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Four Axes of Mission: Conversion and the Purposes of Mission in Protestant History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 March 2022
Abstract
This article offers a framework for historical analysis of the goals of Protestant missionary projects. ‘Conversion’ in Protestantism is not clearly defined, is liable to be falsified and may (in some missionary views) require preparatory work of various kinds before it can be attempted. For these reasons, Protestant missionaries have adopted a variety of intermediate and proxy goals for their work, goals which it is argued can be organised onto four axes: orthodoxy, zeal, civilisation and morality. Together these form a matrix which missionaries, their would-be converts and their sponsors have tried to negotiate. In different historical contexts, missionaries have chosen different combinations of priorities, and have adapted these in the face of experience. The article suggests how various historical missionary projects can be analysed using this matrix and concludes by suggesting some problems and issues in the history of Protestant missions which such analysis can illuminate.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Historical Society
References
1 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2 vols., i, Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa, ii, The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago, 1991, 1997); Lewis Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven, 1993), esp. 3; David W. Kling, A History of Christian Conversion (Oxford, 2020).
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4 Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, i, 7, 10–11; and see next note.
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32 Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, ii, 67.
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37 This was typical of eighteenth-century projects in both the Dutch and British empires: see for example the Congregationalist missionary to the Native Americans, John Sergeant, who in 1743 concluded, after five years in the field, that there was no alternative but to ‘take such a Method in the Education of our Indian Children, as shall in the most effectual Manner change their whole Habit of thinking and acting; and raise them, as far as possible, into the Condition of a civil industrious and polish'd People … to root out their vicious Habits, and to change their whole Way of Living’: most of the adults were beyond hope. Samuel Hopkins, Historical memoirs, relating to the Housatunnuk Indians (ESTC W14473. Boston, MA, 1753), 97–8. For a similar, more systematic approach in the Dutch empire, see Jurrien van Goor, Jan Kompenie as Schoolmaster: Dutch Education in Ceylon 1690–1795 (Groningen, 1978).
38 This was typical of late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evangelical Anglicans, and of the rather different evangelicals of twentieth-century North America: Grayson Carter, Anglican Evangelicals [2001] (Eugene, 2015), ch. 1; Richard Turnbull, Shaftesbury: The Great Reformer (Oxford, 2010), 28–34, 51–7; Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of American Evangelicalism (Cambridge, MA, 2014), 2–5, 326–31; Kling, A History of Christian Conversion, 401–5.
39 This term apparently originated in the early seventeenth-century Dutch East Indies: Johannes Keuning, ‘Ambonese, Portuguese and Dutchmen: The History of Ambon to the End of the Seventeenth Century’, in Dutch Authors on Asian History, ed. M. A. P. Meilink-Roelofsz, M. E. van Opstall and G. J. Schutte (Dordrecht, 1988), 362–97, at 383.
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41 As in, archetypally, the debacle of Karl Gützlaff's ‘Chinese Union’ and the resulting long hangover of scepticism: Jessie G. Lutz and R. Ray Lutz, ‘Karl Gützlaff's Approach to Indigenisation: The Chinese Union’, in Christianity in China from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, ed. Daniel H. Bays (Stanford, 1996), 269–91.
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48 Cf. Hebrews 11:13–15; Avihu Zakai, Exile and Kingdom: History and Apocalypse in the Puritan Migration to America (Cambridge, 1992); Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, i, 172–5
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50 See e.g. Oxford, Bodleian Library, USPG Papers 2: Committee Minutes, vii.134–7.
51 Glasson, Mastering Christianity.
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53 E.g. Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester, 1990); Brian Stanley (ed.), Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire (Grand Rapids, 2003); Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester, 2004); Etherington, Missions and Empire; Hilary M. Carey, God's Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c.1801–1908 (Cambridge, 2011).
54 See e.g. Sujit Sivasundram, Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, 1795–1850 (New York, 2011), 127–31; Etherington, ‘Introduction’, 7.
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57 On perhaps the most spectacular and certainly the bloodiest example of this process of indigenisation, see Kilcourse, Carl S., ‘Instructing the Heavenly King: Joseph Edkins's Mission to Correct the Theology of Hong Xiuquan’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 71 (2020), 116–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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59 Ibid., 217–19; Hilary Ingram, ‘A Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing: British Overseas Medical Missions and the Politics of Professionalisation, c.1880–1910’, in Complaints, Controversies and Grievances in Medicine: Historical and Social Science Perspectives, ed. Jonathan Reinarz and Rebecca Wynter (New York, 2015), 75–90.