Book Briefs: May 13, 1988

Erasing The Missionary Caricature

Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions, by William R. Hutchison (University of Chicago, 227 pp.; $24.95, cloth). Reviewed by Tim Stafford.

Beginning in the 1970s, American historians began to pay attention to a long-neglected subject: missions. Sometimes, as Harvard’s William Hutchison reports, they got a surprise when they did. The caricatures of missionaries presented by modern novels and movies had obscured the thoughtful, able, energetic individuals who led the missions movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Why did historians ignore such an important movement for so long? Embarrassment, answers Hutchison. “The problem has been that the missionaries’ stated purposes, while expressive of service and sacrifice, bespoke a supercilious and often demeaning attitude toward religions that the recipient peoples considered integral to their own cultures. The missionaries … have seemed too admirable to be treated as villains, yet too obtrusive and self-righteous to be embraced as heroes.” Their unremovable offense, kind-hearted and intelligent as they might seem, was that they intended to change others’ religion.

Admiring Portrait

Hutchison’s picture of missionaries is largely an admiring one. He acknowledges that, novels like Michener’s Hawaii to the contrary, nineteenth-century missionaries were often the best and rightest of the American educated elite. The “sensitivity that some mission theorists brought to the dilemmas of cultural interaction was more than just enlightened for its time,” he writes. “Often it was enlightened for any time, our own included.”

In fact, many modern issues were anticipated 100 years ago—debates about imposing American culture, fascination with statistics, and tensions between Europeans and Americans. And missionaries generally were critical of the exploitative political and business interests that went with them throughout the world.

For example, Rufus Anderson, senior secretary of the American Board of Commissionaries for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), who Hutchison says dominated American missions in the 1800s, worked tirelessly to persuade missionaries and their boards to proclaim “Christ, not culture.” As soon as local converts could be ordained, he wanted missionaries to pack up and leave.

Such ideas went against the grain of an America that thought of its “Christian culture” as a gift to the world. After Anderson had forced the closing of several mission schools because their purpose seemed to be “civilizing” rather than “evangelizing,” even the New York Times complained. After Anderson was gone, missions returned enthusiastically to the “civilizing” emphasis of schools, hospitals, and agriculture.

Into The Twentieth Century

Hutchison’s history brings us nearly to the present with an account of twentieth-century controversies between evangelical and ecumenical Christians. He recognizes that evangelicals have become the dominant force in missions, largely because leaders in the mainline churches reinterpreted “missions” to mean something earlier Christians would never recognize. They had “effected a decisive break with the past. They had announced, far more distinctly than most of their evangelical counterparts, an unwillingness any longer to work with the rubrics and terminology of the classical era.”

The author makes clear, however, that evangelical missions are not a holdover from the nineteenth century. He credits evangelicals with a genuine concern for building and respecting an indigenous church, and with accepting social action as a partner to evangelism. In the seventies, “an attitude of penitence … modified the triumphalism of a decade earlier.”

Still, Hutchison appears to find the original missionary “offense” troubling: sincere Christian beliefs become a “crusade” to change others’ religion. He seems to vacillate between a wish that this crusade could be humbler and more sensitive to others (as most evangelical missions leaders would say), and a feeling that determination to spread our faith is as inherently offensive to Christ as it is to pluralistic America.

He also fails to consider two important developments: the emergence of a vital worldwide church, and the development of mission agencies within non-Western countries such as South Korea, which heard the gospel from missionaries in the past century. The very existence of these churches is a comment on the effectiveness of the missions movement Hutchison describes. And American mission leaders have received both developments enthusiastically, suggesting they are less interested in American dominance than one might expect from Hutchison’s account.

Evangelicals will not share all of Hutchison’s concerns, but they will feel that they are fairly treated. And most will find, in reading this short, lively book, that they have learned a great deal about their heritage.

What Kind Of God Do You Get From Science?

Cosmic Joy and Local Pain: Musings of a Mystic Scientist, by Harold J. Morowitz (Scribner’s, 303 pp.; $18.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Bill Durbin, Jr., a free-lance writer specializing in issues of science and religion.

Harold Morowitz is a biophysicist with a poet’s heart. Striving to make science accessible and visionary, he compares favorably with other successful popularizers. His latest book is a genuine attempt to “bridge the gulf between religion and science,” to offer a description of God, purpose, and hope by pondering a wide range of scientific knowledge.

To accomplish his task, Morowitz placed himself on an academic’s dream sabbatical: in splendid isolation on a sailboat off the Hawaiian islands. Surrounded by dramatic natural beauty and a personal library—along with just enough mundane goings-on to give his meditations a folksy tone (like loose wires in the engine room and “harbor rats” on the docks)—the scientist shares with us his “spiritual odyssey,” a conceptual search to find “meaning within science.”

The result is a well-arranged tautology. At the outset, Morowitz “goes on record as a pantheist.” He has rejected the personal God of his Jewish heritage in favor of the god of nature described by seventeenth-century philosopher Benedict Spinoza—a boyhood hero for Morowitz. In the end he finds, predictably, god in nature. He confirms thereby an initial hope: “An intuitive feel that these studies will end up with a friendly view of the universe.”

Interconnected Cosmos

In between, the author provides a good deal of basic science, in terms generally accessible to the lay reader: from principles of thermodynamics to the intricacies of molecular biology; from galaxy formation to weather forecasting; tectonic shifts and quantum leaps; photosynthesis and electromagnetism. Morowitz paints a picture of an “exquisitely” unified cosmos of interlocking “geospheres”—lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and noosphere—which he lyrically compares to the ancient categories of earth, air, water, and fire. His analysis indeed reveals an aweinspiring “interconnectedness” of all things, a “fitness” of the environment, an obvious design in nature.

The physicist finds religion. In the process, he provides the answer to a prevailing question: What kind of god do you get from science? Clearly it is a god of theory, as detached from real life as a musing philosopher on idyllic sabbatical. Ironically, Morowitz recognizes the impersonal character of his personal vision. He attempts to include the “harbor community” in his story. But the nameless sailors, fishermen, tourists, and acquaintances come in and out of his treatise like shadows—as a means to make the technical a bit more palatable, but never a part of his religion of “cosmic joy.”

Inconsistencies

This disjointedness of theory and life characterizes a spate of popular books that now find purpose in evolution, intelligence in the atom, and mysticism in nature. Inconsistencies emerge in these arguments and are evident in Cosmic Joy and Local Pain. While Morowitz warns of the “tentativeness” of all scientific knowledge, he nevertheless concludes that practicing science is equivalent to becoming “partners with god in making the future.” While he warns of the moral dangers of reductionism (of seeing life and man as “nothing but” physical process), he builds an entire natural theology on just such a frame of reference. And a self-effacing style cannot hide an elitism in which the scientist knows best the mind of God.

The book ends with Morowitz literally and figuratively getting stung by a bee, tripping, and skinning his knee. The “local pain” leads him to consider the ethical side of faith. His conclusions here come across as an afterthought and smack of a familiar secular utopianism (“having the power within us to move the local world toward more cosmic joy and less local pain”). The resolution is not likely to satisfy the average reader, to say nothing of the harbor rat. Morowitz leaves his island retreat—to “return from cosmic concerns to the responsibilities ahead”—stung by the philosopher’s desire to reduce religion to science and tripping against an old stone that assumes knowledge is virtue.

Culture Shock

Conflict and Context: Hermeneutics in the Americas, edited by Mark Lau Branson and C. René Padilla (Eerdmans, $13.95, 323 pp.; paper). Reviewed by Larry Sibley, who teaches practical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

How does our cultural setting affect our interpretation of the Bible? What impact does this have on our views of Christ, salvation, and the church? How can we transfer our views helpfully to another culture? Is there danger in allowing for cultural influence on Bible study? What checks and cautions would be helpful?

In November 1983, a multicultural group of 35 pastors, missionaries, and scholars met in Tlayacapan, Mexico, using a mix of theological papers and Bible studies to discuss the interpretation of the Bible in context. The results of their meeting are found in Conflict and Context.

The conference’s deliberate political-economic focus makes this collection constructively disturbing, as it opens our assumptions to needed, challenging examination.

“Toward a Contextual Christology from Latin America,” a presentation by René Padilla, general secretary of the Latin American Theological Fraternity, is a case in point. There is no doubt his views are congruent with classical orthodoxy, yet out of a Latin American context he insists, “Because the Word became flesh, [Christians] cannot but affirm history as the context in which God is fulfilling his redemptive will. The historicity of Jesus leaves no room for a dualism in which the soul is separated from the body, or for a message exclusively concerned with salvation beyond death, or for a church that isolates itself from society to become a ghetto.… One can hardly exaggerate the urgency that questions related to religious oppression and legalism, in justice and poverty, wealth and power have for the mission of the church.…” In short, Christology carries social ethics with it.

Balanced Discussion

The responses to Padilla provide balance. Douglas Webster of Ontario Theological Seminary and Emilio Nuñez of Central American Theological Seminary in Guatemala City are concerned that an emphasis on the historical Jesus who sides with the poor may slide into an easy identification with socialistic liberation theology. Notre Dame’s John Howard Yoder points as a caution against violent change to the example of Jesus as one who loved his enemies.

Padilla’s reply and the subsequent discussion further refine our grasp of the truth.

“The Truly Spiritual in Paul: Biblical Background Paper on 1 Corinthians 2:6–16,” by Aida and William Spencer, asks, “What is a ‘spiritual person’?” The answer (“one who lives out Christ crucified … in imitation …”) is developed both from the passage in question and from an examination of chapters 1–4 of Paul’s letter.

In this passage, spiritual does not mean “immaterial” or “charismatic,” say the Spencers, both of Gordon-Con-well Theological Seminary. Rather, to be spiritual means to serve—Paul’s and Apollos’s word—to preach Christ crucified, or to live “sentenced to death,” weak, in hunger and thirst. Attention is drawn to parallels between Paul’s list of his experiences in 1 Corinthians 4:9–13 and concepts in Jesus’ sermons on the mount and plain. “Paul’s life of suffering in imitation of Christ was his ‘power’,” according to the Spencers.

We must be willing to be thought foolish for the sake of the gospel and for the well-being of others, they say, without denigrating either the material world or spiritual gifts. Paul asserted his right to food and drink and spoke in tongues. But, “living a ‘crucified’ life does entail turning away from a life of excessive wealth and being ready to be despised or thought irrelevant if necessary to promote God’s reign.” Oppressed Christians in whatever culture may be more spiritual than those considered successful because they more nearly imitate Paul and Timothy when they undergo suffering for Jesus.

Readers will find that some participants make concessions to current views of authorship and literary-theological tradition (e.g., three Isaiahs, parts of Exodus formulated during the days of Elijah). However, most of these bones can be trimmed and thrown aside, leaving the theological and social meat developed by the papers. As might be expected, there is divergence of social, political, and economic agendas in the volume. No one could be expected to approve all that is here. But the sorting process is stimulating and keeps one from swallowing anything whole. And all in all Conflict and Context is a useful tool for studying the Bible in context.

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