The Unfolding Drama of the Christian Movement - WCIU Journal

The Unfolding Drama

of the

Christian Movement

byRalph D. Winter

William Carey LibraryPasadena, California

The Unfolding Dramaof the

Christian Movement

byRalph D. Winter

William Carey LibraryPasadena, California

These are transcriptions of lectures given by Ralph D. Winter, Ph.D., at FullerTheological Seminary, School of World Mission, 1979.

The Unfolding Dramao f t h e

Christian Movement

Ralph D. Winter

ContentsChapter 1: The MEANS of World Evangelization

Chapter 2: The Unfinished Task of World Evangelization

Chapter 3: Penetrating the Last Frontiers

Chapter 4: The Importance of a Strategy of Closure

Chapter 5: The First Four Hundred Years

Chapter 6: The Second Four Hundred Years (AD 400-800)

Chapter 7: The Third Four Hundred Years (800—1200 AD)

Chapter 8: The Fourth Four Hundred Years (1200-1600 AD)

Chapter 9: The Breakdown of the Uniformitarian Hypothesis

Chapter 10: The Fifth Expansion

Chapter 11: The Evangelical Awakening

Chapter 12: The Emergence of Protestant Orders, 1795-1865

Chapter 13: The Rise of the American Protestant Mission Movement

Chapter 14: Student Movements in Missions

Chapter 15: The Retreat of the West

Chapter 16: The Legacy of Edinburgh, 1910

Chapter 17: Missions and Church Councils

Chapter 18: The Story of Global Civilization as of 1945

Our first topic to chew into is called, “TheMeans of World Evangelization.” The wordmeans intrudes itself upon the pages of humanhistory at a certain “locus classicus” in the caseof William Carey’s famous little book, the brieftitle of which is “An Enquiry into the Obliga-tions of Christians to Use Means for the Con-version of the Heathens.” The longer title Idon’t recall. The key word in this title is theword means.

Carey’s little 97-page book covers threethings:

1) It talks about previous efforts inhistory.2) It talks about the remaining task. In thesecond part it presents quantitatively aseries of tables and tabular materialswhich incorporate Carey’s own best esti-mates of what was left to be done.Now by estimates, I really mean estimates!Take the island of Borneo—all he knewwas the rough area in square miles. Thisis back in 1790, and he had no idea howmany people lived there, so he estimated.He said, “Well, there are probably somany people per square mile andtherefore the population of Borneo is solarge.” And probably these people aremainly non-Christians. Perhaps there area few papists (as he called the Catholics)and a few Mohammedans” (as he calledthe Muslims).” His guesswork, however,provides the basis of all the tables whichconstitute the second part of that book.3) Thirdly, Carey refers to the wordmeans. In this case he introduces the ideaof a mission society, and finally weunderstand what he means by the“means” of world evangelization!Now, lest you think that all this is some

little obscure reference, off to one side in thebackwater of history, let me say that in myopinion, beyond the Bible itself, the impact ofCarey’s small book on history is greater thanany other document in regard to the fulfillmentof the Great Commission. William Carey isoften thought of as the first Protestant mis-

sionary. He was not the first Protestant mis-sionary; he was merely the first Protestant mis-sionary who wrote a book on the theory of missions,and who specifically proposed that missionsocieties were a legitimate means for the ful-fillment of the Great Commission.

Today most of us take mission societies forgranted. We are so completely unaware of theissue of their existence—that is, whether or notthey should exist—that in our field workoverseas and around the world, almostwithout exception it has never even occurredto us that we have needed to start mission societieswithin the national churches. The very idea justdoesn’t even come up. I’ll bet that for half ofyou what I’m saying is unintelligible; youprobably did not even catch what I saidbecause you have never even thought thatthere should be a mission society composed ofthe national church people themselves.

But lately such mission societies are moreand more talked about, and they are some-times referred to as “Third World Missions.”Not missions to the Third World, but missionsfrom the Third World. Not missions from theThird World to the U.S., although that is cer-tainly legitimate, but simply mission structuresthat are composed of, and directed by, Africansor Koreans or Christians from the Third World.

Unfortunately, this hiatus in missionhistory is so serious that there are almost noeffective Third World mission societies as yet(in 1979). At this point there are at least 200 inexistence. If you go around and count every-thing that moves, every shadow, everyglimmer, you can get even more on the list. Butmany of these societies are perhaps inner citymissions in the city of Seoul, Korea, or somekind of boat mission down in Korea’s InchonHarbor. Very rarely do they work outside thecultural traditions of their own people. Theyare often not “cross-cultural.” Not what we call“foreign” mission societies.

I am not going to stand up here and denythe word missions to such structures. This word

Winter Chapter 1

The MEANS of World Evangelization

1 – 1© 1996 R. Winter. No copy may be made without the author’s permission.

1 – 2 The MEANS of World Evangelization

is free for people to use any way they wish. Ihave no lock and key on the word missions. ButI would suggest that for the most part theword is used more specifically in the foreignmission tradition and usually refers to goingwhere there is not yet a church, not merelygoing out from where there is already a church.

Let me try to draw a picture of what Imean. As you all know by now, in McGavran’sterms, the phrase the mosaic of human societyconsists of different human subcultures not dif-ferent countries. In India, instead of beingstrewn out separately, they pile up like a stackof pancakes since they are very often sand-wiched with each other in layers in a giventown or city. Although there may be fiftylayers in the same town, each layer is never-theless a different culture—missiologically.

If there are well-established churches in oneor two of these different layers, then workingwithin those particular cultures to found otherchurches is certainly mission of a sort.

To cope with such details I have actuallytried, somewhat unsuccessfully, to get peopleto think in terms of various kinds of churchgrowth. Expansion growth is what happenswhen the existing churches grow bigger.Extension growth refers to the multiplication ofexisting churches within the same culture. Butbridging growth is perhaps the least recognizedbecause a bridge is built when the churcheswithin one culture go over to some otherculture where there is not yet a culturally rel-evant church movement. As far as I personallyam concerned, I would prefer to use (or evenreserve) the word mission for the bridging typeof church growth, and I would call these othertypes of growth simply evangelism. I prefer thisnot because one type of church growth is betteror more important than the others but becausemission, as I am defining it here (using the termbridging), requires many more specialized skillsand training. And, by definition, it can’t be donewithout involving an outsider, since there is noChristian movement within that culture as yet.And, obviously, it is the kind of thing youcannot pay someone within the culture to do.

Since not very many others differentiate thetypes of church growth in this way, I myselfprobably won’t be very consistent in how I usethe two words mission and evangelism. Since Ispeak ordinary English most of the time, I willprobably use these two words like everybodyelse does for all kinds of purposes!

In any case, the means to which William

Carey referred was very specifically a mech-anism—a social mechanism, an organizationalstructure, if you wish—which was designedfor bridging church growth. Although the ter-minology here may seem a bit clumsy, theactivity to which I refer is the specific the attemptto go from one culture where there is a church toanother culture where there is no culturally rel-evant church movement.

There might be what could be called anenclave church. Suppose, for example, in Iranone or more of the various subcultures mayalready have an “enclave” church of its own.But this church, we note, in no significant wayrelates to culture in which it is immersed. Inthe same way, to say that there is no church inRiyadh, Saudi Arabia is to speak imprecisely.There is a church, perhaps several, in Riyadh,Saudi Arabia, but there is no indigenous churchwithin that overall cultural tradition. I thinkyou understand what I mean. To go from asubcultural enclave out to the main culture ofSaudi Arabia would therefore be missions, notevangelism.

However, note that this kind of missionsfrom an enclave is probably the least successfulto succeed—because over the years (or perhapscenturies) very high prejudice barriers have beenbuilt up between the majority culture and theChristianized sub-culture or enclave.

That is why it is actually easier for someonefrom a distant culture to do missions in that sit-uation than for the local Christians within theenclave church to break out their situation andtry to witness to the culture that may have longresented them for other reasons than just theirwitness of Christ. This problem represents oneof the most serious misunderstandings inmission strategy today. We can call it “theproblem of the proximate culture.”

But, so much for definitions of the wordmeans. Let me go back for a moment to theastounding hiatus in mission strategy whichhas allowed mission activity to go on and on inthe Protestant tradition for nearly 200 yearswithout any clear-eyed, intentional strategy offounding mission societies in the foreign soil.

When I say things like this in discussionwith others, I find that they are often gropingfor some explanation for this astoundinghiatus. Why haven’t missionaries helped thenational church leaders set up indigenousmission societies? I sense that those withwhom I talk feel uneasy about this wholequestion. They feel that there must be some

Ralph D. Winter 1 – 3

logical reason for this hiatus, and, of course,some of the reasons which they suggest in ourdiscussion are, “Well, you have to start achurch first before you can start a missionsociety.”

Well, for the sake of argument, let me referyou to Alexander Rhodes. A century or so agohe was a missionary to Vietnam, but waskicked out sixteen times. Reg Reimer, a mis-sionary with the Christian and MissionaryAlliance in Vietnam, has done research onAlexander Rhodes. He says that the largestbody of Christians in Vietnam today is theresult of what Rhodes did, even though he wasoften removed from the scene. Actually histotal length of time in Vietnam was not verylengthy, but it was effective.

What is interesting to note is that he didn’tplant churches. I realize that it’s heresy in anykind of a church growth group to say thatRhodes succeeded fabulously even though hedidn’t plant churches, but it is true.

The thing that McGavran is most concernedabout, however, is that we not be content withsimply winning individuals to Christ. And inorder to counteract that inadequate approach,McGavran stresses the necessity of incorpo-rating those new believers into a permanentfellowship. Isn’t that right? It should not be toohard to understand then that to incorporatebelievers into a mission society is simply anotherform of incorporation. So although McGavrandoesn’t state his objective this way, I don’tthink he would object if someone said, “It’s truethat we’re not planting churches, but we areplanting mission societies to plant churches.”

I wonder just how many of you have everread an article on how to plant a “youngermission?” We talk all the time about youngerchurches. But have you ever read a paper onthe planting of “younger missions?” There is achapter on this subject in a book entitledCrucial Dimensions in World Evangelization.[Relate to something more recent.] You reallyshould read that.

Back to Alexander Rhodes. Each time hewas kicked out, he left behind a little cadre ofyounger men who were pledged to theplanting of churches. They worked as a team,just like Paul and his co-laborers worked as ateam. Paul, you know, was basically operatingwithin a church planting team. He was in thebusiness of planting churches, wasn’t he?However, the organization within which heworked was neither a church nor a synagogue;

it was a mission. It was, if you wish, a trav-elling synagogue. It had all the authority of atravelling church. It appointed elders, just likea non-travelling church does.

In the same way, we can consider the“means” of William Carey, the mission of Alex-ander Rhodes, the team of the apostle Paul (ineach case) a “travelling church.” Of course, Idon’t really like to do that. But I insist that ithad the authority and some of the functions ofa travelling church, and was as legitimate as atravelling church would be. But it was not achurch in the normal sense of that wordbecause an individual could be baptized bythat group but not be baptized into that group.An individual could be baptized into a syna-gogue—a Gentile or maybe a Jewish syna-gogue—and from there be selected by, or vol-unteer to a mission team. But it would take acombination of volunteering and selecting inorder for anyone to get on that specializedteam. Nobody could get on it automatically themoment he became a Christian. It always tooka second step, a voluntary additional step beyondchurch membership, for him to become part ofthis special ministry.

It was well understood, I believe, in theperiod of the New Testament church that theteam within which Paul worked had the samestructure as the Pharisaic missionary bands that“traversed land and sea to make a single pros-elyte.” In other words, the structure of missionswhich Paul employed was basically the sameas the structure that for 150 years had alreadybeen in use by the Pharisees. The Pharisaic mis-sionary band was already utilizing that kind ofa structure, and Paul merely borrowed it, justas he borrowed the synagogue. He didn’t inventa new kind of a thing called church. Anyonewho reads the New Testament and thinks thatGod let down from heaven a new blueprint forwhat is called a church and thinks that it is dif-ferent from a synagogue simply doesn’t under-stand the situation. Paul made no attempt tocreate a new kind of synagogue. There was anew message within that synagogue, but thestructure was the same. Paul went aroundsplitting synagogues; he was a church splitter,a synagogue splitter. He was not so much achurch planter as a synagogue splitter. Hedidn’t intend to split synagogues. But he wentthere with the gospel of Jesus Christ, the gospelof redemption, the gospel of grace, the gospelof circumcision of the heart, which we readabout in Deuteronomy and Jeremiah.


Paul got the pattern he used from Alex-andria, where the synagogues were alreadybypassing the requirement of circumcision forGentiles coming into their midst. Paul pressedthis pattern hard, so hard that he alienatedmany of the Jews in the front rows. In Acts 13they finally popped up and cursed at him andblasphemed, it says in the text. Obviously hedidn’t stick around after that second Sabbaththere, but walked out, taking with him many ofthe Gentile believers in the back rows. Withthese and a few Jews he started a new syna-gogue, which is more often called by the Greekname ecclesia, which refers to any kind of ameeting. There is nothing holy about the wordecclesia. And because the structure he used wasalready well established, Paul didn’t have togive a whole lot of new rules. The New Tes-tament contains a few references which, youmay recall, reminds the people how to set up achurch. But basically, Paul is not carving outand establishing a brand new structure. Rather,he’s making sure that these people understandthe old structure, the synagogue, which hadbeen invented in Babylon during the Diaspora.The synagogue was a very valuable kind ofnon-temple fellowship which involvedaccountability and worship and teaching, andit really hasn’t been improved upon to thisday. Instead, it’s been ruined; it’s beendegraded. Any church that’s over 200 membersis already going down hill in terms of internalaccountability, and thus does not correspondto the average synagogue. Nevertheless, thechurch as we know it in the New Testament isbasically a synagogue. It was borrowed fromthe Jewish tradition just like the missionaryband concept was borrowed.

Now what does this mean? It does not meanthat God is canonizing for all eternity thosetwo structures that you find in the New Tes-tament. What He is doing is showing us mis-sionaries how to borrow structures to workwith, and to work within. Paul never had toteach anyone how to do it because he was bor-rowing structures that already existed.Wherever we can in our missionary work, weneed to do the same.

Let’s take Ethiopia, for example. ThroughoutEthiopia there is what is called a mahaber. A“mahaber” is a men’s group, sort of like aMasonic lodge, that is a structure alreadythere. I have thought that that structure couldbecome a Christian structure if it were invadedand utilized in the right way. I don’t know of

any missionary to Ethiopia that has tried to dothis, but at least in terms of missionarystrategy, it would be worth thinking about.

Now, to go back to the two structures wehave just discussed, I’d like to refer you to anarticle entitled “The Two Structures of God’sRedemptive Mission.” That article surveys thelast 2000 years, and points out different typesof examples for each of these structures. Let mejust point out here that there are two ways togo at new ideas. You can either use old wordsand continue to explain to people that you arenot really saying what they think you aresaying, or you can use a new word they’venever heard of, and try to put it over, definedfrom scratch. I’m choosing the second of thesetwo paths, when I speak of a modality.

The word sodality, however, is a word fromthe Roman Catholic tradition which Latourette,the well-known church historian, picked upand used in some of his writings. Anthropolo-gists also have used this word to refer to a vol-untary structure within a society. It’s astructure that isn’t complete by itself because itdoes not have old and young and male andfemale in its midst. Thus, it cannot reproduceitself biologically.

A church, a modality, is a complete com-munity characterized by the fact that it haschildren born into it who become membersalmost automatically. Now, if you are aBaptist, you will say, “No, sir, they don’tbecome members automatically.” And I willreply, “Yes, sir, in most Baptist churches theydo.” The truth is that you will not find muchdifference between a Lutheran church whichconfirms people at puberty and at the Baptistchurch which baptizes people at puberty.Functionally, those two ceremonies are thesame. Neither of them usually has a verysevere selection process. And the normalchurch, whether it’s Lutheran or Baptist, is astructure which gives the benefit of the doubtto the children born into it. Thus, normally, it isbiologically self-perpetuating.

Thus, rather than using a word already inuse for a certain type of structure, as I havedone with the word sodality, I have been a bitmore daring and have chosen the word modalityfor the church kind of structure.

What all this means is that a mission societyis a sodality. You don’t get born into a missionsociety. There is only one mission society that Iknow of where a very high percentage of themembers were born into it, with perhaps half


of the members being children of previousmembers. I don’t believe this is true of SIMInternational. I don’t think that there is anyMennonite mission society where half theirmembers were children of previous members.

A good example, however, is the SalvationArmy. Until recently the Salvation Army was amission society with perhaps more than half ofits members born within the society. But whenit got to the point where more than half of itsmembers were children of previous members,it began to lose the character of a missionsociety. That is why the Salvation Army has tosome extent given up mission society charac-teristics and become more like a churchdenomination.

Let me refresh your mind on this subject,because it is very germane to this whole thing.The Salvation Army was a home missionsociety for many years. You didn’t just join it.You had to know what you were doing tobecome a member because it wasn’t just a cozylittle Bible study fellowship, like the averagechurch. To be a member of the Salvation Army,you had to get out there actively as a mis-sionary in the slums of London or New York.In those days it was very much a missionsociety structure. Its members won people toChrist, but most of those they won to Christjoined existing churches.

The Salvation Army, thus, was not a churchin the sense that I am using the word. Notthen! But it got along very nicely and begansending missionaries to India and to Korea andto various other places in the world. Todaythere are more Salvation Army people in Indiathan in the United States. And in the last fewyears the Salvation Army membership in theUnited States began to say to themselves,“How is it that we’re growing faster in Indiathan in the U. S.?”

Well, the reason was that in India they werea church, while in the United States they were amission society. How did that happen? In India,when they won people to Christ, there were nochurches to which they could send the newconverts. So they incorporated all these peopleinto the structure they had planted; and theyended up immediately with a whole string ofchurches, just like a denomination. Theultimate result was a Salvation Army church inIndia and a Salvation Army mission society inAmerica.

The same thing happened in Korea. Thework got very strong over there, and they said,

“Well, what’s wrong back in the United States?We’re growing; why aren’t they?” So graduallypeople in the United States began to say, “Well,what are we doing? Why is it we don’t takepeople we win to Christ into our fellowship.Why don’t we do that? Everybody else does.Why don’t we?” Well, the answer is that justlike any other mission society, you don’t takeyour converts into the mission society. If youdid, it would no longer be a mission society.There has to be a much stricter method ofselection, which is true for a church fellowship.

Anyway, for better or for worse—and inthis case I think it is for worse—more and morethey allowed their converts to join them. Thiswas very nice of them, but in so deciding theymade the colossal shift from a missionstructure to a church structure. And today theyare the fastest growing church structure in theUnited States.

That’s fine. But there goes a very stalwartmission society that for many, many decadeshad a very specialized, valuable work toperform. I’ll give them twenty years beforethey will be mainly out of that work.

Now, there is nothing wrong with startinga church, but you have to know what it isyou’re trying to do for the given situation. Thatis why there really needs to be two kinds ofstructures. Rather than call them missions andchurches, I would prefer to call them sodalitiesand modalities, since these latter terms havewider meanings, which enables parallels tosecular society—towns are modalities, privateenterprises are sodalities, as are the militarystructures. Both structures are necessary, justas both a checking account and a savingsaccount are necessary. One is an activestructure and the other a relatively passivestructure. We like to think that churches are anactive structure, and in America they are. Infact, many a denomination that is born inAmerica with, say, a new congregation here orthere, has all the characteristics of a sodality forthe first generation. But you show me any localchurch in the United States today that has beengoing for five generations and I will show youa church that is not actively evangelistic. Suchchurches are maybe pledged to evangelism—they believe in evangelism— but they’re notreally actively evangelistic unless, perhaps,they’ve recently been taken over by a newpastor and all the old members have left and anew group of people have come in. But that’snot what I’m talking about.


What I am saying is that within onlytwenty years you might have an entirely dif-ferent type of situation simply because of thebiological factor. When your children replaceyour generation, the result is a new generation;and when their children replace them, that’s anew generation. That process has a non-selective basis. You see, when the structureitself is non-selective and is perpetuated bio-logically, you no longer have that selectionwhich allows the high focus in the specific,penetrating purposes of a sodality. Whilesodalities are not everything that God wants,they are a different kind of a structure fromthat of a church or denomination; and as such,they are very, very useful.

In some people’s minds, I am classified asthe proponent of sodalities. Well, I hate to bethought of as one-sided. But whether I believeit or not, or whether you believe that I believeit or not, I want to say that I think we needboth structures. Both are very, very importantand have different capacities.

I will now compromise what I have justsaid by adding that if you had to choosebetween the two structures, it would be betterto choose the sodality. I say this because I havethe evidence, as we shall see later on, that forabout 200 years there were no really effectivemodalities in Western Europe; there were onlysodalities, like Intervarsity-type groups. Thesewere the durable carrier vehicles of theChristian movement during that entire period.When talking about terminology, I wouldreplace the word church with the words“Christian movement” and in that case theChristian movement consists of both sodalitiesand modalities. You see both of them right inthe New Testament. And by the way, you alsosee them in every human society. They are notnecessarily spiritual structures. For example,the city of Pasadena is a modality, and a localdry cleaning company is a sodality.

The movement that resulted when theAntioch church set apart Paul and his band forwork all over the Roman Empire did not even-tuate in Antioch but rather at Pentecost. Thatmovement contained two kinds of fishswimming around, one serving the other, butthey very much needed to work together. Onewas a modality and the other was a sodality.There were synagogues (modalities) and therewere missionary bands (sodalities), and bothstructures were important. The missionarybands produced synagogues, and the syna-

gogues fuelled and provided members for thesodalities. But the missionary bands did morethan just that. They not only produced a repro-ducible structure, but in so doing, they pro-duced an immensely influential movement.

The church people (the modalities) werewitnessing to others, as we certainly hope theyare doing today. But notice this, even if thechurch people are witnessing, it doesn’t meanthey are sending missionaries—and I meansending them to places untouched by thegospel in any sense. In order to do that, theyhave to do something that is a little more orga-nized than just sending an individual out. Pauland Barnabas did not go out as just indi-viduals. They had a well-recognized and long-established structure behind them to help themknow just what to do in any given situation.Today, especially in the Third World, manychurches are sending people all over the worldto serve as missionaries. But in Hong Kong andKorea, for example, they are often sendingthem out as individuals without a missionsociety backing; and as a result, they aregetting no place.

Another example would be the Mormons.They also send individuals out (usually twocollege students together), and they also haveno mission society structure on the field to guidethem. And because they don’t have veteranmissionaries on the field to tell them what todo, in most cases they accomplish very little.What a tragedy it would be for standard missionagencies if the the Mormons were ever to readWilliam Carey’s Enquiry and find out aboutmission societies, because then we would reallyhave a formidable opponent in the Mormonchurch! Their lack of a mission society doesn’tmean that the Mormons aren’t expanding.They are, but doing so by the witnessingprocess within the cultures where their churchesare already to be found. But breaking into anew place where there is no church is some-thing which usually does not result from thework of individuals witnessing, gossiping theGospel, and so forth. Yes, the Mormons havemore missionaries than any other group, butfar less to show for it per missionary. Whatthey have is basically only a short-term program.

I would say that the church in the New Tes-tament is basically a movement, rather than astructure. And in that movement, the people ofGod are rightly conceived of as the church. Butthat movement contains these two differentstructures.


Now, I’m not really saying anything sovery spectacular when I say that in anthro-pology, every tribe you study is a modality,and that within every tribe known to man onthe face of the earth there are also sodalities.That’s why anthropologists have borrowed theterm sodality. So for me to say that God’speople are found in both kinds of organiza-tional relationships is not to say anything veryprovocative or spectacular.

But there is a problem: all too often churchpeople call this second structure a para-churchstructure—be it a mission agency, a women’ssociety, Intervarsity, Campus Crusade forChrist, or whatever. I do not like that termbecause it implies that somehow these struc-tures are secondary and subservient to thechurchly structures. I would just as soon callthe churches para-missions. I feel that the veryword parachurch downgrades this kind ofstructure. I recognize the term; we all knowwhat it means. I’m willing to use it, but I’m notvery happy about it. In my understanding ofthe Biblical situation in Acts, with Paul’s mis-sionary band, what so often today is called a“parachurch structure,” has all the authority ofa “travelling church,” if you wish. It doesn’tlack any of the authority of a church; it justdoesn’t take any of its children, as children,into its membership. Therefore, it’s moredurable.

I say once more, and you can test this out tosee if it’s true: I don’t know of any local churchor denomination that’s been going for five gen-erations that still carries the specific, sharpfocus and concern with which it was founded.But I do know of many, many sodalities thathave lasted for hundreds of years, that stillhave a very narrow, sharp focus. You take forexample, the IFMA missions or the SudanInterior Mission (now SIM International).Here’s a mission that for over a hundred yearshas carried the gospel overseas without anycompromise whatsoever. You show me adenomination that’s done that.

Some may argue that the reason churchessometimes look down on para-church struc-tures (not my word) is because the churchesfeel that they are illegitimately performing thefunctions of a church. Campus Crusade for

Christ and Intervarsity Christian Fellowshipdon’t see it that way. My little pamphlet, “TheTwo Structures,” is being purchased by thehundreds of copies by both those organiza-tions. What I have written and what I amsaying here today seems to make legitimate theIntervarsity, Campus Crusade and Navigatortype of structure. Although I didn’t start outbelieving this—even ten years ago—I believetoday with all my heart that such structures areevery bit as legitimate as any church sitting ona corner. They are just as biblical, just asauthoritative, just as legitimate and just asessential to the health and vitality of theChristian movement as is the congregationalform of the church of Jesus Christ. They are notemergency “band-aids” that are necessary onlybecause the church has failed. Paul, in his mis-sionary work, was not working the way he didbecause the Antioch church had failed. Not atall. The New Testament does not conceive ofPaul’s activities as a stop gap because thechurches were failing. It was their normalmechanism—let’s use the word “means”—itwas their normal means of outreach, espe-cially, cross-culturally.

Now, what I’ve done is present a fairly pro-vocative point of view. I have said in effect thatparachurch structures are the chief means ofworld evangelism. You now need to study foryourself and see the extent to which the sodal-ities of history have been the cutting edge ofthe growth of the Christian movement. Thatdoesn’t mean that the men in those sodalitiesare more holy than the leaders of the churches;you just might have to be a lot more holy to bea pastor than to be a missionary. It just meansthat we can see these two structures workingtogether down through history; and when theChristian movement breaks down, it’s usuallybecause one or the other of these two struc-tures is not functioning correctly, or becausethe two of them cannot understand each otherwell enough.

In modern Protestantism I feel that thesetwo structures are not acknowledging eachother’s validity, and are not working togetherthe way they ought to. That’s the crisis in thepresent period with regard to the very means ofworld evangelism.

Before we get into our subject—the overallstory of God’s redemptive work on earth—I’dlike to make two comments on the wording:first, the concept of an “unfinished task.”

The very phrase, “unfinished task,” is prob-ably an inadequate phrase. It isn’t as thoughredemption in the biblical narrative or in sub-sequent history is just a job to be done, likenaming the animals or naming the plants, andthat the job is not finished. It is not merely anunfinished task. The only reason to use thatphrase is because it is so traditional, it seems tocommunicate better than others.

Yes, the task we are talking about is muchmore urgently to be performed than the word“unfinished” would imply. Compare, for exam-ple, the two words “creation” and “redemp-tion.” Creation is an activity on God’s partwhich is taking place over a long period oftime and does not inherently involve any spe-cial hurry. Nothing is necessarily going wrongin a creativity process. It is like an artist in astudio working on a painting. If he has no nodeadline and nothing goes wrong, it does notmatter very much if it takes him an extra houror an extra day to create his painting. That iswhy I don’t really like the term, “unfinished.”The task is not a job that is simply unfinished;it is a task that is inherently a crisis. It is anemergency kind of a task. It corresponds, notto creation, but to redemption. The wordredemption by its very nature implies a crisis.When an ox falls in a ditch you don’t say, “Well,one of these days in the next few months, we’regoing to have to pull the ox out of the ditch; it’sone of our unfinished tasks.” When a car goesoff a cliff, or when someone is at the point ofdrowning in a swimming pool, you don’t say,“Well, now, one of these days we’ll have tosee to this situation.” No! You can’t do that,because it’s an emergency! The emergencyitself contradicts the usual priorities. It cuts

across the routines and conventionalities ofordinary societies. Thus, I think it would be agrave mistake to accept the phrase, “the unfin-ished task,” without noting the absence of anemergency element built into it.

Secondly, as we look at it, the phraseinvolves a non-optional dimension. It isn’t pos-sible for us to say, “This isn’t for me;” or “Thisis for someone else;” or as I—and no doubtyou—have heard it said, “The need is not thecall.” But I would ask, “If the need is not thecall, then what under the sun is the basis of thecall?” What we mean by “a call” is not a mereinvitation. The fact is, we are not the arbiters ofwhether or not there is an emergency. God isthe one who has judged man a fallen creature,and His analysis of the problem is not up to usbut to Him. Therefore, our human evaluationof our response is not the source of our deci-sion making; God is! He is the One who, incontrast to His creative endeavors, is pointingout to us a redemptive task which devolvesupon us no matter what we might wish. Obvi-ously, this way of thinking calls for an adjust-ment in the way we usually look at things.

The necessary adjustment that a youngcouple have to make when they get married issimilar. Beforehand, they are free to follow theirown desires and instincts, but now their indi-vidual freedom is to be radically and perma-nently abridged by another person. Decisionmaking is no longer the option of either onealone; they are now bound by an unavoidablenew dimension of responsibility. This is espe-cially clear when the first child is born. It is notpossible in the middle of the night when thebaby starts crying to say in desperation, “Well,now, one of these days we’re going to have todo something about that.” Rather, it is a ques-tion of who’s going to get up, you or I? And, ofcourse, that gets into culture-distinctions ofrole, which are too profound to be discussed

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The Unfinished Taskof World Evangelization


2 – 2 The Unfinished Task of World Evangelization

here. But that’s the nature of the task. A youngmarried couple with a tiny baby goes througha bruising process of readjustment to the exter-nal demands of real life. It’s a real trauma tosome people, and some really can’t take it. Infact, this is the reason that 300, 000 babies areseverely beaten every year in this country—sixtimes the death rate that we see on the high-ways—and often by the mother. That happensbecause the new situation with an infant is aprocess requiring a major adjustment.

Thus, parallel to the nature of the task beingnot creative but redemptive; it is also an obliga-tion, not an option. There is no possibility of achurch saying, “Well, that’s for the otherchurches to be concerned with.” And there isno possibility of any individual Christian say-ing, “That’s for someone else to worry about.”No matter what you call it, “foreign missionwork, overseas mission work” (if you live onan island), the only possibility of a person turn-ing down this kind of a call is if he has someother call which is equally decisive and equallyurgent and equally of God. In other words, youhave to be called to stay home. In my mindthere is no possibility of any other way of look-ing at the so-called problem of guidance.

We recognize in the Bible a similar kind ofsituation. The elder brother didn’t understandwhy the return of his younger brother—the“prodigal son”—introduced an emergency ele-ment into the situation. The elder brotherdidn’t sense the gravity and his own responsi-bility for that which was lost. Prior to the storyin Luke 15 Jesus was essentially asked “Whydo we have to be bothered by this redemptivetask? Why can’t we just go on living crea-tively?” Is this attitude familiar?

In the average Christian bookstore todayyou actually find great support for that atti-tude. In fact, it seems as if the only verse in theBible that some Christians today think about is,“I have come to give you life affluently andeven more affluently.” Many, many books inthe bookstores appeal to people’s hunger todevelop a more sparkling personality, or morethis or more that—“Be all that you’re meant tobe!” or whatever. That theme is very creativewhen cast theologically. To be what Godcreated you to be is perfectly legitimate. I’mnot casting any aspersions on the legitimacy ofour getting a good meal, of being physicallyhealthy, being disciplined, being beautiful peo-ple. Ann Ortland in her book, The Disciplines ofa Beautiful Woman, says that God wants women

to be beautiful. I believe that is legitimate. But,notice, you can’t walk into a Christian book-store today and find a book with a title like“How to Bleed, Suffer and Die for Jesus Christ.”The book wouldn’t sell. Nobody is preparedfor an emergency, once peace has been aroundfor a period of time.

And though I hate to say this, one value ofwar in the history of our nation is that it disa-buses the populace of the assumption that themood of “peace where there is no peace” is notto be questioned. When there are no majorproblems, it is easy to assume that God wantsus to enjoy richly and abundantly all the goodfood and cable television and all the luxuriesthat American life today affords us. We havethis zany process at work whereby if we cansave ourselves enough physical labor, we canactually allow our veins to plug up faster!

In fact, the most extensive menace tohuman life in the United States is physical inac-tivity; and we have gained this achievement,this menace, by hard work and by keen “Chris-tian insight.” As the result of our “dedicatedand disciplined” endeavors to put ourselvesout of work physically, we are actually caughtup in a whole set of diseases that have neverbeen known before.

In very few countries in the world is alco-holism a problem, although it almost always isin relatively wealthy societies. In very fewcountries in the world are the luxuries ofdivorce a problem; in only a few is it possible,for economic reasons, to get divorced.

You have to be a wealthy country todevelop all of the degenerative diseases thatplague the American people. It is another, dif-ferent list of diseases that plagues the people inthe so-called non-Western world. A recent arti-cle by a medical doctor simply gave two lists ofdiseases; and not being a medical expert, Ican’t remember these in detail even though Icopied them down at the time. He said some-thing like this: that you’ve got tuberculosis,dysentery, malaria, and many other diseasesthat are epidemic in the less affluent world, butin the wealthy countries you have a differentlist of diseases that are just as damaging to thecivil body politic as those in the first list. Itseems that the great achievement of our afflu-ence is simply that we have exchanged one listof diseases for another.

But, of course, the Bible isn’t talking abouta peaceful, unruffled situation. When there is asheep that is lost, the pastor goes after the one


lost sheep, leaving the ninety nine behind.That’s his normal, conventional routine; hisobvious, stated responsibility. The pastordoesn’t send a hireling or somebody else tosearch for the lost sheep; he is the one wholeaves. In Antioch in the book of Acts, the twomost respected and mature pastoral leaderswere the ones sent off or released by the churchfor a missionary role. There is no biblical exam-ple for what we do in America today when werecruit our young people as missionaries.

I was in a conference recently in the Philip-pines composed of Chinese Christian leaders,including a number of wonderful evangelicalpastors. I remember trying to make this samepoint, namely, that God could ask pastors toleave their flocks behind and go and try to winthe lost cultures into his kingdom; they reallydidn’t need to worry about the flock they wereleaving behind (you can’t imagine how fastpotential pastors mature in the absence of thepastor who was there). Churches have enor-mous leadership resources, which will neverbe used if the pastors are not constantly beingsent off to the mission field; but that is not theway we do it, even though it is, I think, a bibli-cal pattern.

In the New Testament, curiously, it is peo-ple that are not normally considered importantwho are the object of God’s primary favor andattention. During the last few months I’ve beenreading through the entire Bible in the Livingtranslation. I got up to the New Testament andinto the gospels and half way through the bookof Mark before something began to dawn onme—something I’d known before but hadn’treally felt. You know, there’s a differencebetween knowing and feeling. Well, I began torealize that in the book of Mark, the sensitivi-ties of Jesus were almost always startling, sur-prising to everyone, even to the disciples. Theyseemingly couldn’t anticipate what Jesuswould be interested in. (Are we like that?) Hewas not interested in seeking out the affluent,the up-and-outs, the righteous, the beautifulpeople. If He came to Pasadena, apparently Hewouldn’t be seeking out the chief evangelicalleaders and pastors, and sitting down withthem and having a wonderful time sharing inthe Word together. He would be looking forthe sick and the despised people.

Do you remember when He returned toCapernaum and got off the ship He was met bya leader of the synagogue? The function of theleader of the synagogue in that context is very

nearly that of a mayor. Anyhow, Jesus stepson shore; and here comes this synagogueleader in terrible torment of soul because hislittle daughter is on the verge of death. “Canyou help?” he pleads. So Jesus heads in thedirection of his home. Instantly, His disciplesexchange knowing looks because if Jesus canheal this little girl, the daughter of such aneminent man, He will really “have it made.”And a tremendous crowd follows along to seewhat will happen.

Then, suddenly, something slows down theprocession, and He stops and looks aroundand asks, “Who touched me?” Even the disci-ples are shocked by His question. “What doyou mean,” they ask uneasily, “in a crowd likethis, who hasn’t touched you?”And they are abit irritated when they spot, right close to Him,a woman that everyone in town knows is ritu-ally unclean because she has been hemor-rhaging for years. And they all shudder, won-dering if perhaps by accident they might havebumped into her and become ritually uncleanthemselves.

It is very distressing for the synagogueleader to wait while all this is going on. Hisdaughter is dying! The disciples also are rest-less. They are thinking, “Doesn’t He realizethat He may be blowing the best chance Hewill ever have to be accepted by those whoreally count?” You can almost imagine themleaning close and hissing through their teeth,“The daughter, Jesus, the daughter…” Theymay have thought, “There he goes again—offon a tangent again! How are we ever goingmake him a success?”

Jesus ignores all this, even when messen-gers from the ruler’s house come running withthe news that the daughter has died. Heglances at the agonized face of her father, thenreaches out and touches the defiled woman,who has fallen at his feet in tears. “My daugh-ter, “He says, “go in peace; your faith hasmade you whole.”

Well, that behind Him, He finally turns tothe father, goes with him amidst the jeers of thebystanders, and—now that it is too late—enters the house with only the parents andPeter, James and John. And He doesn’t justheal the man’s daughter; He raises her fromthe dead—a much more impressive feat.

What is moving to me about this episodeis the fact that Jesus would call this uncleanwoman His daughter. The big point here is—often true with Him—there is a clear and sur-

2 – 4 The Unfinished Task of World Evangelization

prising difference between His sensitivitiesand those of His disciples, and between Hisand those of all the people in the town, andbetween His and ours.

Further on in Mark, a blind man besidethe road starts shouting, “Jesus, Son of David,have mercy on me!” All the people followingalong behind Him say, “Shut up!” (That’swhat the Living Bible says, “Shut up!”) The impli-cation is, “Jesus doesn’t have time for you.”But He does!

Or when little children come, and the dis-ciples blurt out “Get away, get away; this isJesus!” But conversely, Jesus says, “I want totalk to those little children.” All too often thereis a great discrepancy between our understand-ing of what God is concerned about and thevery reality of Christ in our midst. The star-tling, surprising nature of His concern reallyhas to be taken into account. We must not becomplacent in our understanding of what, theemergency—what, the redemptive task Godhas given us—really is.

The most horrifying thing of all is the factthat, after being with Jesus day after day for sovery long, the disciples still do not catch on.When Jesus explains to them again and againwhat’s up, their own agenda is written withsuch large letters that they cannot understandhow His agenda could be different from theirs.

For example, on three occasions Heexplains to them that He is going to be assassi-nated. And for one reason or another, in eachof those three situations, they miss that pointbecause they obviously have something else ontheir minds. They’re convinced that with Hiswonder-working power, He’s going to run theshow pretty soon. In the third instance, Hespells it out in much more gory detail than oneither of the two earlier occasions, detailing tothem that He is going to be tortured, betrayedand killed, then rise again on the third day.(Unlike us, they knew what torture means.)But instead of reacting in horror and reallyhearing what He is saying, they, James andJohn in particular, are so eager to pop thequestion about the kind of authority they seekto wield in His new kingdom, that they aren’teven listening. “Are you through with yourparagraph, Jesus?” they say, in effect. “Listen,it’s not a big thing; but would you sign thislittle sheet we have prepared? All this is, ismerely to put one of us on the left hand andthe other on the right. You can do that, cer-tainly?”

What a divergence between their concernsand His! A few days later they pooh-poohedeven the idea that he would be killed. In fact,the first time that Jesus brings up that He isgoing to be killed, Peter censors Him, “Hey,you shouldn’t talk like that. You’re going torun down the morale of the team.” They’re crit-ical; it doesn’t even dawn on them that whatHe’s saying is true. And then in the upperroom when He tells them that one of them isgoing to betray Him and that the rest willdesert Him, they scoff. They all vow that thisjust isn’t going to happen. Yet it does happenin just a few hours. In the Garden of Gethse-mane He asked them three different times topray with Him. And they failed each time. Inaddition, Peter, who vowed to protect Him nomatter what it took, just a little later in the highpriest’s courtyard, turned around and deniedhim with curses, saying that he never evenknew Him.

The disciples simply did not understand,neither the scope, the grimness and the realityof the redemptive task, nor their unprepared-ness for it. This ignorance continues to be trueeven after the cross and the resurrection.

Once again they are together, and sureenough (Acts 1:6) they say, “Now, Jesus, thesehave been great events that have happened.We’re checking our schedules. Just how soon isthe big day going to come. You know, we’rejust curious—nothing special—but how soonare you going to set up Your kingdom?” (Theysaid nothing at all about power or positions.They had apparently learned that such con-cerns upset Him.) His answer, as always, isunexpected. He says, “Listen, that is none ofyour business. You’re in sales. I’m in manage-ment.” (That quote’s not original with me, butit’s even worse than that. He’s not even inmanagement.) He says, “We have nothing todo with these things. For you and me there isanother agenda.” It’s as if he’d said, “Okay,okay, if it’s power you want (and instantlythey said to themselves, “Didn’t we try to steerclear of that word?”) you will finally get thepower you want—once you get going to theends of the earth.” And once again He remindsthem of a vast, unfinished, urgent redemptivetask involving the ends of the earth. Appar-ently it takes something far more than all theirdaily experience with Christ for them to appre-hend the truth, the reality and the urgency ofthat redemptive task.

Now, this is why I feel it is necessary, in


our churches and in our preaching and speak-ing around as we deal with Christians, toassume that the challenge of the Great Com-mission involves a second decision beyond thatof accepting Christ. We can say to people, “Youhave accepted Christ. Have you accepted Hiscommission?” And in most cases they wouldsay, “What do you mean?” They might answer,“No”or “Yes,” but more likely they wouldn’teven know what you are talking about. WhenJames and John asked for the positions on Hisright and left in His kingdom, He answered,“You’re asking for something which is notmine to give. But one thing I will assure you of,is that you’re going to have to drink of thesame cup that I am going to have to drink. Areyou ready for that?” And their childish answerwas, “Sure.” They didn’t even hesitate. Theyjust wanted to get back to that signature theythought they needed. So here it is again: Jamesand John couldn’t quite accept that the torture

and pain could ever apply to them—or to Him,for that matter.

I think this problem of perspective is true ofmost Christians today. Logically and theologi-cally, when a person accepts Christ as his Sav-ior, he is accepting a person who is much morethan Savior, but who is Lord of the Great Com-mission as well. That’s logical and it’s theologi-cal, but it is not psychological. The averageChristian today is no more consciously com-mitted to the Great Commission than were thedisciples—up through Acts chapter one.

So, for the most part, the challenge of theunfinished task of world evangelization isnot in the heart of the average believer today,any more than it was for the disciples beforePentecost. I don’t care whether you’re speak-ing of Christians in the United States or inNigeria or Singapore or Hong Kong. Thislooming fact is why the task is still both urgentand unfinished.

We are going to discuss various distinctionsin this particular lesson, distinctions that couldhave been taken up in another class—in an-thropology, theology or Bible. What we will betalking about is not uniquely history. As a mat-ter of fact, there’s nothing that is uniquely his-tory, and there is nothing that is not at leastpartially history. That’s the very nature of theword history. The reason, however, that we areplowing into these various distinctions is sim-ply to be able to define more carefully justwhat we understand to be the “unfinishedtask.”

Speaking of the word history, I must re-mind you that there has been an evolution ofmy own understanding and thus in the materi-als I have written and that none of my charts ordiagrams has dropped out of heaven fullblown. So, in getting started, I want to quicklygesture at some of the developments thatbrought me to the present.

The article “Seeing the Task Graphically”was written in 1973. In it I divided the worldinto four parts—Chinese, Muslims Hindus,and others—and estimated the number of mis-sionaries working with each group. The “oth-er”group is smaller than the rest, numberingless than 500 million. But, I pointed out, a largeproportion of missionaries are dealing withthis “other” group, compared with a verysmall portion working with any one of thethree major groups.

I admit this was an early and rather sim-plistic analysis. One thing wrong with it wasthat there are actually in these other groupssome Christians. So unless you put all of theChristians in the “other” category, you run intoproblems. So I was delighted when at Lau-sanne I was given another opportunity to de-scribe the situation in the world more effective-ly. For that occasion I produced a fancier chartwhere the Christians and non-Christians aremore carefully distinguished. I forget now howit all worked out exactly. But that was my sec-ond try.

In a third try I made a four-fold distinctionwithin each of these groups. For example,when I drew a picture of the Chinese, I drew alarge circle representing all the (Han) Chineseand within it I put a smaller, dotted circleshowing the Chinese that were culturally inreach of the Christian gospel, then a smallercircle representing the total number of Chris-tians of any sort, and finally inside that circle Iput a much smaller circle representing thoseChinese that were actively Christian.

On the pie chart we have a slightly differ-ent approach to those same four categories. In-stead of drawing a line down between all thesecircles with the non-Christians on the right andthe Christians on the left, this time I put thewhole world population in a single large circlewith a piece of pie, so to speak, for the Ameri-cans and the Canadians, and other pieces forthe rest of the non-Western world: for the Chi-nese, for the Hindus, for the Asian Muslimsand the African Muslims.

There are two other groups that remain.These are what I could be called “residue” cate-gories. In the African section, you have the Af-rican Muslims but also the other Africanswhich are not Muslims. Likewise, in the Asianband, you have the Asian Muslims but also theother Asians, mainly Hindus and Chinesewhich are found mainly in Asia. So the nextcategory in our diagram are the Other Asians.Altogether, now, that gives you eight pieces ofpie. This is my most recent attempt to describethe nature of the world’s population from amissionary point of view.

Now, within each of these four major piecesof pie I have made other distinctions—that is,how many of them are Christians, and of those,how large a group are active Christians andhow many are basically nominal Christians.You also have an additional distinction be-tween reachable non-Christians or beyond-the-reach (or culturally-distant) non-Christians.

This is an evolutionary set of diagrams.None of these is final; all of them grapple with

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Penetrating the Last Frontiers


3 – 2 Penetrating the Last Frontiers

basically the same distinctions. I must confess,however, that I think that another more recentapproach is better still. What I want you to un-derstand is that the distinctions are the same,the mathematics are the same even though thegraphics demonstrating them may be different.

You are probably thinking, “Wait a min-ute. Not even the mathematics are the same.”But look carefully at the statistical table in thischart, which is the same as in the back of theOnce More Around Jericho book (William Car-ey Library, Pasadena, 1977), and you will findthat both of them are newer than the one inthis “Grounds for a New Thrust in World Ev-angelization, ” (a printed booklet containing atalk I gave to the EFMA in 1975.)

That’s true. The chart in the Jericho book isbased upon figures for July, 1977, but the tablethat goes along with this last chart shows thatits figures are from July ‘78. And if you don’tthink the world is changing, then stop andthink again!

There is one other distinction which I’d liketo quickly make. (I’m trying as much as possi-ble to give you the historical background to thevarious things which I am discussing.) At theConference on World Evangelization in Lau-sanne, Switzerland in 1974 the organizers ofthe conference introduced, or should I say rein-troduced, the word “evangelization.” One hun-dred years earlier that same word had beenused in a slogan that became very famous. Itwas the slogan of the Student Volunteer Move-ment for Foreign Missions (SVMFM) whichspoke of the “The evangelization of the worldin this [their] generation.” To my knowledge,no one I have ever read has made a distinctionin print between the words evangelism and ev-angelization. Harold Lindsell told me that hewas the person who pressured Billy Graham touse the phrase “world evangelization” insteadof “world evangelism.” A little earlier DavidHoward had written a book (avoiding theterm), Student Power and World Evangelism, avery good book telling about the growth of theStudent Volunteer Movement, the HaystackPrayer Meeting, etc., which we will be discuss-ing later. But Harold Lindsell said, “Hey, don’tsay evangelism, say evangelization!” He main-tains that it makes a great difference which ofthese two words you use.

I’m not sure but that he would say the samething about my insistence that, Biblically de-fined, a missionary is one who goes wherethere is no church. After all, around the world

there was not as large a national church in hisday except in Catholic areas.

The point is that classically a “missionary”is one who is going out where no evangelismhas ever been done. That is, and has alwaysbeen, the basic motif of missions. However, bythe time J. Hudson Taylor founded the ChinaInland Mission in 1865 a rather different pic-ture had developed. By this time the missionar-ies that had gone out earlier could, at least, besaid to have stuck with it—give them credit.They didn’t just go and almost immediately re-turn like a rolling stone; they stuck. They dugin and established a beachhead. They stayed.They were not here today and gone tomorrow.

But there comes a time when it’s time tomove on. Eventually, in order for a church togain full maturity it has to be untrammeled byforeign experts and advisors and counselorsand comforters and aids and helps—even for-eign money. We see the same thing in theyoung people’s societies in our churches hereat home. They will never get up on their feet ifthere are always a lot of adults present. (This isthe disaster of the Christian Endeavor move-ment being replaced by hired youth pastors.)And people who go out from countries wherethere is a long development of church traditionalways tend to tyrannize the people who growup and establish their own, different tradition.

The classic case is in Sumatra where the Ba-tak church got started. The first missionariesthere were from both the Reformed tradition(Calvinist) and the Lutheran tradition. As itturned out, it was the Lutheran missionarieswho stayed there longer, and thus the resultingchurch was always assumed to be a Lutheranchurch. But as time went on this Batak Luther-an church (as it has often been called) grewbigger and bigger. When the Lutheran WorldFederation came into being the question aroseas to whether the Batak Lutheran Churchshould become a member of the LutheranWorld Federation.

Now, that seems like a relatively minor is-sue, but it isn’t, because the Bataks said, “Well,are we Lutherans? Why are we Lutherans?Why aren’t we just Bataks?” And there was anervous silence.

“But back home we’ve always called youthe Batak Lutheran Church, ” the people fromGeneva answered. Of course, in any case theEnglish phrase is not the Batak’s phrase, butthey essentially said, “All you have to do is tosign your adherence to the “Non-altered Augs-


burg Confession” and you’re in. It’s no bigdeal; just sign this document here.”

“Well, ” the Bataks answered, “Just whatdoes the fine print say?” Actually, the fineprint on the document consisted of what iscalled the “Non-altered”Augsburg Confession.

So they took out their pens and were readyto sign. But as they stopped for a moment, theybegan to think, “Just what are we really doing?Are we submitting ourselves to some foreigncultural influence at this moment?” So they puttheir pens back in their pockets and said, “Letus think this over for a while.”

So they took a copy of the document, and insucceeding months translated it into their ownlanguage, and paragraph by paragraphworked it over. By the next visit of the officialsfrom afar they had their own shortened ver-sion, and said, “Well, we’re all ready to sign,but we have our own version of this.”

The Lutheran World Federation officialswere aghast. “Your own version! And a shorterone at that? How can we let you sign that?”

So there was a big crisis, and to make along story short, later the men back in Genevawere very wise and decided that they wouldmake an exception in the case of the Batakchurch. You’ll notice that I didn’t call it the Ba-tak Lutheran Church any more, because theirofficial name is now the Batak Christian Protes-tant Church or something like that. Whatever.Anyhow, they successfully avoided being la-belled by a European division of Christendom.But the question lingers in the minds of manyLutherans today: “Are the Batak believers real-ly a Lutheran church?”

A few years ago I had occasion to talk al-most solidly for two days to the members ofthe mission board of the Lutheran Church inAmerica (LCA), which is one of the three majorLutheran traditions in this country

The LCA and the American LutheranChurch (ALC) later merged in the EvangelicalLutheran Church in America (ELCA). The Lu-theran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) is stillseparate.

When I told them this story I suggested thatas a matter of fact I heartily agreed that thequestion of whether the Bataks were truly Lu-theran or not was a very important question,but that I felt they probably were truly Luther-an. And, I said that the only substantial reasonfor believing that they were truly Lutheran wasnot because they signed, but because they

wouldn’t sign the non-altered Confession!In other words, if they had signed the origi-

nal Confession, they could not have beencalled Lutheran—because Luther was preciselythe man who refused to sign someone else’sconfession. Isn’t that true? The basic logic ofLutheranism is faith within cultural self-determination. And the Bataks passed that testby the very act of becoming believers whetheror not they signed the Augsburg (German)Confession.

Since the Augsburg Confession is tremen-dously important to most Lutherans, youmight wonder if the LCA mission board peoplewere troubled by my perspective. Well, theyare a rather sophisticated group of people; Idon’t think any of them were offended. In factI’m not sure it worried them too much either.Actually, I’d have been happier if it had wor-ried them because then I could have been surethey had come to the place where they reallyunderstood what I was trying to say.

The point is that when national churchesget along that far in their development, theydon’t really need foreigners telling them whatto do. As I see it, a second stage of missions en-sues once a national church has this kind ofproper autonomy. As you know by now, I’mhaving to lean over backward to even label thissecond stage missions and I only do so becausemost people think of all stages—so long as thechurch is overseas—as missions. So, thoughI’m willing to call it missions, I would just liketo make a distinction between first stage mis-sions and second stage missions. Pioneer mis-sions, the first stage of missions, means goingwhere there is not an established church indig-enous to the culture, standing on its own twofeet. But every time a missionary activity suc-ceeds, we get to the second stage of missionssooner or later. And the sooner the better. Sothat the famous statement about working your-self out of a job is a perfectly legitimate thing.

The fact is, though, that most missionariestoday are falling into a novel situation wherenew jobs are invented for missionaries that arenot pioneering work at all. The average personback home who is still thinking in pioneerterms mainly misunderstands the nature of themission movement today.

But, here’s the point. Every board of mis-sions I know of has tried for the last 25 years tomake it clear to the people back home that mis-sionaries no longer do the same things theyused to do. Boards today often try to educate


them not to ask all the time about things thatmissionaries formerly did. Don’t be surprisedto hear that missionaries are running tractorsand building buildings and doing all kinds ofthings that they didn’t do in the early days.And scripturally there is nothing wrong withall this.

But wait a minute: strategically there issomething drastically wrong with this. It’s allvery well and good to be honest about what ishappening, but it is tragic not to go on and askif this is what ought to be happening. Or, betterstill, Is this new role enough? I don’t want youto believe that I am criticizing what is happen-ing, because, really, I am not. Rather, I am ask-ing whether we ought not be sure to maintainour original pioneering instincts and be surethat we are still concerned to penetrate thefrontiers that still remain.

However, for many different reasons, prin-cipally out of preoccupation with many thingsor a sense of loyalty to what’s already beendone or maybe even principally due to an exu-berance that results from success, there is noth-ing that Western Christians can be more proudof than the outstanding national Christian lead-ers around the world. I don’t know whetherChristian leaders around the world realize theextent to which people in the Western coun-tries are really and truly and honestly proudabout the results of their mission work. Unfor-tunately, the national leaders are so often bat-tering against the tyranny and imperialism offoreigners that they may not stop to think veryoften of how legitimately proud people in theWestern countries are of the fact that the na-tional churches are growing up.

But it isn’t good enough simply to crowabout successes. Paul said, “forgetting thosethings which are behind...” There in the thirdchapter of Philippians he was not talking aboutour mistakes of the past, which probably weshouldn’t forget, but he’s talking about suc-cesses in the past. He’s talking about thingslike being of the tribe of Benjamin, etc., thingsof which he could have been legitimatelyproud. He’stalking about all the laurels andgreat achievements. I’m sure it makes sense forus to say things like, “Wasn’t Robert Morrisongreat? Wasn’t Judson great? Wasn’t Careygreat? Wasn’t Hudson Taylor great?” But itdoesn’t do us any good to be proud about thework of previous missionaries. We must forgetthose things which are past in the sense of tak-ing credit for them, and make sure that we are

equally creditable in our day. The main problem now is that the national

church has grown up like high grass which ourmissionaries can’t see beyond. When you gooverseas to see mission work, you fall rightinto the middle of a bunch of Christians nowa-days. Recently I took a camera with me when Iwent to Brazil because I said, “If I get downthere and I’m met by a bunch of Christians, I’mgoing to take their picture so that when I goback home I can say, ‘See! this is what happenswhen a missionary goes overseas today.” So Igot to the final airport in Brazil, which seemedto me like it was thousands and thousands ofmiles inland. I got off the plane and lookedaround and saw quite a mass of people. Finallya couple of men stepped out and came towardsme, and I thought, “Well, this isn’t a bigenough of a welcoming committee for a pic-ture, ” so I stuck my camera back in my pocket.They shook my hand, and then turned around,and whoosh! There were 15 pastors that cameout to welcome me off that plane. I jerked thelittle camera out again, shoved it in the handsof a young man standing there—and got mypicture!

I was down there to be at the tenth annualmeeting of the Association of Theological Ex-tension Institutions in Brazil. I had been therewhen this association had been organized, andthey were asking me back so I could see how ithad grown after ten years. Well, they took meto a very large room full of tables that were justcovered with theological textbooks at everylevel and on every subject, all of them pro-duced in Portuguese within the last ten years—and especially designed for individual off-campus study. Understandably they were veryproud of what they had accomplished, andwanted me to come down for this tenth anni-versary meeting. Because of all the things theyhad done, there were all these pastors to meetme.

That is symbolic of missionary work over-seas today. You can’t blame the missionariesfor going overseas to work with a lot of nation-al Christians; it’s so much nicer to go where thepeople welcome you. But you have to remem-ber that someone else had gone there before.Unlike going into a pioneer area, you’re notwalking into the lion’s den, or into an unchart-ed wilderness. There is a big difference, as I’msure many of you know, between going whereyou are welcomed by many, many Christiansand going where no one wants you to come


and there is no welcoming party at all. That isthe other extreme.

Let’s go back to the 1850s when HudsonTaylor first went to China. He was glad to finda number of Protestant missionaries there al-ready, but after a few years he became very illand went back to England to recuperate, andstarted writing a series of articles for a littleBaptist magazine as he was convalescing. Hedrew a map of China on which he marked withlittle pins all the places Protestant missionarieswere working. China seemed enormous and hewas pleased that there were now about 70 mis-sionaries there that he knew about.

But lying in bed and looking at the walland his map, he suddenly realized that most ofthem were right there on the coast of China. Healso knew that there were Jesuits a thousandmiles inland—Jesuits who dressed like the Chi-nese. His official biography doesn’t even hintthat he was influenced by the Jesuits, but in amore recent book called Hudson Taylor andMaria you can find a much more revealing re-port. This book (which I earnestly recommendto you) is the story of his courtship and mar-riage as well as the inside story of the foundingof the China Inland Mission, now OMF, Inter-national.

As Hudson Taylor wrote this series of arti-cles and looked at the map on his wall, he wasso stunned that later he wrote in his journal ofthe “accusing map.”

There is a point where academic scholar-ship meets the road. And I wonder if this dia-gram, this pie chart with the eight sectors, can-not also be referred to as “those accusingstatistics.” It seems like that to me because asyou look at the chart, the blue areas down be-low are what you might call the “spiritualhave-nots” while the “spiritual haves” are lo-cated up above. But there is so much blue areathat it becomes an accusing phenomenon, be-cause if we’re not responsible—and I mean allof us here—then who is?

Someone involved in missions said to me awhile back that he wished I would commenton the statement which insists that “the need isthe call.” He said he wasn’t sure that was true.It seems to me that some things are either self-evident or they aren’t. I don’t know how to ex-plain that. It seems to me that for Jesus “theneed was the call.” He came because He wasneeded.

Of course, there are a lot of “needs, ” andsomeone may ask, “How do I decide which

need?” My answer, I’m afraid, would have to in-

clude the concept of “the greatest need.” Sup-pose, for example, we were to take as our max-im Oswald Chamber’s challenge that wewould do “Our utmost for His highest.” Andin the case of the parable of the lost sheep, thefact that it was lost, in itself, made that needthe call. The helpless lostness constituted thecall. Or take the parable of the good Samaritan.The Jewish man was robbed and beaten andwounded, and his need constituted a call toanyone who knew about that and could help.This call rearranged the good Samaritan’s pri-orities. Let’s say, for fun, that he was alreadyon his mission field trip to some other field,and here was a call that outranked what hewas already doing. Now, the adjustment of ourpriorities throughout our lives must, it seemsto me, deal in terms of the needs such as we de-fine by these statistics and by these charts andby these maps

In any case, Hudson Taylor’s decision tostart a new mission organization was one ofthose major decisions in the history of mis-sions, because that decision set off an earth-quake tremor that rippled across the entireworld of evangelical Christendom. In the pro-cess he also set off a new process of supportembodied in what is called “The Faith MissionMovement.” Actually, what is called “FaithMissions” should really have been called the“Frontier Missions, ” as I think I have alreadysaid. Whatever the movement is called, Taylorbegan a new era of missions. In William Car-ey’s day every place was a frontier—and mis-sionaries splattered on the coastlands of thenon-Western world’s continents. But by J. Hud-son Taylor’s day the frontiers were the interiorof China and Africa, and so the China InlandMission came into being. It was no longer goodenough just to go to the coastlands.

Now, I submit to you that there is nothingwrong about going to the the coastlands. Theremay have still been frontier areas on many ofthe coastlands. But, obviously, in rough, geo-graphical terms most of the Chinese that hadno witness were in the interior. And as the re-sult of Taylor’s insight and initiative, a numberof new missions sprang into being: the ChinaInland Mission, the Sudan Interior Mission, theAfrican Inland Mission, the Heart of AfricaMission, the Unevangelized Fields Mission, theRegions Beyond Mission and the like—almostall of these new missions booming into exis-


tence carried a name indicating pioneering be-cause they were dealing with frontiers. That iswhy I think the so-called “Faith Mission Move-ment” should have been named the “FrontierMission Movement.” Note, seen from the homebase, it is likely that the so-called “faith” mech-anism of support was more visible than the all-important field emphasis on frontiers.

Thus, within just a few years forty new mis-sions came into existence. Some eventually be-came major missions. For example, the largestmission on the continent of Europe, the Ger-man Liebensell Mission in Bad Liebensell (nota bad place—bad implies hot springs in Ger-man), came into existence because when Hud-son Taylor went through those parts, he didn’tjust preach a missionary sermon, he talked instructural terms like William Carey had some75 years before.

William Carey, remember, wrote a bookthat not only talked about the need for mission-aries but the need for the structural means tomeet that need. And Hudson Taylor didn’t justsay to those Germans when he was there, “Iwant you all to be praying about the un-reached fields of the world and the possibilitythat God wants you to be a missionary.” Hesaid, “Why don’t you start a mission society.I’ll tell you how to do it.”

The difference is somewhat parallel to thedifference between evangelizing individualsand starting churches. McGavran is the greatexponent of not merely evangelizing but alsostarting churches. I am, in a parallel sense, (healso) a proponent of not merely talking aboutthe frontiers of the world but promoting theidea of setting up the structures and the mecha-nisms that can do the job. That’s why thephrase “penetrating the last frontiers” involvesvarious strategies. Two new agencies that haveresponded to the widening concern for fron-tiers are “Frontiers” and “Pioneers.”

I’ve talked about the Faith Mission Move-ment and I’ve talked about the fact that we’rein a similar situation today. We need to breakthrough again. We no longer need to go to thegeographical frontiers but rather to the culturalfrontiers. Isn’t that right? This is our parallel to-day. And like Carey and Taylor, we are goingto do this by means of charts and statistics thatwill accuse us if we will open our hearts totheir reason and to their existence.

Since 1974 I have been trying to define theneed. And toward the end of ‘77, a little over ayear ago, there was a meeting in New Jersey at

the Overseas Ministries Study Center called theVentnor Study Group. This was a group ofmission executives: Peter Stam of the AfricanInland Mission, Frank Robins of Wycliffe BibleTranslators, Warren Webster of the Conserva-tive Baptist Foreign Mission Society, etc. Therewere also a number of executives from a large,different type of missions. For example, Leigh-ton Ford of the Lausanne Committee wasthere, and so forth. The topic announced in ad-vance was the matter of the Unreached Peoplesand what to do about them.

Anyhow, I was told, “Ralph, you have beentalking all this time about the unreached peo-ples, now why don’t you propose what can bedone?” So I came up with four different strate-gies which I felt should be pursued. There’s nouse writing them down here because they arethe strategies defined in a booklet entitled“Penetrating the Last Frontiers.” Right now I’mjust giving you the historical context in whichthis booklet came into being. Also present wasa man by the name of Paul Hopkins, and histhesis was that we don’t have any frontiers,that we don’t have any unfinished task, at leastnothing that North Americans need to be tooworried about. To him this is probably a ratherunacceptable summary of his position. But heis a very sincere and sensitive soul and wouldsay that the American church is not qualifiedto evangelize the rest of the world. Now, that isan interesting observation and I suppose that ifwe wait until we are fully qualified we’ll waituntil the end of history. But, anyway, he wasso perturbed by the lack of commitment of theAmerican church that he didn’t feel that wehad anything to offer to anybody else in theworld. I’m sure that he is right in some ways:many American Christians do not have any-thing to offer. They themselves need renewal.Let’s not kid ourselves; we have an amazingamount of re-evangelizing to do right here inthe United States. There’s no question about it.

Hopkins also believes, it seems—and thisgoes along with his comments about the U.S.—that there are Christians out there in everyplace around the world already. Because of hisconviction and his presence at the conference, Ifelt that in my talk I should review some of thestatistics about who is yet to be won, and I sortof redefined once more these four categories—the different kinds of people needing to bereached as of the middle of 1977. (This was inDecember of ‘77.)

But I also outlined four strategies: 1) to re-


build pioneer mission perspective, 2) to redis-cover the Unreached or Hidden Peoples, 3) tore-evaluate all previous approaches, and 4) toreconsecrate ourselves to a wartime, not apeace time, lifestyle. Those are the four strate-gies that are in that booklet. And for each strat-egy there is at the end of the book a section ontactics. Maybe you don’t feel so happy aboutthe difference between strategy and tactics, butanyway the booklet runs over the four strate-gies a second time in terms of more minutethings that can be performed. I’ve mentionedthese things because I wanted you to have afeel for where that booklet came from.

The Unreached Peoples poster—what wecall the Circle Chart—is more recent and thestatistics on its lower right hand side are frommid 1978 rather than mid 1977. Also, we haveadded in some extra columns. Every year ortwo I get some extra minutes to do a little re-search and so I add a few more columns. Any-how, I decided that I would figure out roughly(and I want to emphasize that like William Car-ey’s these are rough estimates) how many mis-sionaries are reaching out to the 500, 000, 000people that are within range of the Gospel andthe 2, 500, 000, 000 that are beyond its range.Let me add that I was very, very conservativein my estimates. McGavran and I went overevery single row, and we would say, “Well,now, what do we think?”

I talked to David Fraser, one of the key re-searchers at World Vision. I said, “I grant thatthese are just estimates, but if they’re wrong,correct them. Let’s improve the data.”

We all agreed that the upshot of the wholething is that today there are very few mission-aries that are doing first stage missionarywork, and yet according to our estimates, thereare millions and millions of people who needthat kind of work.

A missionary to Japan has asked me if Iconsider that country unreached. (Now, re-member, we’re not talking in terms of coun-tries but in terms of people groups.) It is truethat there are many Christian congregations inJapan. What determines the answer to this mis-sionary’s question is whether or not new con-gregation here or there is an extension withinthe culture of that same church or not. Now Idon’t know all that much about Japan, but I amtold that within Japan 70% of the people live inone or other of the cultural strata within whichthere is no church of any kind.

Now if you have a church that is built out

of a certain stratum and they decide to go to anew housing complex filled with professionalpeople of a different stripe socially, economi-cally, or technologically, their attempt to pene-trate that new unchurched cultural tradition isan E-2 type of outreach. By contrast, this sameoutreach for the foreign missionary would bean E-3 outreach because for him it is not onlyfirst stage missionary work but is to a culturethat is totally different from his own. If the Jap-anese Christians, however, find in this newhousing complex people that will fit into theirown church, or would be comfortable in achurch like their own, then that would be E-1type of outreach. (To make this more clear, re-member that the E-1, E-2, etc. categories haveto do with cultural distances from the Christianevangelist, while first or second stage activityrelates to the evangelism attempts and successamong that people—that is, the stages of mis-sion success.)

Therefore, for you to help these JapaneseChristians, even though you are learning a for-eign language, doesn’t make you into a mis-sionary, it makes you into a church worker—even though you are working at an E-3 dis-tance, to be sure.

I hope you understand what I am trying tosay. Just to be sure, let me give you one moreexample. I was asked to talk to the Women’sMissionary Union of the Southern Baptist Con-vention. Now the Women’s Missionary Unionis a powerful, magnificent organization ofwomen. Their regional heads came together inBirmingham, Alabama in March of 1977. I wasthe only non-Southern Baptist there, and I wasasked to give them some kind of a pep talk onmissions. So I started out bravely saying that tomy knowledge there is only one mission agen-cy of a general sort in the United States that isdoing a really effective job, and unfortunately,it is not working outside the United States.

Note that the Southern Baptist Conventionhas two boards of missions: the Foreign Boardand the Home Board. Everyone was sittingthere suitably mystified at my former state-ment, so I went on to say that the mission agen-cy I felt was so very effective in missionarywork was the Division of Missions of theHome board even though it did not work over-seas. I continued by suggesting that the For-eign Board was not doing any missionary workbut merely doing the home-church kind ofwork overseas.

When we came to the question period, a


lady representing the Foreign Board’s work inBrazil stood up and commented, “I don’t un-derstand what you are saying. While we our-selves might not be doing missionary work,we’re training the nationals to do missionarywork.”

“Oh, oh, ” I thought. There goes my theory.But I’ve got myself in this far, so I may as wellgo a little further!” So I answered, “Yes, but,what precisely are you training the people todo? Are you training them to do mission workor merely how to evangelize their own people?To my knowledge, and I would be delighted tobe contradicted, ” (I put that in to be safe) “Idon’t know of a single Southern Baptist mis-sionary around the world who is teaching a na-tional how to do mission work.”

So immediately she popped up again andsaid, very proudly, “My brother in Brazil isteaching a class to Brazilians who are going outas missionaries in the Amazon basin to reachthe Indian tribal people there.”

“Okay!” I answered. “I’m so glad to be con-tradicted. That’s one out of your 2, 700 mission-aries that is doing this. Are there any other can-didates for this classification?” Dead silence.

Well, later after the meeting was over, I

could tell that there was a good deal of conster-nation about this subject. And I was totally sur-prised when one of the executives of the For-eign board whispered to me that the lady’sbrother was not a Southern Baptist! So essen-tially she fudged since we were talking aboutwhat Southern Baptist missionaries were orwere not doing.

[It is wonderfully true, of course, that theSouthern Baptist Foregn Board/InternationalMission Board has in the intervening yearsmade decisive astounding strides toward verygreat emphasis on frontiers.]

But this is the situation. Missionaries ingeneral are not any longer in the business ofpenetrating the last frontiers; we’re simply stir-ring around in old frontier areas which are nolonger mission frontiers. It is as if we have re-written the Great Commission so that it nowsays “Go ye into all the world and meddle inthe national churches.” We’re doing whatGeorge Peters [for many years the one missionprofessor at Dallas Theological Seminary] callshomesteading missions, getting our roots indeep, producing homesteads around the worldwhere we already have been at work for years.

I will begin by commenting on the docu-ments you will be reading. They provide a ba-sis for thinking in closure terms.

First, I want you to know the context withinwhich this yellow booklet came into being. Inour last class I commented on the documentcalled “Penetrating the Last Frontiers.” Thatwas my answer to people who said to me,“Okay, you’ve made your point about theoverlooked peoples. Now what do we doabout them?” But getting to that point in-volved some still earlier thinking. In the appen-dix of Crucial Dimensions in World Evangeli-zation (the precursor to the PerspectivesReader) is this article entitled “The Groundsfor a New Thrust in World Missions” whichyou now have in your hands as a yellow book-let.

This material is what I presented as theopening address at the IFMA-EFMA meetingin 1976, a joint meeting of these two organiza-tions which occurs every three years. Sincesome of you may not be acquainted with thesetwo groups, let me give just a bit of the back-ground of each of these major associations be-fore we discuss the kind of address which Iprepared for them—because a strategy of clo-sure, if it is not owned by these associationswill practically be born dead.

IFMA stands for the InterdenominationalForeign Mission Association. Note first of allthat this oldest association of mission agenciesis not the Independent Foreign Missions Asso-ciation nor is it the Interdenominational For-eign Missions Association. Note especially thatthe “M” in the IFMA acronym stands for Mis-sion, not Missions.

The first five missions that got together toform that association met in 1917 in the FirstPresbyterian Church of Princeton, NJ. Of thosefive the Sudan Interior Mission may be themost easily named among them. And to thisday the IFMA members missions have grownuntil there are about 100 different agencies thatare members and about 6, 000 or 7, 000 mis-

sionaries working under those 100 agencies.Then there is the EFMA. The EFMA is the

Evangelical Foreign Missions (now, note, withan “s”) Association. [Later renamed The Evan-gelical Fellowship of Mission Agencies]. Istress the presence or absence of the “s” be-cause, again, it makes a loaded word—it canmean different things to different people. Doyou remember that in the Old Testament cer-tain people were cast out on the basis of howthey pronounced certain words? They em-ployed the shiboleth, a single consonant thatcould not easily be pronounced by foreigners.

The same sort of thing happened in the Sec-ond World War; the soldiers would ask a cap-tured person whether he could pronounce theword “click” or “camera” to see if the personwas American born or of Japanese extraction.

So it is in the mission world. If you refer tothe “Interdenominational Foreign Mission As-sociation” and add an “s”to the word Mission,that’s a shiboleth; those checking to see if youknow what you claim to know will be awareinstantly that you an outsider, and that youdon't know what you're talking about!

The same is true with the EFMA. In thiscase if you don’t add the letter “s” to the wordMissions, you just expose the fact that you areignorant of the actual situation. I point thesedetails out because at the Fuller School ofWorld Mission (note, no “s”) you’re supposedto find out the details.

Same for the U. S. Center for World Mis-sion—no “s”—and the International Review ofMission (which once was the International Re-view of Missions). I mention this apparenttrivia because we will later see it linked withone of the most monumental and ominoustransitions in mission perspective in the 20thcentury.

The important differences, however, be-tween those two organizations are structural.The EFMA is a division of the National Associ-ation of Evangelicals, and as such its member-ship consists of both denominational mission

Winter Chapter 4

The Importance of a Strategy of Closure


4 – 2 The Importance of a Strategy of Closure

agencies as well as interdenominational mis-sion agencies. It would be neater if all interde-nominational agencies joined the IFMA and allthe evangelical denominational agencies joinedthe EFMA, but the reality is not quite so neat.The EFMA has type D- related as well as typeC-, B- and A-related agencies, whereas theIFMA has merely type D-related agencies. Ifyou don’t recall what I’m talking about when Isay type-D, look again at “Seeing the TaskGraphically” and you’ll find there this fourfoldbreakdown of different types of mission agen-cies.

These two associations together have about15, 000 or 16, 000 missionaries. The reason whysome of the interdenominational agencies inthe EFMA had never joined the IFMA (prior toEFMA’s founding in 1945) is because the IFMAwouldn’t accept them as members for either oftwo reasons: 1) they might be considered eithertoo young and too dumb, or 2) they were Char-ismatic or Pentecostal.

Even though there are these two separateassociations of Evangelical mission agencies,they get along very well working together.And as we discussed earlier, the fact that theyare separate means that they don’t have tofight each other as they might if they were dis-parate elements in a single association of mis-sion agencies. There’s no big hair-pulling con-test going on between them; indeed they worktogether very closely, even having a number ofjoint committees. They jointly publish the Ev-angelical Mission Quarterly, for example, andjointly sponsor CAMEO (the “Committee toAssist Missionary Education Overseas”) andabout five or six other committees. IFMA andEFMA even meet jointly every three years.

Now, back to the subject. The documentunder discussion today, “The Grounds for aNew Thrust in World Missions, ”as I say, canbe found in the appendix of Crucial Dimen-sions in World Evangelization. This documentwas actually created for delivery as the open-ing address of the 1976 joint IFMA/EFMA Mis-sion Executives’ Retreat. Ordinarily the joint re-treat would not have been held until thefollowing year, but for some reason they sched-uled this one just two years after the precedingone, perhaps because of the mounting interestin unreached peoples.

Ordinarily, about 400 mission executivesfrom the member agencies attend these jointmeetings, making it the largest meeting of mis-sion executives that repeatedly occurs. So to

me it was a very great honor and privilege tobe asked to speak to this august assembly ofmission executives. I mainly recapitulatedwhat I had said in Lausanne two years previ-ously.

Thus, this “Grounds” document with thesedifferent kinds of circles (check its circle chartcharacterizing that stage of graphics) was pre-sented to this group. However, lest you miss it,there is a section in the back which I call the“dirty laundry section”— which is a little overhalf of the whole talk—in which I spoke of theobstacles to world evangelization in terms ofvery concrete and specific maladies that afflictexisting mission agencies: sicknesses, weak-nesses and problems which must be overcomebefore the job can be done.

Today we are talking about the essentialcomponents of world evangelization. This 12-fold list is at least a related subject, so don’tmiss it.

I’ll mention only one of the twelve obsta-cles here, namely, the Self-Managing Mission-ary. In my opinion half of all missionaries areworking at 50 percent efficiency because theyare not capable of managing themselves. I ammerely saying they are incapable of self-management, not guilty of laziness; in fact,they practically kill themselves in overwork.But that’s because of bad management. I fallinto that category myself. I don’t think I’m agood self-manager. And having adjusted mysights to that reality, I’ve decided that probablya lot of other people aren’t either, in fact mostpeople.

I believe the cure is not to put greater pres-sures on the poor people who can’t effectivelymanage themselves but rather to offer a super-visory structure without which they will prob-ably never accomplish their best. In any case,I’m just pointing to those twelve obstacles atthe end of that article. I would be happy if youwould at least do some reflection on thosepoints22222.

The next thing to mention is another docu-ment. A year ago, December 14, 1977, therewas a meeting in Atlanta called “The Consulta-tion on Evangelical Futures, ” or something ofthat sort, which brought together a very emi-nent group of people. I felt very honestly that Iwas the least of all the people in that groupand that I didn’t really qualify for membership.

Present were such leaders as Pat Robertson,Hudson Armerding, Leighton Ford, college


presidents of all kinds, presidents of major cor-porations, the president of the CBMC (Chris-tian Business Mens Committe) and FrancisShaeffer types—those types of people. Well,Francis Shaeffer himself. It so happened thatthe man who managed the conference hap-pened to be an old friend of mine, and wasvery pained because it was so difficult to getanything on the subject of missions into theconference.

Just imagine, here were 150 Evangelicalleaders in America, perhaps the most influen-tial (I won’t say most holy, but at least the mostinfluential) assembly of Evangelical leadersthat had ever gathered in American history.They were meeting together for five days withnothing in particular on the agenda except todiscuss among themselves the future of the Ev-angelical movement in the whole world.

They had invited to meet with them allkinds of experts from all over—secular peopleand everything else—to suggest what theseoutside pundits would predict about the fu-ture. But no one, absolutely no one except forLeighton Ford in a brief comment in hisspeech, made any reference at all to world ev-angelization.

I could see in the advance materials thatthis was likely to happen. So I told Don Hoke,who was working under the auspices of theBilly Graham Center to organize this meeting(although it was to meet in Atlanta), that I justcouldn’t see myself even attending such a con-ference. I said, “I have too many other things todo. Anyhow, my exclusive focus is not justmissions but frontier missions, so why would Iwant to go to a meeting like that?”

Hoke, a good friend, answered, “But,Ralph, that's why we need you there.” To makea long story short, it turned out that I had an-other trip that took me right to Atlanta exactlytwo days prior to that meeting, which meant itwouldn’t cost me anything extra. So I actuallywent to the conference. And I’m glad I did.

While I didn’t make a public nuisance ofmyself, I did at least chirp up meekly now andthen. And just being there in that situation andwitnessing the travesty of it all! Well, the pro-ceedings of the entire conference are printed ina book entitled Evangelicals Face the Future.That’s a William Carey Library book, and in ityou will not find any more than six lines ofprint that make any reference, even in passing,to the task of world evangelization.

However, they had another meeting this

year (1979) and lo and behold one of the sixmajor plenary addresses this time was pre-cisely to focus on the future of the church andworld evangelization. And guess what? I wasasked to give that talk.

Again, let me repeat, I do not fit into thatelite group of people. But at least as an out-sider coming in to give a talk, I at least fit in onthat subject anyway. It certainly is somethingabout which I do most of my thinking. So Iwent to that meeting and presented my talk.That’s what I’m passing out at the end of theclass today—“The Six Essential Components ofWorld Evangelization.”

What I did was to assume that these peopleknew utterly and absolutely nothing aboutmissions, which was not a rash assumption.You cannot believe how illiterate Evangelicalleaders are today on the subject of missions.Most Evangelical leaders slide easily betweenevangelism and missions. They don't stop tothink about the necessary, crucial difference, orthe structure of mission. The task to them iswinning people to Christ. They think that eve-rybody is a missionary. Everybody should bewinning people to Christ. Everybody is either amissionary or a mission field. You’ve heardthat, but if you talk this way it simply fuzzesup the reality. It prevents you from seeing thepriorities and the distinctions in the task. Notthat it isn't true that everybody needs to wit-ness for Christ and that we all need to be busywinning people to Christ. This is true, ofcourse. But there’s something wrong with thislogic if certain of these tasks can be done withno more special preparation than an evangel-ism seminar but others require linguistics, an-thropology and advanced training at a schoollike this. And if you don’t make that distinctionand press it home and draw the necessary con-clusions from it, then you see we’re going to bemishandling the task that is given to us.

Therefore, I felt that I should start fromscratch in my talk. In order to do this I usedwhat I call a check list now found in the paperwhich I presented. I’ve used this checklist forseveral years, as have Peter Wagner and sev-eral others. In graphics, it’s often representedas a six-spoke wheel, implying that if any onespoke is missing, the wheel will be out of bal-ance and will tear itself to pieces before long.Every single one of these spokes is necessary.That is why I have called them essential com-ponents of world evangelization. Some aremore urgent than others, but all involve certain


emergency and critical, or perhaps even crisisactivities.

At this point I would like to introduce twoconcepts which may often be foreign to ourthinking. I want you to read about them in thispaper. (I really don’t intend to tell you what isin that paper—since reading is a more efficientprocess than listening.)

Just in general, I personally believe that wehave to be more flexible and be willing to read-just our strategy at any point where someemergency, opportunity, or special crisis comesinto view. This perspective is perfectly indi-cated by the case of the good Samaritan.

I am always amazed when I meet peoplewho plan two years in advance and say veryproudly, “Well, I’m booked up for the next twoyears; you’ll have to talk to me about the thirdyear down track.” It’s as if they are assumingthat all the priorities in missions have alreadybeen established for the next two years. A per-son of this temperament would allow hisschedule to get so full that it would be impossi-ble to make any changes. And that’s a greattragedy, if you ask me. It’s a kind of poisonthat enters into our veins and produces what iscommonly known as rigor mortis. And it is notan achievement whatsoever!

I remember when somebody, whose name Ishall not mention, told me that he was bookedup for two years and couldn’t come to speak ata certain conference only seven months away. Isaid, “Well, I’m sure glad Leighton Ford isn’tbooked up that far ahead because he’s chosento help us on a single month’s notice.”

The fact is, if in the cause of missions thereis any wheel that is squeaking, or any gearmissing, or any breakdown in that overallcause—since it is a single cause—then, that iswhere our attention and our energy shouldgravitate. We ourselves may not feel it is effi-cient to move out of our jobs and drop every-thing, dragging family and children, and go towork on that problem. But at least we can raiseour voices and say something about it. We canstir up the consciousness of the Evangelicalmission world so that at least somebody gets atthat particular task.

The analogy would be that of an automo-bile where with great care every single part ofthat entire automobile has been put togetherand is in working order except for one littlething like a fuel pump, one of the simplest ofall the components of the entire automobile.What is the value of even filling the tank with

gas if there is no fuel pump, pray tell? The in-ter-relatedness of the components of a causecry out for a strategy that is flexible enough toreach to those places that are hurting. If there issomething that is wrong here, and you’re allsewed up downtrack, you can’t just go onworking, saying somehow the Lord will justtake care of it.

Let me reach into zoology for an illustrationof this syndrome: the trapdoor spider. In theinsect world it is not cultural learning butrather instincts that make most of the deci-sions. There is not very much learned behaviorin that low order of life. The point is that whereaction is based only on instinct, there’s lessflexibility in decision making. A trapdoor spi-der digs a hole down in the earth and goesdown in that hole, taking out the earth tocreate it. It’s a nice round hole maybe an inchacross and running down maybe 12 to 15inches into the ground. When the spider getsthe hole dug, she goes down to the bottom andstarts building a web which becomes a conicaltube going up to the surface. And when shegets up to the surface, she goes out and finds alittle leaf or something else that can function asan unnoticeable doorway, puts a hinge on itand attaches it at the opening of her tunnel.Then she goes out and kills her prey and dropsit down to the bottom of the tube, feeds on theprey and bears the new generation, which thenis protected by this beautifully designed co-coon-type situation.

However, when the trapdoor spider hasdug the hole and built the tube half way up ifyou then take a stick and jab it into the lowerpart, destroying the bottom of the tube, whatdo you think the trapdoor spider does? Doesshe adjust to the new situation, go back downthere, re-excavate and replace the bottom partof the tube? No. She just keeps right on going,right up to the top, goes out and gets the door-way, puts the hinge on it, finds her prey, comesback and falls down to the bottom and dies!She does not readjust to the new situation.

Many human societies are just like that intheir old age as they amass their legal struc-ture. You can look out the window here andsee that big courthouse where they are con-stantly piling paper upon paper and redefiningand sharpening and improving the legal struc-ture of our society to the point where there willbe a day when the legal codes of the city of LosAngeles will be a stack of pages as high as theEmpire State Building. At that point the inflexi-


bility will be so complete that we will abso-lutely be prey to any other nation becausethere will be no ability to respond in a crisis.

All of this is to say that an element of flexi-bility on a checklist is very important. You mayonly be working in one of those six componentareas, but I want to assure you (at least I willsay it is my own personal belief) that all of usmust be more flexible than the trapdoor spider.All of us must be aware of the necessity of be-ing watchdogs, able and willing to keep trackof all of the components and be willing tomove in the direction of that which is missing.

In this particular document, “The Six Essen-tial Components of World Evangelization, ” Iwas dealing with a particular audience whichhad very little knowledge of missions. So Ididn’t bother them with all the various detailsand complexities of nationalized churches andthings like that. What I did do is that in the sec-tion where I’m talking about mission agencies Igave them five examples of alternative missionstructures or mission activities. I pointed outthose which I consider basic and made the dis-tinction between basic missions and non-basicmissions.

For example, I described the situation of afamous pastor who is so caught up in the re-newal of church life in this country that he getsto the point where he really doesn’t believethat this is the time to send missionaries over-seas. Why, he thinks, if other churches just hadthe body life or whatever kind of discipleshippatterns that he’s developing in his own con-gregation—Evangelism Explosion techniquesor some other special program that has been ablessing in the States—then when missionariesgo out to the corners of the earth they wouldcarry with them that new insight into congre-gational life and structure, and would, thus, bebetter missionaries.

This I do not question. What I am question-ing is, should we wait until all 386, 000 Ameri-can churches are imbued with that marvelousCoral Ridge spirit and insight before we con-tinue to send missionaries? Once when I talkedto Bill Gothard personally he expressed to mehis eagerness to give to Christian families allover the world the help that he feels they needso that they become “Gothardized, ” so tospeak. I don’t speak of that lightly for I’m sureit would be a great blessing to Christian fami-lies everywhere to be exposed to his teaching.But we can’t wait for every Christian family ofthe world to be blessed in that way before

Christian families of the world take up in theirdaily prayers and their family circle the burdenof world evangelization.

In fact, I do not believe that any local con-gregation in this country, or any Christian fam-ily either here or abroad is ever going to to beable to become a strong entity, solve its inter-nal problems, unless there is a strong hold onan external challenge. I think it is a law of psy-chology that a person who wants to findwholeness first and serve society second willnever find wholeness. Jesus put it differently,“He who seeks to save his life shall lose it ....”And the family which wishes to arrive at a cer-tain pinnacle of perfection before it acknowl-edges the needs of people outside of itself willnever arrive. I think that is a spiritual principle.

Now here is another emphasis that you’llfind very extensively treated, probably morethan you’re even interested in, and that is whatI call the precandidate crisis in this country. I’lltake just a moment to highlight it so that youwon’t miss it when you read the “Six EssentialComponents” article.

In speaking of automobiles, we often referto the power train. That is the thing that isguaranteed to be dependable over a certainnumber of years so that if anything goes wrongwith the power train they’ll fix it. I think it’ssupposed to last at least three years. That, youmight say, is the basic guts or backbone of thecar. If now you look at the power train of themission cause, it too has a U joint, an elementwithin that sequence of phenomena which I be-lieve could with a different metaphor be calledan Achilles heel. It is the weakest of all theweak spots of the entire mission cause, andtherefore, as you can well imagine inasmuch asI am trying to live up to the very ideals I’msuggesting, these days I give a great deal oftime to this issue.

The pre-candidate crisis could be defined aswhat happens when a thousand college stu-dents write to Wycliffe Bible Translators butmost of them —630 or so out of a thousand—never respond to Wycliffe’s answer. That is,63% are never heard from again. Ten thousandof the 18, 000 students at Intervarsity’s Urbanaconference signed cards stating that they werewilling for God to lead them overseas, butvery, very few ever went.

In other words, there is a huge gap betweenthose moments of high inspiration at mission-ary conferences, which continue to occur in


many ways, shapes and forms across Americatoday, and that final moment when the personactually becomes a candidate in a missionagency. There’s a great gap there. It is as if thepipeline is ruptured at that point.

In my estimation, the gap results from thefact that young people a hundred years agodidn’t have so much to learn to become awareof what was going on in missions. They alsodid not feel, as they may sense today, that somuch has already been done that perhaps theyare not needed. That plus a hundred other con-fusing things may dampen their enthusiasmfor going.

Today young people at such a stage areolder than they used to be. The average collegestudent today is five years older than he was ahundred years ago. In 1865 you could matricu-late at the State University of Iowa at the age of14, with no previous schooling. It is only re-cently in American history that you have hadto have 12 years of previous schooling in orderto go to the university.

So, compared to what they were for most ofAmerican history, college students today are,as it were, in middle age before they can getfree from schooling. The average age of gradu-ation from college for the first 200 years of ourcountry was 17, 16, and 15. When you hear thatThomas Jefferson was so bright he graduatedfrom college at the age of 17, you need to real-ize he was a bit retarded.

I was at Williamsburg not so long ago. Inthe chapel of Jefferson’s college located there,one of the guides gave us a lecture on famousthings about William and Mary College. In thequestion period I said to him, “Well, you saythat Thomas Jefferson was only 17 when hegraduated, thereby implying that he was an in-tellectual prodigy. Pray tell what was the aver-age age of matriculation at this college in hisday?” I knew the answer. I had made a ratherextensive study of just this issue. But this lec-turer obviously did not know. He fumbled andstammered, and then the time for questionswas over so we went to the next room.

In any case, our college students are muchmore cautious today than ever before. Theyneed proportionately more knowledge beforethey can make a sane decision. The implicationof that statement is that many who decide formissions are making insane, trigger-happy, im-pulsive, spookly decisions, which are not verysound, and they are using all kinds of pseudo-spiritual decision-making methods. They’re

shaky about what they decide, as they ought tobe. Furthermore, the complexity of the situa-tion and the limitation of their own knowledgeis such that you almost have to conclude that ifthey were to decide to be a missionary, theremust be something wrong with them! Are theyrunning away from something—a brokenhome or a broken engagement or a bad schoolexperience?

A vast number of people—perhaps, allthings considered, the highest quality group inAmerica today—do not decide to become mis-sionaries but nevertheless would probably bewilling to do so if they knew more about thesituation.

What are we going to do about that? Well,one way to grapple with that problem is to buya college campus and set up a program to befollowed as a model elsewhere and to try todraw out of the state universities and secularcolleges of America about 20, 000 students peryear.

Do you know how many Evangelical stu-dents are in secular colleges right now, year af-ter year? Close to a million and a half. Now,that excludes two-thirds of the Evangelicalbackground students who may not even betruly committed. The committed Evangelicalstudents number well over a million. To get 20,000 of them per year off the secular campus fora semester and then send them back with asolid biblical, historical and international per-spective wouldn’t be such a bad idea. You say,“Well, is it necessary?” That’s the whole ques-tion. You’ll have to decide for yourself if it isnecessary. But it is if it is essential to the cause.

This month we are hoping to see come to-gether a consortium of leading mission agen-cies in this country to promote training of thissort for students not yet candidates. Our as-sumption is that those who are candidates area very tiny percentage of those who would be-come candidates if there were better knowl-edge and understanding of the overall situa-tion.

Everything we have said so far leads to aconcept I hope to bring up again and again. It’sa new perspective for me, as are most of thethings I am telling you. It’s a phrase: “TheStrategy of Closure.” I’m not even sure it’sused in this paper, but it will be before the finaldraft for the book this year. A strategy of clo-sure is one which works in light of the overalltask and in view of its intended completion. Astrategy of closure is any strategy, no matter


how specific, minute and partial it may be,which is being performed in light of the overalltask and the conclusion of that task. Now letme tell you what is not a strategy of closure.

Most good missionary work is not beingdone as a strategy of closure. In other words,sad to say, most of what the average mission-ary and the average mission agency accom-plish is merely doing good things. No one cansay these good things are bad even if the desireis to make them as effective as possible. But,frankly, if you stopped and shook all thesegood people by the shoulders and said, “Wakeup! Look at the whole picture! ” they wouldn’tknow for sure how their work fits into thewhole picture. And if they were to standback—like they were looking back from themoon—and look at the earth and see the entireworld evangelization process passing beforethem, they would not be able, honestly and sin-cerely and on the basis of careful research, tosay that what they are doing is the most strate-gic thing that they could possibly do in orderto terminate and conclude the mandate of ourLord which is called “the Great Commission.”

I believe that not everyone has the right, theprivilege, the potential, the opportunity, andthe availability—even if they wish—to be fulltime in this, but I think ever serious believermust at least partake of a strategy of closure.We’ve got to work in terms of the overall pic-ture.

For example, what would happen if abunch of football players ran out on the field,all of them in great shape physically and readyto go, and with their goals in mind and every-thing else, but they simply ran with the ballwherever they got it in their hands? They

never huddled together; they never planned,“Well, you go there and I’ll go here, and whenthey think we’re going there, I’ll go aroundthere....” In other words, there was no overallstrategy to finish the game and to make thosetouchdowns. Obviously, they wouldn’t win thegame.

Or what if a bunch of construction workerswere to go out to build a great, huge building,each with his own set of blueprints—completeblueprints, mind you (call it their personal in-terpretation of the Bible, if you wish)—allready to follow his own blueprint by himself,not one of them comparing his blueprint withany others? Do you think that building wouldever get built?

Or, what if a number of Christians were togo out into all the world to preach the Gospeland never comparing notes with each other,never working together consciously within anoverall strategy of closure, would they evangel-ize the world? I don’t think so.

You can name on the fingers of one handthose key people, such as McGavran and a fewothers as well as a few mission societies, whoreally are thinking determinedly and enligh-tenedly in terms of a strategy of closure. I don’tthink we are going to get this job done if all wedo is to fall into our beds at night exhausted,knowing that we have worked just as hard aswe could possibly work.

That’s good old American logic, maybe—todo your utmost in your work—but it is notgood enough. God calls us to do our utmost forHis highest, and I have to believe that involvesbeing a conscious part of a “strategy of clo-sure.”

The average person in the pew is not justuninformed but also misinformed about mis-sions. The average person would not know, forexample, that 85 percent of all the schools inAfrica are there because missions foundedthem. Or that the largest technical university inLatin America is there because a missionfounded it. Or that the largest agriculturalexperiment station in Asia is a mission center.He would not know that the largest experimen-tal hospital in Asia is a mission center and thatthere are 600 mission hospitals in India. Theaverage person cannot pull all this informationtogether into one place. There is no way forhim to get the faintest idea of what the missiondollar does.

Even though Liberation theologians maychoose to disagree, the dollar that goes intomissions goes further and does more goodwork than almost anything you could possiblyconceive of. The amount of money Americansput into missions, $700, 000, 000 per year, is avery small proportion of the amount of moneythat nowadays is raised by the nationalchurches in the mission lands. I don't know ofany country, practically speaking, where a mis-sion agency is pouring more money in than thenational church itself is raising.

So it is a regenerating process that producesnew giving. That new money given in the mis-sion lands does not, of course, come back to theU.S.—sorry about that—but is given to a causewhich itself is a very benevolent one. But ifthese broad realities are not clear, what do yousuppose is the knowledge of the average sainttoday about anything 2, 000 years ago?

Let’s take a peek. As you know by now, wehave for convenience divided the whole of his-tory into 400-year periods rather than to try toget you to remember what happened in everycentury. In any event I’m not very interested ingetting people to remember unrelated details. Ithink the ability to remember something isalmost useless unless what you remember istied into some concept. So I would like now to

talk about concepts that relate to this first 400-year period.

First of all—and almost preliminary to anydiscussion of what happened so far back in his-tory—is the question that could be called histo-riographic. I’m sorry to disturb you with solong a word. It’s a question of how do youknow what you know. We say that the Romansdid this and the Romans did that. In speakingof his invasion of Gaul, Julius Caesar wroteback from Gaul, “Gallia est divisa in partestres.” How do we know at all that there was aman named Julius Caesar, or that he said that?

One of the most eminent professors in theworld today in the field of history is LynnWhite, Jr., whose article you’ll be reading a lit-tle later on. He made the statement that if itwere not for the Carolingian Renaissance wewould know no more about the ancient RomanEmpire than we know about the ancient Maya,which is not very much. Now, what we doknow about the Carolingian Renaissance wewill be taking up in the second 400-yearperiod, which we’ll be talking about it in thenext lesson. But it is amazing that, as LynnWhite, Jr. tells us, there are only four docu-ments available at this time in history thatcome directly to us from the era of the RomanEmpire. Four physical chunks of paper orparchment as the case may be. Everything elsewe know results from the literary output ofconverted savages in the forests of Europe andthe Bible study centers they established all overthe place. In each center they treated the Biblewith great care. Notice, these are the first Bibleschools you ever heard of where they not onlystudied the Bible but other literature—secularliterature—as well. They copied and recopiedespecially the Bible, but also a lot of the ancientRoman literature. Except for those four manu-scripts, whatever ancient Greek or Roman liter-ature we have today we got because of thatintervening, “Bible school” activity after thefall of the Roman Empire. And this rescue ofthe literature came just in time before the


Winter Chapter 5

The First Four Hundred Years

5 – 2 The First Four Hundred Years

Vikings swept in and burned most of it backdown to ashes again.

In other words, we’re looking back overmany centuries and catastrophes—manymountain ranges, leaving valleys of darknessin order to get clear back to Latin Rome. It isreally amazing that we know anything at allabout anything that far back. It’s as though wehave to physically go through multiple knot-holes just to reach back to that time.

There is a second dimension of difficulty,however, that isn’t just a physical problem. Ithas to do with blankets of prejudice. Every-thing we do has that complication. Forinstance, The Decline and Fall of the RomanEmpire by Edward Gibbon is a very detailedand lengthy set of volumes which scrounges itsinformation from many other documents, mostof which are still available. But it is a highlyselective, biased and colored account. Hiswhole purpose is to prove that the Christianfaith wrecked the Roman Empire. And the factthat he has a hard time proving this is at leastone positive thing, but the record he gives is adistortion due to his prejudice. And, as youpaddle back through history, you don’tuncover a single document that is unpreju-diced. The only really unprejudiced bookyou’ll ever find would seem to be the Bibleitself, which attacks its own people over andover again. That’s one reason people trust theBible.

It is a fact, however, that for some reasonthere is less prejudice in the modern era thanever before. Many of the more recent versionsof American history written in the last 20 yearsare less prejudiced (although there are stillsome that are quite prejudiced as well).

For example, there is the fact that theRoman Catholic tradition with determinationand thoroughness has in effect tended to reviseand twist the entire story of Christian historyin order to make its own church lineage looklike one single beautiful, continuous phenome-non. This means that you have to go easy witha Roman Catholic document when it is talkingabout the Celtic church. And you also can’ttrust an English document when it talks aboutthe Celtic church because the English churchwas even more irritated about the CelticChurch than were the Romans down in Rome.

And so everywhere you go you’re con-stantly running into huge prejudices, and theart of the interpretation of history is to a greatextent catching on to the prejudices. We’re try-

ing to find out what those prejudices are, andthen by allowing for them, figuring out whatactually must have been true.

Let me give you just one example of what Imean. There was a guy named Pelagius. I’msure that all of you who have heard of himimmediately think of him as a heretic. Augus-tine was the so-called “good guy” during thisperiod of time (better known as Augustine ofHippo—that’s in North Africa; the otherchurch leader named Augustine came decadeslater and was known as Augustine of Canter-bury, a missionary). Augustine of Hippo wasthe orthodox theologian who argued with Pela-gius, telling him and everybody that Pelagius’theology was lousy. To this day church histori-ans usually consider his theology to be a nota-ble heresy. They base their comments to a greatextent on Augustine’s judgment. Well, you geta man like Latourette looking into the wholeaffair once more, and he comes out with thestatement that Pelagius probably didn’t believeexactly what his antagonists said he believed.

That’s almost always true in an argument ifall you have available are the documents writ-ten by one side only. Maybe what the otherpeople are saying is not really what their oppo-nents said that they said. So Latourette comesup with the rather astounding statement thatPelagius probably was not Pelagian! He was atthe most maybe a “Semi-Pelagian.”

The question that an anthropologist mightraise over this whole situation is why werethese two fellows arguing in the first place?Because we have in existence today hardlyanything that Pelagius himself wrote, we can’tsimply read the text of his argument anddecide for ourselves; all we have are what hisaccusers said about him. Why was there anargument? That is the most important prelimi-nary question.

Aha—it’s not very hard to find out thatPelagius came from the wrong side of thetracks. He wasn't even a citizen of Rome. Hecame from the Cornwall area—the lower southend of Britain in the Celtic belt where theRoman legions were still in charge. Apparentlysome of the people there were highly educatedbut were not first-class Romans. When Pela-gius went down to Rome, he already knewGreek and Hebrew and Latin whereas Augus-tine, a first-class Roman citizen, knew onlyLatin and couldn't read either Greek orHebrew. So here Augustine is, upstaged by aguy from the sticks! I’m telling you that to


come from Cornwall is to have come from the“wild and wooly west, ” so to speak.

Picture Pelagius walking into Rome, muchabout him betraying his background from thesticks—he may even have had the wrong colorof hair, blonde instead of Mediterraneanblack—but nevertheless with such sophisti-cated academic credentials (better than Augus-tine’s). You can well imagine that this wouldprovoke an argument, no matter what Pelagiusbelieved. And we have two denominations, soto speak, one Celtic Christian and the otherRoman Catholic.

Okay, after visiting Rome and (Roman)North Africa, Pelagius went on his way to theMiddle East. We next hear about him when hegot into Jerome’s sphere, and Jerome calledhim a “Celtic pig, ” not a very scholarly evalua-tion, I suppose. He not only called him a pig,but actually said, “that stupid pig like all theother Celts, ” a comment which gives usinsight into the “broad research” Jerome haddone.

Then Pelagius disappears from the pages ofhistory except for other occasional references tohim in these documents from the period of theCarolingian Renaissance which were faithfullyand mechanically copied. These are still availa-ble to us, and when we read about Pelagius,we tend to say, “Oh, what a terrible heretic thisguy was.” All I’m saying is that when you goback and try to find out what happened, youbump not only into mechanical problems injust getting the data, but you run into culturalfactors—enormous prejudices, which mayactually cause even more misunderstanding.

One other example which my wife knowsmore about than I—maybe at a later date shecan fill in the details for you. The VenerableBede, as he is called, was one of the very fewhistorians during the first millennium, and oneof the most trustworthy. He wrote a verydetailed account of the English-speakingchurch. Even he had to deal with political cor-rectness. Bede lived in a post-Celtic era afterthe Synod of Whitby when the English churchhad supposedly adopted the Roman (Catholic)tradition. Although an Anglo-Saxon, he waseducated in a Celtic area but was politicallyunable to write anything that was pro-Celtic.Thus, all the way through his rather thick andvery interesting book, An Ecclesiastical Historyof the English Speaking People, you find Bedeconstantly taking pains to point out that Celticscholars were dead wrong about the Easter

date, the “tonsure” (or haircut that monkswore), and other equally “important” things.

However, leaking into the narrative, eithersubconsciously or very likely consciously, is asteady campaign. According to my wife, if youread the whole book and stop to think aboutwhat is really being said you get a differentpoint of view. You can’t just look at the overtmessage on the page. And what you see com-ing through is that this man Bede is really quitepro-Celtic. Before the Synod of Whitby, most ofthe Celts in Britain were followers of Pelagius;indeed many continued to revere him for fourhundred more years. In his book, Bedepresents these Celtic Christian leaders as hum-ble, godly people. In his detailed story of theexchange at the Synod of Whitby, the Romanchurch leaders come across as insufferablesnobs, even though by a sort of fluke they arethe ones who happen to have the correct theol-ogy. In other words, Bede bows to the politicalnecessity of following Rome, but you can tellwhere his sympathies really lie if you read theentire book carefully, being aware of the racialtensions of the time.

So here you have a piece of literature that issuperficially prejudiced in order to get pub-lished, but is maybe more accurate and sympa-thetic in its between-the-lines message. Theseare just examples of how historiography mustdiscover and grapple with prejudice.

One more point under historiography:what is it then that we actually do know? Mostof what we know in terms of the phenomenonof Christianity in the first 400 years after Christcomes from only one or two documents. Iteither comes from the New Testament itself,which is a blazing beacon of truth and light inthe early part of this 400-year period, or itcomes from one other set of documents, thework of Eusebius, the official chronicler of theRoman Empire.

Once again, most historians are embar-rassed to admit that they have to trust Euse-bius. When Christianity became officially toler-ated, he was asked by the government to pulltogether a lot of the documents that had sur-vived from the catacombs and the earlierperiod. So, he put together a massive multi-tomed set of stuff. He quoted from hundreds ofdocuments which are no longer available to us.So when you hear someone say, “Well, Tertu-lian said, ” this may not be Tertulian speakingbut Eusebius, supposedly quoting Tertulian.Now you have to ask yourself, “Did Tertulian


really say exactly this?” Probably, in most caseshe did. The problem with Eusebius is probablynot that he is misquoting those people, becausewhen we do have the original documents fromwhich he quoted, the quotations are fairlyaccurate. It’s the stuff that he did quote versusthe stuff that he didn’t quote. And he quotedwhat he wanted to quote and didn’t quotewhat he didn’t want to quote. Thus, inevitablyhundreds and hundreds of documents arecompletely lost sight of except for quotationsthat come from Eusebius.

This is also true of the editorial work thatwas done on what we call the Septuagint—theGreek Old Testament. It is a selection fromhundreds of other documents, and while everydocument in the Greek Old Testament isquoted in the Qumran scrolls, they quote atleast 400 other documents as well.

Thus, almost always when you’re readingthe Early Church Fathers—Clement of Alexan-dria, Tertulian, and all these greats—you’rereading what Eusebius pulled together. Nowthat is a rather hair-raising fact, but it is justone last point on the subject of historiography.We are very, very scarce in terms of directknowledge of this period. And it is just abso-lutely amazing when you open a modern bookon Rome, the Roman Empire, or on the EarlyChurch, how much we actually do know. It isprecious little, but it is amazingly much whenyou take into account the problems of histori-ography and the heroic work of the monaster-ies in all this. Now, let’s move on.

We do know the beginning of the periodand we do know the end. We know the begin-ning because it is in the New Testament, andwe know the end because a lot of things gotwritten down when Constantine and othersallowed Christianity to flourish in the last hun-dred years of the 400-year period—from AD300 to 400. At that point a huge number ofChristian bookstores—Zondervan Presses, soto speak—rolled into action, and a vast bulk ofliterature poured out in that fourth century.Thus, we really do know a great deal about thechurch in the fourth century. But we do notknow anything, except indirectly, about theperiod between the New Testament and thefourth century.

However, let me point out that if you knowthe beginning of a story and you know the end,that’s a great deal to know. It doesn’t take toomuch imagination to figure out what hap-pened in between. At least you are welcome to

imagine. Historians are not allowed this lib-erty. In fact, there is a whole school of histori-ography that will not allow anybody to makeany conjectures whatsoever. That to me isobscurantism.

Let me give you three examples. First ofall, we know that at the beginning of thisperiod the gospel was in a stable; at the end ofthe period it was ensconced in the Lateran Pal-ace of Rome, comparable to our White House.That is, the very palace of the emperors wastaken over by the Christian church when Con-stantine, due to his wife’s deriving from theeastern part of the empire, finally yielded toher wishes (women are often more powerfulthan men) and moved the headquarters of theempire from Rome to what was thereafter to becalled Constantinople. (Can you imagine theinfluence of a wife?) Anyway, that move leftbehind this palace which was then turned overto the most reliable people in town, which bythat time, even in Rome, happened to be Chris-tians. I say “even in Rome” because when theseat of government moved east from Rome, itran into a hotbed of Christianity as comparedto what was true at that time on the Italianpeninsula.

In contrast to the West, Christianity had asizable slice of the population in the easternpart of the empire. Perhaps as much as 30 per-cent of Greece was now Christian, for example.By then it was simply impossible to ignore thismovement. It is utterly ridiculous to assumethat, just because by a fluke Constantinebecame a Christian, that gave the Christians anunfair advantage. The professor at UCLA(Lynn White, Jr.) to whom I referred earlier hassaid that whether or not Constantine was con-verted, Rome would have had to tolerateChristianity anyway because by AD 300 therewere so many Christians throughout theempire.

The second example of being able to con-jecture because we know about the beginningand the ending is that we know the gospelwent from Galilee of the Gentiles to the Gothsduring this period. The arguments that tookplace in the fourth century were so virulentand the heretics driven out so systematicallythat those heretics became reluctant missionar-ies up in the Gothic areas. As a result, most ofthe Gothic peoples became at least nominallyChristian by the end of the 400 years. That is anend product that we know about. The mecha-nism whereby they were converted is not very


clear, but we know that they were Christians ofa sort by the end of the period. In some cases,the Goths accepted Arians exiled as hereticsbecause they welcomed the heretics as enemiesof Rome! Of course, there weren’t just “Goths”in middle Europe. We’re speaking in general ofa whole menagerie of tribes. It seems to mesomething like saying that “Africans” arebecoming Christian.

Thirdly, we know that the gospel wentfrom Galatia to the Celtic (pronounced keltic)peoples. We don’t know that it went literallyfrom Galatia to Galicia (in northeast Spain), butwe can at least dream. (This is probably themost far-out conjecture that you’ll hear fromme.) There was probably a connection, I’ll sug-gest, by family, by traders stretching fromGalatia of Asia Minor all the way to Ireland—across the northern part of Greece up throughwhat is Yugoslavia today, up to the Celtic peo-ples in what is still called the “Celtic belt”which stretched across Southern Europe. Therewas likely some kind of fairly constant commu-nication between the Celtic tribes, either byship from Asia Minor going west through theMediterranean and out through Gibraltar, thenup into northern Spain, up into what is calledGalicia (another Celtic name) in the Northwesttip of Spain, up into Brittany (another Celticname) in France, up into South Wales andCornwall or Wales and Ireland. All of this wasconnected.

For Paul the Apostle to have gone to theGalatians, who were Celtic peoples, or at leastto have visited among them and to haveimplanted the gospel into that Celtic belt givesus the possibility of imagining that that is themeans whereby the gospel got so early into Ire-land. Otherwise we have no explanation.

Note, I’m not saying that the Galatians ofthe New Testament were Celts. They couldhave been. They lived in the Celtic belt, in anarea named after the Celts, who landed there284 BC. Remember that the Greek word forGalatians, galatoi, is phonetically parallel to theword celt, the three consonants—g/k, l, t—arethe evidence.

We also know that the gospel that landedin Ireland was not Western but Eastern. It wasnot Roman in the Latin tradition of Christian-ity; it bears strong evidence of Greek and Egyp-tian Christian background. This, of course, isanother tell-tale evidence as to why CelticChristianity must have come from the easternend of the empire.

I have been talking about the historiogra-phy of a particular situation and how if we atleast know the end and the beginning we cando a certain amount of guess work into whathappened between the two periods. I havealready mentioned that Constantine’s conver-sion was not the main reason why the RomanEmpire became tolerant to Christianity. Youshould realize that Constantine did not pro-claim Christianity as the official religion ofRome. That did not happen until over a halfcentury later.

It is interesting that even after it becameofficial, there was a case of a short reversal,something like what happened in Chad whenChristianity had pretty much dominated thesituation there along with Islam. Do youremember how in Chad in the 1970s there wasa reversion to tribal religion when a new presi-dent came into office and forced all the govern-ment officials to go back through their tribalpuberty rites and revert to the earlier animisticreligious traditions?

In the Roman situation in the fourth cen-tury the emperor Julian tried to get the peopleof the empire to go back to their pagan tradi-tion. That is why he is still known as “Julianthe Apostate.” He grew up a Christian, butapparently didn’t like the politicization of theChristian religion—not surprising. Also, hehad a sort of deep inherent concern for thepast, and perhaps Christianity was still not suf-ficiently indigenized.

So he tried to reinstate the pagan tradition.He ordered the priests in the pagan temples totry to keep up with the Christian preachers.The Christian tradition emphasized helpingthe widows and the orphans and being kind tothe slaves, often even liberating them. Heordered the pagan priests to do the same andto preach to their followers that they should dosimilar good works. But it was really prettyembarrassing for them. Julian’s intendedpagan reform just didn’t work. It lasted justabout three years, and then collapsed whenJulian lost his life in a military battle and thenext emperor was a Christian.

The interesting thing about Christianity inthis period, however, is that as it began tomove out of its Palestinian background itdidn’t carry a Palestinian trait or culture withit. In Paul’s hands it was no longer simply aJewish tradition. To this day across the worldChristianity has no homeland; there is no holyplace like Mecca to which we turn nor any par-


ticular Christian culture, if we are careful notto canonize a particular tradition. It is the mostnearly non-cultural religion in the world.Islam, wherever it goes, has people facingtoward Mecca. They believe that their Korancan’t be adequately translated, or at least theydon’t like it to be translated. Christianity ischaracterized as a world religion. In somerespects it is the only world religion—the onlymulticultural religion—by the fact that it is notheld down by a particular ethnic origin. This iswhy it was able to conquer the Roman Empireand in doing so became a potentially unifyingfaith among a wide diversity of peoples. It didnot represent a particular language or culturalbackground.

Of course, there were many other reasonswhy the Christian religion was able to racearound the empire. Very crucial was the com-munication system made possible by the hun-dreds of thousands of miles of roads pavedwith stones, which enabled messages to gofrom the far reaches of the empire to Romeitself in the matter of a few days. Secondly, thePax Romana, produced a (forced) militarypeace which stretched across a huge section ofthe world. Because of this peace and the com-parative ease of travel, Christianity could evencross the English Channel to Britain, therebyintroducing another phrase, the Pax Britannica,or the Peace of Britain. Centuries later it waspossible for the British to rule the seas of theworld without fear of pirates because they fol-lowed the example of Julius Caesar who hadeffectively destroyed the ability of pirates toharass ships on the Mediterranean Sea. Exceptfor storms, travel by sea became as safe as onthe roads of the empire, making it possible forthe faith which had no ethnic origin to expandwith linguistic and geographical freedom.

Another characteristic of this early period isthe fact that there was no organized missionarywork. When Paul was headed for Spain, hewas part of a missionary team. But inevitablyhe went to the synagogues. When he wrotethat “all Asia has heard the gospel, ” he did notmean that he had preached to all the people inAsia Minor, as we now call it, much less whatwe call Asia today. In those days Asia merelymeant a small “county” at the western end ofwhat we now call Asia Minor. Nobody in theRoman era would have referred to Asia Minor,much less to China, as part of Asia. By sayingthat all Asia had heard the gospel Paulundoubtedly meant that he had been to every

synagogue in Asia, a small eastern section ofTurkey, because that was his approach. Thesesynagogues were where he focused because hewas trying to find the God-fearers, those Gen-tiles who had been drawn to the Jewish faithbut had not become Jewish proselytes. He wasalso trying to win godly Jews over to an evan-gelical faith in Christ.

Only at Lystra and at Athens do we findhim really bumping into pagan Greeks, and hedid not do so well in those cases because hisspecialty was working with people who hadalready become friendly to the Jewish tradi-tion. Of course, he knew about all the variouskinds of people: the Jews, the Greeks, the Bar-barians and the Scythians. And he was willingto become a Jew to the Jews, a Greek to theGreeks, and, I suppose, a Scythian to the Scyth-ians, although we don’t know of any work hedid among the Scythians. He just sort of namedthem as part of his anthropological list.

Although Paul, a Jew who had grown upin a Gentile setting, was not really evangelizingcross-culturally, he was nevertheless doingmissionary work because he was planting achurch where there was no church in thoseparticular cultural traditions—that is, therewas no indigenous type of Christianity there.Later on, Cappadocian prisoners who hadcome to Christ within the empire witnessed tothe Goths to the north, as did the exiled Arianbishops kicked out by the more orthodox lead-ers. To the east of the empire the so-called“Nestorian” bishops were also forced to leaveand carried the gospel further east beyond theboundaries of the empire. Barbarians to thenorth and the west invaded the empire andcaptured Christian girls who spoke of theirfaith and sometimes won their pagan hus-bands.

For centuries, however, there had been col-onies of Jews spread all over the Roman world.In a certain sense they made up what might becalled a “missionary compound.” Let’s take,for example, a synagogue in northern England,say, up toward Hadrian’s Wall. That syna-gogue was not a missionary outpost in theusual sense; it wasn’t a mission compound likewe think of today. But those who came to thatsynagogue revered their Bible, which wasmostly the same as the one we have in the OldTestament today. And they learned in thisBible that God wanted all the nations to hearthe gospel. Although that synagogue didn’thave missionary purposes like we would


expect from a mission compound, neverthe-less, it did have a missionary function becausethe Godfearers (Gentile believers) were drawninto that synagogue and hundreds of otherslike it scattered all over the Roman Empire. Forall we know, way up in Britain, it was the syna-gogues that preceded the witness to Christ andin that sense actually had a very valuable func-tion.

As a matter of fact, it is very likely, preju-dices being what they are, that Christians alldown through history looking back at their ori-gins have failed to realize the mighty contribu-tion of these thousands of Jewish synagogueswhich for centuries radiated the light of Godand paved the way for a faith that would elimi-nate almost entirely the Jewish cultural vehiclewhich they unconsciously embodied. Theremay have been one million of these Godfearersassociated with the ten million Jews in theempire. And ten million Jews is about 10% ofthe Roman citizenry.

It should be difficult to ignore the mission-ary significance of this fact. In all of subsequenthistory Jews have been upright, industrious,family-loving, God-fearing people. That theycould have consciously or unconsciouslyattracted a million Gentiles to their Bible (andmaybe 100, 000 Gentiles to convert completelyover to their culture—called proselytes) islikely something Christian historians havetended to overlook. We may have tended towrite off the vast Jewish diaspora as a purelylegalistic and non-functional faith, meanwhilethinking, superficially, that the Gentile versionof that faith—later to be called Christianity—was pure and not itself also a mixed multitude.

But we don’t really know about everythingthat far back in history. This first 400-yearperiod is very, very dark and much of it verydiscouraging in some ways. Yet we do knowthat those years ended up with a blaze of gloryby the year 400 (what I have named The Classi-cal Renaissance) simply because the world’smost powerful empire up to that point in his-tory had been taken over by the faith of ourLord.

But before Paul ever set to work, the Jewishdiaspora was in place. Peter said that “in everycity Moses is preached” (Acts 15:21). What thismeans is that the husky presence of believingJews throughout the Roman Empire was a defacto missionary movement to which we see anamazing parallel in the diaspora of Western

Christian culture today. Today, then, the Bibli-cal faith is also to be found “everywhere, ” butmainly in the garments of a particular (West-ern) cultural tradition. Only to the extent that itcan put on other clothes will it ever become atruly universal faith.

In the era of the Roman Empire the Biblicalfaith was found “everywhere” within thatempire in the enculturated form of the Jewishdiaspora, and to a much less significant extentbeyond its boundaries. We hear of Jewish Syn-agogues in India and Korea, for example.

Today, however, the Biblical faith is to befound “everywhere” this time, while found inmany forms, it is nevertheless to a great extentin an enculturated form called Christianity.And, like the Jewish diaspora it is unevenlyleavened by true faith. There are masses ofpurely wooden “followers” of this faith crowd-ing the ranks of Christians just as there werethe equivalent within the Jewish diaspora,which Paul at times downgraded harshly as alegalistic deadness. In other cases he insistedthat faith was still to be found in that dias-pora—that “not all Israel is Israel” (Rom 9:6).

We would have to say the same about themodern expansion of Christianity around theglobe. It is a mixed movement, not just a purefaith. Millions of “Christians” East and Westare mere nominal followers. The true faith isfound only partially but nevertheless vitally.

Thus, the question is not whether Judaismor Christianity are, in part, faith communitiesbut whether either of them are candidates for auniversal faith. Both of them are enculturatedvehicles of true faith—fairly specific culturalvehicles. The mission task is apparently thennot to extend either of these vehicles but toextend the Biblical faith, preaching Christ, notChristianity, preaching the Bible, not all thetwists and turns of our enormous theologicaltradition. And we return to our earlier conclu-sion: only to the extent that our faith can puton other clothes can it ever become a truly uni-versal faith.

[But this is happening before our eyes. Afri-cans have taken the ball and run with it—in theenormous AIC movement. The same thing hashappened in the phenomenal Chinese housechurch movement, and in the “ChurchlessChristianity” movement to faith in Jesus Christin millions of Hindu homes. Added 20 yearslater.]

Now we come to the “Barbarian invasions.”Shortly after the year 400 we find a great dealof chaos—the beginning of the first of the twoDark Ages. Looking at the chart of the FiveRenaissances, we see the year 400 and the year800. Where are the two Dark Ages? You canshade in the hundred or so years after each ofthose two dates. Those are the two Dark Ages.The first was just after 400, when the so-calledBarbarians—the Germanic tribes—swept intoRome and Southern England. The second DarkAges occurred just after 800 when a new anddifferent type of barbarians, the Vikings,swooped down from Scandinavia upon the by-now Christianized earlier kind of Barbarians.Between those two Dark Ages, however, youhave the marvelous Carolingian Renaissance,named for Charlemagne. (Carol refers toCharles or Carl—it’s all the same word—andCharlemagne is simply another version of thesame word with the magne suffix, whichmeans great.) Once again, now at the end ofthe 400-800-year period, there was a blaze ofglory far, far brighter in many ways than theparallel blaze of glory at the end of the first 400years. Thus, although there were two DarkAges, there were also two Light Ages. Therewas an age of Light between 300 and 400, andanother Light Age, renaissance, between 700and 800, beginning actually a little before 700).

At least one historian has noted that whatwas “dark” for the Roman world was actuallythe dawning of a great light for the Barbarianworld. No matter how you look at it, the timebetween 700 and 800 was a period of consolida-tion and scholarship, and Bible transmissionand Bible study, etc.

It is possible to observe that in the fourhundred-year period between 1200 and 1600 athird Dark Age occurred. This was not due to amilitary invasion so much as to the widespreaddevastation of the Bubonic plague in the mid-

dle of the 14th century. The plague, whichmight be called a bacteriological invasion, wasfar more destructive than either of the two ear-lier invasions.

Now, with this rough canvas before us, let’sgo back and pick up some of the traces of theCeltic tradition. Although I’ve already told youa great deal about this in different ways, theCeltic tradition is usually passed over in ourhistory books. Why? It is partly because thisperiod of the Celtic tradition does not have anymodern advocates. We’re dealing once morewith the phenomenon of prejudice. In fact, notfor at least a thousand years do you have anygroup of people who were eager to tell aboutand to preserve a recollection of the Celticchurch. And there hangs a very, very uniqueseries of events.

As I implied in the first lesson, in 410 andafter, everything was cut to ribbons by the Ger-manic tribal peoples, who took over Rome it-self. The result was such chaos that the peoplein Rome began to lose the ability to speakLatin. During the fifth century the only outpostof peace and quiet was in Ireland. Even Eng-land was under tremendous stress becausewith the fall of Rome and the withdrawal ofthe Roman legions from Britain, other Barbari-ans—the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes—had invaded England from across the channel.Simultaneously, the Celts (by and large stillsemi-pagan) of Ireland and Scotland also in-vaded from the west and north. But St. Patrickand other Christians who had been captured inBritain brought the Gospel to them early in thisperiod. And they responded almost en masse.

Eventually it was from Ireland that the Gos-pel came en force. Scholarship came, the Biblecame, documents came. At this point there wasno Celtic church as such, just monastic centers,which were both scholarly and missionary out-posts. To them, the transmission of the Bible

Winter Chapter 6

The Second Four Hundred Years(AD 400–800)


6 – 2 The Second Four Hundred Years (AD 400–800)

and the transmission of the faith were one andthe same. These Celtic monks knew not onlyLatin but Greek and Hebrew. Thus, the peopleof the city of Rome, now dominated by Gothicinvaders, asked for teachers from Ireland tocome to teach them how to speak Latin again.

What an amazing twist! It is as if the Chi-nese were to invade the United States, and af-ter a hundred years everyone was speakinghalf Chinese and half English and didn’t knowwhich was which; so U.S. government officialshad to go to Nairobi to bring some Oxford-accented Africans to come and teach us Englishin the United States. That’s exactly parallel tothe situation in Rome. Because of the chaos ofthe invasions, the aqueducts no longer broughtfresh water to the city. Indeed, the whole citywas practically a malarial swamp. They forgotskills they had known, and for a long, longtime things really ran down hill. This is the“fall of Rome”—the city of Rome, not the seatof the Roman empire, which long before hadbeen shifted to Constantinople.

But the Irish “church” (that is, the CelticChristian movement which was more like anetwork of Youth with a Mission bases) was adifferent kind of a structure. Nevertheless itwas a “church” of a sort which retained and ex-tended the faith wherever it went. The CelticPeregrini, or “wandering monks” of which La-tourette writes, went all over England and Eu-rope, spreading the Gospel.

However, as you read the usual church his-tory texts, you really have to look hard foreven hints about Celtic Christianity. Until re-cently the only decent book on the subject wasa University of Chicago book called The CelticChurches by John T. McNeill. The subtitle ofthat book is the most electrifying thing aboutthe whole book. I was truly amazed when Ifirst saw it when the book came out in the mid’70s. The entire title read The Celtic Churches,a History 200-1200. I was staggered and de-lighted that a man of McNeill’s stature as ascholar would press home the point that theIrish Christian tradition actually began as earlyas 200 and was not snuffed out significantlyuntil 1200. In light of most of earlier scholar-ship, McNeill’s audacity is an act of academiccourage because only in the last 20 or 30 yearshas research on the Celtic church begun to besignificant. It’s a big reversal of the study ofWestern civilization to uncover the vitality andthe power of this Celtic movement. And morethan any other single book McNeill’s book tells

the story. I can’t demand that you all get it; youcan look it up in the library.

I wish I could say that Latourette does agood job in this area—and he goes a longway—but at the time he wrote, he simplydidn't have the data available to him.

But, until almost the eighth century the Cel-tic Christians in general were well beyond theMediterranean sphere of things, like Pelagius,whom Augustine of Hippo and others in theearly fourth century considered a heretic out-sider. Thus, some might ask if the theology ofthese Celtic Christians was orthodox. Well,they were somewhat orthodox in the technicalsense of the word, if you mean Greek or East-ern Orthodox, since from the East is wheretheir faith originally came. They were certainlymore nearly Orthodox than Catholic.

But were they sound, you might wonder?Sure, they were sound. After all, the basic bookfor them was the Bible, revered above all oth-ers, and that’s a pretty sound book. They werea bit bizarre; all of us in our cultural traditionsare a bit bizarre. Some people, you know, regu-larly eat worms; “one man’s meat is the otherman’s poison, ” as they say. And if you stopand think of it, if you look at us from the van-tage point of some other culture, we also in ourculture do absolutely ridiculous things. Thus,okay, the things that some of these Celticmonks did probably seem a little screwy to us.

Nevertheless, here’s this monk by the nameof Cuthbert up in Northumbria in NorthernEngland. He’s standing out there on the sea-shore surrounded by the mist and the fog inhis early morning time of meditation. As thewaves go back and forth, back and forth, he’smeditating on the grace of God. Only a fewyears before, this person’s forebears werehead-hunting savages, and you wonder whattransforming power has come into his life. Youjust cannot avoid the conclusion that it is theGospel of Christ.

But like every other tradition, when thepeople in their first blush accept the Gospel,they still have all kinds of strange things float-ing around in their world which gradually getsluffed off. Irish were drinking out of skulls aslate as the 16th century.

When my daughter was doing some re-search last year for her senior thesis at Caltech,she uncovered the fact that in the Celtic area, inthe 1850s (a long time after the RevolutionaryWar and shortly before the Civil War). a num-ber of industries went broke because of the re-


vivals that were taking place. One industrythat blinked out was the one that producedglass eyes. Before the revival period they wereproducing thousands and thousands of glasseyes. Why? Because it was a very commonthing in brawls in bars for people to punch outthe eyes of other people. Everyone knew thatyou must not gouge out both eyes; after all, wewere real Christians about it, weren’t we? Butto gouge out just one eye was a respectableway to leave your mark on the other man, andthe practice of doing this was so common thatmaking glass eyes was a major industry.

Now, that tradition—eye gouging—did notcome out of the Bible, nor was it the result ofthe Gospel nor did the Gospel instantly elimi-nate it. Rather, it was a feature that still re-mained of the social culture that was there be-fore the Bible came, before the revival and thepreaching of the Gospel really pressed home tothose people. But where did they get this sa-tanic wicked evil? You can’t explain suchthings apart from a “god of this world” whoseends are destruction. And to root that kind ofevil out of a society takes a long time.

When you look at the Celtic churches andmonastic centers way back in the 400-to-800-year period you must, as good missionaries,take into account the background of these peo-ple and try to understand how far they hadcome from where they were before the Gospelgot to them.

Harold Cook in his excellent book, HistoricPatterns of Church Growth, has an excellentchapter on the Celtic church. I read it before hesent it to press and suggested that he take intoaccount McNeill’s book which he had not yetseen, and so he did refer to it. Although I can’tremember all the details, I feel that he did avery good job on the Celtic Church. I wasn’tthe one who suggested that he include theCelts in his book; he already knew quite a bitabout them when he sat down to develop a se-ries of lectures to present at the School ofWorld Mission. Those lectures then became hisbook. On his own he decided to include theCeltic church. I felt it was a surprising andwonderful thing that a professor from MoodyBible Institute would choose the Celtic churchas an example of early missionary passion eventhough many theologians would consider theirChristianity not “balanced” nor truly sound.But don’t ever let me say that any form ofChristianity is balanced, because no form ofChristianity truly is. Sound? Yes! Authentic?

Yes! Balanced? No!As I have already said, the early evidences

of Celtic Christianity are so hazy that it is anaudacious thing for McNeill to start his bookout with the year 200. But there are evidencesof the early existence of Christianity in south-ern Britain when Constantine became the em-peror of Rome and turned the lights on, mak-ing it legal to be a Christian. That’s whathappened in 312 in the edict of Milan whenConstantine declared that there would be nomore persecution of Christians. Christianitywas already deeply entrenched, though stillgreatly persecuted in the east. But Westernscholars have not in general realized just howmany Christians there already were in Britainby the year 200.

When Constantine took over and sensedjust how widespread Christianity was, he con-vened a council in 314 in a little place in south-ern France called Arles. Three bishops—CelticChristians—are recorded to have come to thiscouncil from southern England. EvidentlyChristianity was already flourishing in Britainbecause the Celtic church there already had atleast three bishops!

Later in that same century Pelagius showedup in Rome. Remember? He was a highly edu-cated and sophisticated Celt even though hecame from the wrong side of the tracks. Butculturally, he was quite different from theChristians in Rome and North Africa. Evenmore difficult for them was the fact that histheological stance was not considered proper,being much closer to that of the eastern end ofthe empire than it was to that of Augustine ofHippo and the church in Rome in the West.Whatever is true about his theology, we knowthat the followers of Augustine of Hippo hadmonumental arguments with Pelagius. In factall we know about him is what some of his op-ponents said of his thinking.

Now, I’m not trying to boost Pelagius or histheology at this point. I’ve already done that.I’m only stressing the fact that here was ahighly sophisticated scholar coming out ofsouthern England, way out in the westernsticks in Cornwall, the point that juts out intothe Irish Sea. His scholarship and Biblicalknowledge show that even in the fourth cen-tury there was a relatively advanced kind ofChristianity in England in a situation which to-day might be called a mission field.

After the fall of Rome to the Ostrogoths in410 and the resulting invasion of somewhat-


Christian England by Barbarians from the con-tinent a few decades later, things were entirelydifferent.

I want to mention some things that youjust won’t believe. In 432 Patrick went to Ire-land. His autobiography is a fascinating storythat fortunately has come down to us todayfrom that time.

Frankly, it is perfectly possible, and manyof the books admit this, that Patrick was notthe first missionary to Ireland. Some historiansbelieve that there was a lot of Christianity inIreland before Patrick ever went there. Not allscholars are even sure that there was a mannamed Patrick. But there are some documentsattributed to him that are breathtakingly beau-tiful, high-minded and spiritual. Obviouslysomeone wrote them.

The only catch is, in terms of Patrick, whenyou go on down through 500, 600 and 700 andget down to 730, there you find Bede. Now theVenerable Bede was the Eusebius of the secondEra of Light. Remember that in my approach,you have periods of Light—one toward theend of the first 400 year cycle (300 to 400) andanother toward the end of the next 400 year cy-cle (700 to 800). In the first period of Light, orrenaissance, Eusebius was the historian. TheVenerable Bede was the historian in the secondperiod of Light.

Although most readings give the impres-sion that Bede was very critical of the CelticChristian movement, you will recall that bothmy wife and I feel that when Bede wrote theEcclesiastical History of the English SpeakingPeople he was in fact pro-Celtic, as you can seeif you read between the lines. Interestingly,however, for our point here, he doesn’t sayanything at all about Patrick. Here is the mostcomplete narrative of the story of Christianityin the British Isles, and there is no referencewhatsoever to Patrick, not even negative. Thatis a very, very confusing and mysterious situa-tion.

Bede must have used all the documentsavailable to him at that time. And, of course, hewas writing much later than both Patrick andthe time represented by the Arthurian legend,which probably occurred shortly after the Ro-man legions withdrew from Britain to protectRome from the Gothic invasions. King Arthur,who may have lived in the period of the An-glo-Saxon invasions in England—a type of Bar-barian invasions shortly after 410—was appar-ently pushed over into western Britain. Of

course, Arthur came into existence in a literarysense centuries later.

So we’re looking back through history allthe time, and it’s very hard to find out the truthabout the Celtic Christian situation. But onething we can perceive comes from the effectthey had on the pagans they evangelized. Wedo know that the Celtic Christian monks cer-tainly had a lot of Christian vitality.

Around the year 500, Columba, the secondson of an Irish chieftain and a member of a Cel-tic order, started the first missionary trainingcenter in history. At that time Scotland was to-tally pagan, so Columba discretely set up hiscommunity on the island of Iona, just a fewmiles off the coast of Scotland. Later on, a simi-lar missionary training center was establishedon the other side of Scotland just below thepoint where it joins England. Once again it wason an island, at least when the tide was up, butotherwise a peninsula of sorts. This second out-post was called Lindisfarne. Both of these train-ing centers began sending missionaries notonly into Scotland but down into England,which was now mainly occupied by the paganAngles, Saxons and Jutes. They also begansending missionaries across the English chan-nel. Columban, not as well known as Columba,went to the continent in the late 500s. He trav-eled all over the place, ricocheting and rever-berating as far down as northern Italy. Downthere the various other kinds of Christians—mainly those who had followed Augustine ofHippo and called their theology catholic—wereas mad at him as the Jews were at John theBaptist. To try to bring some resolution to theargument, Columban ended up writing schol-arly epistles to the pope, telling him that hehad the Easter date wrong, and so forth.

There were many Celtic missionaries, andthey established monastic missionary centersin so many places both in the British Isles andon the continent that finally the pope (of whatis now called the Roman Catholic church) de-cided that his “catholic” brand of Christianityought to get into the act. So in 596 he sent up toEngland Augustine of Canterbury (not to beconfused with Augustine of Hippo, whose dis-ciples 200 years before had argued theologywith Pelagius).

This later Augustine timidly settled in Can-terbury, a small peninsula jutting out into theEnglish channel in the south of England and asclose to the continent as it was possible to beand still be in England. There he converted the


king and queen of the area and established theRoman Christian tradition.

To this day there are two archbishops in theEnglish church—the Archbishop of York whorepresents the Celtic tradition and the Arch-bishop of Canterbury representing the Romantradition. The fact that the Archbishop of Can-terbury is considered in a popular sense thetop leader of the Anglican church shows thateventually the scales tipped very slightly in fa-vor of the Roman tradition. But, the fact that,technically, the Archbishop of York is equal tothe Archbishop of Canterbury (the latter is“first among equals”) shows you that in actual-ity the Celtic tradition held very strong.

York is in northern England, where the Cel-tic tradition held on the longest, and Canter-bury is in southern England where Augustinefirst landed. To this day in the English churchthe Archbishop of York by his vestments repre-sents the Eastern form of Christianity and theArchbishop of Canterbury, with vestments de-rived from the Latin Roman secular magis-trates, represents the Western form of Chris-tianity. Is it any wonder that EasternOrthodoxy and Western Catholicism eventu-ally split?

The Celtic tradition, as we have seen, origi-nally derived mainly from the eastern part ofthe Roman Empire, revealing this fact by theirslightly different theology, their tonsure (haircut of the monks) and their method of calculat-ing the date on which Easter was celebrated.(The Celts celebrated it the first day of springaccording to the solstice, whether or not thatwas on a Sunday. In this custom they again fol-lowed what had been the pattern of the churchin the east.)

Thus, in 597 Augustine of Canterbury wassent as a missionary to England by Pope Greg-ory, the first pope of any significance and oneof the most revered of all popes since. Since thevery title pope was invented later, Gregorywas simply known in his era as the bishop ofRome. But he was a very dynamic and godlyman, a product of the Benedictine monastic tra-dition. Even as many of our presidents havecome out of military experience—for example,Eisenhower and Kennedy—most of the bestearly popes came from the monastic tradition.This has continued to be true for most of Ro-man Catholic history.

This second Augustine, the missionary, wasnot in any sense as capable as Gregory theGreat. And he didn’t have the same sense of

missionary calling as was true of the Celticmissionaries who wandered all over Englandand the continent. Augustine had not beentrained as a missionary. He really didn’t wantto go to England and try to evangelize the pa-gan Angles and Saxons. He was afraid of them.He went only out of obedience to Gregory.

It is interesting to read some of the letterswritten by Gregory to Augustine which Bede150 years later preserved in his writings. Itseems that when Augustine and his fellowmonks got as far as the coast of France acrossfrom England, he wrote back to Gregory, es-sentially asking, “Are you sure we shouldcross the English Channel? Isn’t there a betterway?” But Gregory said, “No! I want you tocross! To evangelize those people, you need tobe there.” That became the beginning of West-ern or Roman Christianity in England, long af-ter—note—Celtic Christianity had been wellestablished.

One might ask, why did the Angles andSaxons respond to the Roman missionariesmore than to the Celtic ones from the north?Well, they responded to both. They respondedbest when a missionary lived among them. It isalso true that when they had invaded Englandafter the withdrawal of the Roman legions, thepeople they fought with to take over the landwere all Celts, whom they pushed over into thewestern seaboard of present day Cornwall andWales. Taking over the religion of a conqueredpeople, remember, isn’t a shoo-in. Also, CelticChristianity stressed humility and a simple life-style. Again, by contrast, Roman Christianityloved ceremonies and had behind it the lovefor pomp and ceremony. It also had the statusof the immensely prestigious, although nowquite defunct, Roman Empire in the West (stillalive in the East).

So, at this time the picture of Christianity inEngland was mainly Celtic except in the south-east near Canterbury in Kent. Celtic missionar-ies from the West and North had already pene-trated deep into middle England, setting upand reestablishing monastic houses whereverthey went. But coming mainly from the twomissionary training centers, both in the north,they had not yet really established themselvesstrongly in the south. Augustine landed at theright place.

Thus it was that the clash begun two hun-dred years earlier with Augustine of Hippoand Pelagius came to a head with Augustine ofCanterbury and Aidan and other Celtic abbots


from Lindisfarne, Iona and the many monaster-ies they had founded. Augustine’s assignmentwas not just winning Angles and Saxons, butturning heretical Christians (Celts, followers ofPelagius) into Catholic Christians. He was suc-cessful to a certain extent, especially in win-ning the king and queen in the area of Kent toRoman Christianity.

Also, when the king of Northumbria, KingOswy, was converted by Celtic missionaries totheir brand of the faith, he looked around for asuitable Christian bride and chose the daugh-ter of the king down in Kent. It wasn’t long be-fore the couple recognized how awkward itwas for him to be Celtic and for her to be Ro-man in her faith, especially as it related towhen to fast or feast for Lent and Easter. So in664 King Oswy called a council to be held atthe Celtic monastery of Whitby, more or less inthe north-central part of England. Whitby, inci-dentally, was a double monastery with bothmen and women sections, but headed by awoman.

Bede gives a detailed account of what wenton there—the arguments to and fro, and theoutcome of it all. From a very young age, Bedehad lived in a monastery founded by Celticmissionaries. But the decision at Whitbychanged it into a Benedictine (Roman) house,so he now wrote with the Roman Catholicviewpoint even though one who reads his ac-count carefully, as mentioned earlier, can’thelp but notice the respect and appreciation hehas for the genuine humility and faith of theCeltic monks who came to the Synod ofWhitby.

This Synod is considered by Roman Catho-lic historians, and to some extent by Protes-tants as well, to be the great watershed of theconflict between the Roman and (as both Prot-estants and Catholics might say) “true Chris-tianity.”

As we have already pointed out, the Celticchurch at this time was probably truer to thefaith of the early apostles than was the Romanchurch. The final outcome of the Synod ofWhitby supposedly hinged on which brand ofChristianity was more true. Rome’s followersclaimed as their founder the Apostle Peterwho, they said, was given the “keys of thekingdom” by Christ himself. The Celts fol-lowed the Apostle John, probably because oftheir long-standing connection with the Chris-tianity of the Middle East where John residedfor so many years. King Oswy, it seems, was

partially persuaded by the matter of “the keysof the kingdom, ” though he had great respectand love for the Celtic missionaries from Lin-disfarne.

Today, if in a book on church history youcome to a section that talks about the conver-sion of the English and Augustine of Canter-bury is praised, you know that you are readinga Roman Catholic perspective, even if it is aProtestant textbook. Such a book has a distinctRoman Catholic bias obvious from the fact thatthe great missionary work of Celtic Christian-ity is rarely mentioned, if at all. And yet, exceptfor the very minor work done by Augustine inKent, missions in England at this period didnot come from the south but from the north,not from Rome but from Iona and Lindisfarne.Latourette makes this clear once and for all inhis seven volume History of the Expansion ofChristianity.

It is also true that even the Synod of Whitbyis overblown by the Roman tradition. This maynot the place to go into that, but Theodore ofTarsus—from the East—was the man who ar-rived from Rome shortly after that Synod andessentially rescued it from oblivion. We’ll comeback to this in a minute.

Although Ireland and Wales did not havesuch well-known missionary training centerslike Iona and Lindisfarne, Celtic Christiansfrom there also reached out to the admittedlypagan Anglo-Saxons in central and even south-ern England. Indeed, the Celtic peregrini(which means wanderers and refers exclu-sively to the Celtic missionaries) evangelizedand set up monastic houses not only on thecontinent and in eastern Europe, but cleardown into Italy, up into Iceland, and on theFaro and other islands to the northwest of Ire-land. There are even some possibly questiona-ble evidences that Irish missionaries may havearrived in Greenland or in some of the north-ern areas of the United States. All told, CelticChristianity and its missionary movement inparticular was very virile. Ireland can be saidto be the only nation in the first thousand yearsof Christian history that was a truly “mission-ary” nation.

I want to comment just a bit more about thepossibility of Irish missionaries coming to theU.S. hundreds of years before Columbus “dis-covered” America. Twenty years ago peoplelaughed at the idea that not only Celtic voyag-ers but also Canaanites had visited our shoresway back in history. But archeologists have


found Canaanite and Phoenician inscriptionsin Massachusetts. And there are early but veryrare signs of Celtic influence as well. Such evi-dence really disrupts all of our previous ideas,but the fact is that this Celtic church went farand wide. Although in Latourette you’ll find avery significant Celtic Christian movement dis-cussed, much more data has come to light sincehe wrote his books. Today, scholars studyingthe situation tend to be from France, Scandina-via and Germany with a few from England(mainly women) and recently a few from theU.S.. Among the Anglo-Saxon English there isstill, as you know, a real bias against the Irishand anything pertaining to them historically.

What are the missionary lessons we canlearn from the invasion of the pagan Anglo-Saxons into England in this second 400-year cy-cle after Christ? We know that the Anglo-Saxons who invaded and conquered Britain (aCeltic name) were completely pagan, whereasthose they conquered, the Celtic peoples, wereto some extent Christian. Here’s a case wherepagans conquered Christians. It’s usually veryhard for the conquerors to take the faith of thepeople they have conquered. It is easier theother way around. Therefore, despite my seem-ing anti-Rome upbringing, I have to admit thatit was a good thing that the Romans arrived—they were culturally more acceptable to the An-glo-Saxons.

Likewise, it’s a good thing today for an-other denomination to arrive if the Christianswho are already in a given place represent adifferent ethnic or cultural tradition from thepeople you are trying to win. Let me give you amodern example. It would be much easier for,say, Southern Baptists to win the Turkana peo-ple of Kenya than for Presbyterians to try towin them. Why? Because the Presbyterians ofKenya are mainly Kikuyus, who, for many gen-erations have been enemies and have despisedthe Turkana. Therefore, in evangelizing theTurkana, it is better for some other denomina-tion to take on that task than for the Turkananot to become Christians at all. Unfortunately,the Southern Baptists don’t happen to be in-volved in reaching the Turkana.

Well, I’m just giving you a modern illustra-tion of what happened in England in the 500sand 600s. Thus, for the Romans to arrive with adifferent form of Christianity, which was notall that good but also not all that bad, was mis-siologically a good thing. It was useful becausethen the Anglo-Saxons could become Chris-

tians without saying that they were now be-coming Celts.

Today for the same reason some of theBrahmins and middle caste peoples of Indianeed to become Christians without having toimply that by so doing they’ve become un-touchables. To me this parallel is very close towhat happened so long ago in England.

Also there is another parallel. In contrast tothe general lack of missionary passion in theRoman tradition back then, where did CelticChristianity get theirs? Every Celtic monasteryhad a scriptorium where they copied the Bibleday in and day out. I can only conclude that asthey copied and lovingly illustrated thesescriptures, they also read them and understoodthe Bible, even the Great Commission. There isno other reason on earth that I can figure outwhy the Celtic Christians were so avidly mis-sionary. This is why the Roman church fearedthat without a Roman missionary presence inEngland the Celtic tradition would win overthe Anglo-Saxons and thus expand the non-Roman Celtic base that was already there. Ihave to assume that that was a major part ofGregory’s concern.

Legend says that Gregory had seen someblonde-haired boys being sold as slaves in theslave market in Rome, and had asked, “Wheredo these people come from?” When told theywere Angles from then-called England, he wasvery interested and said, “ Maybe we shouldsend some missionaries over there, Angels toreach the Angles.” Whether this story is true ornot, at least that’s the tradition. But believingas they did that Celtic Christianity was heret-ical, inevitably, he also must have reflected thatif the church of Rome didn’t send their Romanbrand of faith up there, those Anglo-Saxonswould become Celticized.

You can see the parallel here, say, to somePresbyterians worrying that a more recent out-fit like, say, the Assemblies of God might moveinto a vacant portion of an area which had longbeen considered Presbyterian mission territory.In the 20th century it has sometimes been acase of a mission trying to move in with what itconsidered to be a superior theology ratherthan missionaries simply going where therewas no faith at all.

Perhaps I should also comment a bit moreon my statement about how difficult it is forconquerors to accept the religion of the peoplethey have conquered. There are a few cases ofthis. The Romans conquered the Greeks, but


eventually took over a great deal of the Greekculture. It was certainly true that the Vikings,which we will talk about in the next lesson,took over the Christianity of the people theyconquered.

But where this has occurred historically, theconquerors were usually crude savages comingout of the forest into a more sophisticated situ-ation. And it isn’t too hard to imagine that theywere eventually overawed by what Christian-ity had produced rather than by the kind offaith that the Christians possessed.

Let me point out another little missiologicaltechnique here. The Romans were not sodumb. Remember the surface differences be-tween the Celtic Christians and the RomanChristians at Whitby? (By the way almost al-ways the differences between cultural tradi-tions come out in the form of tug-of-wars overtrivialities.) What were they arguing about?The Easter date and the way they cut their hairand the type of monastic order they had. Yousay, “Well, why if they were brothers in Christwould they argue about things like that?”Well, they were aware of about 150 other littlecultural details that were different. Culturallyantagonists, they irritated each other (today wecall it culture shock) and latched onto thosesurface issues, saying, “Ah, these are impor-tant.” Practically all the theological argumentsdown through history resolve down to triviali-ties which hide much more significant anddeep-seated prejudices as well as ethnic differ-ences.

Now in the situation that they then faced,what did Pope Gregory the Great do? Here’s amajor missiological insight. It was an act of un-believable wisdom for the Romans to eat hum-ble pie, go over into the eastern part of the em-pire to nowhere else but to Tarsus. Tarsus, youknow, had to be very significant, not only foranyone who reads the Bible (after all, that’swhere Paul came from), but for those CelticChristians whose Christianity harked from theeastern end of the Mediterranean.

So they latched onto a monk there who waskind of on the skids, already 66. But Theodorewas a good man, a solid customer, loyal toRome. note that they deliberately chose a manfrom that end of the Mediterranean whosehaircut, being Eastern, was the same as the Cel-tic tradition, and asked him, “Will you be theRoman church representative to the Celts inEngland?” And they made a deal with him.This was sort of like the Jerusalem council go-

ing to Cypress to get Barnabus due to hisGreek/Hebrew background.

I imagine he said, “Ummmm, yeah!” Sothey sent him first to Rome and then up to Eng-land. Yet throughout history he is called Theo-dore of Tarsus. It was a very strategic move tosend him into that situation because he camefrom the East, which the Celts trusted. But theyhad him stay in Rome long enough for his hairto grow out so that it could be combed like theRoman tonsure.

Coming from his background, he couldnow tell the Christian Celts, “Look, I used tocut my hair just like you do. I used to celebrateEaster according to the soltice of the sun, justlike you.” But now, here he is, a respected sen-ior, coming from the right place but wearingRoman garments. The Roman strategistsrightly calculated that Theodore was the kindof a guy who would be acceptable to those Cel-tic people, mollify them and perhaps even winthem to the Roman faith. And he did, to a con-siderable extent. This was in the 7th centuryjust after the Synod of Whitby in 667. When hegot to England he could talk sympatheticallywith both traditions and amazingly was able toaccommodate Roman ideas of ecclesiasticalstructure to the dispersed independence of theCeltic monastic centers. In this structural pro-cess, the young Wilfred, the proud and oftenheralded Roman hero of Whitby, had his im-mense diocese whittled down into pieces bythe elderly Theodore. Sparks flew, and Wilfredhad to yield.

A possible reason for Roman scholars notoften recognizing Theodore’s strategic contri-bution is his suspect Eastern background. Infact, after he had been invested with authorityby Rome, Rome apparently felt it had to sendanother man named Hadrian along with himto England just to make sure he didn’t strayfrom the Roman tradition.

But let’s not fail to apply the missiologicallesson here. In your mission field you are try-ing to win people who like everyone every-where have certain predispositions and preju-dices. Use a little bit of wisdom as to whomyou use to be a missionary to any one group.

Suppose you’re working in South Indiawith a certain kind of a group (and I shouldn'teven name anything specific because I wantthis to be a principle and not a specific illustra-tion). And suppose you are able to discoverthat there may well be someone from someplace other than America who would be a bet-


ter missionary for that certain kind of a group.Wouldn’t it be better in that case to go to

that other country and get the man or woman,pull him in and train him and send him outthere and use him? This was the strategy of theRomans in getting Theodore. And all downthrough the history of the church anybodywho has any common sense has been willing totry and figure out which cultural terms wouldmake the most sense, be the most acceptable inthat situation.

Frankly, if you’re in a former British colony

like Ghana, don’t get people from France towitness there. But if you’re in Niger or Gabone,well, you better not get all your missionariesfrom the Anglo-Saxon background. You’d bet-ter poke around in France and get somebodywho can represent the French tradition becausein Francophone Africa they don’t particularlylike the British or the Americans. We have touse the simple wisdom of the ages when we goto win people to Christ. Their predispositionsmust be taken into account.

Each time as we push on to the next 400year period we see more and more happening.In this third period, just like in the second pe-riod, you start out with a massive Dark Ages ofintrusion of invaders from outside—the “Sec-ond Dark Ages.” This time it is not pagan An-glo Saxons but pagan Vikings pillaging newlyChristian Anglo Saxons. Toward the end ofthis period as in the previous period you haveagain a period of peace and quiet, productiveoutreach, scholarship and Bible study on thepart of the Christian movement in the West, aflourishing of faith, in a word, a “renaissance.”

However, this period of peace toward theend of the second period started a little earlierthan the last 400 year period, starting consider-ably before 1100. If you were to diagram thosetwo Dark Ages followed by the two Light Ages,or renaissances as they are called, you wouldfind a striking parallelism. We have already re-ferred to the Second Dark Ages being the resultof the Scandinavian invasion. As in the FirstDark Age, you find a great deal of persecutionof Christians in the early years, followed thenby this period of peace and quiet called by his-torians, the Carolingian Renaissance.

Although it is almost impossible for me tosay this because I respect Latourette so verymuch, in my estimation, the biggest single mis-take that he ever made in his writings is that hedown-plays this Carolingian Renaissance morethan he should have. Because of that he doesn’ttalk in terms of two Dark Ages, as many of themore recent scholars do.

But, before we move on into this third pe-riod, let’s speak about Charlemagne a bit.

Two generations before his reign, the Mus-lims had started moving up from North Africainto Spain, and Charlemagne’s grandfather,Charles Martel (the “hammer”) had stoppedthem at the Battle of Tours, just north of the Py-renees Mountains which separate present-day

Spain from France. Charles Martel had becomea Christian of sorts—rather rough and ready—but now his grandson was a literate, scholarlystatesman and an outstanding humble Chris-tian.

One thing he is notorious for is his treat-ment of the Saxons. He was convinced that theonly way to protect his territory was to makethe Saxons (still living and constantly raidingto the north of France where he ruled) into realbelievers. There was still pressure from theMuslims in Spain and increasing pressure com-ing down from the north with the Vikings. Allthe more, Charlemagne—Charles the Great—had to keep his eye on unpredictable dangersfrom the Saxons, who were still pagans in Eu-rope and right on the very border of his terri-tory.

He sent over to England and Ireland andimported thousands of Celtic monks (by nowperhaps quite a few were Benedictines) tocome and set up schools all over his domain,which included the Saxon territory. He urgedthe monks not only to teach about Christ but toteach the people to read the Bible.

But politically the Saxons hated the Franksand refused. They killed some of the missionar-ies, and eventually Charlemagne threatenedthem with extermination if they did not getbaptized—at least so the story goes. And hevery nearly did, although thousands wereforceably transplanted to the area today calledSaxony, in Eastern Germany.

It has been thought that Charlemagne wasilliterate. But some recent research merely indi-cates that he couldn’t read Latin, Greek andHebrew, or perhaps not the Germanic script.He typically moved around the countryside inmonk’s robes, followed by his (I believe) tendaughters. In his private correspondence, hesigned his name David after King David in theBible and tried to emulate his piety and life,


Winter Chapter 7

The Third Four Hundred Years(AD 800–1200)

7 – 2 The Third Four Hundred Years (AD 800–1200)

even to the point of having more than onewife.

Some historians claim that during a thou-sand year period, he stood head and shoulders(both literally and politically) above everyother ruler on earth. Truly a great man. Hewanted to rebuild the Roman Empire with allits benefits but without its vices, thus request-ing the pope to crown him emperor of the HolyRoman Empire, which was done in the year800, the symbolic year when the Vikings beganto invade from the north. But the renaissancewhich he brought about in learning, Biblicalstudies, manuscript reproduction—all becauseof his importation of learned Celtic and Bene-dictine monks from England and Ireland—worked to preserve to a great extent whatpeace there had been until the Vikings came,and he set a significant pattern to follow.

Starting, then, around the year 800, we’re inthis third period with the Second Dark Agesopening with the increasing invasions of theVikings. Pictures of the Vikings have a certainlurid reality about them and tend to bringmemories to mind. Whether you have any Vi-king blood or not, Churchill’s series of bookscalled A History of the English Speaking Peoplescontain a chapter on the Vikings which youwill find very exciting. Churchill himself wasan Anglo-Saxon, so he doesn’t have any senti-mental attachment to the Vikings, but he doeshave a powerful gift of description. In his chap-ter entitled “The Vikings” he talks about the ef-fulgence of the gospel ultimately dazzling andholding captive these marauding tribals.

He uses a very arresting phrase in the veryfirst page of that chapter. He describes the Vi-king ships in their sleek beauty and balanceand gaudy color and ends up the sentence bysaying, “but there was a scent of murder aboutthose ships.” He talks about the Vikings as “thecruelest pirates that ever roamed the seas.” Hemust have forgotten about the Carobs, thoseIndians that terrorized the Caribbean Sea, cap-tured people and actually fed them in cageslike animals until their legs and arms wereready to be cut off one at a time to be eaten. Idon’t think the Vikings were quite that de-praved but they were pretty close to it.

Let’s face it gentlemen and ladies, our gen-tleness is not native to our fallen nature. What-ever gentleness we have is purely the grace ofGod. To unsnarl the unbelievable complexitiesof Satan’s power over mankind and the dark-ness and the distortion of his purposes and be-

ings is impossible apart from the grace and thepower of the gospel. In any case Churchill’s isan exciting chapter.

There is another equally exciting chapter onthe Vikings in a book by Christopher Dawsoncalled Religion and the Rise of Western Culture.Unfortunately, the book is out of print and ap-parently hard to find on reserve in the libraryas someone is always borrowing it. But it is avery outstanding little paperback if you everget your hands on it. I hope that Doubledaywill reprint it some day. It has a whole chapteron the Second Dark Ages; Dawson is one of thehistorians who uses that phrase. The picture ofthe Vikings as he tells it is a very ugly andgruesome picture. And he points out that thedifference between the Vikings and the barbar-ians who invaded 400 years before was in partbecause the Vikings were not Christians at all.They slaughtered the people in the churcheswith an almost special gusto. They tore thechurches down with a venom that really stemsright back to Satan himself. They burned theBible; they did almost everything you couldthink of to eliminate the Christian faith.

But the Christian tradition they were elimi-nating was by then a Christian faith that wassitting back on its haunches and taking it easy.And in a certain sense—let’s face it—the Vi-kings were not the only bad guys. As far asBiblical perspective is concerned, if the Biblehad been extended by the inspiration of God tocover this period, I would conjecture thatGod’s true judgment would not fall upon theVikings but upon those Christians who failedto reach out to the Vikings, who didn’t sendany missionaries to them. And because of this,in their ease and religious splendor, they even-tually had to suffer the invasions of these ex-ceedingly rude, crude and vicious savages.

In this period a lot of interesting thingshappen.

One of the most significant missiologicaldevelopments was that in the confusion thelines of communication were cut—what todaywould be all telephone lines and the transatlan-tic cables as well as the satellite communicationcenters. Thus, it was not possible for Rome tomaintain its hold even tenuously upon thechurches of England. But once again Godbrought to the fore a man to salvage the situa-tion—Alfred the Great, the second son of theAnglo-Saxon king down in southwestern Eng-land. Alfred had intended to go into a monas-tery and spend his life in devotion and scholar-


ship. But his brother, after becoming king, waskilled in a Viking invasion and Alfred had totake over.

The most famous story, of course, is thatonce after he had just lost a major battle againstthe Vikings, he took refuge in a swamp andfrom there crawled into a little village wherehe asked a woman for some food. Not know-ing who he was—since kings in those dayswere just chieftains—she said, “Well, look, ifyou’ll watch these cakes so they don’t burn, l’llgive you one.” I suppose these “cakes” were ei-ther like pancakes or tortillas—something sim-ple no doubt. But even so she should havebeen a little more polite and she surely wouldhave had she known with whom she was deal-ing. Anyhow, the legend says that Alfred satthere musing on having lost the battle. Andwhen she returned to the fire, she found thatall the cakes had burned, and she scolded himsomething terrible.

Is that story true or not? We don’t reallyknow. But we do know that Alfred eventuallydefeated the Vikings. They conquered everyother place in England, but they never reallyconquered Wessex, King Alfred’s area, themost southwestern part of England.

In the first of the two Dark Ages, the An-glo-Saxon forebears of Alfred had come infrom the south, but in this period the invaders,the Vikings, came in from the north. Not onlythat but many centers well fortified againstland invasion were totally exposed to sea inva-sion. And the Vikings came by sea! These arethe Scandinavians—the Danish, the Swedishand the Norwegians. The Danes were evi-dently the most visible at first becausewherever they extended their domain it wascalled the “Danegeld, ” meaning that’s wherethe Danish invaders demanded tribute in termsof gold (“geld”) just to go away and leave theChristian people in peace.

But Alfred was able to push them back.Consequently they never quite triumphed overthe southern part of England. So much for thepolitics and military.

The fascinating thing is Alfred himself. Hewas a studious sort of a guy, in some ways al-most like Charlemagne in his religious, schol-arly and military characteristics. He decided—and this was very rash at the time—that hewould start translating the Latin scriptures andthe various ecclesiastical documents into An-glo-Saxon. I say “rash” because at this time inWestern (Roman) Christianity Latin was the

only acceptable language, and Roman Catholi-cism the most respectable form. But due to thesimple isolation of England from Rome the ver-nacular language began to break through inworship.

Today, Wycliffe Bible Translators would, ofcourse, be overjoyed. They could have namedtheir organization the Alfred the Great BibleTranslators instead of the Wycliffe Bible Trans-lators. I know at one point they were thinkingof creating a new group called the TyndaleBible Translators.

Now, by the way, they have started five dif-ferent Bible translator organizations represent-ing different Christian traditions that couldn’tall be in the same organization. There’s theEvangel Bible Translators, which is charis-matic, and the Logos Bible Translators, whichis Roman Catholic, and a couple more whosenames I don’t remember, representing Chris-tian traditions that couldn’t easily be mergedinto the same organization.

Anyway, the Alfred the Great Bible Trans-lators never arose, but King Alfred and hiscrew did begin translation work. This is in curi-ous contrast to the work of Cyril and Metho-dius up in eastern Europe. As a matter of fact,it was already perfectly normal for Cyril andMethodius to use the Slavonic language. Theyare the ones who produced what today isknown as the Cyrillic Script, named after Cyril.We find here this curious contrast between thepatterns of western Europe—what I havecalled “uniformitarian”—and eastern Europewith its permitted diversity—what has beencalled “autocephalic, ” which allowed each cul-tural tradition to have its own patriarch and itsown equally legitimate form of Christianity.The autocephalic type resulted in a large diver-sity of different kinds of Christianity in theEast, while in the West you had a single tradi-tion (the Roman Catholic). Later we’ll observethat this is one reason that there had to be aReformation in the West and there didn’t haveto be one in the East. Let’s leave the emergenceof the vernacular in Alfred’s situation.

Back now to the Vikings. For over 250 yearsyou never knew when the Vikings were goingto show up. They arrived unexpectedly. Therewere no citizen’s band transmitters available inthose days to warn the next village down. Butpossibly due to the very terror of the circum-stances there was another fascinating develop-ment in this period.

It was the appearance of the Cluny renewal


in the monastic tradition. Cluny is now thename of a Scotch whiskey, an angry fact whichclashes with the wonder and the beauty andthe worship that developed in the originalCluny movement in France—with no connec-tion to Scotland. What is there about the Clunymovement which was so influential?

First of all, it was the beginning of the flour-ishing, the renaissance that welled up towardthe end of the period. It was the beginning of areformation within the monastic tradition it-self. Things had gone from bad to worse,mainly due to creeping affluence. Just as it istrue today in many of the Korean churches, af-fluence overtook these outposts of Bible study.Amazingly, if you give a group of people whoare godly, hardworking, abstemious, peacefuland productive time and space, and you letthem go on recruiting other people for a hun-dred or two hundred years, pretty soon theyare fabulously wealthy. Then as a result oftheir wealth they become targets for vandalismand robbery. You can easily imagine why thisis so. That is why Francis of Assisi many yearslater wandered around with nothing to hisname. He wasn’t afraid of robbers because hehad nothing to rob.

By contrast, the monastic centers soon be-came the place where wealth accumulated. Asa result the secular chieftains roundabout be-gan to cast greedy eyes upon them. And veryoften these chieftains would simply get up abunch of horsemen and soldiers and just rideinto one of those places and take it over.Maybe one of the these chieftains would puthis son in as the abbot—a curious clash withthe tradition that was already there. As a re-sult, these monastic centers often went downhill faster than they had gone up hill. In otherwords, the wealthier they became, the morelikely they were to be subjugated.

Probably the most far-reaching example ofthat very syndrome of wealth leading to down-fall was what is called the “dissolution of themonasteries” in later history. I’m only referringto it here by way of parallel. When King HenryVIII decided to divorce Catherine, his mainreason was not because he wanted to become aProtestant or even to divorce his wife andmarry again, but simply because he neededmoney. And the money was in the hands of themonasteries. According to Luther, who livedabout the same time, the monasteries were notvalid. So King Henry VIII found it very desira-ble to dissolve all the monasteries in England

and to seize their wealth as a political maneu-ver. This as much as any other reason waswhat made Henry VIII into a Protestant.

But it certainly was the wealth that becamethe downfall of the monasteries. Roland Bain-ton said that “the whole history of the monas-tic tradition is the story of their unsuccessful at-tempt to stay poor.”

This is why I, no longer a field missionary,am still living on a missionary salary and evenpromoting in America an organization whichwill welcome any serious believer into itsmembership and allow him the privilege of liv-ing on a missionary’s salary. It is called The Or-der for World Evangelization. This order simplyenables a person to choose a mission societyand to adopt the salaried level of a furloughedmissionary as his own lifestyle level. All therest of his money then is made available, by hisown decision, to the work of the Lord. Thisseems to me a perfectly logical way to fight af-fluence.

I’ll admit that we haven’t had a massivenumber of people charging in to become mem-bers. I have often thought that while many mis-sionaries, to their credit, simply suffer alongwith their missionary salary level, if for anyvalid reason they could get out of the harnessthey wouldn’t feel bound by that type of life-style level. If, however, you would like a littleencouragement to stay with this kind of life-style, then join the Order for World Evangeli-zation. We are trying to combat the difficultyof staying poor by this approach. It is a con-scious reference back to this situation.

The Cluny Reform also occurred just at thepoint when so many monasteries were beingtaken over by civil powers that this movementraised the issue of what later came to be calledthe investiture controversy. While that may be avery distastefully opaque term, it has to dowith who’s going to put on the garment? Whois going to “invest” monastic leaders with au-thority, and thus put on the vestments of au-thority in a monastery? It is eminently clearthat they did not think the members of the mo-nastic community ought to elect their leaders.Would it then be a local bishop who would ap-point an Abbot, a bishop who might well besubject to the string-pulling of the local chief-tain? Or should it be the chieftain himself? Justwho is it going to be? Will the Abbot himselfchoose the new abbot at some point when hispowers began to wane, as had always been thecase? Or would somebody else have power


over that monastic center? Now this portrays a wholesale clash be-

tween the diocesan (parish) tradition and themonastic tradition in Christendom. What re-solved the clash is, in a way, the single largestpower play in the history of the Christianmovement. It clearly established a new pattern,which is not what it seems to be. For example,the Duke of Aquitaine (the area of the firstCluny house) simply said, “Look, I’m going toestablish a monastery at Cluny and this monas-tery is not going to be subject to me or to anycivil power or to any local bishop. Instead itwill be subject to—well, who? Well, let’s see—the pope? Yes, the pope!”

I have playfully put it that way becausefrankly, in what resulted, the pope had no realpower whatsoever over the monasteries. It wasa sanctified subterfuge. It was a power play. Itresolved the age-old tension over the questionof who appoints a new abbot essentially restor-ing to the monastic center self rule.

Aquitaine is in southwestern France, inthose days that was a long, long way fromRome. And even at our late date in history to-day there is no real possibility of the pope hav-ing any great influence over the monasteries.But notice, by saying that the pope was incharge, they were saying that the bishop wasnot in charge, the local chieftain was not incharge. See what I mean? This new appeal tothe pope was a declaration of independence, soto speak. However, it wasn’t so independentthat it made that monastery a unique isolatedisland.

The Cluny Movement had tremendousspiritual power. It began to find other monasticcenters asking (so to speak), “Hey, come onover and tell us how you do it there at CoralRidge, Florida, or at the Peninsula BibleChurch. Tell us how you do it, Pastor Getts ofDallas. ...”

This type of movement caught on every-where pretty fast. Pretty soon two, then five,then ten, then twenty, then thirty, then eightyand then eight hundred other monastic settle-ments pledged their loyalty to Rome alone(which meant they pledged their loyalty to no-body local) and adopted the lifestyle of theCluny movement. This was called the ClunyReform.

Notice there are two or three things hap-pening here. First of all, Cluny established onceand for all down through history the fact thatthe investiture of an abbot is not subject to the

power of a local bishop. This eliminated anyclaim to power there might have been of abishop over the leadership of a monastic cen-ter. Secondly, it established for the first time aconnectional development within the monastictradition.

Now, what do I mean by connectional? Ijust mean what the word implies—that therewas a connection between Cluny, which wasthe mother house, and the various daughterhouses, although each of them had a certainamount of their own authority. The daughterhouses submitted themselves to the motherhouse. just like they said they were submittingthemselves to the pope in Rome. But in manycases they didn’t know or care who the pope inRome was. As a matter of fact, the pope at thisparticular moment was one of the least quali-fied in the entire history of the papacy, an abso-lute scoundrel, a violent, murderous man.

One point we must not overlook is the factof the connectional development. I don’t wantto overemphasize this, but as a result of thisCluny reform, you now had a connectional tra-dition developing within the monastic move-ment itself. And to this day virtually everymonastery in the world in the Roman Catholictradition is part of a connectional group.

Such clusters of monasteries today arecalled—in the Roman Catholic vocabulary—“congregations.” This sounds strange to Prot-estant ears. It seems like every key word theCatholics use, the Protestants also use but in adifferent sense! A congregation in the Catholicworld is usually a reference to a subdivision ofone of the major orders. In other words, maybeten or 15 monasteries in a certain region will becalled a congregation.

Then in Rome you have the Superiors Gen-eral. The superior of an order who is general orleader over the whole thing, over all the vari-ous congregations, may have his office inRome. Then, because there are so many differ-ent Catholic orders, there is a whole group ofSuperiors General who live in Rome. Inciden-tally they have a committee on missions. Iknow a Columban father, an Irishman al-though an American, who is a member of themodern order of the Columban fathers. He isnow in Rome doing his doctorate and he toldme that he hobnobs with the members of thismission committee of the Superiors Generalgroup in the Vatican.

Well, so much for the Cluny Movement. Itis just something to keep your eyes on. Latour-


ette describes the Cluny Movement with somecare, and it is worth looking at. In my ownopinion the Clunys went overboard on the ideaof worship, which I feel they stressed toomuch. I know that it’s hard to imagine anyonestressing worship too much, but it does seemto me that when they gave up working withtheir hands and decided just to pray, they werenow parting ways with Benedict himself. Idon’t think they did this intentionally becausein their own minds they were still Benedic-tines, of course. But Benedict was very bal-anced, and I feel the Clunys lost some of thatbalance. The Benedictines had a saying that “tolabor is to pray.”

The Cluny Movement was established in910. But after a relatively short time that move-ment itself became so opulent with beautifulbuildings and chapels and paintings, andeverything else, that another renewal move-ment arose called the “Cistercians.” I have amuch higher regard for the Cistercians than Ido for the Clunys.

Latourette says that the Cistercians had fivechief characteristics, all of which I think arereally attractive. (You can read them beginningon page 423 of Latourette’s History of Christian-ity.) For one thing, the Cistercians went backout into the swamps and started all over fromscratch. They were determined not to get rich.They built their monastic houses either in theswamplands or on the steep hillsides. Aboutthe only thing they could possibly do to makea living would be to graze sheep on the hill-sides and to drain the swamps. They often didsuch things and in the process created vast,huge areas of new and high quality pastureland. And what do you know? Here we goagain: after a hundred years the Cistercianshad unintentionally cornered the wool marketof Europe. That is the story of the Roman Cath-olic monastic movement again and again andagain.

Cluny started at Cluny, whereas Citeaux isthe place where the Cistercians got started. TheCistercians were a magnificent bunch of peo-ple. And if you want to jot down some pagenumbers to read about the Cistercian canonsregular, you’ll see them on pages 426-427. Thefive characteristics developed by the Cister-cians are really very significant developments.

One other phenomenon in the flourishingof this period that I can only refer to in passingis the development of the scholastics. I men-tioned previously that long before 1200—even

before the year 1000 really—you began to seemore Christian scholars. Anselm is one of thefirst scholastics and Abelard perhaps the sec-ond. Overlapping him was Maimonidies, whowas not a Christian scholar but Jewish andwho did a fantastic job of fusing the Jewish Se-mitic cultural tradition with the knowledgeand the philosophical tradition of the Greeks.That fusion then gave rise quite possibly toThomas Aquinas’ work; he’s the most famousof all the scholastics and lived right around theyear 1200. His work cast a long shadow intothe future reconciling Christian thought withAristotelian thought, just like Maimonides haddone for the Jewish tradition.

This scholastic movement wasn’t really theBible-studying movement of the earlier monas-tic scholars by any means. These were nowmore nearly philosophers than simply Biblescholars. But we need to mention them as wellas the development of the universities of Eu-rope during this period. The Crusades also be-gan during this period, to which we have al-ready referred.

In the final flourishing of this period, “TheTwelfth Century Renaissance, ” cathedralbuilding becomes a fad. Almost all of the majorcathedrals of Europe were begun during a fad-dish fifty-year period—many taking centuriesto complete. The universities also appear as asignificant phenomena. But far and away themost significant development missiologically isperhaps the most important—the appearanceof the friars. Most of their work is in the next400-year period, which we will pick up on inthe next lesson.

Finally, you should know that towards theend of this third period the Vikings, once theybecame Christians, themselves literally becamecrusaders. All of the major crusades were ledby former Vikings, the so-called Northmen.They had a great perception of distance andthe ability to navigate and to travel. They alsostill had that lust for war. Even though theywere now Christians, they still retained thisrather unfortunate warring bent. As crusaders,they destroyed many Christian communities intheir rampaging as well as Jewish.

We need to keep track of these major devel-opments toward the end of this third periodbecause things are really getting exciting now.We are heading into the period when we knowfar more than we ever knew about things hap-pening before. And it’s not just that we knowmore about things, but because more things


were happening. The population in Europe bythen was four, six, or ten times what it hadbeen. And we will see that population growth

is also one of the indirect effects of Christianity.So much for today.

As we plunge into this next period—1200-1600—it gets even more exciting. The periodstarts out with the pinnacle of Papal power inthe “high middle ages, ” about 1200, and endswith the permanent breakup of that Spiritualempire in the Reformation. Barbara Tuchmanwrote a book on just the 14th century whichmy wife and I were reading through recently.She feels that today is another 14th century.The 14th century was the time of the BlackPlague, a rather ominous time, but as she stud-ied the 14th century Barbara Tuchman felt thatthe way Europe fell to pieces as a result of theimpact of the plague was very similar to thefalling to pieces of the Western world as a re-sult of the impact of the two world wars andthe threat of a third—the rivalry, the cold war,the fantastic expense on duplicate armamentsand so forth, enough to drive every Westernnation into bankruptcy, she implied. Shethought there were a lot of parallels, and Ithink there are. She started to study only aboutthe plague, but then she realized that thewhole 14th century was just a mirror of ourtime, perhaps. The title of her book is A DistantMirror, the Calamitous Fourteenth Century.

Between 1200 and 1600 there is a type ofsuspension bridge. The year 1200 itself was ayear of a pinnacle of ecclesiastical power. Thatwas the year that Innocent the III put all ofFrance into an interdict, which means that thepope obviously had the power to preventevery Frenchman in France from taking com-munion. Today that would be no problem atall. Far fewer would pay any attention. But itwas a real problem then, showing an amazingcontrast in the temper of the times. It alsoshows the kind of papal power that Protestantshave always assumed to have existed, but hasvery rarely existed.

When I was a fairly young kid, I rememberthat Pope Pius Xll commanded that all the con-

templative monasteries in the world shouldopen their doors and require every singlemember of those communities to minister oneday a week out in a nearby town. And I re-member that of the some 400 such housesaround the world, very, very many of themsimply ignored the pope’s command. That wasmy first tiny keyhole glimpse into the differ-ence between what the Protestants think is trueand what is the actual authority structure inthe Catholic church.

In any case, this period is noted for theapex of papal power, the tremendous power ofthe Crusades, the movement to build cathe-drals (all the major cathedrals in Europe werestarted within a 50 year period), the universitytradition, but above all the emergence of thefriars.

In 1210 at the Lateran Council, the papacyfinally approved Francis of Assisi and hiswork. In 1205 they had allowed him provision-ally to operate. Now they granted him full rati-fication. They did this for more than any otherreason because they rued the day a few yearsearlier when they turned Peter Waldo down.Too late they realized that that decision hadbeen a great mistake. Waldo was a muchtougher, more stable, competent, businessmanJohn Wesley-type of leader and even thoughthey turned him down, they just couldn’t getrid of him. Francis of Assisi, by comparison,was not the kind of a guy that would, humanlyspeaking, ever do anything great. He was thekind of man whose thoughts were in theclouds all the time. But that made him less of athreat and control of primary, apparently.Also, his home base was much closer to Romethan Waldo’s. Assisi is a little bit north ofRome, and somehow the powers in the papacythought perhaps they could keep him undercontrol, so gave him tentative approval.

Meanwhile, also in 1210, Dominic came


Winter Chapter 8

The Fourth Four Hundred Years(AD 1200–1600)

8 – 2 The Fourth Four Hundred Years (AD 1200–1600)

down from France, and he saw Francis there inthe Vatican with only a rope around his waist,not a fancy leather belt. So Dominic pulled offhis nice black belt and cast it aside, and fromthen on the Dominicans and the Franciscanswore the same kind of rope for a belt. How-ever, Dominic was a very different kind of per-son from Francis, a tough minded, theologicalscholar who was determined to stamp out theAlbigenses (Cathari) in southern France by the-ological argument. He made sure that in everyone of the Dominican houses, the communitiesof friars had a resident theologian. They alsowere the forerunners of the Inquisition. Theywere determined to purify the church bypower and occasionally violence. Their ex-cesses are much overblown by Protestants,whose own excesses in controlling the newlyfreed slaves in the USA by thousands of lynch-ings is a whole lot worse.

Francis, on the other hand, was very differ-ent from Dominic. He was not inclined to readbooks—like Dawson Trotman, founder of theNavigators, was furious if any of his followerswere attracted to the universities—but wasvery much of a mystical person whose follow-ers had no written rules to follow until he wason his deathbed and then it was too late. As aresult there were many, many different splin-ters in the Franciscan movement even beforehe died. Today there are about 35 Franciscangroups, most believing they are closer to Fran-cis than the others although some basically dis-agree with him.

But the Dominicans have not splintered;they are a disciplined, carefully organizedgroup—egg heads, would be the term wemight use. I often think that there was a certainsimilarity between the Intervarsity movementand the Dominicans. The Intervarsity Move-ment, with its Intervarsity Press and piling uphuge, thick theological tomes on all subjects, isvery much of an egghead movement by com-parison to Campus Crusade, which until re-cently did not even have a publishing arm andwas more of a Franciscan type of operation.

By 1250, forty years from the time Franciswas given official full recognition, the popevery wisely required Francis to have a writtenrule or regula which his followers patched to-gether rather hurriedly but was not completeenough or soon enough to forestall splintering.This requirement shows the very practical wis-dom of church authorities who actually tried tohelp the Franciscans at that point.

Anyway, these two movements started outvery differently. One was anti-intellectual andwouldn’t go near the universities; the otherwas highly intellectual and lived within theuniversity world. However, in the long haul,by looking at each other across the decades,they eventually began to try to keep up witheach other. And by now they are very similar. Ithink that Campus Crusade, now with its ownseminary and its own publishing company,will be moving more and more into an aca-demic emphasis. They have even planned tohave a graduate university.

The point is that the way a movement startshas little to do with where it ends. If you lookback twenty years, it’s kind of breathtaking tothink where Campus Crusade might be twentyyears from now. I know Bill Bright well; he andI used to go jogging together at Princeton Semi-nary forty years ago. I’m sure that neither of usthen had any conception that Campus Crusadewould become the largest Protestant sodalityin the world at this point. It is a very amazingorganization. I think that some groups havesort of looked down their noses at CampusCrusade because of the simplicity of the ideasit is promoting, and because of its hierarchicalstructure. But I urge you not to underestimatethe potential of that movement. Intervarsity isalso flexing its muscles, moving in different di-rections. There’s a new breath of fresh air in In-tervarsity and today Intervarsity is almost asstrong on the campuses as Campus Crusade.The only difference is that Campus Crusade isdoing seventy others things as well, and Inter-varsity is still primarily a campus movement.

Navigators could be mentioned as a paral-lel to the friars. Some of them have preferred tothink of themselves as the Jesuits of the presenttime. That probably is a little bit strange to sayconsidering that the Navigators until recentlyhave had very little academic emphasis—as al-ready mentioned, the founder, Trotman, likeFrancis, had no use for academia—but it is avery fine organization. I was very much in-volved in the Navigators in the early days of itsdevelopment. I helped to find the verses for thethird memory set back in 1941-42. It was veryexciting to see that movement grow. In thehouse where I’m living right now in South Pa-sadena, we met together every week for twoand a half years with Lorne Sanny, now thepresident of the Navigators. And Dawson Trot-man was in our house many times as well asother leaders in the Navigator movement.


So I have been, by accident so to speak,pretty close to the origins of both Crusade andNavigators. I have watched these movementsover the years and am very impressed and yetnot uncritical of them. The little pamphlet thatI wrote called “The Two Structures of God’sRedemptive Mission, ” which is a chapter inCrucial Dimensions, has been bought in largequantities by Campus Crusade, Navigators, In-tervarsity and Young Life. Thousands andthousands of copies have been devoured bythose people, trying to understand themselvesin history.

Back to the historical friars. They were al-ways a part of the church. There never was aquestion that they were not part of the church.In this period, 1200-1600, you see for the firsttime, as I put it the other day, “monks on skate-boards.” These friars were mobile evangelistswho went all over creation, all the way to Pe-king and all around the world. The friars werethe major mechanisms of Roman Catholic out-reach.

Now, the friars are a little different from theclerks regular. This where the Jesuits come intothe picture, much later, about the time of theProtestant Reformation. By now you shouldrecognize immediately this word regular,which simply means to be “subject to a writtendiscipline.” I am not sure whether clerks camefrom clerics, but clerks regular is the officialphrase for an organization like the Jesuits.Every organization since the Jesuits has fol-lowed a pattern similar to the Jesuits ratherthan that of the friars, although every organiza-tion founded soon after the friars followedtheir organization until the Order of the Jesuitsappeared.

Once again, there are subtle differences be-tween these various traditions—the Celticmonks, the early Benedictines, the Cluny tradi-tion, the Cistercians, and the Canons Regular,the friars—there is a kind of progression interms of intentional intervention in the outsideworld. But whatever you do, don’t succumb tothe facile, simplistic stereotype that the monas-teries were simply where people fled to getaway from the world. Even in the very earliestdays—by the year 700—those 800 monasteriessprinkled up through France and Germanywere missionary outposts as well as sources ofengineering, architectural and technologicaltalent. They weren’t fleeing the world; theywere penetrating the world. This is demon-strated by the simple fact that the world even-

tually accrued significantly to the organiza-tional pattern, language, etc., of the monaster-ies.

In fact, almost every major city of Europe isa great oak grown from the acorn of an originalmonastic center. Rather than vice-versa, thisphenomenon is an interesting twist on whatyou might call a pure Alan Tippett or CharlesKraftian approach in which the missionary willmix completely into the culture without a traceof his own cultural background except for thepure gospel invested therein. In contrast, themonasteries totally ignored the outside culture.And after a suitable length of time, like a thou-sand years, the outside culture came to followthe pattern of the monasteries instead of viceversa.

They were better than just mission com-pounds. Mission compounds are not meant tobe self-sustaining, and they’re not intended toacquire members from the local situation. Ifyou would go to any mission compoundaround the world and tell the missionaries,“Look, you’ve got to work and be self-sustaining. You’ve got to provide services thepeople will pay for, and you’ve got to add peo-ple to your membership from the locality, ”then you would find yourself describing a mo-nastic structure as a mission outpost. And itwould be far superior to the often sterile mis-sion compound in more modern history.

By contrast, in recent history a missioncompound is propped up from abroad by sub-sidies. Therefore, it is inherently incapable ofgrowing or duplicating itself. It cannot evenabsorb its own children. Columban went toeastern Switzerland and established forty otheroutposts working out from present day St. Gal-len because his mechanism was reproduceable.Yet it was not contextualized. There was verylittle contextualization of theology especially,or even of church life. The monastery carriedits own social structure which was exceedinglydurable and not easily corrupted, so to speak,by the outside world. Rather, the language andculture of that monastic tradition eventuallytook over the outside world.

Both OM and YWAM have forged a net-work in which in all fields local people can joinin. This is quite different from traditional mis-sions which expects to plant a church move-ment which will be separate as well as main-tain an unjoinable foreign mission presencewhich is not transferable.

I say all this just to balance out the extreme


emphasis (which I nevertheless deem healthyhere at Fuller) on going out and contextualiz-ing everything, becoming part of the situation,going along with the culture. and allowing thatindigenization process to grow into full bloom.I fully agree with that. I am just pointing outthat that is not really the way it happened inEurope.

However, let’s step back from our euphoriaabout the friars. All this wonderful evangelisticpower moving forward into this 1200-1600-year period was stricken with a mighty blastwhen the Black Plague appeared out of theblue. I confess, I cannot understand what Godwas up to. I don’t see how the plague was ablessing any more than sin is a blessing. Obvi-ously God did not send sin in order to bless us.The Black Plague came apparently—whoknows from where—but burrowed into south-ern France, into Italy and advanced by deadlywaves and eventually killing off one-third toone-half of the entire population of WesternEurope.

But it killed off nine out ten of the Christianleaders, friars in particular, because they at-tended the sick and anybody who attended thesick was bound to die. It’s a wonder that any-one survived who went near anyone who wassick. The pope survived. While no one under-stood the function of fleas as a plague vector,the Pope lived for several years between twohuge bonfires. Unlike the friars he didn’t gonear the sick, so he survived. There were somewealthy aristocrats who fled to their mountainresorts and were able to cut off all contact withthe outside world for a year or so and sur-vived. But the people who were in the streamof commerce, the ships that went up intosouthern England, etc., carried the plague intoEngland, and it fanned out. You can see pic-tures in books of the waves of impact of thatplague month after month—six months now,six months again later, etc. It swept over Eng-land and killed off enormous percentages ofpeople. Social structure itself broke down inmany cases. Some of the monastic settlementswere so stricken that the members actuallywent insane and ran naked in the streets. Therewere all kinds of breakdowns. The demoraliza-tion of society in general was just amazing.

This was far worse than any Viking inva-sion because the Vikings never killed off athird of all the people. In any one place theymay have killed off 100 percent of the people,but they just weren’t powerful enough to kill

off as many people as the plague did. The mi-crobes were more powerful than the Vikings.They still are.

The Black Plague was able to transmit itselfby three mechanisms: by air, by direct contact,and by fleas that would hop from one infectedrat or person to another person. It’s hard to be-lieve how you could ever stop a thing like that.The amazing thing is that there is no medicalreason why there could not be another out-break of this plague. There is nothing we knowof today that would have any ability to keepthe plague from spreading out throughout theworld today—other than the caste system inIndia.

You probably wonder if the plague still ex-ists. Sure! You can find it right here in Califor-nia. Some little kids were playing with a deadsquirrel in a vacation park in northern Califor-nia. When animals die, the fleas jump off, andas the kids played with this dead squirrel, theypicked up the bubonic plague. I picked up apaperbound book in New York the other daywhich is an account of a fictional outbreak ofthe Bubonic Plague in 1984.

It seems to me, looking back, however, thatGod chastened Christianity in the 14th century.It almost seems as though the best elementswere eliminated. I’ve often wondered why.Just maybe God felt that the people didn’t de-serve the friars.

On the other hand, the resulting drasticscarcity of peasants had the effect of makingthem more scarce and thus increasing theirwages. Furthermore, not only because of theplague but because of the impact of the Biblethere began to be a restlessness among theserfs. Somehow the sensed that their grindingpoverty was not really according to God’swill.

The result was violence—in part promptedby the Bible! In England, it started in Kent inthe Canterbury area and swept over thousandsof acres. Hundreds of thousands of peoplegathered in a mob that moved toward Londonin what is called the Wat Tyler rebellion. Theydemanded better treatment, actually only rea-sonable treatment and very much based on theBible. A local priest had a lot to do with it. Hecoined the ditty, “When Adam delved (dug)and Eve span (spun cloth), who was then thegentleman?”

Because of rebellions like this, long beforethe Reformation the Bible began to be seen as avery dangerous book. The complete Bible was


translated into German fourteen times beforeLuther’s superb translation. (Even though ourProtestant stereotype is that Luther was thefirst person to translate the Bible into a Germanvernacular.)

Luther grew up in a peasant family. In hisyouth one of the major rebellions, known asthe Bundschu Movement, was vigorouslycrushed by land owners. We’ll be taking thisup later when we talk about the Reformation.The fertility of this period, the confusion, thebreakdown of society ushered in more stronglythan ever the secular Renaissance, a harsh, stri-dent stream which is glorified by secular schol-ars but which was a tragic development insome respects. There were good things aboutit, but those good things came from the Chris-tianity which underlay it. But there were alsohorrifying immoral extremes in the Renais-sance, a harshness and worldliness which maybe thought of highly by secular people today,but sensitive Christian insight would certainlynot give the Renaissance the same grades thatsecular scholars do. All of this prepared inwestern Europe the grounds not only for thepolitical revolt of the serfs who complainedabout their conditions, but also for religious re-volt. And when you put the two together,you’ve got the Protestant revolt which was 50percent a political and cultural backlashagainst the Latin civilization and 50 percentpart and parcel of the religious reform move-ment that was sweeping all of western Europe(not just Germany).

However, the most amazing thing in thisperiod is how the friars tried to go overland toPeking as missionaries. By 1492 toward the endof the period, Columbus discovered America,as every child in American schools is told. Thatwas also the year, roughly, when Savonarolawas burned at the stake in Florence, when ayoung law student named Martin Luther wasstruck down by lightening and decided to gointo a monastery. It was also the year when asaintly clergyman named Ximenes, who wasalso a great Bible scholar, became the chaplainof Queen Isabela of Spain—a tremendously im-portant event. But equally important was thefact that in 1492 the last of the Muslims, whohad been in control in parts or all of Spain for700 years, were now finally expelled. So don’tforget 1492!

In fact, that year also had to do with navi-gation, which contributed to missions. Nowthe friars could go all over the world. They

tried to go by land but really couldn’t get veryfar since land travel to Asia was quite difficult.But they finally got there by ship.

By 1535 the university of Mexico City hadalready been established by friars—two hun-dred years before Harvard in Massachusetts. Anew contender within the Catholic sodalitysystem for missions soon after was the Societyof Jesus (the Jesuits). And by 1600 Matteo Ricci,a Jesuit, was climbing the steps of the palace inPeking. This phenomenal world outreachthrough the Catholic mechanisms of the friarsand the clerks regular had no parallel or coun-terpart in Protestant tradition for anothercouple hundred of years. Just imagine, Do-minic back in 1212 was reading the Great Com-mission to his little band of followers, the Do-minicans, soon to become a mighty worldwidemovement. He told them:

You are still a little flock, but already Ihave formed in my heart the project of dis-persing you abroad. You will no longer abidein the sanctuary of Prouille. The world hence-forth is your home, and the work God hascreated for you is teaching and preaching. Goyou, therefore, into the whole world andteach all nations. Preach to them the glad tid-ings of their redemption. Have confidence inGod, for the field of you labors will one daywiden to the uttermost ends of the earth.

Note well that this was 600 years before theProtestants seriously entered the fray! Yes, hereis Dominic quoting the Great Commission 600years before William Carey was on his way toIndia. Now, granted that 600-year advantagewas considerably blunted due to the difficultyof land travel during the first half of it, but inthe second half by sea travel the Catholics en-compassed the world. And though they per-haps had a somewhat defective gospel, never-theless, they got there and took their form ofChristianity with them.

Then, in just the last few “minutes” of his-tory, the Protestants with a leap and a boundcaught up to the Catholics, partly because Prot-estants had something superior. But Goddoesn’t forever guarantee superiority to thosewho boast of it.

In the 1200-1600-year period, exciting andamazing things happened. Probably the mostdisastrous single thing, however, was the vio-lent attempt to convert the Saracens, anotherword for Muslims. This began a century earlierthan the four-hundred-year marker of the year1200. By contrast, in all our previous 400-year


periods the major people groups were con-verted—the Romans, the Barbarians and theVikings. In this period, although the Muslimswere a major focus, we got nowhere withthem. They were too tough. All the Crusadersdid was bloody their noses. The missionarymethodology of the Crusades was obviouslynot the best method to use.

It is still true today that any organizationwhich uses the word crusade in its title displaysappalling ignorance of the most obvious factsof history, and in the Middle East today this isa terrible, terrible error. (Campus Crusade, forexample, does not translate its name for use inthe Middle East. As in the case of the Wheaton

College football team named “the FightingCrusaders, ” it might have been better not tohave chosen the word to use anywhere in theworld.)

In any case, by 1600 Catholic missionarieshad at least superficially baptized millions ofpeople in the Western hemisphere and in Asia,and as in previous periods, the final centurywas one of an incredible flourishing of thefaith. But while the major players were Ortho-dox, Catholic and Protestant, only the latterwas uninvolved as yet in global mission.

This should give you something to thinkabout as you plunge into this period. I hope itwill be exciting to you.

Winter Chapter 9

The Breakdown of theUniformitarian Hypothesis

The Reformation is at the late end of the sameperiod we’ve been talking about, the fourthexpansion. It’s a specialized topic. For us it’sgermane, because most of us are in some wayindebted to this movement. But we want to putit into perspective, and we want to make surethat we get a good clear-eyed view of where itis we have all come from. I suppose there mustbe someone in the room who does not derivefrom a Reformation church or a church greatlybenefited by the Reformation. The Greek Ortho-dox have not very greatly benefited from it,unfortunately. But in your own immediate back-ground there may have been some. How didyou ever get here? We often have somebodyfrom the Thomas Church in India, and they feelthe Reformation is a very recent movementcompared to their origins, although actuallythe Mar Thoma Church itself is the result of theimpact of the evangelical movement on the olderSyrian tradition of India.

But I should make one other distinction.Whatever you do, don’t confuse the Reforma-tion with the Evangelical Awakening. TheEvangelical Awakening occurred less than halfthe distance between ourselves and the Refor-mation—it is closer to us, in fact, than it is tothe Reformation. Most of the modern vitality ofthe Reformation tradition can more accurately beattributed to the Evangelical Awakening than itcan to the Reformation. But I must hasten tomove back away from that statement by addingthat, of course, if the Reformation had notoccurred, then the Evangelical Awakeningprobably could not have occurred.

But then having said that, you would haveto say that maybe even the Reformation couldnot have occurred had it not been for the RomanCatholic tradition. So it’s really an unendingthing.

I’ve often said to myself, you talk about thePentecostal movement in modern times, that

9 – 1

all pentecostals are evangelicals, but not evan-gelicals are pentecostals. All evangelicals areProtestants, but not all Protestants are evangel-icals. And all Protestants are Roman Catholics—you may wonder at that—but not all RomanCatholics are Protestants. And so it goes.

The fact is that compared to the GreekOrthodox tradition, we Protestants must seemlike Roman Catholics in terms of our calendarand our theology and everything else. We areRoman Catholics in a hundred ways. We Prot-estants are Roman Catholics; that is where wecome from.

But there was in the Reformation a breakdownof unity, a breakdown of what I would call the“uniformitarian” principle or expectation. I’vealready pointed out earlier that in the easternpart of the Mediterranean, the Greek, or Eastern,form of Christianity, as it reached out, didn’tseem to feel it quite so necessary (or feasible) toclobber everybody with the same language andtheological tradition. They allowed for greatdiversity from the beginning. Even in Romethere was originally a patriarch, but somehowthey had, say, four patriarchs: one in Antioch,one in Alexandria, one in Rome, and so forth.The Roman patriarch eventually became a pope,in the sense that he said he was “the SupremePatriarch.” The other patriarchs never suggestedthat they were better than each other; they wereall equal. This autocephalic system allowed for a cultural decentralization of the Christianmovement. Another phrase is cultural self-determination, and this is, of course, akin toindigenization and contextualization.

But in the West there was a hard-nosed uniformitarian policy. That policy survivedpartly because the Roman Empire itself hadhad the same policy. The Roman Empire wasdetermined that everyone would speak Latin.It was the language of the empire. When theRoman Empire collapsed and Christianity

© 1996 R. Winter. No copy may be made without the author’s permission.

9 – 2 The Breakdown of the Uniformitarian Hypothesis

began to function in its very place, do you real-ize that Gregory I, Gregory the Great as he iscalled, actually ran the postal system of theRoman Empire? He functioned as a magistrate.When the political center of the Roman Empirewent east, and the western part was shatteredby the migrations (that’s a euphemism), theinvasions of the Germanic tribes, somehow theChurch survived. It floated like a surfboardabove the turmoil, and it was not in competitionwith the various tribal chieftains. They couldgo about their business, but Christianity hadbecome established as a non-threatening auxil-iary government.

Christianity began to some extent to functionin lieu of the Roman Empire. They gave outgrain to the poor; they ran almost everything.The Christian church in Rome and in WesternEurope was a very vital municipal factor in theorderliness of the situation, in a time of tremen-dous chaos and confusion. It was the bulwarkof order. But finally even the church blinkedout, and the monastic movement was the mostdurable of the various structures, allowing thesurvival of the Christian movement.

Somehow this uniformitarianism had to havean end. There had to come a time when thiswould not work. The classical breakdown—there was breakdown both before and after the Reformation—but the locus classicus of thebreakdown of this uniformitarian principlewas the Reformation, so-called. Now it is mis-named and misunderstood. Apart from that,everything is okay. The Reformation: as far asthe average understanding of the term is con-cerned, when somebody talks about the Refor-mation, they are talking about the Reformationof the Roman Catholic Church. Right? They arenot talking about the reformulation of the gospelalong Germanic cultural lines. They are talkingabout the correction of evils in the Roman Church.There is where the word Reformation becomesa misnomer.

In the first place, the so-called “sons of theReformation,” the Reformers so-called, werenot the only reformers. It is absolute folly tothink of Calvin and Luther and Zwingli andHenry VIII as the only reformers. Erasmus wasa reformer, the man who jerked Luther out ofthe doldrums by introducing him to the Paulinedoctrine of justification by faith. Johann Staupitz,the Catholic leader who helped Luther see justi-fication by faith in the Pauline letters, was areformer. There were hundreds of reformers! It was this reforming spirit, that was so power-

ful in Italy and in Spain and in France, that gotinto Germany.

But in Germany, due to other factors, itbecame a political issue. And so there was theconfluence of two streams of force: the politicaldesire to be separate from Rome, on the onehand, and the religious desire to reform theChurch of Rome, on the other hand. These twostreams really didn’t necessarily have anythingto do with each other; they were independentmovements.

The Reformation in the larger sense of theterm, for instance, allows some historians tospeak of the Catholic Reformation (the phraseCounter-Reformation will not do). The RomanCatholic Reformation was not merely a backlashagainst the Protestant Reformation; it startedlong before. The Protestant Reformation, in acertain sense, is merely one aspect of a largerreformation that was going on for a long time,both before and after Luther. The Reformation,spoken of as a Europe-wide phenomenon, or at least Western European-wide phenomenon,is not just the Protestant Reformation; but theRoman Catholic and Protestant Reformationspirit was a movement that ran all across Europe.It was a movement within the church tradition,just as much in Italy as in Germany.

The Reformation with a capital R, referringto the Protestant Reformation—quite often,and much more correctly, referred to as theProtestant Revolt, becomes not a reformationfrom within a large stratum running all acrossEurope, but a geographical separation, ratherthan a stratification problem, within the wholeWestern European civilization. As a result,when political issues began to get in there, andseparation from Rome reared its ugly head,and the breakdown of Christian Europe beganto appear, people were horrified, and they laidthe blame on the reforming spirit, which wasas much present in Italy as it was in Germany.They blamed the people reading the Bible, andthey said the Bible must have something to dowith this. And so they said, “Goodness! If we’regoing to dismember the whole Christian empire,the Holy Roman Empire, why we’re going tohave to get rid of the Bible!”

The famous stereotype says that the Reforma-tion was the result of Luther reacting againstthe limitations on the Bible. You could put itthat way. It’s not true, but this is the way thatsome people put it, wrongly: because the RomanCatholic Church wouldn’t let the people readthe Bible, Luther broke away and translated the


Bible into the vernacular and allowed peoplefor the first time to read the Bible, and thereforethe Reformation broke away. Nothing could befurther from the truth! They were reading theBible all over creation! It wasn’t until politicalentanglements got involved that they blamedthe Bible and started to suppress the Bible, notonly in Catholic Europe, but in Protestant Europe.The Bible was feared just as much in Englandas in Italy. You can see those customs menplunging these long iron bars down throughthe barrels of flour to see if there are any Biblescoming into England, because they wanted tokeep the Bible out of England. Who’s paying thecustom collectors? Protestant rulers! Protestantsburned Bibles by the thousands! They evenburned the Bible translators. Tyndale died beforethey could catch up with him, but they dug uphis bones and burned them. That’s the treatmentthe Protestants gave to the people who translatedthe Bible. The Bible was a feared book on bothsides of this tension between North and South.

The fundamental tension was cultural,between the Germanic tradition and the Medi-terranean tradition. I’m just trying to sum up in harsh, contrasting terms, another view of theReformation, which is probably not exact indetail, but which is greatly different from thetraditional view of the Reformation. I want tostir up your minds a little to think of this interms of missions.

Let’s go back to Luther. There’s a greatercomplexity involved, because of the layers ofsociety in Germany. Luther was born into apeasant family. In that peasant family, his sym-pathies inevitably were with the Bundschuhmovement. That was very, very viciously sup-pressed when he was in his teens. At that timehe could easily understand what happened,and he saw this peasant movement brutallysuppressed. He, obviously, being from a peasantfamily, sympathized with the peasants. One of the things that boiled and smoldered in hisblood was the oppression of the peasants bythe aristocrats.

Many years later, when he got into the Bible,he discovered the true spiritual response of theheart to the living God through faith, instead ofthrough rituals and so forth. This was an enlight-enment that came to him, not only because ofthe Bible, but because of a man named JohannStaupitz and others, godly Roman Catholic Bibleexpositors who lead him and helped him along.

Luther, of course, was a rather special person.I wouldn’t say unstable, but highly sensitive

and conscientious, and perhaps a little over-sensitive about his own guilt. It was a monu-mental step to get him over the hump into theassurance of God’s love and pardon. It was agreat achievement. They helped and helpedand tussled and pushed to get him over thathump. When he finally got over it, that gavehim a sweeping insight into the possibilities ofreform of the church. He didn’t feel any moreGerman about that than anything else; this wasa spiritual concern of his.

Luther was a profoundly spiritual man, noquestion about it. I’m not trying to make himinto a politician. On the other hand, when hewent down to Rome, as he did because of anassignment by his order, the Augustinian Order,there is no question but that he was turned offby the Romans. He smarted when they snick-ered at the way he spoke Latin. They instantlydetected his Germanic accent and flashed outthe term tedesco, that is, “hick” from the Germansticks. Tedesco was a word like our “Wop” or“Jap” or something like that. It’s an epithet.Luther somehow lost his loyalty for that Head-quarters of Christendom, and in the process ofgoing up those steps on his knees and seeingall the various tourist traps of Rome—the eccle-siastical booby traps to get the money awayfrom the unsuspecting hicks from the sticks—something clicked inside. He was too much ofa biblical scholar by this time to be able to gagit down, and he stood up and said, “This is notthe way to salvation. This is a fraud!”

Rome itself now became just a smelly city;you could smell it for ten miles before you gotthere! Luther was glad to get out of there. Allthe way back to Germany, you could imaginehim getting more German all the way. Now anew dimension entered: it was not just a reformof the church, but it was a German versus Romanattitude. It was mixed in his mind. It wasn’t 50-50 or 70-30, or whatever. But we know boththings were boiling in his mind.

A long succession of sparing took place inhis writings with John Tetzel. Tetzel had a bigchest where you put money in and supposedlygot your soul out of purgatory, or the soul ofyour grandmother or something. The Germanphrase that rhymed was: “When the coin clinked,out of purgatory the soul sprinked!” Luthersaw that at a distance, and having just comefrom Rome, he had had enough of these guys!He didn’t want to see all that money goingdown to Rome, anyway. And he was not theonly German who felt that way. So there’re two


factors right there: a theological factor and aneconomic, nationalistic factor.

So Luther announced that in the next weeklydiscussion, he was going to take up some ofthese things. The so-called hammering of a nailinto the door of a cathedral and all that drama—this was the normal way of posting the subjectof discussion. There was nothing particularlyradical about that. It was just like writing onthe bulletin board, or on the democracy wall inBeijing; it was the normal thing, to put up therethe topic you were going to talk about. The thingthat was not normal was the thoroughness andthe comprehensiveness and radicalness of the95 theses that he advanced. Most of them wereunexceptionable; none of them were unique toLuther.

But there was an incendiary situation at thistime in history. In other words, while manysparks had been cast off the anvil, this sparklanded in a tinder box. The Germans wereunder pressure to put more money into Rome.There was an uneasiness all over the empire.They were looking for a new emperor of theHoly Roman Empire. This is a very significantfactor.

The papacy was controlled by the Spanish,the French, and the Germans. Any two of thosepowers could control the papacy. The Frenchhad carried the papacy off for safe-keepingover into France for a number of years justbefore this, and that was a great shame andscandal. The papacy was now back in Rome.The popes survived by juggling these powersand playing them off against each other. It isvery easy to say that those popes weren’t veryspiritual men. You didn’t even have time toread the Bible, if you were going to try to retainyour existence as an autonomous Vatican state.At first, the Spanish would come in and burnRome down and take everything over. Thenthe French would come in and take everythingover. Then the Germans would chase the Frenchout. There were these three balls in the air thatthe pope was juggling: the Spanish, the French,and the Germans. Every time a new emperorwas chosen for this loose, unwieldy, somewhatdisunified empire, it was always a great crisis—far more than simply electing a new presidentafter an assassination.

At this very moment when Luther was begin-ning to cause trouble, as we say, they werelooking for a new emperor. Of all the possibilities,the pope could see that he could not get aheadby getting a Spanish emperor. And that guy

Charles up in France—he didn’t want him tobe the emperor. The man that the pope wantedto be emperor happened to be an East German,as we would say today, to tell you where it wasin Germany: a man named Frederick of Saxony.Where is Saxony? It is not where the Saxonscame from; it’s where Charlemagne sent them.Saxony is now in Eastern Germany. The Saxonsstarted out on the North Sea, but when Charle-magne tried to keep them from marauding andcausing trouble, he finally just went in andgrabbed them and scattered them all over, anda lot of them landed in East Germany. That iswhere Saxony is today, and that is where theelector, Frederick, was.

An elector is like a senator, but not exactly.He is a political power, qualified to become anemperor. The pope wanted Frederick to beemperor because Frederick was an honest man,he was a good man, he was a Christian man,and he was a man the pope had less troublewith than anyone else. So he wanted him to bethe new emperor. I studied the Reformation for many years before I found this out, so youshould greatly value that little tidbit, that thepope favored Frederick to be the new emperor.Do you know why that is significant? It meantthat the pope was not about to take up armsagainst Luther! How long do you think Lutherhad? How much of a lease on life do you thinkhe had because of this accidental political rela-tionship with the pope? He had 25 years withinwhich to work, because of political factors thatkept the pope from pushing the buttons for theKGB or the SS or whoever to go up there andget Luther. The pope held them off.

It wasn’t that the pope couldn’t do anything.He chose not to do anything, even after theinexorable forces of the Diet of Worms thatcondemned Luther, and everything else. Theysent up one of their brilliant theologians, JohnEck, who turned Luther’s arguments againsthim skillfully. But even after that, the popedidn’t do anything. They did not enforce whatthey had decided. Why? Because the pope washoping that Frederick would be on his side andbecome the new emperor. Even after Charles Vbecame the emperor, the pope still counted allthe more now on Frederick being the counter-balancing friend. The Germans were needednow, to balance the French, who might comeand lug the pope off again to some French loca-tion.

Another factor: as time went on, even thoughthe Bundschuh movement had been cruelly and


violently suppressed in his youth, it becameclear to Luther that he was not going to get anyplace as a peasant. He needed Frederick’s back-ing. As a matter of fact, he probably would havelost his life if Frederick had not hijacked himon the way back from the Diet of Worms andplaced him in protective custody.

For Luther, it became more and more clearthat the great issues of reformation and ofnationalism, both swimming around in hishead at the same time, could not be cured bysimply retaining his theological concern andretaining his family background in the fore-ground. Now he was in the limelight. He wasnow a famous person, he was on a first namebasis with aristocrats, and more and more hebecame at home among those people. Some-where along the line, though he started out as a peasant, he ended up as an aristocrat, as aman who for practical purposes inevitably—not giving up his Christian faith, but simplyrealizing the lay of the land—ended up on theside of the aristocrats.

There was another reason for him to movein that direction. Not only were the aristocratsa people that the pope depended on, but theywere the ones to whom the pope was generousand kindly, so long as they were generous andkindly to the pope. But remember the Bundschuh.Call them the communists, if you wish, therabble-rousers who were going to get the peopleto rebel against the leaders. The Bundschuhwas not dead. The aristocrats had killed off asmany of the Bundschuh as they could. But theideas were still there. You can not kill an idea.One of the other little tidbits that I bumped upon,long after studying the Reformation in seminary,was the fact that the very night when the Dietof Worms brought in its verdict against Luther,all over the city of Worms there appeared on themost important doorways of homes and civicbuildings, the sign of the peasants: the sandalof the peasants. Bundschuh: bund meaning pact,covenant, conspiracy; schuh meaning shoe. Thepact of the peasants, the conspiracy of the peas-ants, the communists of their time, if you wish!They put their mark on the door, like the hammerand sickle, only theirs was the symbol of a sandal.What was the significance of that? They wererising up in wrath and anger that the man thatthey were counting on was condemned.

This was a threat! You can imagine, not onlythe papal forces, but the people of Frederick ofSaxony were afraid. l imagine that some peopleeven said, “Ah ha! This means that Luther is in

league with the Bundschuh!” This made it very,very dangerous for Luther, if he was suspectedof being a “commie.” That’s where it lay.

For that reason and others, Frederick senthis men to hijack Luther on the road back fromWorms. He’d been given safe conduct to gothere and to come back, but it wasn’t going tobe very safe, apparently, especially with theBundschuh attempting to affiliate themselveswith his cause, an Anti-Roman, anti-establishmentattitude. So Frederick took Luther in by force,so to speak, and brought him into the aristo-cratic world for over a year.

During this period, Luther translated theBible, while he himself was translated into anew social world. It’s another misconceptionthat Luther was the first one to translate theBible into German. The whole Bible was trans-lated 13 times into German before Luther! His translation was the fourteenth. In fact, theBundschuh movement wouldn’t have been inbusiness at all, if it hadn’t been for a vernacularBible. This is why the Bible is so dangerous!

Of course, those peasants down through thedecades had become emboldened by their scar-city. Their scarcity was the result of the BlackDeath. Imagine a Europe hardly a tenth as largeas it is now, or maybe an eighth or a seventh,and 33,000,000 people being killed in the Plague!Can you imagine 33 million people dying? So peasants became scarcer and more powerful.

They were reading the Bible. The Bible is theprime mover in all of this. In the Bible they didnot see all this wealth and all the rich people’ssuperiority. In one case, they brought together adocument with ten petitions to the landholders,to the aristocracy, all very respectfully written:not a snarl, not a swipe, not an untoward phrasein it. The final paragraph of this petition said,“If there’s anything in this petition that is con-trary to the Word of God, we herewith andstraightway withdraw it.” You see, the Biblewas central.

What do you think was in that petition?They were pleading with the rulers to go easieron their taxes, to go easier on them. Sometimesin their winter game hunts, aristocrats wouldtake a bunch of peasants along with them onthe hunting expeditions. In the bitter wintersome of these aristocrats would get cold feet.Their feet would get so terribly cold—how doyou warm up your feet in the middle of winter?You don’t take out your Coleman stove or any-thing like that. You cut open a peasant and putyour feet inside the body! It will keep your feet


warm enough, without getting them too warm,and frostbite can be avoided. It’s really an idealtechnique!

But the peasants, who were reading theBible, felt that there should be a limitation onthe number of peasants per expedition whocould be so used. Their pleas to the aristocracywere not unreasonable pleas. Talk about thecolonial atrocities of our time: there is nothingapproaching the brutality and the horror ofserfdom back in those days!

The Bible permeated and penetrated thatlump like a leaven, and inevitably produced aPeasants’ Revolt. By the time the second revoltoccurred in Luther’s century in Germany, hewas on the side of the aristocrats. Being themost powerful person in Germany, in terms ofhis theological and spiritual dictums, he wrotein his pamphlets right straight out of Romans13: “The powers that be are ordained of God.”And these peasants are to be suppressed inevery way, shape or form, beaten and stabbed,and kicked like mad dogs.

By the time the typewriters got all this typedup and in camera-ready copy, and the instantprinters ran off the copies and got them all dis-tributed, it took a little longer than it does today.By this time, the aristocrats, without Luther’sassistance, had already killed off 30,000-40,000people: garrotted them, crucified them, drownedthem, in the utterly most merciless ways! Bythe time Luther’s pamphlet hit the streets, hewas pouring fire on fire. This did not sit wellwith the populace. It hardened the polarizationbetween Luther and his own background andthe people. Luther was now irretrievably a partof the aristocracy. And more and more a German,rather than a Roman.

This gives you some of the complexity of thesituation. I am not trying to say anything that isintended as a criticism of Luther as a Christiandisciple. He was not only a godly, sensitive,conscientious believer, but he was an exceed-ingly brilliant and eloquent person, a monumentalleader, a tremendous person. But, under thecircumstances what would you have done?Where would you have gone? With whomwould you have affiliated? Would you havegone with Frederick? Or would you not havegone with Frederick?

Picture yourself and all those tensions andforces, and you see that the Reformation is nota simple picture. It has a great deal to do withthe Bible, but it is not as though the Bible wasnot studied before the Reformation. The Bible

produced the Reformation. As far as suppres-sion of the Bible is concerned, the Reformationproduced the suppression of the Bible more thanit resulted from the suppression of the Bible.The Reformation didn’t happen because theBible was suppressed; the Bible was suppressedbecause of the Reformation happening in sucha way as to produce a political breakdown andwar and dismemberment of Europe, and so forth.So it is obvious that the mistreatment of theBible was not the cause of all the Reformation.

That is one way to put it. I would rather saythat the Bible was the one unrelenting force tochange and to humanize and to correct and toimprove the situation. But, looking back, it’svery hard to disentangle all these things.

The result, of course, was the LutheranChurch; also the so-called Reformed Church.Luther was not part of the Reformed Church.Idiotic though these names are—I think I clari-fied this once before—the Reformed traditionwas that derived from Geneva. The Lutherantradition was different and not the same as theReformed tradition. But both of them have beencalled the Protestant Reformation.

The evangelici were opposed to the pontifici.The pontifici were the party of people who fol-lowed the pontiff, the pope. The evangelici werethe people who became Protestants: they pro-tested against any kind of sweeping unificationof any portion of Europe. They proposed (pro-tested) that people should be allowed to choseto be evangelici or pontifici, and should not beforced. Thus, those who protested the imposi-tion of the pontiff’s tradition were called theProtestants.

Strictly speaking, you can’t say that KingHenry VIII was a Protestant. More and moretoday, Episcopalians say, “We’re not Protestants.”Seventh Day Adventists say, “We’re not Prot-estants.” In a certain sense, however, the wordProtestant has gained a larger meaning.

As we look back, what is the significance ofall this for us in terms of missionary theory? It means, I believe, that where you do not allowthe vernacular and cultural self-determinationin a situation, you will have to expect a split inthe church. And that could very accurately becalled a reformation: a reformulation alongindigenous lines.

In Africa, more spectacularly than in anyother place, you have thousands of splits offmission-founded churches, the mission-foundedchurches being more Western and Europeanthan they should be perhaps. Eventually, when


the Bible gets translated—this is one of DavidBarrett’s theses, which makes the Bible Societypeople very unhappy—it is the translation ofthe Bible that liberates the people from thebondage of missionary culture, and allows andencourages the splits of the African independentchurches. The AlC’s of Africa, according to thattheory and many other factors, are the result ofthe translation of the Bible.

One thing is certainly true: out of some 5-6,000African independent churches, many, if not most,would welcome missionaries who would come,not in the name of another church or missionsociety, but to help them read the Bible inGreek and Hebrew. They’d be very happy foryou to go over there and teach them Greek,because then they could read the Bible for them-selves, they could translate it for themselves.They would become their own people.

Isn’t this reminiscent of the Reformation? Ittook the Lutherans 50 years to finally establishsome kind of formal structure for their move-ment and then settle upon it. When they did,they merely borrowed back again the RomanCatholic diocesan structure. They never didput the Orders back into the picture, and so theProtestant tradition lost the arms and legs, thevehicles, for renewal and outreach and mission.

To this day, we still don’t know what to dowith the mission societies, because the Refor-mation essentially threw out everything, andmerely replaced the diocesan structure, minus

the order structure. Reformation will occur insomewhat similar form wherever there is notan ‘autocephalic’ approach, namely, allowingthe people themselves to develop their owntheological tradition, to read the Bible forthemselves and to be themselves.

Now, I’m sure in all the classes here in theSchool of World Mission, this same subject isbeing discussed, so I don’t need to add to it.The fact is the Reformation is that one locus

classicus, that massive breaking away of a cul-tural tradition, that allowed for a breakdown of the uniformitarian hypothesis.

We should view it as such. It is not just acurious thing that happened. It foretells thefuture. It could have been predicted. It is at peacewith many other movements in the modernworld today. We need to study it, because wecan see our hand in front of our face in parallelsituations in foreign settings.

In response to questions: I think that the Refor-mation would have taken place without theprinting press. I’ll grant you that the printingpress helped, but the printing press existed longbefore the Reformation. I’m trying to revise mypersonal opinion about these mechanical featuresof communication. Here’s an interesting thing:scholars tell us that the average man on thestreets of London knew more about the NewTestament prior to the invention of printingthan they do today! So think about that.

Winter Chapter 10

The Fifth Expansion

We’re supposed to push on now into the nextperiod according to our schedule: The FifthExpansion. But we are only going to take oneaspect of this 1600-2000 year period.

I must just make this off-hand comment, thatthere is so much of rich interest in all theseperiods that it does seem almost as if a teachertakes a group of students to a museum, but themuseum is very large. There really isn’t a lot oftime, the little kids are flitting around and can’tquite fully understand what’s going on. But theyget absorbed here and there, and they no soonerbegin to figure out what is happening, than theteacher drags them on to the next section of themuseum. And they fiinally get out sort of daz-zled and confused by the rich detail of the wholesituation.

You understand that my purpose is not tostand here and read for you all the little thingsthat you can see through those museum windowsyourself, but just to get you excited about themuseum itself—so interested that you will wantto go back and visit by yourself and linger aslong as you like at any particular exhibit, andcontinue to do so for the rest of your lives.

Thus, what we need to do at this point is to getour perspective again in terms of our time grid.We’ve seen our first two epochs, where we dealtwith the Romans in the first 400 years, and thenthe barbarian tribes flooded into Central Europe,blossoming as Christians by 800. Then camethe Viking period, and toward the end of thatthird period, by 1200, we found a much moreextensive period of flourishing. We talked aboutthe Crusades, the friars, the cathedrals, the uni-versities, and the tremendous burst of power.It’s amazing how prolific the human being is,when he doesn’t keep killing himself off all thetime! But, of course, that flourishing took placeafter the Viking invasions subsided and theVikings themselves had become Christians (ofa sort) by 1050.

I’m not presenting these epochs as beingsomething on God’s timetable. It’s just thatwe’re trying to use 400-year chunks in order

10 – 1

better to keep track. This is a grid we’re layingdown on top of history. For just vague parallelismto the two Dark Ages you now have, beginningin the middle of the fourth epoch, the outbreakof the Plague, which ran for half a century inactuality and then for more than that in itstapering effects. It produced the unrest for thepeasants uprisings that leaned into the periodof the Reformation, so-called.

This reminds me of a similar situation later.The Second World War was a struggle essentiallybetween Western powers. It wasn’t a world warexactly, except that the whole world was watch-ing it on television, so to speak. But while theWestern powers were locked in struggle thenon-Western countries, the colonial countries,struggled loose and got free from the Westernpowers. That is, during that war the French, theSpanish, the English, the Americans all beganto lose their direct political control over the restof the world. Now, the same thing is true here,to some extent: because of all this turmoil of thePlague and everything, the Roman church endedup losing control over the outlying provinces.To some extent that was the political breakdownof Europe ending in the Reformation—the outerprovinces began to struggle loose during theconfusion and the difficulties of the Plague.

Meanwhile, however, the most tragic impactof the Plague, as I see it, is its impact on thefriars, the Roman Catholic missionary orders,which were able to go out across the world. Itwas a tremendous set back! I can’t rememberthe precise number, but on an historical chartthat my wife prepared, “2000 Years of ChristianExpansion,” there’s a little note off to the left,indicating that something like 120,000 Francis-cans died in the Plague in Germany alone!Dominicans died, Augustinians died, all kindsof people died in the Catholic orders. They werethe ones who tried to help the afflicted. So it wasa fantastic set back!

Nevertheless, I’ll read you a quotation fromDominic in 1210—at precisely the time of theLateran Council, which formally approved the

© 1996 R. Winter. No copy may be made without the author’s permission.

10 – 2 The Fifth Expansion

Franciscans and the Dominicans (the Franciscanshad a five-year lead with a provisional approvalbefore that, but at the Lateran Council they werefully approved)—it was that same year thatDominic came out with this statement to hisfollowers: “You are a little flock, but God hasfor you the purpose of reaching the ends of theearth, because He has said that we must go andpreach the gospel in all the lands.” It’s an obvi-ous quotation of the Great Commission.

This was in 1210. See, we need to wait from1210 to 1810 before there really is any Protestantquoting that same verse. In other words, 600years of time goes by between 1210 and 1810.William Carey, of course, got out there a fewyears earlier, but 1810 is as good a date as anyother to date the beginning of real energy inProtestant missions.

Six hundred years go by, in which the RomanCatholic tradition is the only really extensivemissionary effort. The first part of this 600-yearperiod, running up until 1492—call it 1500—was mission effort characterized as travel byland. The stories of attempts by the friars to crossthe steppes of Asia and to go to Beijing, as wecall it today—the legendary city of Cambaluc ofthe Mongols—all of this is just fabulous reading!You would never, ever turn on the television ifyou had access to the reality of that era. Takethe question of the four spiritual laws that werewritten on the sides of the canvas of the travel-ling trailer these friars used! They were all verymobile, just like the Mongols were a very mobilenomadic people. The friars would raise this tenttrailer up, and there would be the four canvassides with the four spiritual laws of their devis-ing on it, preaching the gospel of Jesus Christin their particular way. What I would give tosee what was on those four sides, what theirprecise gospel message was!

This is something you could write a paper on:What gospel did the friars preach? What werethey trying to say? What was their emphasis?We have already pointed out that throughoutEurope there was a great deal of emphasis on aJohn the Baptist sort of repentance and forgive-ness of sins through faith in Jesus Christ. It’sgot to be some how basically pretty Scriptural.You cannot account for the vitality, the durability,the patience, the many other virtues of thesemovements, apart from the true influence ofthe Bible.

The friars could not go by any other method,so they had to go by land. Way back there in1262—notice how far back that is—you get the

Marco Polo story coming into the picture. In1262, Marco Polo, one of several travelers of afamily of merchants, brings back word fromCambaluc, today’s Beijing, the headquarters ofthe Mongol Empire, and the emperor there askedfor a 100 missionaries to come and teach themscience and religion! Notice the combination:science and religion. It’s very, very interesting.The gospel has always, always, always carried,in its very nature, elements other than purelyspiritual elements. Don’t ever suppose that thegospel of Jesus Christ is just purely spiritual!Why? Because God’s concern for us is not justspiritual.

One reason the church persecuted certainpeople in those days was because they weredualistic, Manichaean. Some of them believedthat the Bible was evil. The Inquisitors didn’thave a theology that was all that superior, butit was superior. And, much as I hate to see theviolence of the destruction of whole towns, andthe hunting down of the heretics in SouthernFrance, you have to admit that their theologywasn’t so hot. It was tinctured heavily with adualism and an ancient paganism, which wasnot Christian.

Christian insight has always involved salva-tion on a holistic scale, but Christians have notalways understood that. It was Santa Theresa,one of the most godly women of history, who,it is said, had a little worm that screwed its wayinto her forehead and tormented her. But shesaid, Paul had a problem that he couldn’t cure,and so do I. And this made her more spiritual,she said. One day she leaned over to pick some-thing up, so the story goes, and the worm fellout. She put it back in again! Now, that is theultimate of pagan interpretation of God’s attitudetowards the body.

So there has always been, or should havebeen, in the preaching of the gospel and theacceptance of the gospel, elements other thanstrictly spiritual elements. For they exist in God’sown appraisal of his own creation, fallen to beredeemed, not only spiritually but physically.

See page 656 in Latourette, where he talksabout the study of the Bible in Spain and the roleof Cardinal Ximénes (Cisneros is just anothername for him). He’s the same man who puttogether the Complutensian Polyglot Bible. Thereal study of the Bible is there during that time.

Remember the movie on Francis of Assisi,“Brother Sun, Sister Moon.” The film endswhere it should have begun, but as far as it goes,it is an excellent movie of the times and the


situation in which the Catholic Franciscan orderwas born. The thing that irritates me is the factthat all through the movie they’re quoting theBible, but never in the movie do you see theBible. The Bible is totally absent. The wholeidea is that somehow God just works like this,and yet the Bible is being quoted—obviously,somebody was reading the Bible. At this sametime, Peter Waldo was taking the Bible in thevernacular all around the place. The Bible is thepreeminent force in all this period!

Morris Watkins, who did his doctoral disserta-tion here recently and whose book has just beenprinted by the William Carey Library, showsthe prominence of the Bible. Remember theprominence of the Bible in the Irish church: thatbejeweled book which they were constantlycarrying and copying and writing commentariesabout. I think that while the Bible was part ofthe political banner of the Reformation, it con-tinued to be a living force both in the north andin the south.

Someone might want to do a paper on the roleof the Bible in the Catholic so-called Counter-Reformation. You’d better put “so-called,”because I really think that’s the only fair way toput it. It’s true that the Protestants boast aboutthe Bible. The role of the Bible in the Catholicmovement is more subdued; it’s less officious,but it is obviously there.

The point I’m trying to make right now isthat when 100 missionaries were asked for bythat Mongol emperor, Kublai Khan, he askedfor missionaries who would bring them scienceand religion, or faith. I’m not sure of the exactwording of what they asked for, but they didwant Europeans to come and bring them science.Missionaries have taken science all over theworld. The largest technical university in LatinAmerica, in Brazil, is there because of mission-aries. The largest agricultural experimentalstation in Asia is there because of missionaries.The vast majority of universities outside of theWest, as well as in the West, are there becauseof Christians, and even the emphasis on sciencein the Western tradition has its roots in theChristian movement. Of the five greatest menof science in English history—Sir HumphreyDavie, James Clerk Maxwell, William Thompson(Lord Kelvin), Isaac Newton and Michael Fara-day—four of these five were devout Christians!

Kepler’s three laws of motion were the firstexample in human history of the reduction ofnatural law to mathematical description. Histhree laws themselves are actually stunning,

absolutely fantastic breakthroughs in terms ofdescribing in mathematical terms the planetarymotion that was confused for centuries in people’sminds—reducing it to really amazing laws! Heshowed that the time periods of the planets areproportional to the squares of the distances oftheir axes, and all kinds of amazing things likethat were explained. Why? Because Kepler, as aChristian, had a Christian cosmology. He believeddevoutly that God’s creation would be orderly.

Latourette talks about the fact that the pagantribal peoples, with their capricious pantheonof competing deities fighting and scramblingwith each other, just like the Greek gods were,found that Christianity replaced all that with acosmology of one God of order, and actuallylaid the groundwork for belief in natural law.These former tribal peoples wouldn’t be lookingfor laws that could be described in mathematicalterms, if they hadn’t become Christians. Thereis no other human historical tradition that con-ceives of nature as orderly, except that whichstems from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Scienceis impossible without that kind of cosmology,which is uniquely Judaic.

Even the so-called Greek science, as someauthors have tried to put it, that precededChristianity, was a vast confusion, comparedto what happened when Christian cosmologyreplaced those deities whose sudden impulsescould change nature, and allowed people tobelieve that God was consistent and predictable.

So, one of the things that attracted the rulers inCambaluc was this other insight into the natureof nature, which came along as a by-product ofthe Christian faith. They wanted it. There it is,in 1262.

Now you go running down through historyto the year 1600, and here is a man walking upthe steps of the palace in Beijing, as it is nowcalled. Who is he? Where did he come from?What has he got? What is he delivering? Hisname is Matteo Ricci. Matteo is simply the wordfor Matthew—there’s the impact of the Bible.Right there in the year 1600.

Back in Italy some years before, maybe 15years earlier, the intelligence of the Jesuit orderhad brought back the information that the rulersof China were very fascinated and attracted bytwo things: maps and clocks. These were twothings they did not have control over, whichthe Christians did have control over. Latourettepoints out that clocks were invented in themonasteries in order to sound out the hoursand then to reduce the regulas into practically


implementable orderly schemes. The clocks hada practical goal in mind in those days.

And the maps, too, were the result of world-wide interest, based on the Great Commission.Prince Henry the Navigator was one of the greatscholars of the seas and promoters of navigation,although he never navigated except from land.He was a proponent, a massive, steely, disci-plined proponent of reaching out, who hadprofoundly Christian purposes in sending shipsout and refining their navigation methods andso forth. Their interest in the world, the mapsthat were being put together also were theresult of Christian concern and Christian faith.

You take those two things, the clocks in themonasteries and the maps that would enablethe Great Commission to the be fulfilled, andthose two things are the key that finally getsthe Jesuits to Cambaluc, to Beijing. In a Jesuitmonastic center in Italy, the command comes toMatteo Ricci’s superior: “Prepare a man in mapsand clocks, cartography …” So this young manspent 11 years mastering clock-making andmaps and cartography, and then he graduatedfrom the “School of World Mission” and wassent off to the East!

Even so Ricci couldn’t get into China and solanded in Macão, which was Portuguese. Hestayed there and sort of informally allowed outthe information that he knew all about clocks.They had clocks there, which travelers goinglater to Beijing looked at. And they had maps,which they wouldn’t allow out of the room,but they showed them. So the word finally gotto the emperor, and after a number of years theword comes from Beijing that Matteo Ricci iswanted in that capital city.

It is a very interesting repetition, you see,four hundred years later than Marco Polo. Inhis time, of course, they did send a handful ofmissionaries back to China. They sent four: twogot scared before they ever got to the eastern endof the Mediterranean; the other two quit later on.Marco Polo’s group did finally get there, butwithout the missionaries. Twenty-five yearslater, John of Montecorvino did finally get toBeijing. But by now the Khan who had askedfor the missionaries had died. One of history’sgreatest failures to respond!

The only thing comparable that I know ofoccurring in modern times involves that samecountry, China. In a film that we made at theU.S. Center for World Mission about nine monthsago, we had Pat Boone asking me a questionabout China, and I made the statement, “People

have said, ‘These places are all closed to thegospel. You’re talking about Chinese, Hindus,Moslems. You can’t get at any of these people,so why keep talking about them?’” My answerto such questions is, “If China should open andall of a sudden they should want 50,000 Ameri-can teachers of English, would we be ready?”

Now, what is it they would want English for?Clocks and maps! That is, technology from theWest! A technology born and bred and developed,as only it could have been—among people whobelieve God made the world and made it beauti-ful and orderly.

You look at the 34 subatomic particles chartedout by the nuclear physicists, and you are dazzledby the symmetry and the astonishing wonderof that. You’re getting to the outer limits ofhuman perception when you get into the sub-atomic particles and try to see what God madein that area. But this kind of knowledge is whatthose same Chinese want today.

Well, my answer was wrong. I mislead PatBoone. China didn’t ask for 50,000 Americanteachers of English. They have just now announcedthat they want 500,000! I made a big mistake.But, of course, we’re not ready for that either.If we’re not ready for 50,000, we’re not ready for500,000. The 500,000 isn’t all English teachers,I’ll grant you. They want them to teach English,French, Spanish and German, in a big masscampaign; but English is the language they arereally emphasizing. More than half of thoseteachers are to be English teachers. Are we readyto go to China with what it is they want, as wellas the gospel?

Again and again after Marco Polo Europeansmade massive attempts to go to China by land,but the land approach was not very successful.But then 1492 rolled around. Remember that date:that’s the date when the Moors were pushed outof Spain. The next period of Catholic missionswas to be by sea, and this was unimaginablymore successful in reaching China! Here’s againa technological achievement: navigation instru-ments, prepared by a godly man named PrinceHenry the Navigator, an achievement thatallowed these same people, these same organi-zations, to get to the ends of the earth. Withoutsuch instruments, they couldn’t have done so.

Don’t tell me that there isn’t an interplaybetween technology and missions! Here’s aperfect example. But it’s a long and fabulousstory, hardly known to Protestants. Protestantsdon’t have the faintest idea what it is all about.

To illustrate, I brought along a book today


called Observations in Lower California., publishedby the University of California at Berkeley.What I have told you is the English translationof the title. It was written in German in 1772 byBaegert, a Jesuit. He spent almost 20 years inBaja California, just south of us here. Whileyou’re in California, you ought to look arounda little . You’ll find a great deal of evidence ofRoman Catholic missions in our area. Just a fewmiles away from here is the San Gabriel Mission.These mission outposts were one day’s journeyaway from each other, all the way up fromMexico, like a spinal column running up throughCalifornia.

These were not examples of the monks flee-ing the world. These people were on the outeredges of the face of the earth here in California!There was no place farther away from Europe.Even China was much closer than California,in the sense of how to get there safely. Theseoutposts were not just little private preserveswhere they were looking out for their own sal-vation. They were reaching out to the Indiansand trying to convert them. They were veryobviously in that kind of a business, and thiswhole book is about that.

One of the most astounding things in thisbook is the culture shock of this Jesuit as helooks at these Californians—which is what hecalls the Indians. Probably the most humorousthing is his ethnocentrism with regard to lan-guages. This is 1772; he should have knownbetter. Long before this, 200 years before this,the Catholic missionary movement had manymissionaries who were highly skilled linguists.In Mexico City they were teaching a number ofdifferent languages to the friars who were goingout to the various tribes. Down in Guatemala,where my own family lived for ten years, youcan go and see a great set of ruins, broken downby earthquakes, the remains of the buildings ofa group called the Redemptionist Fathers. Theyemphasized the indigenous languages, usingthe vernacular.

But here in 1772 comes a guy who somehowmissed out on all that linguistic insight, and hiswhole book is just a diatribe about the stupidCalifornians. He doesn’t say it quite that way,but he really doesn’t think these people arevery bright. In chapter 10, he comes to the theirlanguage and he speaks of:

a surprising and pitiful lack of a great numberof words, without which I believe it is hardlypossible for reasoning creatures to converse,still less to preach to them or teach them the

Christian doctrine. For example, there are nowords to express whatever is not material andnot perceptible by the senses and can neitherbe seen nor touched, nor are there words toexpress virtues nor vices nor qualities offeelings. For example, there are no nouns ofthat type and only three or four adjectiveswhich could be read in the face in terms ofemotions: merry, sad, tired and angry. Thereare no terms which relate to social, humanor rational and civil life, and no words for amultitude of other objects. It would be futileto look in the [local Indian language] for thefollowing words. Don’t look for these words;they are not there: life, death, weather, time,cold, heat, world, rain, reason, memory,knowledge, honor, decency, consolation,peace, quarrel, member, joy, grace, feeling,friend, friendship, truth, shame, enmity,faith, love, hope, wish, desire, hate, anger,gratitude, patience, meekness, envy, industry,virtue, vice, beauty, form, sickness, danger,fear, occasion, thing, diversity, punishment,doubt, servant, master, virgin, judgment,suspicion, happiness, happy, reasonable,bashful, honorable, intelligent, moderate, pious,obedient, rich, poor, young, old, agreeable,lovely, friendly, half, quick, profound, round,contented, to greet, to thank, to punish, to besilent, to walk, to complain, to worship, todoubt, to buy, to flatter, to persecute, to dwell,to breathe, to imagine, to idle, to insult, tocomfort, to live, and thousands of words likethese, in general all German words ending inheit, keit, nis, ung, and facht.

Obviously, he was not a very good linguist!Obviously, he had not really learned that par-ticular language. What he is saying is just somuch nonsense! But it reveals to us the cultureshock, the problems, the inabilities. It’s the usualsort of clash that took place when people fromEurope moved out across the globe and landedhere in the so-called New World in the 1500sand penetrated clear across Mexico, clear overinto California, ran into these strange peopleand just could not understand them.

We need to avoid the common stereotypesof our time, even though there are elements oftruth in them. If these Native Americans did nothave ways of expressing the concepts listed bythis missionary, how could they reason? TheEuropeans looked back on their own savagepast and they realized that there was a timewhen they themselves really didn’t have cities,they didn’t have industry; they didn’t have acivilization growing up apart from the comingof the Christian faith—remember Churchill’ssummary. Thus, when they went out to the rest


of the world, they not only went out to theworld with the spiritual gospel, but also withcivilization, with science, because that is whatthey assumed the people would want. That, theyfelt, was part of God’s concern. They assumedthat if they were to take the gospel, they wouldalso civilize the people. And if they civilized thepeople, then the people would be more useful.They could do more things, they could tradewith them. They could get them to do usefulthings, instead of chasing each other aroundand killing each other, which is more or less thechief pastime of all mankind everywhere, and,as it turned out, that was what the people in theNew World were doing before the conquistadorsever arrived. Had they not been at odds withone another the conquistadors could not haveconquered them.

But we can’t say that the Europeans went justfor commercial purposes. We have to say it wasa double motivation, even if some say it wasmainly for commercial interest. It is quite impos-sible, I believe, to make a case for one of thesetwo interests as being more prominent than theother. It’s very easy to say that religion was justa technique. But you just cannot explain whathappened that way.

Look at this man’s motivation. Here he is,frustrated after 20 years, writing up this wholebook: imagine the stupidity of this man, but alsoconsider the fact that he stuck it out for 20 years,and that he went out there in the first place.The only reason he is back in Germany now isthat the entire Jesuit Order was dissolved, andso he has time to write this book.

There is another section of this book we haveto contend with. It is an interesting chapter inthe Appendix in the back. When I showed thisto Donald McGavran years ago, he lifted out thewhole chapter, threw out every bit of the textof the Church Growth Bulletin planned for thatmonth, and just plunked this whole section inits place! Maybe he had temporary insanity orsomething, but judge for yourself. I won’t, ofcourse, have time to read the whole thing, butyou can look it up in the Church Growth Bulletin.This chapter is entitled “Some Questions Directedto Protestants and Particularly to ProtestantMinisters.” He says:

Although I am writing a report and not acontroversy [his book is primarily to Catholics],I may be permitted to interrupt my narrativeand address myself in this chapter to thegentlemen of the Protestant faith, since itmay happen that this volume will get into

their hands. Now the Protestants are obvi-ously not the true Church, because the trueChurch is characterized by its zeal to convertpeople.

The true Church of the New Testament doesnot say: “Do not set your feet into idolatrousprovinces and lands.” But on the contrary,the New Testament says “Go into the worldand preach the word of God unto all men!”

This comes from the Latin, to the German, tothe English, and it still sounds pretty much likethe Great Commission. Let’s go on.

The Bible frequently and emphatically demandsof Christian preachers to seek converts. Thiswork of conversion must be carried on inorder to conform with the many prophecies.The neglected missionary work on the partof Protestants must be due either to preju-dice on the part of all non-Catholic sects, orit must prove that they are invalid and theRoman Catholic religion is the truth. TheProtestants, for example …

Here he goes into another whole sectionsaying, essentially, “You know, if the Protestantsreally wanted to be missionaries, they wouldreally have a very easy time, because they havecomplete sea power in both the West Indiesand the East Indies. They have an excellentopportunity of carrying out the work of con-verting nonbelievers in both the West and theEast Indies, for there, as everyone knows, theirtrade and power is very great. And [now here’sa theological barb!] it would be much easier forthem, and they would be much more successfulthan the Catholics, because as a matter of factall they have to preach to the pagans is theirdoctrine of faith. They in fact could permit thenatives in the spirit of Luther to practice theirwickedness thousands of times a day. In thatspirit they could allow them to kill and yet throwthe gates of heaven wide open for them, thanksto faith alone.”

And then, lest anyone not believe what hehas just said, he now quotes Luther verbatim—here’s Luther, who said almost everything atleast once—and you can try to reconstruct thecontext, but here it is:

Be a sinner, sin bravely, but let your faith bestronger for it, and rejoice in Christ whovanquished sin in the world. We have to sinas long as we are in this world. It is enoughthat we through God’s wealth and grace haveseen the Lamb who bears the sins of the world.No sin will separate us from Him, althougha thousand and another thousand times a daywe whore and murder.


That’s Luther making a point!I won’t have time to go further into this, but

in this chapter directed to Protestants Baegertquotes every verse you’ve ever heard at a mis-sionary conference, quotes them in favor of theGreat Commission! He asks:

Where are the great volumes of martyrs inthe history of Protestant missions, like we’vegot in the Jesuit Order? The results of theso-called Reformation in the 16th century,and from 1517 until now, have been nothingbut dissension and devastation in the sheep-fold of Christ. The English and the Dutch,particularly the latter, trade in all things inall corners of the globe and they will doanything for a profit, but they do not carrythe Gospel of Christ.

He is right. For example, when the Japanesegot so fed up with Christianity that they closedtheir ports to all European traders, they didn’tthrow the Dutch out. Why? Because the Protes-tant Dutch never, ever, brought missionaries.In fact, the Dutch even helped the Japanese kickout the Spanish and the Portuguese, and evenassisted in the gruesome martyrdom in Japan ofhundreds of Catholic missionaries and thousandsof Christians! This went on for quite a while.

Anyway, the fact is that here is a man quotingthe Bible, obeying the Bible, going across theworld with the Bible, along with other Catholicmissionaries, during a period of 600 years prior toany stirring within the Protestant tradition alongthe same lines.

We left Matteo Ricci on the steps of the PekingPalace. We have not yet talked about the ChineseRites Controversy. Let me just give you a littlepeek into what was involved there. The Jesuitsgot to China first. Matteo Ricci sailed for theEast long before the year 1600. He was in Macãofor some years before getting this fantastic open-ing to get into China. These men apparentlyhad a School of World Mission behind themthat produced in each of them a very similar,highly contextualizing strategy, whether it wasNobili in India or Ricci in China or Valignanoin Japan—they were all contemporaries—allapparently getting their strategy from the samemood and perspective back in Europe. One ofthe things Ricci did was to absolutely master theChinese classics. His people knew the literatureas well as any Chinese. They dressed like theChinese.

Centuries later, Hudson Taylor was to runinto the Jesuits. While the official two-volumereport on Hudson Taylor makes practically no

mention of the Jesuits, more recent researchgives quite a bit of additional information abouthis contact with the Jesuits. You can see this in alighter and very fascinating book called Hudsonand Maria, which is ostensibly about the romanceof Hudson Taylor and his marriage. But it men-tions his contact with the Jesuits and the factthat, of all the Protestant missionaries in China,Taylor was the only one who proposed wearingChinese dress, wearing a pigtail and everythingelse, and that he got this from the Jesuits!

Back to 1600. Ricci and company becameChinese if any missionaries ever did! Of course,they didn’t ever go on furloughs, or anythinglike that. But there came a day when the Fran-ciscans arrived. And the Franciscans, even bythe year 1600, were characteristically less intel-lectual, less academic. They were going to getthings done quickly, by a process of immediatewitnessing and so forth. I hesitate to makecomparisons, but there would be some trace ofcomparison, say, between Campus Crusadeand the Franciscans.

So the Jesuit sees a Franciscan coming, andlet’s assume they were both Italians, so theJesuit conjures up a bit of his remaining Italianand blurts it out to this guy coming up the steps,and the guy jumps back absolutely astonishedthat a Chinese would speak in Italian! Freakedout completely! The immediate conclusion wasthat these Jesuits have syncretized Christianity:they have gone over to the Chinese. Instead ofwinning the Chinese to Christ, the Chinese havewon the Jesuits to themselves. And they evenallow the Chinese to worship their ancestors—that is the heart of the Chinese Rites Controversy.

So there began a seesaw of power across theyears: letters going back to the pope; the popewriting back to China. It took about two solidyears for a letter to go and a reply to come; itwas not a very good method of communication.Exaggerations were made and all kinds of dis-tortions, as you could imagine, with the twoparties trying to persuade the pope of theirversion of what was happening. And, of course,pope after pope after pope went by, and eachnew pope had to be reeducated; and the Vaticanpoliticians, of course, had other things to do.

This little thing finally had to be settled, andthey finally settled it wrong. Even the emperorof China got into the act and said, “Listen, wetrust the Jesuits. They understand us. If you denytheir approach, we will throw all missionariesout of China.” The pope, of course, couldn’tbelieve that anybody would have more authority


than he did, and so he simply wrote back to theemperor and said, “Go jump in the lake!” Orsomething to that effect.

And, sure enough, the emperor of China,very begrudgingly, expelled every missionaryfrom China. What a major setback! There weremaybe a quarter of a million Christians by thistime in China, and the whole thing collapsed,due to the sudden, very bizarre, elimination ofany contact with the outside world and withChristianity elsewhere in particular. Then, ofcourse, not for this reason, the entire Jesuit orderwas closed down for about a quarter of a century,most of them actually killed off. Finally only ahandful of white-haired men were left, but thatis all it took to rebuild the order into enormousmuscular strength again in a few years.

Someone has asked me, “Isn’t it amazing thatthe Jesuits would bounce back so rapidly? Wherewould they get all their new missionaries?” Ipromised to say just a word about this.

It is amazing, but the hardest thing aboutstarting a mission society is to design the socialstructure of that organization. This is why it hasbeen so slow in Korea to get a mission societystarted that really is a tough-minded, effective,experienced organization. The structure—thatis what’s precious—is so important, and is sodifficult to hammer out and to define! Once it ishammered out, well-oiled, and clearly under-stood, then it is a hundred times easier for agroup like the Jesuits to bounce back, havingalready developed the mold, than to start a neworganization that has to make things up as itgoes along.

I know, I’m involved in such an endeavor. Ihave ninety people now who have joined me atthe U.S. Center for World Mission. We’re ham-mering out, as it were, a regula, a way of life, alifestyle as well as a theology and a strategy.The people that we absorb, in a naturalizationprocess, the definition of standards, and all thehundreds of little nitpicking things that theconventional way of life has already resolved,have to be either borrowed or created, and ittakes time!

It’s easy to build buildings; it is not easy tobuild social structures. We have to take veryseriously and very respectfully the developmentalaccomplishment of any existing organization.

Now I say that because many of our youngpeople today are displeased with existingorganizations. They want to start new ones, orthey don’t want to have anything to do withorganizations. They’re just mad at all institutions!Anti-institutional is the phrase. Anything thatalready exists, any rules that are already laiddown, have got to be wrong! The hippies intheir day tried to start out afresh. There were20,000 communes in this country at one point:almost all of them went kaput, and almost alwaysover the problem of establishing a regula, a wayof life, a social system. They just couldn’t do it!

For example—just to give you a little insightinto the enormity of the problem—has anybodyhere ever attempted to start a new languagefrom scratch, without borrowing from any otherlanguage? It is almost impossible to believe thatany human being would have the intelligenceto come up with a new language comparable toany real language that already exists, if he hadto invent it out of whole cloth. As a person witha Ph.D. in Linguistics, I know how amazing andstrange the different grammatical mechanismsare from language to language. It is hard tobelieve that there is any common origin what-soever. Forty utterly different language systemsin the world today! By a language system, I meana system that groups languages as different asFinnish and Korean in the same family; theyapparently have the same origin. The Koreanwho travels in Finland may not realize that fact,nor vice-versa, but linguistically speaking, it somuch easier for a Finn to learn Korean or vice-versa, than it would be for someone who speaksEnglish or Swahili or Chinese. On the other hand,there is no connection whatsoever betweenKorean and Japanese. Well, now, for a Koreanto invent Japanese, for example, or vice-versa,is just unthinkable!

Okay, social structure is just as complicatedas language structure. While the Jesuits don’trepresent a completely different social structure,they certainly represent an additional set ofsocial norms which produce a community, inaddition to what the general European back-ground provided, and their structure is really agreat accomplishment. It is what enabled themto bounce back and recruit new missionariesagain so readily.

The Unfolding Drama of the Christian Movement - WCIU Journal

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