SCM Studyguide: Christian Mission. Stephen Spencer

SCM Studyguide: Christian Mission

book to the Pope, its theory was so unsettling that it was placed on the index of forbidden works. But a rubicon had been crossed: in the West a shift began to take place in the way we view ourselves and our world, a paradigm shift from an ancient to a modern outlook.

Kuhn mentions another example, the shift from a Newtonian picture of the world (which talks about particles and forces and positions and times) to the world of quantum theory (which talks about probabilities, measurements, mixtures of particles and waves) and relativity theory (where there is no fixed space or time). Such a shift of understanding was revolutionary and brought about a whole new way of seeing our place in the universe, one that has often been described as ‘relativism’.

In 1984 David Tracy and Hans Küng adopted the use of the idea of paradigm shifts to explain the evolving nature of the Church’s theology and self-understanding over the centuries (see Paradigm Shifts in Theology, 1984, English trans. T & T Clark, 1989). In Küng’s voluminous book of 1994, Christianity: Its Essence and History (English trans. 1995), he put this theory to work by mapping out Christian history and theology into six basic periods, each with its own paradigm. The movement from one to the next was a revolutionary jump in the whole ‘world-view’ or theological system of the Christian community, a paradigm shift for the Church. (See Walls 1996, ch. 2, for a similar and concise overview of Christian history which gives greater recognition to the role of cultures in changing paradigms.)

At the start of his book Küng provided an illuminating diagrammatic summary of what was to follow, and this is reproduced in an amended form as a reference point for our own survey. The diagram makes a number of key points:

(a) While there was continuity of faith in Jesus as Lord and saviour over the centuries (the dotted circle that appears in each box), the intellectual framework that held this belief in place changed from one era to the next (the square boxes that run down the page).

(b) Each of the paradigms has continued to be expressed in subsequent periods and can be found in different parts of the Christian world today. The faint lines and boxes that run to the bottom of the page represent this. The Hellenistic paradigm, for example, is still dominant within Greek Orthodox traditionalism in many parts of Eastern Europe.

(c) New paradigms have come about as a result of social, political and cultural influences (the italicized words in between the boxes) as well as the influence of certain theologians and church leaders (the people listed down the left hand side of the boxes). This shows the creative interaction of the Christian tradition with different cultures through history: it shows how Christianity has been translated from one cultural setting to another in sometimes surprising and radical ways through different eras.

Mission within the paradigms

In Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in the Theology of Mission (1991), Bosch used Küng’s framework as the basis of his own survey of the history of Christian mission, employing it to make sense of the different ways mission has been understood and practised. Bosch draws on the views of key theologians, official church pronouncements and the ways missionary work was carried out, to present concise and perceptive portraits of mission in different eras. While he does not cover every period with equal thoroughness his book gives what is generally regarded as the most comprehensive overview to be published in the last two decades. (See Transforming Mission, pp. 181–9 for a full explanation of his approach.)

A recent book by Stephen B. Bevans and Roger P. Schroeder, Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission for Today (2004) must also be mentioned. This supplements Bosch’s book with extensive treatment of movements and missionaries not described by Bosch, especially within Roman Catholic mission around the world from the Middle Ages to the modern era. It is a mine of information and insight and complements the Protestant emphasis of Bosch’s book. (See also Yates 1994 for a more detailed presentation of twentieth-century mission theology.)

Building on Bosch’s presentation, though, we can go one stage further and isolate the distinctive type of mission found within each paradigm. The category of ‘type’, as mentioned on p. vii of this book, was first used of religious subjects by Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch. A type is a genuine if stylized representation of an authentic theological tradition (Graham, Walton and Ward 2005, p. 11). At the start of the twentieth century, as we saw, Troeltsch developed what has become a classic typology of religious organizations with his distinction between a ‘church’ type and ‘sect’ type. Other writers, mostly notably H. Richard Niebuhr, have adopted and developed this approach. Niebuhr presented five types of relationship between Christianity and wider culture (Niebuhr 1951). Most recently, Elaine Graham, Heather Walton and Frances Ward have analysed and described different forms of theological reflection by employing their own helpful typology (Graham, Walton and Ward 2005, especially pp. 11–12). This book seeks to do the same for mission. Within each paradigm it identifies the distinctive feature of its mission, a feature that sums up the way in which the outreach of the institutional Church or individual Christians related to the other two key ‘players’ of (first) the social and cultural world in which it lived and (second) the coming kingdom of God. The chapters do this through comparing each paradigm with the others and identifying a phrase, such as ‘establishing Christendom’ or ‘building the kingdom on earth’, which employs key missional concepts from that paradigm in an epigrammatic way. Using the historical overviews of Küng and Bosch, then, the following chapters identify six such types of mission, types which have influenced the practice of mission down the centuries. This will enable us to locate contemporary practices in relation to the received traditions of the paradigms.

It should be added that the choice of examples for each type, examples which are indicative and exemplary of their development, reflects the Western provenance of this book. It is written within a Western setting for a mainly Western audience. If it was being written within the global South the choice of examples would to some extent be different. Also, in the same way that the book is not a survey of mission history neither is it a presentation of all mission theology. Bosch attempted to provide such a survey, especially in his presentation of twentieth-century mission theology in the massive penultimate chapter of Transforming Mission (which he optimistically entitled ‘The emerging ecumenical missionary paradigm’). This Studyguide does not attempt to do the same thing: instead it concentrates on six fundamental types and expressions of mission, believing that these lie behind much of that mission history and theology.

Discussion questions Are there some significant omissions from Küng’s list of paradigms (Figure 1)? What are the weaknesses of this kind of way of gaining an overview of Christian history, and what are its strengths?