its own attractions across a continent ruled by Africans and always expected to be ruled by Africans. All these factors have to be taken
into account when evaluating the effect of a history of civilization based on mission transmitted Western culture. The theory had a huge disability. It could affirm the worth of African race and nationality and the superiority of African achievements, but it had no way of giving value to African culture itself. It measured attainment by a single universal imperial standard. It could help broken up rooted people forge a new coherent identity, but it had limited appeal to people with
their dignity intact, reasonably satisfied with the life they had in integrated functional societies. There was therefore significant African resistance to civilization theory, but Western factors were more potent in its decay than the African. There were changes in the religious field. Evangelicalism changed course in the later 19th century. Mid-century Evangelicalism had an essentially worldly spirituality. The long association with humanitarian causes locked it into economic and social concerns. The new Evangelical spirituality was radical in its stress
on personal devotion, in its demanding yet quietest view of consecration, and it gradually seeped into the mission community and altered its perspectives. In the wider church, ideas of a different stamp emerging from evolutionary doctrine affected opinions. Evolutionary ideas allowed for a racial relativism that traditional Evangelicalism had instinctively rejected as subversive of the universality of the Gospel. It was, as my colleague Andrew Ross has shown, liberal theology that opened the door for the Christian versions of scientific
racism. Changes in religion led to changes in missions. New missionaries adopted the new spirituality, doctrine, racial assumptions and attitudes. And there were more missionaries than ever before. And they were better educated than the earlier ones. And the now widespread use of quinine meant fewer died so soon. With their radical ideas of spirituality, their education and social status, a touch of the new ideas about race, the deficiencies of the indigenous church in every respect stared at them.
The need for a self-governing church and an African missionary force was less obvious than when missionaries were fewer. One by one, African church leaders were replaced by Western missionaries who stayed there till the 1950s. Works of civilization of the cotton-growing category were not of the Gospel. Schools were still necessary. Grammar schools survived with the rest. But economic development no longer lay in the domain. Other factors quite different arose. As missionaries engaged more and more
with integrated functional traditional society, and especially as they went deeper into African languages, respect for traditional African culture increased. There were reasons for disillusionment with the idea that commerce would be the trusty ally of Christianity and civilization. In many places, commerce had simply led to pyramids of gin bottles and an alcoholic haze. As the century wore on, Europeans too began to have doubts about the civilization that no one had doubted in the 1840s. I wish I
could give to you a beautiful passage from the Scottish missionary Duff McDonald on this point. Finally, there were changes in Western society that were going to the roots of Western culture, undermining the whole consensus on which civilization theory was based. A consensus to which African Christians could incorporate into their thinking. The increasing application of evolutionary ideas to social theory, the increasing appeal of the new field of comparative religion with the new possibility of maintaining a distance
from religious commitment attractive for those weary of life in the ecclesiastical crossfire, were part of a general drift in the intellectual world and the opinion-forming sectors of society away from traditional Christian thinking. It made it possible, for instance, to argue that Islam was a more suitable religion than Christianity for Africans, whose social evolution was of a comparatively low order, without having to declare that Islam was the best religion for oneself, let alone that it was
true. Missions found the old markers removed, and themselves increasingly having to defend Christianity in general and missions in particular against charges of deleterious social effects. The Christian recession in the West becomes clearly recognizable just at the high peak of the missionary movement. The other influential change is the arrival of the imperial order. Only in the 1880s does it become clear that Africa would be the domain of European powers. There was no place for African leadership in
colonial society, and the pan-African dream of the educated Christians of West Africa was over. Sierra Leone was just one more colony. And the new administrators, while attending Sunday service in the cathedral of their colonial capital, might hold quite advanced views of the relative suitability of Christianity and Islam for the African native. Africa has taken over this lecture. It was not meant to do so. I had intended, and indeed had substantially written, a parallel section on
China and India. After trying to combine them, it became clear that the African and Asian sections could not be conflated and remain intelligible. That I was, as in the old song, a case of how happy could I be with either, t'wer t'other dear charmer away. I've had accordingly to dispense with my two-step Asian section. Let me just say one thing about it. Since the appearance of Edward Said's Orientalism in the 1970s, 19th century Western
interpretive writing on Asia has been under suspicious scrutiny. Following the lead given by Foucault, Said and many others have taught us to see the development of Western knowledge of the non-Western world in terms of intellectual control, inseparable from the geopolitical awareness of colonialism. It's good medicine and has done much good, but as with other Foucault- based regimes, overdosing can upset the digestion. Missionaries contributed substantially to the body of literature identified by Said as Orientalism.
Yet what's striking about Missionary Orientalism is its tentative provisional nature. It arises less from a desire to dominate than from a far from cocksure quest for understanding. And it bears the marks of frustration and failure. I'll argue tomorrow that the Missionary movement itself originated in frustrated colonialism in the failure of all the well-tried methods of extending Christendom. Many landmarks of Missionary endeavor, including many more monuments of Missionary scholarship, arose out of frustrated evangelism. And I
would have wished to demonstrate that with three figures from China Mission history, which cover the whole period of the Protestant endeavor from 1807 to 1952, first someone frustrated by the hopeless incapacity of the Western Academy at the beginning of the 19th century to provide even the most elementary tools for understanding China or its civilization. And it's Robert Morrison, an uncharismatic dower man of little formal education, who provides the instruments for Western access to Chinese language, literature,
and life. Not for academic purposes, but to translate the scriptures to introduce Christ. James Legg, a former Chinese scholar of the 19th century, spends his life translating not into Chinese, but out of Chinese, because this is the only way that Christians, and especially Missionaries, will understand the soul of China. Karl Ludwig Reichelt feels despair at his failure to understand what's going on in Buddhist worship, and at the fact that Buddhist monks are ready to say that
Christian teachings are true, but find Christians universally deficient in gentleness, the first fruit of the religious life. Eventually he realized how many of his frustrations arose not from his warm Lutheran pietism, which he never lost, but from the fact that Western theology had a huge hole in it. As a garment, it simply would not cover the East. And then we look at a similar series in India, which does indeed begin with a sort of domination model,
soon passes that by into an approach to understand the religious heritage of India, and finishes with the person who still seems to me the most interesting theologian writing in English in the 20th century, A.G. Hogg, professor of philosophy in Madras Christian College, who finds the conclusion is the doctrinal formulations which the missionary brings with him are largely useless, not because they're false, but because they're irrelevant. The missionary exemplars I was mentioning represent ways in which
missions transformed the Western academy, changed Western culture itself. New disciplines were invented or made possible in the languages of Africa and Asia, comparative linguistics, anthropology, comparative religion, tropical medicine. The secular academy is now forgotten where these came from. They were, or were made possible by the desire that Christ should be made known in other cultures. And in the process of making Christ known in other cultures, the unexpected deficiencies of received theology, the one area in which
missions had caused to be confident, were revealed. I don't have time to consider my last point, how Africa, above all, showed the deficiencies of the received theology, showed how small Western theology is, because it's been pared down to fit a small scale universe. Most Africans live in a much bigger universe than most Europeans do. And the theology of Africa just isn't big enough to fit it. Theology is a byproduct of cultural conversion. With the demographic transformation
of the church, great issues for theology will be arising from the interaction of biblical thinking with the ancient cultures of Africa and Asia. We're at a threshold of an age which could prove as creative and enriching theologically as any since the similar interaction with Greek culture from the second century. Conversion is the steady, relentless turning of all the mental and moral processes toward Christ. In other words, it's turning what is already there, turning to Christ the
elements of the pre-quote conversion setting. I hope those of you from MEHR will forgive one more repetition of one of my favorite passages. Origen puts it beautifully, with a little touch of his own special sort of exegesis. How is it, he says, that the Israelites were able to make the cherubim and the other gold ornaments of the tabernacle when they were in the wilderness? The answer is, they had previously spoiled the Egyptians. The cherubim and
the vessels were made from Egyptian gold, and the tabernacle curtains were of Egyptian cloth.