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Paul Gordon Hiebert, Distinguished Professor of Mission and Anthropology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, arguably the world's leading missiological anthropologist, died on March 11 of cancer. He was 74.
Paul combined attributes not easily combined: anthropologically—and theologically—informed scholarship and a passion for God's global missionary purposes. The story of how Paul fruitfully merged these commitments is worth telling.
Born in India (1932) to second-generation Mennonite Brethren (MB) missionaries, Paul was deeply influenced towards missionary service by his evangelistic but erudite father, Johann Hiebert, whose single-minded missionary commitment led him in 1947 to reject the tempting offer of a faculty position in Indian History at the University of Southern California.
Paul often told the story of how, at Taber College (Hillsboro, Kansas), where he studied physics and history, he approached a young lady: "Miss Flaming." "Yes?" I'm Paul Hiebert. I'm going to be a missionary. Would you like to have dinner with me?" So began a romance that would last 57 years, until Fran's own death from cancer in 1999.
A missionary needed theological education, which Paul acquired at the Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary (Fresno, Calif.). Inspired in college by missionary anthropologist Jacob Loewen, whose lectures were "exciting," "iconoclastic," and "made so much sense," Paul felt missionaries needed anthropology. And in a family that took education seriously—four of his seven sisters would earn Ph.D.'s—only the Ph.D. would do. So Paul completed Ph.D. coursework in anthropology at the University of Minnesota while also pastoring a church. Then in 1960 he went to India for fieldwork and a six-year term of service with the mb Mission Board. Here Paul unlearned the simplistic missiology he was taught in seminary, and began rethinking missiology for a postcolonial age.
Inherited models were strong. Old-timers challenged him, "Do you really have the call of God? Are you going to be here for forty years and not quit? Are you going to stay and die here and be buried?" Paul's answer? "Yes!"
But God had other plans. While on furlough Paul completed his dissertation in Anthropology (Minnesota, 1967), which established him as a rising scholar. When his Mission was unable, temporarily it was thought, to arrange his return to India, he took a one-year appointment in anthropology at Kansas State University, close to family and supporters. Since this was a stopgap measure, he rejected the professionally more attractive offer of a faculty position at a leading graduate program of anthropology. But in May, Fran was deathly ill, and Mayo Clinic doctors insisted she not return to India. Kansas State wanted to keep Paul, but he struggled to reconcile this with his missionary call. So he agreed to teach at the mb seminary in Fresno (1969). His assigned teaching there, as it turned out, involved very little missions and no anthropology, and Paul returned to Kansas State (1970) to teach anthropology to undergraduates, write anthropology books and articles, and direct the South Asian Study Center. Recruited to the University of Washington (Seattle, 1972-1977) with its large graduate anthropology program, Paul received tenure, prestigious research grants (ACLS, SSRC) and honors (Fulbright), and continued publishing.
Despite all this encouragement, and though he loved the intellectual pleasures of anthropology, he was unable to connect his professional achievements with his sense of calling. Each weekend he preached about missions in churches, served on the MB Mission Board, helped edit mission publications, and ministered on research trips to India—struggling to link the free moments of his life to what really mattered, missions. For years he kept telling people that he and Fran would someday return to India as missionaries, only gradually acknowledging even to himself that this would not happen. "Psychologically," he said in an interview, "I was never able to understand my calling in terms of being an anthropology professor." Although he would later question the model of the "missionary call" he had inherited, he nonetheless came to believe that his ongoing sense of unease was used by God to move him in a different direction—one that would position him at the center of American missiological training.
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