Missiology and the Social Sciences

Contributions, Cautions and Conclusions

Edward Rommen, Gary Corwin, Edward Rommen, Gary Corwin

• Publisher: William Carey Library
• Year: 1996
• ISBN:
  9780878089925
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christlicher Dienst

Experts in various branches of social science address the reader, explaining the scope and limitations of their discipline in the science of missiology. Find the balance between those who discount the value of the sciences for missions and those who use them without discernment.

PART I
MISSIOLOGY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

1

INTRODUCTION: AN APPEAL FOR BALANCE

Michael Pocock¹

The principle reason for the existence of any professional society is to serve as a forum for the exchange of ideas among its members. This is true of the Evangelical Missiological Society (EMS), even though its constituency is intentionally broader than professional missiologists. The EMS seeks to unite in dialogue all who wish to think seriously about evangelical missiological concerns, whether they are pastors, field missionaries, mission executives, or researchers and professors of missions.² We all need to interact because we are inextricably bound together in the great enterprise of world evangelization and the missionary endeavor designed to achieve it. This paper is a call to enter our dialogue about missiology and the social sciences with objectivity, balance, and grace.

We shall look at the relationship between the social sciences and missiology. Presenters with a particular expertise in the various branches of the social sciences will address the society, explaining the scope and limitations of their discipline in informing the science of missiology. This is a good time to explore the theme because, as we shall see, among the thinkers and doers of ministry and missions, there are both those who practically discount the value of the sciences for missions and also those who make uncritical use of them.

Spiritual warfare advocates (a term I will use to include advocates of power encounter, territorial spirits, and spiritual mapping) believe they are rejecting what has become a predominantly scientific approach to missions in favor of supernatural dynamics. Concerned about the resistance that characterizes many of the last unreached peoples, they have concluded that demonic opposition has caused this phenomenon and that identification and binding of regional controlling spirits is the answer. This concept can be seen in the AD 2000 Prayer Track led by Peter and Doris Wagner and is fundamental to the “Light the Window” campaign in which one hundred “Gateway Cities” in the 10-40 window have been targeted for prayer visitation.³

Among missiologists inside and outside the EMS, the above mentioned developments find both enthusiastic support and emerging concern.⁴ The EMS does not wish to polarize protagonists on either side, but calls all participants to constructive dialogue. As evangelicals, we share certain convictions. We all

• want to work for the completion of the Great Commission
• realize that unreached peoples generally constitute resistant groups
• believe Satan actively suppresses belief among non- Christians
• are eager for any breakthrough possible
• understand our real weapons are primarily spiritual
• believe the written Word of God should set the parameters for our belief and actions relative to the exercise of spiritual dynamics in ministry.

Nevertheless, there are differences. Most advocates of spiritual warfare believe all the above; but, in regard to the last, some emphasize the present reality of a spoken, non-normative revelation from God (a “word of wisdom”). This, they believe, is what enables them to understand issues about which there is a lack of written data in the Bible. They may also give considerable credence to data gained from dialogue with demonized people, believing that, through a command to tell the truth in Jesus’ name, demons must divulge the truth⁵

This epistemology tends to minimize the kind of systematic and rigorous observation of data that science normally implies. Some critics of the spiritual warfare approach have felt their concerns were trivialized by references to having been overwhelmed with Western rationalism.⁶ On the other hand, the critics themselves have charged that a new animistic and syncretistic paradigm is emerging among spiritual warfare advocates.⁷

Debates like this need to find a safe haven free from animosity, offensiveness, and rancor. Hopefully, the EMS is such a place. To that end, we have encouraged and published a dialogue, Spiritual Power and Missions: Raising the Issues, and made it available to our membership at this conference.⁸ This dialogue brings together the provocative paper by Robert J. Priest, Thomas Campbell, and Bradford A. Mullen, “Missiological Syncretism: The New Animistic Paradigm,” presented at last year’s EMS National Meeting. It includes responses by Charles Kraft and Patrick Johnstone and a summary by editor Ed Rommen.

Since all peoples and religions exhibit syncretism,⁹ we should constantly be open to the possibility that we ourselves may be unduly, even unconsciously, influenced by non-Christian world views. As missiologists we will be open and non-defensive when held to account for the bases upon which we build or criticize mission strategy for the evangelical missions movement.

Returning to the more specific question of the relation of the social sciences to missiology, we should note James Scherer in his preface to the magnificent work by the late David Bosch, Transforming Mission:

Missiologists know they need the other disciplines. And those in the other disciplines need missiology, perhaps more than they sometimes realize. Neither the insider’s nor the outsider’s view is complete in itself .... The complimentary relation between missiology and the other learned disciplines is a key of this series, and interaction will be its hallmark.¹⁰

Missiology is not simply informed by other scientific disciplines. It is by definition inclusive of the sciences. It is a discipline itself wherein theology; missionary experience; and the methods and insights of anthropology, sociology, psychology, communications, linguistics, demography, geography, and statistics are brought together for understanding and advancing the missionary enterprise.¹¹ Because of this, we are not debating whether the sciences relate, but how and to what degree.

Within the limits imposed by human nature, the sciences can illuminate missionary theology and practice and vice versa. Wycliffe Bible Translators is a good example of this symbiotic relationship. Their work has been greatly assisted by the sciences of cultural anthropology and linguistics. Having thus benefitted, Wycliffe (SIL) workers, after years of field experience and reflection, have become experts in both areas and have assumed professorships in those fields in several major universities.

The sciences, however, do not make things happen. They describe what happens, postulate and theorize on observed phenomena, and predict logical outcomes. Technology builds on science and obviously facilitates it, yet nothing save the Spirit of God can bring forth spiritual life where there has been none.

The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life (In 6:33 NIV).

This fundamental truth of Scripture must surely keep us careful when applying insights from the sciences to the work of missions!

In spite of the fact that missiology presupposes the value of the sciences, there are many evangelicals who are wary of attempts to integrate the two. There are, of course, dangers. We tend to either reject the sciences or adopt and apply them with insufficient discrimination. Os Guiness notes:

Since truth is truth, it would be odd for any Christian to deny the illuminating helpfulness of the social sciences. At the same time, however, it is amazing to witness the lemming-like rush of church leaders who forget theology in the charge after the latest insights of sociology regardless of where the ideas come from or where they lead to. Carelessly handled, innovation and adaptation become a form of corruption, capitulation, and idolatry.¹²

A kindred spirit, Mark Noll, in his lament on the disappearance of the American evangelical mind, complains that in the spiritual fervor (not necessarily because of it) of the late nineteenth century Holiness movement and the overlapping appearance of the Pentecostal, Fundamentalist, and Dispensational movements, an appreciation for nature and the value of science and the ability or willingness to take time to reflect deeply was lost.¹³ Noll’s criticism could be taken as supercilious and unwarranted. Indeed, Alister McGrath, in a dialogue between himself, Mark Noll, Richard Mouw, and Darrell Bock sponsored by Christianity Today in the summer of 1995, commented, “Mark does a good job of depicting how fundamentalists realized they had a problem on their hands and what they did in response, but, looking back, what else could they have done?”¹⁴ Nevertheless, Noll’s point of view needs careful consideration.

Noll’s book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind includes a chapter, “Thinking About Science,” which is particularly apropos to our conference theme. There was a time, he maintains, when evangelicals valued the sciences and used them extensively to both understand Scripture better and appreciate the world around them. But as the nineteenth century drew to a close, a deep skepticism began to grow about the ability or interest of science to help the Christian cause. Evangelicals began to retreat from the universities or were marginalized by newly-monied titans of industry who wanted something else from the schools than the character formation the schools had hitherto held to be important.

For their part, evangelicals “dropped the Ninteenth Century conviction that the best theology should understand and incorporate the best science.”¹⁵ An antagonism to science began to flourish among evangelicals, and it was only insofar as science could be used to refute the opposition that evangelicals used it. What so deeply concerns Noll is that evangelical suspicion of the sciences led them to devalue even that which was the object of scientific study and its rigorous discipline of thought, namely, the world around them.

To Noll, both the world of nature and the human mind are supremely valuable. They are both creations of God. The former is worthy of study, and the latter is capable of that study. Worship of the Lord must include the sometimes forgotten element, the whole-hearted use of the mind (Mt 22:37).¹⁶

Distrust of intellectual exercises and the sciences led evangelicals in two directions. On the one hand they moved to an intuitive way of knowing rather than a way of careful deduction. Their convictions either came directly from Scripture or from the Holy Spirit or an intuitive sense of what they should believe or do. Later, when they felt more comfortable with the sciences, having reaped many happy benefits from its application in daily life, they began to use science, but in an unreflective, selective, and hurried way. As Noll says, “ . . . if evangelicals are ever to cultivate the mind, habits of intuitionism-or the rapid m...