Reclaiming Mission as Constructive Theology

Missional Church and World Christianity

Chung

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621891994
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Reclaiming Mission as Constructive Theology offers a compelling case for the need to integrate God's mission and missional church conversation with a public and post-colonial study of World Christianity. Driven by a commitment to publicly engaged theology that takes seriously the reality of Global Christianity, Paul Chung presents a vital new model for understanding the mission of God as a dynamic word-event. This is argued in conversation with contemporary missional theology and analysis of the development of Global Christianity, and as such brings important transcultural issues to bear on contemporary American conversations about the missional church. All of this serves to innovatively stimulate this missional church conversation and more directly address the various questions that arise in pursuing mission in a multiculuralized American society.

PART I

Embodying World Christianity in the Mission of God

Within Catholic perspectives, a theology of grace and nature comes into sharp focus for grounding Christian mission. God’s grace fulfills and completes nature rather than excluding and supplanting it. Bevans and Schroeder outline six constants, doctrinal themes which are important for the church in mission. They are Christology, ecclesiology, eschatology, salvation, anthropology, and culture. In the various missional contexts God’s elements of grace work through the world of creation culminating in Christ and finally in Christ’s eschaton. The importance of methodology in the analysis of these constants in context can be seen in their interaction and articulation—Christology, ecclesiology, eschatology, salvation, anthropology, and culture.1 The church’s missionary practices are shaped and implemented in the various times and places of its history, situated within various cultural, political, social, religious, and institutional contexts.

In the “Age of Discovery” Christian mission demonstrates the painful history of its collaboration with colonialism and ecclesial triumphalism. “Compel them to come in” (Luke 14:23) and just-war theory became the dominant model in the imperial missional theology. This imperial missional position was justified by the axiom: “Outside the church there is no salvation.”

Bevans and Schroeder have written a typology of Catholic missionary models which identified three types. Their third type is mission as commitment to liberation and transformation, which they call type C. In 1968, at the Second General Assembly of the Latin America Bishops’ Conference at Medellín, Colombia, the type C perspectives of Vatican II were further developed, which laid the foundation for liberation theology. Liberation theologians in Latin America sought to understand Jesus Christ contextually as one who sided with the poor and marginalized of his day. For Gutiérrez, the church as the sacrament of liberation is a community in witnessing to God’s liberating work in history. Liberation theologians share both the high regard for the human and the strong sense of the power of sin. Calling humanity to full consciousness of its possibilities (conscientization) is related to denouncing the greed and selfishness enslaving humanity in the structures of institutionalized violence.2 It is important to examine the legacy of Las Casas in this regard.

In their second model (type B), Bevans and Schroeder understand mission as a discovery of the truth. Within the contemporary discussion of religious pluralism, the type B perspective (in contrast to type A which is exclusivism) embraces the inclusivist position and the pluralist position. Central to type B anthropology is confidence and trust in human reason or experience to find the truth. What is truly human is good and it becomes the door to the holy. Mission built on this anthropology sees itself as helping to give birth to what is already there. Grace builds on and perfects nature. Type B theology sees mission as engaged affirmatively in the cultural life. This perspective is related to the “three self formula” (self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating) that Henry Venn (1796–1873) and Rufus Anderson (1796–1880) formulated. This principle undergirds a fourth: self-theologizing. In this regard we will examine Matteo Ricci’s concept of mission as inculturation in China.

In moving to Asia, the Jesuits practiced a different type of mission informed by Italian humanism and Ignatian mystical-activist spirituality. The missionary should enter the world of the religious outsiders with gentleness (il modo soave). This missional attitude furthers an attitude of accommodating the Christian message to the culture of those who receive it. The Catholic paradigm of liberation and inculturation can be best exemplified in the missional works of Las Casas and Matteo Ricci. Evangelization necessitates a profound dialogue with the host culture, language, and scholarship and leads to respect for religious freedom and human dignity. In such dynamic interaction between grace and nature, grace (constant) brings the world (context) to God’s intended fulfillment. Christian mission becomes possible and meaningful to the extent that the grace of God recognizes, embraces, and completes the others in the world of nature. This perspective continues to be influential in studies of World Christianity and in postcolonial theology.

1. Bevans and Schroeder, Constants in Context, 2.

2. Ibid., 66, 70.

1

Bartolomé de Las Casas

Mission as Prophetic Justice

The Journey toward Gold and Mission

Prior to the conquest and colonizing of Latin America, there existed two major civilizations: the Inca in Peru and the Mayan-Aztec in Mexico, as well as other native cultures, for example, the Chibchas in Colombia.3 At the time of the arrival of the European conquistadores and colonialists, these indigenous cultures had their own forms of cultural development. The Hispanic people were the descendents of the Caucasoid tribes who originally inhabited the Iberian Peninsula.

The Iberian “discoverers” of the “New World” forcefully imposed their culture and dominion upon the native peoples. The conquistadores had a twofold objective: the conversion of the indigenous peoples and the acquisition of their wealth. The history of this period is marked by the genocide of native peoples, slavery, and dependence upon the European metropolis. The white people colonized the rest of the world in order to spread civilization, religion, knowledge, and development. The church was an accomplice in this sordid history, the religious rationale of Christian mission for the colonization process in which the Catholic faith was imposed upon the native people as an indistinguishable dimension of Spanish rule.4

Capitalism unfolded in two stages: the first was marked by the conquest and pillage of America (sixteenth century), the second by the rise and affirmation of the bourgeoisies (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). What Western history calls “the great discoveries” drove both of these stages. In 1486 Bartholomeu Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope and in 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered America. In 1498 Vasco da Gama arrived in India after a nine-month voyage around Africa. A great hunt after wealth—trade and pillage—began.

Reflecting on the conquests, Adam Smith wrote, “The pious purpose of converting inhabitants to Christianity sanctified the injustice of the project. But the hope of finding treasures of gold there, was the sole motive which promoted them to undertake it . . . . All the other enterprises of the Spaniards in the new world, subsequent to those of Columbus, seem to have been promoted by the same motive. It was the sacred thirst of gold . . .”5

Columbus stood out as a very staunch Catholic whose voyage mission was to convert the heathen to Catholicism. However, the heathens he did find were killed or enslaved rather than converted. In a passage from Hans Konig’s Columbus: His Enterprise we read: “We are now in February 1495 . . . . Of the five hundred slaves, three hundred arrived alive in Spain, where they were put up for sale in Seville by Don Juan de Fonseca, the archdeacon of the town. ‘As naked as the day they were born,’ the report of this excellent churchman says, ‘but with no more embarrassment than animals . . .’” The slave trade immediately turned out to be “unprofitable, for the slaves mostly died.” Columbus decided to concentrate on gold, although he writes, “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”6

Hernán Cortés began the conquest of Mexico from Cuba in 1519, and he confessed: “We Spanish suffer from a sickness of the heart for which gold is the only cure.”7 In 1519 the pillage of the treasure of the Aztecs in Mexico began; in 1534 the pillage of the Incas in Peru followed. According to Columbus, “one who has gold does as he wills in the world, and it even sends souls to Paradise.”8 In 1524 twelve Franciscan missionaries had arrived and the evangelization of Mexico began; the Indians were subdued by force of arms.

Due to Rome’s weakness, the king of Spain had right to nominate bishops and deal with the Archbishop in order to enact his own plan. The king of Spain chose all the bishops during the colonial period. The expansion of Christendom in Latin America from 1492 to 1808 was one of the successes of the colonial style of mission.9 The Spanish adventures saw the natives of the Antiles as inferior and subhuman. As these ci...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: Embodying World Christianity in the Mission of God
• Part 2: Contributing to the Missio Dei and Missional Church Conversation
• Part 3: Re-envsioning Missional Church and Public Faith
• Epilogue
• Glossary and Explanations of Technical Terms and Concepts
• Bibliography