The Missionary Movement in Christian History

by Walls, Andrew

• ISBN13: 9781570750595
• ISBN10: 1570750599
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-09-01
• Publisher: Orbis Books

Summary

This book brings together lectures and articles by the renowned historian of world Christianity, making them available, many for the first time, to scholars and students of world mission. While examining the many aspects that have characterized mission, indigenous Christianity, and colonialism in modern Africa, The Missionary Movement in Christian History has a far broader reach. Essays such as "The Gospel as the Prisoner and Liberator of Culture" reveal the paradoxes of the Christian movement as a whole in discussing how different primitive Mediterranean Christianity is from early Catholicism, from Celtic monasticism, from Reformation Protestantism, and from Nigerian Spirit Christianity. Andrew Walls shows how the central question for Christianity has always been one of identity in many different forms, a phenomenon revealed at each stage of its history by the missionary movement. What this means for theology, however, has hardly been explored. This is the subtext of Walls' work, providing extraordinary insights and successful counters to secular critiques of world Christianity.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	ix
Preface	xi
Introduction	xiii
Part One The Transmission of Christian Faith
The Gospel as Prisoner and Liberator of Culture	3	(13)
Culture and Coherence in Christian History	16	(10)
The Translation Principle in Christian History	26	(17)
Culture and Conversion in Christian History	43	(12)
Romans One and the Modern Missionary Movement	55	(13)
Origins of Old Northern and New Southern Christianity	68	(11)
Part Two Africa's Place in Christian History
The Evangelical Revival, the Missionary Movement, and Africa	79	(23)
Black Europeans-White Africans	102	(9)
Some Missionary Motives in West Africa
The Challenge of the African Independent Churches	111	(8)
The Anabaptists of Africa?
Primal Religious Traditions in Today's World	119	(24)
Part Three The Missionary Movement
Structural Problems in Mission Studies	143	(17)
Missionary Vocation and the Ministry	160	(13)
The First Generation
The Western Discovery of Non-Western Christian Art	173	(14)
The Nineteenth-Century Missionary as Scholar	187	(12)
Humane Learning and the Missionary Movement	199	(12)
``The Best Thinking of the Best Heathen''
The Domestic Importance of the Nineteenth-Century Medical Missionary	211	(10)
``The Heavy Artillery of the Missionary Army''
The American Dimension of the Missionary Movement	221	(20)
Missionary Societies and the Fortunate Subversion of the Church	241	(14)
The Old Age of the Missionary Movement	255	(7)
Index	262