Christian Missions and the Enlightenment

Brian Stanley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780700715596
• eBook ISBN: 9781136865619
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Addresses the nature of the influence of the European Enlightenment on the beliefs and practice of the Protestant missionaries who went to Asia and Africa from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, particularly British missions and the formative role of the Scottish Enlightenment on their thinking.

CHAPTER ONE

Christian Missions and the Enlightenment: A Reevaluation

BRIAN STANLEY

The theme of this volume is embedded in the language that is conventionally applied to the past two hundred years of Christian missionary activity. We speak of “the modern missionary movement,” or, more significantly still, of “the modern missionary enterprise.” At least tacitly, our terminology suggests that it is possible to identify a distinctively modern Christian project for “enlightening” the globe by means of a highly organized investment, and transfer from West to East and North to South, of funds, personnel, literature, and institutions. The relation of Christian missions to modernity is now a topic of intense debate both in the scholarly community and, in less obvious ways, in the churches. The recent explosion of writing by historians and anthropologists on the missionary impact has concentrated on the role of missions in propagating the values, disciplines, and economic relationships characteristic of modern Western societies. The missionary movement has been portrayed as one of the earliest forces of “globalization,” creating networks and new media of communication no less powerful than those established by the global market and information technology revolution of the late twentieth century. The American anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff (undoubtedly the most influential exponents of this recent scholarship) have graphically described nineteenth-century overseas missions as “nodes in a global order, their stations pegging out a virtual Empire of God no less ether-real than is cyberspace today.”¹ From a different intellectual perspective, Christian theologians and mission theorists have been no less concerned with questions of mission and modernity For them, the close approximation between the missionary movement and patterns of modernity raises a question mark over the appropriate forms, or even the fundamental legitimacy, of Christian mission in a postmodern world. The contemporary crisis of confidence in the validity of Christian mission has its roots, according to the late South African missiologist David J. Bosch, in the collapse of the Enlightenment inheritance and the emergence of a postmodern worldview.²

These debates over mission and modernity focus more sharply on Protestant than on Catholic Christianity Two reasons may be adduced for this. First, the rapid expansion of Christian missionary activity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was, in its original impetus, largely a Protestant evangelical phenomenon. Roman Catholic missions, which had dominated the field from the sixteenth century, were in the doldrums following the suppression of the Jesuit order in 1773 and the vicissitudes of the papacy during the Napoleonic era; only gradually, in the course of the nineteenth century, did the Catholic missionary enterprise revive. Second, the Roman Catholic Church, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, set its face firmly against the values of modernity throughout the nineteenth century, whereas the Protestant churches, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, appropriated the intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment. Protestant missions, therefore, were in the nineteenth century much more active apostles of modernity than Catholic ones, and hence in the late twentieth century they have felt more acutely the challenge of disintegrating confidence in modernity. This volume concerns itself only with Protestant missions.

The eighteenth-century Protestant missionary awakening was intimately associated with the birth of evangelicalism. Evangelical Christianity, for long regarded by historians as an enthusiastic, heartwarming, and experiential reaction against the aridity and skepticism of the Age of Reason, has in recent years been increasingly interpreted as a movement whose origins and contours owe an immense debt to the philosophical and cultural patterns of the Enlightenment. “The evangelical version of Protestantism,” writes David Bebbington in what has become the standard work on evangelicalism in Britain, “was created by the Enlightenment.”³ W. R. Ward has shown how the “heart religion” of Count Zinzendorf, father figure to much of the eighteenth-century awakening, was indebted in various paradoxical ways to Enlightenment thought.⁴ Similar work by Mark Noll and others on American evangelicalism has demonstrated its essential congruity with Enlightenment ideals and patterns of thought.⁵ While recent studies of popular religion in eighteenth-century Britain have emphasized the extent to which ordinary people responded to the evangelical message in ways that did not conform to Enlightenment norms of order, reason, and individual choice,⁶ evangelicalism as a theological system can no longer be dismissed as intrinsically anti-intellectual or irrational. On the contrary, the particular blend that evangelicalism achieved between the doctrines of grace and the canons of empiricism and common-sense philosophy has come to be widely recognized as the key that unlocks not simply the distinctive tenets of evangelical theology itself but also such wider mysteries as early nineteenth-century political economy or the character of the dominant intellectual tradition of the United States in the antebellum era.⁷

It is no surprise that this trend has been carried over into studies of the missionary movement, that most vigorous and arguably unruly of the offspring of the eighteenth-century Protestant awakenings. David J. Bosch devoted one of the most substantial chapters of his seminal textbook on historical missiology, Transforming Mission, to the subject of “Mission in the Wake of the Enlightenment.” Bosch was not afraid to make sweeping claims about the nature of the relationship, asserting that “the entire modern missionary enterprise is, to a very real extent, a child of the Enlightenment” and, similarly, that “The entire western missionary movement of the past three centuries emerged from the matrix of the Enlightenment.”⁸ According to Bosch, emphases derived from the Enlightenment provided the defining or paradigmatic features of the Protestant missionary movement from its origins in the eighteenth century until the collapse of Enlightenment rationality in the postmodernist crisis of the late twentieth century. The Methodist scholar Kenneth Cracknell has applied the same theme to the fiercely contested question of Christian attitudes to world religions. The radical denial by nineteenth-century missionaries of salvific significance to other religious traditions was due, writes Cracknell, “not only to their mediaeval and reformation inheritances but to the new rationalism which was becoming prevalent in both Europe and America.”⁹ Although Cracknell admits that the legacy of both medieval and Reformation thought played its part, the dismissal of nonChristian religions as idolatry or superstition is for him explicable primarily in terms of the preeminent value placed on rationality by evangelical Protestantism in the Enlightenment era.¹⁰

These recent approaches to the intellectual framework of evangelical Protestantism and its missionary expressions have proved extremely fertile, not least in stimulating new perspectives on the mental culture of missionaries and their domestic supporters. This book seeks to reinforce, and in no way to undermine, the central contention of such writing that the modern Protestant missionary movement cannot be understood unless full attention is paid to the intellectual milieu within which evangelicalism was shaped. Moreover, it broadly supports the now established consensus that this milieu was essentially one formed by the intellectual contours of the Enlightenment. In chapter two, Andrew Walls demonstrates convincingly that the origins of the modern Protestant missionary movement lie not, as conventional wisdom would have it, in late eighteenth-century English evangelicalism but in a continental and primarily Germanic Pietist tradition stretching back a century earlier to the era in which the Protestant Aufklärung first made its protest against the rigidities of confessional orthodoxy.¹¹ Those isolated dissenting voices that have recently claimed that, on the contrary, early nineteenth-century evangelicalism should be viewed as a counter-Enlightenment Romantic ideology have not, in the view of the contributors to this volume, advanced a persuasive case.¹² Yet the fact that such voices are beginning to make themselves heard suggests that it is time to pose some questions to what has become the historiographical orthodoxy on this subject. Historiographical orthodoxies develop their vigor on the basis of innovative research and writing, in their maturity spawn further creative interpretations, but then in their scholarly middle age run the risk of becoming overweight and ponderous, bloated with a surfeit of conference papers and publications dedicated to ever more meticulous analysis of their central preoccupations. The study of evangelicalism and the Enlightenment has, thankfully, not reached that stage. This volume is to be read as a sympathetic contribution from those who are concerned to ensure that this profitable line of inquiry is kept lean and hungry by the discipline of challenge and questioning.

In certain circles in both historical and theological scholarship, “the Enlightenment” is in danger of becoming a term of abuse, a trend that needs no definition but only repeated censure. As Richard Bernstein has complained, postmodernist writing essentializes and universalizes the Enlightenment that it attacks, and thus ironically falls prey to the very intellectual fashions that it professes to deplore as characteristic of Enlightenment discourse.¹³ In the churches, this habit of mind may be due in some measure to the popularization and oversimplification of the extremely important writings of the late Lesslie Newbigin, who cogently identified the Enlightenment separation of fact and value as lying at the root of the malaise of Christianity in contemporary Western society.¹⁴ We are all post-Enlightenment people now. For Christians, the consequent temptation is to identify theologies of which they disapprove with the Enlightenment, and then to employ the identification as a facile device for cutting loose from moorings that may turn out to be more deeply embedded in the banks of Christian tradition than such an equation would suggest.

Among historians of modern Protestant mission, a similar temptation rears its head with peculiar force, in part because many of them remain woefully ignorant of the earlier Roman Catholic missionary tradition, and in part because the scope for finding a genuinely pre-Enlightenment model of Protestant mission as a control against which to measure the Enlightenment missionary paradigm is necessarily rather limited. Bosch’s chapter on “The Missionary Paradigm of the Protestant Reformation” is predictably much shorter than his following chapter on “Mission in the Wake of the Enlightenment,” and it begs some large historical questions by placing the origins of Pietism in the former rather than the latter.¹⁵ It is no surprise that Bosch had to concede that “the Enlightenment macro-paradigm remains elusive and manifests itself, at best, in a variety of sub-paradigms, some of which appear to be in tension, even conflict, with others.”¹⁶ Whether this assortment of frequently contradictory subparadigms remains in any meaningful sense a “paradigm” is clearly open to debate. Bosch’s admission that mission in the Enlightenment era “was much more diverse and multifaceted than ever before” may point to the conclusion that the Enlightenment ought rather to be understood as an emancipation of the individual reason from paradigmatic ways of thinking.¹⁷ Certainly one does not have to dip very far into the scholarly literature on the impact of the Enlightenment on Western views of the non-Western world to realize that, in the hands of different writers, “the Enlightenment” is wheeled out as an interpretative device to explain mutually contradictory trends. The Enlightenment has been blamed by many for making Westerners more arrogant and racist; yet it has been credited by others with making them more tolerant and open to learn. Some authors have identified the Enlightenment confidence in progress as one source of the missionary imperative, while others have seen Enlightenment values as fundamentally subversive of the Christian missionary project.

The great majority of Anglophone nineteenth-century evangelicals, had they been able to eavesdrop on this scholarly conversation, would, of course, have been totally mystified. According to Owen Chadwick and the Oxford English Dictionary; the term “Enlightenment” as an English rendering of the German term Aufklärung first appears in 1865, followed in 1889 by the first use by Edward Caird of the phrase “the Age of Enlightenment.”¹⁸ Even if late Victorian evangelicals had heard the term, they would have taken it to refer to the religious skepticism of the French encyclopedists and reacted with indignant incomprehension to the implication that their brand of godliness had anything in common with the thought of Voltaire or Rousseau. In the period of the Evangelical Revival, as Chadwick points out, British Protestant writers placed themselves in a national tradition that conceived of the relationship between religion and progress in terms that were diametrically opposed to the views of that relationship held by those French writers whom a later generation came to regard as the fathers of the Enlightenment.¹⁹ The fact that past generations of Christians would not have understood the charge that is now being leveled against them may, of course, be taken as clinching evidence of how all-pervasive their intellectual conditioning actually was, but it ought at least to alert us to the difficulties involved in taking a term introduced into the English language in the late nineteenth century with one quite precise meaning in mind, applying it to a far broader...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Christian Missions and the Enlightenment: A Reevaluation
• 2. The Eighteenth-Century Protestant Missionary Awakening in Its European Context
• 3. The British Raj and the Awakening of the Evangelical Conscience: The Ambiguities of Religious Establishment and Toleration, 1698-1833
• 4. Patterns of Conversion in Early Evangelical History and Overseas Mission Experience
• 5. Ethnology and Theology: Nineteenth-Century Mission Dilemmas in the South Pacific
• 6. Civilization or Christianity? The Scottish Debate on Mission Methods, 1750-1835
• 7. "Civilizing the African": The Scottish Mission to the Xhosa, 1821-64
• 8. Christianity and Civilization in English Evangelical Mission Thought, 1792-1857
• 9. Upholding Orthodoxy in Missionary Encounters: A Theological Perspective
• Bibliography of Printed Sources
• Index