What is the mission of the Church? William Carey faced that question in his day. An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen was his written answer. It prefaced another volume, a Living Book opened in India and read of all men. This fall, more than a century and a half later, the question will be put again in India as the Third General Assembly of the World Council of Churches meets at Delhi. Resurgent Hinduism will ask it. Is the mission of the Church alien proselytism or even subversive colonialism? The agenda of the Assembly will also ask it.
The integration of the International Missionary Council into the structure of the WCC is the major business of the joint meeting. The IMC is an organization of missionary societies as well as of church mission boards; the WCC is a “fellowship of churches.” If the church council is to absorb the mission council, then the mission of the Church should be plainly set forth.
There will be no lack of material on the question. Many a delegate to Delhi has a stack of books and pamphlets documenting the 50 years of ecumenical discussion that began in the Edinburgh missionary conference of 1910. Somewhere in that stack, you might think, there must be an explanation of what the Church has been doing through the centuries. Are we only now asking what the mission of the Church is?
Christians may confess Christ without being prepared to give a full theology of evangelism. Yet what men think determines what they do. The Church had to be taught by Carey and others that the work of missions is not limited to the time of the apostles; until that misunderstanding was removed, the “Great Century of Missions” could not begin. Sometimes real progress can only be made backwards, by returning to examine what we have taken for granted.
Students of ecumenical discussions find just this merit in the missions conversations of half a century. “It is like a spiral staircase with landings,” says one. “Edinburgh, 1910, was at the top, asking about the ‘How’ of missions and assuming that the Great Commission was the only basis needed. The landings at Jerusalem, 1928; Madras, 1938; and Willingen, 1952, asked the Wherefore, Whence, and Why of missions. Delhi, 1961, brings us out on the main floor, asking, ‘What is the mission?’ ” There is no telling, the same writer cautions us, how many basement levels there may be in the theological foundations of mission.
If this were the whole picture our only lament might be that we have been so slow of heart to believe. Unfortunately, there is another aspect to ecumenical discussion of the mission of the Church. Its shadow was seen at the Jerusalem meeting of the IMC, and Delhi will not escape it. The inclusivist structure of the ecumenical gatherings has often given the floor to advocates of a humanized, denatured Christianity which does not believe that men are doomed without Christ and saved only through the preaching of the Cross. The problem of the theology of missions became the problem of justifying the Christian mission in fellowship with some men who did not really believe in it.
William Ernest Hocking, the prominent philosopher who was the author of Re-Thinking Missions, issued in 1932, and who was present at the Jerusalem meeting, urged that Christian missions make common cause with world religions in the fight against secularism. His blueprint called for inter-faith discussion to supersede preaching. Christianity could be diffused within other religions with “no loss of the historic thread of devotion which unites each to its own origins and inspirations.” Such diffusion could be best accomplished by replacing evangelists with social service “ambassadors” who would make common quest with other religions in following the gleam. These ambassadors would be directed by one central agency.
The Jerusalem meeting tried to hedge on the issue of a liberalized Christianity. When it declared “Christ is the message” it was not advancing in the theology of missions but retreating. Archbishop William Temple remarked about his draft of the Jerusalem statement: “I seem to have written what opens the doors for the progressives while perfectly satisfying the conservatives.”
At the Madras meeting of the IMC in 1938 Hendrik Kraemer presented his book, The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World (1938). Kraemer called the Hocking approach “the suicide of missions,” and declared that the uniqueness of the revelation in Jesus Christ created a basic discontinuity between Christian revelation and world religions. Ever since Madras, liberals have been reluctant to carry Hocking’s colors. One missions executive says, “It is hard to realize how far the optimistic liberalism of an earlier day, and in which I once believed, had taken us from the realities of the Christian Gospel. We made our exodus from that Egypt only under storm.”
No doubt the storm of war did more to slow the liberal challenge to missions than did Kraemer’s defense, but the Dutch scholar had put his finger on the key issue: the nature of Christian revelation. This is still the crux for a theology of missions.
Yet Kraemer’s own position, which he called “biblical realism,” is not the response of orthodoxy to Hocking’s denials. It seeks a dialectical path, neither orthodox nor liberal. Kraemer rejects the claim of historic Christianity that the Bible contains revealed truths. The ideas of Scripture respond to revelation, but they do not contain revelation. “The decisions and pronouncements in the New Testament are, by virtue of the nature of the Christian faith and ethic, never laws for any other generation of Christians” (op. cit., p. 98). Revelation is said to be dialectical because it is by nature inaccessible and remains so even when revealed. God is at once completely revealed in Christ and completely hidden in the man Jesus.
Kraemer’s breach between the Gospel and non-Christian religions is also a cleavage between faith and knowledge. Hinduism is not continuous with the Gospel, but neither is Christianity. Both stand under the judgment of God’s ineffable revelation. Christianity has the advantage of prolonged subjection to the judgment of the Gospel, but it does not possess it. The church exists in bearing witness to the Gospel. For this reason Kraemer states that the church is mission. Since all men are justified in Christ, the church is not to be distinguished as a company of the saved, but only in its function of bearing witness to God’s judgment and grace upon all men. The church stands in solidarity with the world, witnessing to the world. Kraemer holds that Barth’s negative view of religions is not enough. Religions are both rebellion against God and search for God (Religion and the Christian Faith, pp. 193, 251, 309).
This reappraisal of the theology of missions is scarcely less radical than Hocking’s. Since Madras it has been a major viewpoint in mission conferences, particularly among Continental scholars. In the Willingen meeting of 1952, where the missionary obligation of the Church was the theme, J. C. Hoekendijk of the Netherlands vigorously maintained that the Church was defined by its mission. No conclusion was reached (the prepared report was received, but not adopted). It is the Willingen studies which have led to preparation for a fuller consideration of the theology of missions at Delhi.
In direct preparation for the Third Assembly, a joint study commission of the WCC and the IMC has arranged for two books on the subject. One is a study of the biblical doctrine of the Church’s mission to all the nations, written by Dr. Johannes Blauw, of the Netherlands Missionary Council. The other is by D. T. Niles, secretary of the East Asia Christian Conference, and will stress the meaning of the mission of the Church in practice.
To evangelicals the distant Delhi assembly seems to be gathering an enormous organizational potential. Church officials are demanding executive powers for the new Commission of World Mission and Evangelism to be set up.
THEOLOGICAL FOCUS ON DELHI
In the symposium on The Theology of the Christian Mission (Gerald H. Anderson, ed.), Wilhelm Andersen notes two theological problems unresolved by recent discussions of Christian missionary philosophy: 1. the relation between history and salvation history, and 2. the question of eschatology. Debate on eschatology overshadowed the 1954 Evanston Assembly, whereas discussion of salvation history looms in the foreground of the 1961 New Delhi Assembly. Viewed another way, the current problem is the relation of God’s act in creation to God’s act in redemption. A theology of mission grounded in the Trinity and made concrete in Christ faces two dangers: either identifying these divine acts, or disrelating them.
In a hurried overview of ecumenical dialogues and study documents, Andersen shows diverse theological traditions at work on this problem. Anglican theologians see the Incarnation as the unifying principle which declares God’s solidarity (and the Church’s) with the world and with secular history. Yet it is possible for incarnational theology to so one-sidedly expound the missio Dei as the meaning and motive of history that it deflates the Cross (as did the social gospel) into a mere human declaration of solidarity with the world. Others strive to correct this tendency (so Max A. C. Warren) by finding in the Cross the indissoluble connection between salvation history and secular history. Incarnational theology is further criticized by J. C. Hoekendijk in the interest of the eschatological dimension of the kingdom of God, which dimension is said to rule out a distinction between God’s act in creation and in redemption; since the Resurrection unveils the Creator reclaiming the world for himself, Hoekendijk tells us, no distinction between history and salvation history is permissible.
But Andersen himself cautions theologians against any such eschatological leveling of Church and world. “The eschatological dimension has two components: The already and the not yet. The Kingdom of God has come in Christ, but we nevertheless are waiting for its appearance in glory.” Andersen hopes for a consolidation of theological emphases. “A healthy theology of mission will not commit the error of isolating the view of the Cross from the Incarnation on one side, nor from the Resurrection on the other side.” And “a theology of mission that is determined from the standpoint of the whole Christ does justice to the eschatological dimension.”
I Believe …
With neither moral direction nor moral stability, modern post-Christian man is in sad straits indeed.
Some confused leaders even commend thievery of land and piracy at sea as proper manifestations of man’s aspirations for freedom. Any purchase of freedom by injustice, however, is a bad bargain that carries hidden future charges.
Contemporary world peace propagandists encourage us to sacrifice something precious—even facets of our freedom, if necessary—for the sake of human survival. But peace bought in the bondage-mart, and flying the flag of justice only at half-mast, is surely a prelude to totalitarianism or to tyranny. Such peace is no triumph for human dignity and destiny. The surest way for the West to seal up the era between the Protestant Reformation and the Russian Revolution is to purchase peace from dictators who whittle away our liberties.
The theological challenge of Delhi may prove equally great. What will the Assembly say about that ecumenical mission of Christ’s Church for which it claims to speak? When it tells of Christ the Light of the world, will it use the figure to justify the old liberal “ashram” approach in which the light of the Gospel blends with the festival of lights in Hinduism? Or will it utter a dialectical “yes” and “no” upon both the Vedas and the Old Testament?
What will be said, after decades of discussion, concerning the biblical basis of missions? Misgiving has already been registered in the WCC about Dr. Blauw’s assignment. “We should ask what the Word of God says to us about mission instead of seeking for a biblical basis of mission” (Victor E. W. Hayward, “The Word of God and the Church’s Missionary Obedience,” in Bulletin, WCC Division of Studies, Vol. VI, No. 2, p. 12). That distinction would mystify many a village pastor in the younger churches. Delhi should be pressed to speak plainly about the Bible. Is a theology of missions to be based on the conviction that Jesus never spoke the Great Commission—“a word spoken in the spirit of the Lord rather than … a word of the Lord himself” (Ernst Lohmeyer, “All Power Is Given Unto Me” in Schmauch, In Memoriam Ernst Lohmeyer, Stuttgart, 1951, p. 126)—indeed, that he never spoke that Commission because the Resurrection is a myth?
In a biblical theology of missions, Jesus’ own teaching must have a central place. The new debates about the Jesus of history cannot be quietly shelved. An appeal to the Christ of faith will not suffice. Was Jesus mistaken about his Kingdom? Would he have been astonished by the Great Commission? The promises of the Old Testament are also decisive for the mission of the Church. Peter preached from Joel on Pentecost; at the Jerusalem council attended by the apostles, James appealed to the book of Amos to settle the scope of the Church’s mission. No theology of missions can acquiesce in the negative conclusions of the critics concerning the Scriptures. German scholars may declare that a saying of Jesus is not genuine, then urge its “eminently positive meaning.” Such talk may have its appeal—to Hindus. But it cannot sustain the Christian Church.
The theology of missions must be an evangelical theology, without equivocation. Discussion at Delhi will touch the roots of the Gospel. What is the message? The existential “Kerygma” fancied by the critics? Or the full proclamation, instruction, and comfort of the whole Bible? Are we to tell men that they are already justified in God’s Act, or that except they repent they shall surely perish? What is the Church? That functional community in solidarity with the world which is happily aware that all men are under God’s final yes? Or the chosen people of God, united to Christ, born of the Spirit?
It is vain to drive the question of the Church’s mission to its foundations unless there is the discernment and courage to distinguish the Rock of Foundation from the quicksands of unbelief.
PUBLISH GLAD TIDINGS IN A SPACE SHIP? WHY NOT?
The space age left the comic strips and became an imponderable reality when Major Gagarin rode the nose cone of a space ship around the earth and returned to the soil of the U.S.S.R. Scientific and technical aspects of the achievement are remarkable. Political implications are less than sanguine.
For Christians the orbiting astronaut has a message of both faith and works. He reminds us that he is not the first man into space. On Ascension Day (May 11) we observe the ascending of Jesus Christ to the right hand of the Father. As Lord of time and space, Christ rose unconfined by the limitations that beset Christian and Marxist alike.
But this new “breakthrough” also reminds us that whoever or whatever may be out there in space needs to know that “all things were made through him” (John 1:2). A vast new evangelistic possibility awaits the Church in the service of the Saviour. Not Gagarins, but Gideons are being called for. Who answers?
