For the Gospel's Sake

The Rise of the Wycliffe Bible Translators and the Summer Institute of Linguistics

Boone Aldridge

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781467449380
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Ministro del culto cristiano

Informed take on the amazing growth of a very unusual missionary organization

The two-sided mission organization comprising Wycliffe Bible Translators and the Summer Institute of Linguistics is a paradox that begs for an explanation. The Summer Institute has long been doing laudable linguistic, humanitarian work in many countries, while Wycliffe has been one of the largest, fastest growing, and most controversial Christian missionary enterprises in the world.

In this wide-ranging study Boone Aldridge—a religious historian and twenty-year insider at WBT-SIL—looks back at the organization's early years, from its inception in the 1930s to the death of its visionary founder, William Cameron Townsend, in 1982. He situates the iconic institution within the evolving landscape of mid-twentieth-century evangelicalism, examines its complex and occasionally confusing policies, and investigates the factors that led, despite persistent criticism from many sides, to its remarkable rise to prominence.

CHAPTER 1

Pioneering and the Progressive Ideal

Cameron Townsend was by nature and experience endowed with a frame of mind that knew few limitations to his pioneering missionary strivings or to his progressive ideals for the social uplift of the world’s indigenous peoples. More an entrepreneur in some ways than a conventional missionary, Townsend struggled to comport himself after the fashion of a typical faith missionary. Born into a family that had traversed the country from Pennsylvania to Kansas to Colorado and finally on to California in search of a better life, the young Cameron Townsend was himself an expression of this American peripatetic urge; it was an impulse that, when combined with more than a touch of idealism, imagined something bigger and better just over the horizon. Therefore, as a missionary he was instinctively drawn to pioneer where other missionaries had yet to tread, and as a progressive-minded idealist, he strove tirelessly to conquer social injustice. Discovering that language was perhaps the greatest barrier to effective evangelization and to realizing his dream of social justice for Latin America’s indigenous peoples, Townsend reordered the missionary endeavor by locating Bible translation, literacy, and education in the forefront of his strategy. His unbounded vision often bumped up against the narrower conception of missionary activity pursued by the Central American Mission (CAM) in which he served during the 1920s and early 1930s. Suffused with an irrepressible determination, he launched his own venture. With the help of a former missionary and energetic preacher, Leonard Livingstone Legters, Townsend took his radical concept of missions into anticlerical Mexico, where the WBT-SIL dual-missionary organization first took shape. To understand WBT-SIL, then, it is necessary to appreciate something of the extraordinarily creative mind of Cameron Townsend as it developed over the course of his youth, his first decade of missionary service in Guatemala, and his initial forays into Mexico.

Cameron Townsend came of age during the high tide of the American Progressive movement. Although little concrete evidence indicates a close correlation between the ideology of the Progressive movement and Townsend’s approach to missions—after all, he was not given to studied reflection or detailed elaboration on the origins of his often imaginative ideas—it nonetheless remains, whether by natural inclination or by direct influence, that his outlook bore a striking resemblance to the ideals of this early twentieth-century sociopolitical movement. As the narrative unfolds, it will be seen too that Townsend, unlike most faith missionaries and fundamentalists, was often on the same side of the fence as the purveyors of the Social Gospel, a religious movement that shared many features with American sociopolitical Progressivism.

From about 1900 to 1920, Progressives sought to lessen economic inequity in America by attacking political corruption and curbing unrestrained capitalism. Hiram Johnson, a California Progressive and the state’s Republican governor from 1911 to 1917, is a fine example of the Progressives’ stress on political reform. In his 1911 inaugural, Johnson intoned that “the first duty that is mine to perform is to eliminate every private interest from the government and to make the public service of the State responsive solely to the people.”¹ Newly elected president Woodrow Wilson not only pledged to effect a return to “equality” and “justice” in his March 1913 inaugural, but he also promised to protect American citizens “from the consequences of great industry and social processes which they cannot alter, control, or singly cope with.”² Progressives insisted that reformed government had a central role to play in achieving social justice for American citizens at a time when many of them were struggling to adapt to the industrialization and urbanization of America.

The idea of progress was clearly manifested in this early twentieth-century reform movement. “In the struggle [for] equality of opportunity,” President Theodore Roosevelt declared in a 1910 speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, “nations rise from barbarism to civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next.”³ The Progressive’s reformist “vision,” wrote prominent economist John Bates Clark in 1913, is an “Eden . . . that he can seriously expect to reach.” Bates said this achievement was “practicable for all humanity.”⁴ This sentiment was also unmistakably on display when Wilson, in 1889, insisted that “it should be the end of government to assist in accomplishing the objects of organized society.” Wilson went on: “Every means, therefore, by which society may be perfected through the instrumentality of government, every means by which individual rights can be fitly adjusted and harmonized with public duties, by which individual self-development may be made at once to serve and supplement social development, ought certainly to be diligently sought. . . . Such is the socialism to which every true lover of his kind ought to adhere with the full grip of every noble affection that is in him.”⁵ In other words, it was considered possible for the modern state to bring about a more perfect, if not perfected, social order. With much the same logic and spurred by his own Wilsonian tendencies, Townsend would harness his own mission to the state-making process in Latin America. Beginning in Mexico and continuing in Peru and beyond, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, under his direction, functionally became an extension of the state and took a hand in these nations’ ambitions for effecting their own progressive social transformations.

Purveyors of the Social Gospel were affected by the same intellectual currents that influenced the Progressives. Walter Rauschenbusch, perhaps the Social Gospel’s leading figure, wrote in 1914 that “there are two great entities in human life,—the human soul and the human race,—and religion is to save both.”⁶ Many conservative evangelicals, especially those in the premillennial-dispensational camp, disagreed. Society was, according to many fundamentalists, ultimately doomed, and only individual souls could be saved.⁷ The closer the Social Gospelers came to historicizing Christianity as the outworking of God immanent in society, the more fundamentalists de-emphasized social concerns and stressed evangelism aimed at rescuing individual souls from the present age. Historians have referred to the fundamentalists’ shying away from social reform (which had loomed large in nineteenth-century evangelicalism) between about 1900 and 1930 as the “Great Reversal.”⁸ The way in which Townsend navigated this particular aspect of the religious milieu was strikingly uncommon for an evangelical in the interwar period, and in doing so he set the stage for how he would eventually shape his own mission.

Cameron Townsend’s Early Life

Cameron Townsend was born in an old farmhouse on July 9, 1896, in Eastvale, California. In his junior year of high school, the family moved forty miles west to Clearwater, closer to Los Angeles. The home in which Townsend grew to maturity was a deeply religious one. His father, William Hammond Townsend, was a devoted Presbyterian who led daily devotions in the home and saw to it that the family was in attendance at the Clearwater Presbyterian Church on Sundays. Cameron Townsend later recalled that the church was rather “lifeless.”⁹ Thus, according to his brother Paul, it was their father’s influence that primarily shaped their religious character. William Hammond taught his children to trust in God and stressed absolute honesty and personal integrity, but his admonitions were not aimed at inculcating any kind of dogmatic religion or procuring conversionary experiences in his children.¹⁰ It comes as no surprise then that Cameron Townsend could never recall having been “born again.”¹¹ Perhaps the most telling evidence that he did not hail from a narrow religious setting was his taking a Roman Catholic girl on a date when in high school.¹² Cameron Townsend’s religious upbringing was broadly evangelical and not overly doctrinaire.

The Townsend family had high hopes for their eldest son’s advancement off the farm. His mother was especially resolute that Cameron, who had four elder sisters and a younger brother, would attend college. Graduating at the top of his class in high school intimates that his family’s expectations were well founded.¹³ With ambitions of becoming a minister, another idea earnestly fostered by his mother, Townsend enrolled at Occidental College, located near Los Angeles, in the fall of 1914.¹⁴ Occidental was a Presbyterian institution offering a broad liberal arts education, where the sciences were coupled with traditional subjects such as Greek, Latin, philosophy, and Bible study. Bowing to the winds of progressive educational reforms, the college withdrew from Presbyterian oversight in 1910 while remaining evangelical in religious temperament.¹⁵ A number of Townsend’s essays written while at Occidental are reflective of the school’s intellectual atmosphere. In his sophomore year he read the noted philosopher William James’s essay “The College Bred.” Townsend agreed with James that a college education should prepare students to recognize, as he put it in his own 1915 essay, “the highest ideals, the best in art and literature, and the greatest in science.”¹⁶ It is difficult to imagine Townsend reading James had he attended, for example, the nearby and recently established Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA). Bible schools such as BIOLA largely forsook a liberal arts “education” for a narrower focus on Bible-based “training,” which aimed primarily to prepare students for evangelizing lost souls. Virginia Lieson Brereton, in researching the Bible school movement, correctly observed that “brevity, practicality, [and] efficiency were summed up in the word ‘training.’ ”¹⁷ Occidental attempted to broaden students’ intellectual horizons rather than to narrow them. Therefore Townsend was expected to make some effort at cultivating the life of the mind rather than simply picking up practical pastoral or missionary skills.

Lofty Jamesian ideals soon faded, and by his third year in college Townsend had grown restless; he was coming to the conclusion that he was not particularly suited for the intellectual life or the tedium of seemingly abstract academic study. While he earned top grades in Bible and history, his performance was merely adequate in other subjects. It is somewhat ironic that this future Bible translator earned his lowest marks in Greek and Spanish.¹⁸ Later in life Townsend recalled that he became “quite discouraged in college.”¹⁹ He was especially dispirited if his efforts produced no immediate and tangible results other than a good mark. “I was tired of working to get good grades,” he complained, “but not really retaining what I was studying.”²⁰ In a December 1915 essay on Christian faith, Townsend offered up some indications of his heart superintending his mind. “It is with the heart that man believes unto salvation. This is not the Devil’s brand. His believing is of the head and does not point to life. Intellectual belief is merely one step towards faith.” Perhaps thinking of his own future beyond the confines of the academy, he added that “faith . . . produces a change in a man’s life whereby he feels in his h...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Bob Creson
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Pioneering and the Progressive Ideal
• 2. The Linguistic Approach
• 3. Translating the Word
• 4. Cameron Townsend and the Strategy of “Service to All”
• 5. On the Home Front
• 6. Staying the Course
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Appendix 1: Interviews
• Appendix 2: SIL University Affiliations (1990)
• Bibliography
• Index