The Kindness of God

Graham Hooper

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781844746491
• eBook ISBN:
  9781844749126
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

PART 1:
MISSION IN A TROUBLED WORLD

1
From Edinburgh, 1910, to Jos, 2012

In December 1996 the British missionary theologian Lesslie Newbigin stood up to address a World Council of Churches’ conference at Salvador de Bahia in Brazil. It was to be his final public message; he was now eighty-seven years of age and had lost his sight. Despite his reputation as one of the most prophetic of contemporary missionary thinkers, the organizers of the conference had assumed that he would be unable to contribute much of significance and so had allotted him only a brief slot between two major sessions. However, Newbigin failed to keep to the script. When he ran over time the chairman handed him a note saying, ‘Your time is up!’. Newbigin’s blindness meant that he was unable to read the message and, to the delight of his audience, he simply carried on speaking! What Lesslie Newbigin said on that occasion has been called his ‘swan song’ on the ecumenical stage and it provides the starting point for the reflections I wish to offer here on the subject of ‘mission in a troubled world’.

Newbigin repeated some of the themes which he had developed during the extraordinarily fruitful final decades of his life when, having returned from cross-cultural missionary service in India, he directed his attention toward the missionary challenge presented by the modern Western world. Describing this as the most urgent and difficult missionary frontier at the present time, he spoke with undiminished passion and clarity:

The most powerful and pervasive of all the cultures of the world at this present time is that one which has been developed in Europe in the past two or three hundred years and which has created a global unity based on the science, the technology, and the ideology of the free market.5

Newbigin went on to claim that the only serious challenge to the scientific, secular culture emanating from the Western world is that offered by Islam, which ‘with a courage that should put us Christians to shame, is openly challenging the claim that the free market and all its ideology is what rules the world’. Looking ahead into the third millennium, Newbigin concluded with these words, which will form the basis of my reflections in this and later chapters:

And it seems to me that in the century that lies ahead of us these are the three major factors which will compete for the allegiance of the human family: the gospel, the free market, and Islam...As to Islam: while the other great world faiths are deeply significant and worthy of respect, none of them makes the same claim for universal allegiance. As to the free market: the crucial question is going to be whether the Christian church can recover its confidence in the gospel in order to be able to challenge the tremendous power of this ideology which now rules over us.6

Lesslie Newbigin

What is striking in this statement is that while the missionary frontier with Islam is recognized as an obvious priority, Newbigin did not regard it as the supreme challenge of our times. That, he believed, was constituted by modern, Western culture which, through the process of globalization, had come to dominate every part of the earth. In Newbigin’s view, the ideology of the free market involves something far more powerful and sinister than a neutral economic theory; it constitutes a worldview which defines people in terms of what they possess and consume. Behind the slogans of ‘civilization’, ‘progress’ and ‘development’, Lesslie Newbigin detected the presence of hideous forms of idolatry which demand exposure, challenge and repudiation by people who confess Jesus Christ as Lord. My purpose in what follows is to use Newbigin’s analysis of the contemporary historical and cultural context to explore what might be involved in the practice of Christian mission in the ‘troubled world’ of the early twenty-first century.

Mission and Western civilization

Just over one hundred years ago, on Monday 14 June 1910 to be precise, the World Missionary Conference opened in the city of Edinburgh, Scotland. As many recent studies have shown, this was a key event in the history of Western missions and it represented the high watermark of the modern missionary movement. The dominant mood among the delegates was one of confidence in the success of the work of world evangelization, expressed in the famous slogan, ‘The evangelization of the world in this generation’. Brian Stanley has described the prevailing atmosphere at the time as one of ‘boundless optimism and unsullied confidence in the ideological and financial power of western Christendom’.7 And yet, it is possible to detect signs that not far beneath the surface of this public confidence, which sometimes bordered on triumphalism, there lurked a growing fear that the future might be far more uncertain than the dominant rhetoric suggested. For example, the report of the commission on ‘Carrying the Gospel to all the Non-Christian World’, while viewing the whole world as ‘open and accessible as never before’, identified a ‘crucial problem’ in the ‘state of the Church in Christian countries’. In other words, the signs of spiritual recession within Europe itself were already clearly evident and led the writers of this report to warn that talk of the evangelization of the distant places on earth would prove futile ‘unless there be a great expansion of vitality in the member churches of Christendom’. In a statement which now seems to contain an element of prophecy, the authors warned that the main concern of the conference should not be whether the peoples of the southern hemisphere would receive Christ, but whether Western Christians, ‘in failing to communicate Him, will themselves lose Him!’ 8

World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910: opening session

The optimism which was so evident in Edinburgh in 1910 did not last long. Within the short space of four years the continent of Europe was to be engulfed in the bloodiest and most terrifying war experienced in human history, as the very nations which had been so proudly declared to be the heart of the ‘Christianized world’ at Edinburgh, fought each other with new and terrifying forms of mechanized weaponry. Every European nation was involved in this conflict except Spain, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries. The battle line between the combatants, the ‘Western front’, became ‘a machine for massacre such as had probably never before been seen in the history of warfare’. Millions – millions! – of men faced each other from within trenches in which ‘they lived like, and with, rats and lice’. The British, the French and the Germans all lost an entire generation in this conflict, with many towns in the north of England devastated by the deaths of so many young men under the age of thirty. Observers who tried to make sense of the chaos reached the conclusion that the world they had known, and of which they had been so proud and confident, was dis­integrating before their eyes. As one histor­ian of the period puts it, ‘the great edifice of nineteenth-century civilization crumpled in the flames of war, as its pillars collapsed’.9

The impact of what came to be called the First World War on Western missions is seen most clearly in the reaction of one of the key players in the Edinburgh Conference, the Scottish layman, J. H. Oldham. Like most of his contem­poraries, he was taken by surprise at the speed with which Europe descended into chaos and confessed that hardly anyone who had been present in the Edinburgh conference had anticipated the coming disaster. He struggled to understand the events through which he was living but recognized that they threatened to utterly destroy all he had been working for in mission over many years. Oldham insisted that the rising tide of nationalism and anti-Germanism in Britain should not be allowed to destroy ‘the international fellowship and love which we began to learn at Edinburgh’. He wrote to Christians across the war-torn continent, including those in Germany, seeking to reaffirm and strengthen a unity in Christ transcending the widening chasm of racial divisions. Even more significant was Oldham’s theological conclusion that modern Europe could not expect ‘to escape the consequences of its sin’. He increasingly understood that the continent which the Edinburgh conference had so confidently declared to be ‘evangelized’ was, in fact, shaped by profound evils, and that ‘the whole commercial system of the West’ had resulted in deep social divisions and was one of the ‘chief influences that...fostered national antagonisms’.10

As the war dragged on and the scale of the casualties increased to horrifying levels, Oldham’s perceptions of mission began to change. When the full extent of Western moral bankruptcy became clear to him, the model of mission that underlay the Edinburgh conference, namely that Europe was a Christianized continent with a superior civilization which it was obligated to extend across the globe, lay exposed as a terrible mistake. Oldham was forced to the conclusion that, although Christendom continued to send thousands of missionaries to the southern continents, it ‘had all but lost its credibility and moral authority for engaging in such an enterprise’.11 By January 1915, Joe Oldham can be found writing the following remarkable passage:

I cannot help thinking that the war is teaching us to draw a clear distinction between the Church of Christ and what we have been accustomed to speak of as Christian civilization. We have assumed that we had a ‘Christian civilization’ which was something we could proudly offer to the non-Christian world. God is showing us how rotten that civilization is. We shall need in future to be more humble, to be more ready to take up the cross, follow Christ and bear his reproach among men.12

J. H. Oldham

The end of Christendom...but not of Christ!

Joe Oldham’s realization that European civilization would need to be clearly distinguished from the message of the gospel of Christ anticipated discussions concerning the gospel and culture which were to become key themes in missionary theology in the second half of the twentieth century. However, the legacy of the identification of Christianity with European, or Western, civilization continues to create serious misunderstanding and confusion and, especially on the volatile fault lines where the gospel encounters Islam, demands rigorous and critical theological reflection. Indeed, I wish to argue that there are reasons to believe that this issue is now more urgent than at any previous time.13

First, within the old Christian heartlands in Europe the gap between faith and culture has grown ever wider in the course of the twentieth century, with the result that any failure to distinguish Christ and the gospel from the profoundly materialistic system which now dominates this continent will have catastrophic results for the Christian mission. Since the First World War revealed the extent to which European Christianity had lost critical contact with its own culture, the crisis of faith in the West has continually deepened. Jane Collier and Rafael Esteban describe how Christendom used the political and economic expansion of Europe as the vehicle for its global mission with little evidence of condemnation of the colonial enterprise. They continue,

But while the churches were using their energy happily growing in the territories opened to them by colonization, they failed to realize that in their own Western back yard an alternative culture was emerging that was to claim the adherence of church members, body and soul, by its promises of instant success and gratification, and the elimination of all evils afflicting humanity. Science and the invisible hand of the market would gradually replace God and God’s providence in the hearts of believers.14

By the end of the twentieth century, and after yet another bloodbath which devastated both East and West and left us with the seemingly insoluble legacy of the Holocaust, the decline of European Christianity reached a level at which whole swathes of institutional and denominational forms of the church were barely surviving. At the same time, mosques were becoming prominent features on the skylines of every major British city, while militant forms of unbelief and atheism gained ground in public discourses, whether through the educational system or the increasingly powerful mass media. However, notwithstanding the significance of these changes, the core ideology which now reigned largely unchallenged over this culture was what Oldham had called ‘the commercial system of the West’, or what we have heard Lesslie Newbigin describe as the ideology of the ‘free market’. When the Communist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe collapsed in 1989, bringing to an end the bi-polar world of East and West which had begun with the Russian revolution in 1917, the capitalist market system was left free to expand without challenge. Voices were now heard in prominent places in Europe and North America declaring the ‘triumph of the West’ and the ‘end of history’. This was the prelude to the emergence of the phenomenon of globalization, the near-universal reach of a market system with its roots deep in the history of the Western world, a system which is accompanied by promises of human development and well-being, but which in reality condemns millions of poor people to life in ever-expanding urban slums.15 For Christians in Europe and North America who continue to benefit economically from this system, the supreme challenge of the present age remains that suggested by Joe Oldham more than a century ago, namely, to disentangle the gospel from the all-pervasive technical and economic culture in which we ‘live and move and have our being’, so that we might rediscover the meaning of the death of Jesus and walk in his way.

Second, even as the influence of Christendom waned in Europe, to the point at which a new generation of young people in post-war Germany could say, ‘We have forgotten that we have forgotten God’, the message of the gospel was being received with joy by millions of people across the southern continents. Andrew Walls has pointed out that the dreams and visions of the Edinburgh Conference concerning the evangel­ization of the ‘non-Christian world’ were fulfilled, although ‘not in the way, nor always by the means, nor even in the places that the delegates expected and planned’. But the twentieth century witnessed a huge reversal of the position in 1910, resulting in a situation in which today ‘the majority of Christians now live in Africa, Asia, Latin America or the Pacific’.16 The biggest surprise of all has been the growth of Christianity across sub-Saharan Africa. Of the 1,215 delegates present at the Edinburgh conference, less than twenty came from the non-Western world and none of these were from Africa.17 Yet in the course of the twentieth century the number of Christians in Africa grew, and went on growing, so that it is now estimated that something over 300 million people on this continent profess to be Christians. Many observers have recog­nized that sub-Saharan Africa has become one of the new Christian heartlands, quietly replacing Europe as the centre of spiritual and theological life and renewal within the worldwide Body of Christ.

While I do not wish to deny or in any way diminish the significance of the shift in the centre of gravity in world Christianity which scholars like Walls have so well described, important questions need to be raised concerning the impact of modern, Western culture, especially in the era of global­ization, on the burgeoning churches of the Global South. Looking back across the twentieth century, and before the term ‘globalization’ had entered our vocabulary, the historian Theodore von Laue described what he called ‘the world revolution of Westernization’. A global rivalry for wealth and power had ‘stimulated an unprecedented rise in material prosperity’ and advanced ‘human mobility’, creating a ‘global metropolis remarkably uniform in appearance and standards, glittering with the splendour of human ingenuity’. Yet von Laue warned that this global city was increasingly populated by people full of ‘deadly fears and explosive anger’ resulting from the ‘depths of despair, frustration, and fury to which the world revolution of Westernization has reduced its victims’. Using biblical imagery, von Laue concluded that the worldwide confluence brought about by the modern market system ‘has produced not a shiny global city but a global tower of Babel in which the superficial and ignorant comparison of everything with everything else is undermining all subtle distinctions between right and wrong, good and evil, worth and worthlessness’. Where, he asked, in this global Babylon do we find ‘the transcendent moral absolutes that can restrain the rising penchant for violence?’18

With that penetrating and crucially important question we reach the end of this introductory survey, because it brings us from Edinburgh, 1910, to Jos, Nigeria, 2012. The ‘deadly fears and explosive anger’ mentioned by von Laue are tragic realities in this African city at the present time and they create precisely the context for mission in a troubled world which is our concern in these studies. In many ways Jos is a microcosm of the ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART 1: MISSION IN A TROUBLED WORLD
• 1 From Edinburgh, 1910, to Jos, 2012
• 2 Critical issues concerning the gospel and culture
• 3 Mission, violence and suffering
• 4 Translating the gospel for the globalized world of the twenty-first century
• PART 2: RELEASING THE MESSAGE OF THE BIBLE FOR A DIVIDED CHURCH AND A TROUBLED WORLD
• 5 The Bible and globalization: critical reflections on biblical hermeneutics
• 6 The letter to the Romans and mission in a troubled, urban world
• Conclusion: witness to – and in – the kindness of God