Chapter XI - The Bible and the Missionary

Summary

For nearly two thousand years the missionary work of the Church has been essentially Bible-centred, and that in three senses: the Bible has been the source of inspiration and of spiritual nourishment for the missionary himself; it has also been the basis of the worship of the Church into which he sought to bring pagan or non-Christian tribes or individuals; and (to a larger extent than is commonly recognized) it has been a means of evangelism in itself.

From the end of the period of oral transmission the Church was dependent for authentic knowledge of Christ on the apostolic witness enshrined in the Epistles and Gospels. The final definition of the canon, followed by the provision of an authoritative version of the Latin Scriptures by St Jerome, was, therefore, an important step both for the inner life of the Christian community and for its expansion into the pagan world. The facts to which successive generations of Christian missionaries have borne witness are not merely matters of subjective experience: they are rooted in history, and in a history which is recorded uniquely in the documents which comprise the New Testament, read in the context of the Old Testament. Moreover, it has been the consistent witness of the Church in every age that these records contain not only an account of the coming of Jesus Christ and of his work for man's salvation, but also an authentic Word of God to the human soul. The missionary, therefore, has been bound to the Bible by a threefold cord: his own spiritual life and his authority as a messenger of the Gospel depended on his own knowledge of the Scriptures; the message he sought to proclaim and the Church into which he brought his converts was centred on the Bible; and the written Scriptures were a means by which the Gospel could lay hold of the minds and hearts of men and women, sometimes more effectively than by any word of his own.