Witnessing to Christ in a Pluralistic Age

Lalsangkima Pachuau

• Publisher: Regnum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781870345958
• eBook ISBN: 9781911372370
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

The relationship of Christian faith and mission to other living faiths is a core issue in contemporary mission. In a world where plurality of faiths is increasingly becoming a norm of life, insights on the theology of religious plurality are needed to strengthen our understanding of our own faith of others. Even though religious diversity is not new, we are seeing an upsurge in interest on the theologies of religions among all Christian confessional traditions. One reason is the 'discovery' in the West of other religions living in its own midst and neighbourhood. One may justifiably claim that no other issue in Christian mission is more important and more difficult than the theologies of religions. This will remain a major challenge for mission in a new century.

CASE STUDIES

MISSION AMONG MUSLIMS:
CHRISTIAN MISSION AND ISLAM

John Azumah

Edinburgh 1910: Convictions and Commitments

Certain convictions and motivations were the driving forces of the Edinburgh 1910 Missionary Conference. As part of the ground rules, theological issues and their potential for controversy and division were downplayed. Nevertheless certain key theological convictions remained the driving force of the conference. Firstly, there was no debate in the minds of the participants that ‘Christianity is the final and absolute religion.’ The missionary task was ‘not primarily that of proving, but communicating the Gospel’s truth.’ Secondly, there was the conviction that mission was the business of the (Western) Church and its missionaries. All of the mission agencies that sent out missionaries were located in the West and the rest of the non-Western world was considered “the mission field”. This is understandable as Western people were, at the time, the representative Christians. The ‘missionary conscience was assumed’ and the conference was to be a ‘gathering of missionary specialists’ united in their commitment and passion for the Great Commission in Matthew 28: 19-20. ¹

Thirdly, mission was understood primarily in soteriological terms: as saving the souls of individuals from eternal damnation. Or in cultural terms: as introducing people from the East and the South to the blessings and privileges of the Christian West. And in ecclesiological terms: as the extension and expansion of particular denominations.² The main task the conference committed itself to was ‘to exchange views on the ways and means’ for ‘a triumphant advance of Christianity abroad.’³ The stated aim of Commission 1V was ‘to study the problems involved in the presentation of Christianity to the minds of the non-Christian peoples.’ Lurking behind without mentioning by name was “fulfillment theology” as participants repeatedly quoted Matthew 5:17 (“… I have not come to abolish … but fulfill…”) to make the point that all other religions were in some sense preparations for the Gospel. World evangelization as the main motivation was to be achieved through assessments of the “points of contact”, i.e. “the good” in other religions for the presentation of the gospel, on the one hand, and moral, intellectual, and social differences, on the other hand, between Christianity and other religions.

In their quest for “points of contact”, the reports concentrated on what missionaries on the field perceived as the highest ideals of other religions. This was a major departure from what demonization and summary dismissal of other faiths as purveyors of falsehood. Responding to criticism that the Commission ignored the less estimable aspects of these religions (thus running the risk of romanticizing them), the vice-chairman of Commission IV, Robert Speer, pointed out that ‘we should do as we would be done by.’⁴ The Commission in its quest for points of contacts was faced with serious challenges when it came to primal religions and Islam. African Traditional Religions (ATRs), for instance were considered collectively as a ‘backward and childlike sort of religion’ with little or nothing that could be considered as high ideals, which, in turn, meant that ATRs offered minimal, if any, points of contact with Christianity. In a similar vein, the overwhelming majority of missionaries working in Muslim contexts questioned the praeparatio evangelica in relation to Islam. Temple Gardiner in particular argued that it was ‘so transparently absurd to take this attitude towards a faith which explicitly says it came to supersede the original revelation of Jesus and to destroy the current religion of Jesus.’⁵ In other words, he was pointing out the fact that Islam regards itself as fulfilling and superseding Christianity.

Mission among Muslims: A Brief Historical Recap

Islam and Christianity are the two main missionary religions in the world. From the time of Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, with the exception of the persecuted minority who fled Mecca and sought asylum in Christian Abyssinia in 615, Muslims encountered Christianity from a position of authority and strength. As Muslims conquered vast Christian territories from the seventh century, there came moments of intellectual discussions on matters of religious truth between Muslims and Christians. This pattern can be traced from Muhammad’s discussion with a group of Christians from Najran in 630, to discussions between Christian clergymen and Muslim rulers in the 9^th and 10^th century. Throughout these periods up to the crusades, the material produced for in-house Christian consumption bore the marks of a polemical approach to Islam with the purpose of preventing Christians from converting to Islam whilst the material meant for Muslim readership demonstrated a more conciliatory approach. St John of Damascus (675-753) and The Catholicos Timothy I (728-850), are representative of these two approaches.

As Muslim conquests and rule took a strangle hold over Christian populations, ‘circumstances [became] such that it took considerable tenacity, often a kind of hopeless doggedness, to remain Christian’⁶, let alone to propagate Christianity. After the crusades in the Middle Ages, with the exception of a few individuals, the exchanges between the Muslim orient and Christian occident were in the main based on mutual suspicion, contempt and hostilities until European colonial expansion and missionary enterprise in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁷ Despite what Muslim scholarship will have the world believe, the colonial political interest did not always coincide with those of the missionaries. In sub-Saharan Africa, Islam, with the patronage of the colonial powers, made more advances during colonial rule than it did in more than ten centuries of its previous presence. For instance, the Muslim population in Africa rose from 34.5 million at the beginning of colonial rule in 1900 to 145 million by the early 1960s when Africa was slipping out of European colonialism. ⁸ In most cases colonialism obstructed Christian missions to Muslims. The British declared areas such as Northern parts of Ghana, Nigeria and Sudan as “mission-proof” and banned Christian mission in those areas.

In places like nineteenth and twentieth centuries India, the situation was different. Missionaries had the freedom to do mission among Muslims. Missionaries like Henry Martyn (1781-1812) preached without any hindrance. During the 1910 Edinburgh conference, Commission IV reported that ‘workers among Moslems in India all testify that their (Moslems’) attitude towards Christ and his people is more friendly and favourable than it was a generation ago.’⁹ Nevertheless, on the whole, the missionary enterprise in India amongst Muslims was unsuccessful. This was put down to the approach adopted by the missionaries. True to their pessimism and protestations during the Edinburgh 1910 conference regarding points of contact between Islam and Christianity, the missionaries working amongst Muslims in the Indian sub-continent took a more confrontational and polemical approach to Islam. J. S. Trimingham aptly describes the approach in the following words:

[T]hey would admit nothing good [in Islam] and gave a dogmatic presentation of Christianity. They thought that it was their work to attack and break down the Islamic religious system, and their method was developed accordingly (sic). They sought to prove to the Muslim by argument and controversy that Christianity was better, and to force an intellectual assent. They failed, for they were fighting on the Muslim’s own ground. ¹⁰

As a result, the Indian sub-continent produced some of the most outstanding Christian/Muslim apologetic and polemical literature in the history of the encounters but few converts! Around the mid twentieth century, missionaries were starting to get frustrated by the negligible numbers of converts. An Anglican bishop, Timothy Olufosoye, writing about the situation in The Gambia exclaimed in a report: ‘we’ve toiled all night and caught nothing’, a quotation that was also the favourite passage amongst missionaries like Samuel Zwemer who spent more than 38 years (1890-1929) in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.¹¹ These reports somehow led to what J. T. Addison called ‘the almost uniform reluctance of the Christian Church’ to do mission amongst Muslims.¹²

Shifting Convictions and Commitments

As pointed out above, during the Edinburgh 1910 conference, the main theological prism through which the nature and practice of mission were viewed was the “fulfillment theology”. Today, however, the dominant theological prism is the “pluralist theology” as propounded by people like John Hick, Paul F. Knitter, J. S. Samartha and others.¹³ The pluralist view holds that all (the great) religions are equally valid paths of salvation. The confidence and conviction in Christian truth claims are questioned and mission is no longer taken for granted. The argument is that since all religions are equally valid paths of salvation there should be no need to seek to convert Muslims to Christianity and therefore the Great Commission now needs radical redefinition.¹⁴ It is considered arrogant and imperialistic to seek the conversion of people of other religious traditions.

In the post-colonial era, Christian mission in general and mission to Muslims in particular have therefore come under severe criticisms. Conversion is indeed a controversial issue especially in such places as India and the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, prohibited by law in Muslim countries and punishable by death in mainline Islamic teaching. Some leading Christian scholars and clergy contend that exclusivist claims and the mission they inspire have bred a ‘Christian superiority complex that supported and sanctified the western imperialistic exploitation of what was called the ‘Third World.’¹⁵ Muslim scholars and activists have also been unrelenting and scathing in their attacks against Christian mission. Muhammad Rasjidi characterises Christian mission in the Indonesian context as the ‘exploitation of the weak by the powerful, of the poor by the rich, of the undeveloped by the developed, of the common man by the clever elite’.¹⁶

At a consultation in 1976 between Christian and Muslim scholars in Switzerland on the nature and history of Christian mission and Islamic Da’wah, a resolution was passed, under strong Muslim pressure, calling for the suspension of Christian mission in Islamic societies in order ‘to cleanse the atmosphere of Christian-Muslim relations’.¹⁷ Many argue that mission poisons interfaith relations and is therefore inappropriate in a pluralistic context and that it should be replaced with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Editorial Introduction
• Christian Mission among Other Faiths
• Position Papers from Various Churches and Traditions
• Thematic Papers
• Case Studies
• Bibliography
• Index
• List of Contributors
• Back Cover