From Every Tribe and Nation (Turning South: Christian Scholars in an Age of World Christianity)

A Historian's Discovery of the Global Christian Story

Noll, Mark A., Carpenter, Joel

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441246424
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

Christianity's demographics, vitality, and influence have tipped markedly toward the global South and East. Addressing this seismic shift, one of America's leading church historians shows how studying world Christianity changed and enriched his understanding of the nature of the faith as well as of its history. Mark Noll illustrates the riches awaiting anyone who gains even a preliminary understanding of the diverse histories that make up the Christian story. He shows how coming to view human culture as created by God was an important gift he received from the historical study of world Christian diversity, which then led him to a deeper theological understanding of Christianity itself. He also offers advice to students who sense a call to a learned vocation. This is the third book in the Turning South series, which offers reflections by eminent Christian scholars who have turned their attention and commitments beyond North America.

1

Cedar Rapids

At Calvary Baptist Church in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where I grew up, missionaries were conspicuous—both in the flesh and as idealized exemplars of what the Christian life should be. Not only did we stage an annual weeklong missionary conference, with nightly meetings addressed by Christian workers from around the globe who spoke about and illustrated (with slide projectors and curios) their tasks in the Philippines, Brazil, Argentina, India, Pakistan, the Ivory Coast, what was then called the Belgian Congo, Alaska, and more. But other missionaries also regularly passed through, to be introduced on Sunday morning, or more commonly to address the congregation on Sunday evening or at the church’s midweek prayer meeting. My parents, Francis and Evelyn Noll, were active in all phases of life at Calvary Baptist and so did their full share of hosting, entertaining, and squiring the visiting missionaries. In later life, long after I had left the family nest, my parents took several tours to missionary sites where on the ground in Africa, Pakistan, the Philippines, and perhaps elsewhere, they reconnected with missionaries who had come through Cedar Rapids.

During the 1950s and early 1960s I was not in a great position to appreciate the mission-mindedness of our local church. But much later, a little bit of family history played its part in clearing up my vision. My father, a navy pilot in the Second World War, had flown eighty-nine missions off his carrier to support the movement of US troops westward across the Pacific. More than three decades after that service—and because contact with missionaries had helped redirect his life—one of these tours took my father to sites in the Philippines that he had once flown over in his Grumman TBF Avenger. I was greatly struck with what the passage of time had brought about and keen to learn more about his wartime experiences, but he seemed more impressed by the chance to meet Filipino believers and view missionary life up close.

In the late 1980s, when I began to realize how important the world as a whole actually was for the history of Christianity, I felt that these new insights had to overcome what I had experienced of missionaries when growing up. At that later time I was, for example, much impressed with books that explained the irreversibility of translation—once missionaries and their native coworkers had translated the Bible, Scripture no longer belonged to the missionaries but was put to use for purposes determined by those who spoke the target language. Thus, the missionary translators might want new converts to concentrate on the apostle Paul’s account of the substitutionary atonement, but the converts themselves might view the struggle between Elijah and the prophets of Baal, or the genealogy of Matthew 1, as the key to the whole biblical story. The process of translation, my new reading revealed, was far from the uncomplicated task of “bringing the good news” that I remembered the missionaries describe.

What I was learning in the late 1980s also showed clearly that the great surge in world Christian adherence was taking place primarily through the efforts of native teachers, local “Bible women,” colporteurs, and newly converted catechists and evangelists. Missionaries often provided a spark for this process of indigenization, but it was almost always local believers who fanned the spark into flame. In addition, I was learning more about the costs of conversion: stories of missionary deprivation, even martyrdom, stuck in my memory from what I had heard as a youth; but broader reading revealed that what local believers sacrificed for their faith in many new Christian regions—property, health, family relationships, even life itself—was almost always much more extensive than what missionaries had been asked to endure.

The young people of our church, along with adults and youth everywhere in evangelical America, were deeply moved in January 1956 as news spread about the five young missionaries killed by the native Waorani in an Ecuadorian jungle. When a memorable book written by one of the widows appeared shortly thereafter, their sacrifice made an even deeper impression. That book, Elisabeth Elliot’s Shadow of the Almighty: The Life and Testimony of Jim Elliot (Harper, 1958), deserves its status as a classic of evangelical spiritual biography. Yet I do not remember any comparable books, or serious attention of any sort, paid to the thousands of Majority World Christians who in those very years were experiencing hardship, deprivation, and often death for their Christian adherence: Kenyan believers targeted by Mau Maus, Mexican Pentecostals attacked for violating village traditions, Chinese Christians of all sorts rounded up in the early years of the Mao regime. On rare occasions, there might be mention of believers suffering for Christ in China or the Soviet Union—but usually to illustrate a larger problem: the threat of godless communism. From time to time there might also be reports of Protestants persecuted in Colombia—but again to underscore a more general danger: the ongoing threat posed to “real Christianity” by the domineering actions of the Catholic Church.

With most of my generation of evangelical young people, I also thrilled to stories about the self-sacrificing martyrdom of John and Betty Stam, even though the only concrete circumstance respecting their lives that I remember is that they were slain by Chinese Reds. In fact, they were killed in 1934 as a by-product of a long and complicated civil war, whose origins could be traced to the failed Chinese republic of Sun Yat-sen, or back further to the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, or perhaps even to the Opium Wars of the 1830s when Britain muscled its way into the China trade by allowing the East India Company to market narcotics to the Chinese people. The Stams’ story had the potential for illuminating the history of that part of the world where they met their end, but I recall only an emphasis on the kind of piety we were supposed to emulate.

In other words, a serious disconnect separated what I remembered about missionary service from my youth and what decades later I was learning about the dynamics of world Christianity.

In retrospect, it is clear that the problem was not primarily with the missionaries I met, for most of them were dedicated people, and almost all of them bore lightly the weight of commitment that took them from North America to “the regions beyond.” Instead, part of my problem was missionary hagiography. At least as I perceived the matter, our species of hagiography had little room for critical, particular, or concrete thought. In the apparent hierarchy of godliness, missionary service was not like other vocations. The names of missionaries who began service but then moved on to other careers were expunged from the congregation’s memory as thoroughly as anti-Stalinists once vanished from Marxist photographs documenting the history of the Soviet Union. The missionary aura seemed to convey a level of sanctity on those who continued in the harness that removed them from the realm of merely terrestrial concern.

Yet precisely in those early years, I was growing increasingly interested in terrestrial concerns. To be sure, I was also reading heaps of stories about Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Dizzy Dean, Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, and other heroes of the baseball diamond who somehow escaped my aversion to hagiography. But there were even more books about the nation’s founding, the Civil War, the notable presidents and statesmen, Indians and settlers on the frontier, the Depression, and the world wars. This reading was introducing me to political conflicts, material interests, imperial aspirations, colonial resistance, and this-worldly complexity. And with these dimensions of human experience I was fascinated. Another disconnect followed: between the new worlds opened by such reading and the worlds I remember from early attention to missionaries.

Our missionaries were treated like gods, and gods, it seemed, could not be bothered with merely human questions of politics, culture, economics, literature, foreign policy, or the comparative study of religion. In point of fact, I now know that some of the very missionaries who passed through our church did have definite, and sometimes learned, opinions on these questions. If I had asked them about broader cultural or theological matters, some of them would have provided thoughtfully informative answers. But for whatever reason, their interest in such matters and my eagerness to learn about the shape of the world never quite connected.

The reading urged upon us was another part of the problem. To be sure, juvenile missionary literature had some points in its favor. At about age ten or eleven, I devoured the Jungle Doctor books by the Australian Paul White. (When many years later I discovered some of these old books and read one or two to our own children, I found them not quite as good as I thought they were when I was ten but a lot better than I would have considered them if I had rediscovered them at age twenty-five instead of nearly twice twenty-five.)

Graduating to what was heralded as more serious missionary literature created the really serious problems, though I should be charitable in recognizing the purposes for which such books were written. Besides the unbelievable heights of spiritual dedication portrayed in these volumes, what particularly put me off was what I perceived as insensitivity to local contexts, a lack of interest in historical background, the absence of attention to cultural connections, and a distressing absence of maps.

One particular example sticks in my mind, although my memory of this book may be a product of late-adolescent prejudice. Whatever the cause, I can still remember the distaste with which I finished a biography of James Outram Fraser entitled Behind the Ranges. At least as I recall it, the book furnished very little on the texture of the South China world in which Fraser worked, almost nothing that would allow a reader to situate the Lisu people in broader ethnic, linguistic, or political contexts, no analysis of family or economic life, little attention to the history of China or Britain, and only sparse details about Chinese culture or the culture from which Fraser had come. Recently I discovered that the original 1944 edition of this work did in fact contain maps, but I am pretty sure that the copy I read was as mapless as it could be. Later I also discovered that Fraser had been a pioneer in recording and analyzing the Lisu language, but these aspects of his work had also escaped my attention.

The sad result of experiences with books like Behind the Ranges was that, just as I was beginning to get serious about other kinds of history generally, and soon other kinds of church history specifically, I abandoned mission history as in any way relevant to those developing historical interests. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

It took quite a while to recognize the mistakes I made—about the importance of missionaries and about my own experiences at Calvary Baptist. The perception of an outsider was crucial to that recognition.

The outsider was my wife—though when she first visited Cedar Rapids, she was still only a girlfriend. Maggie Packer had been raised in a conservative Presbyterian church where missionaries were not unknown but where they occupied a smaller place in the spiritual universe than at Calvary Baptist. Her experience was especially different from mine in one crucial respect. Missionaries in her denomination received their financial backing from the denomination. Missionaries visiting Cedar Rapids were, among other activities, raising their own support. At the time I did not realize that our Baptist pattern was becoming increasingly common throughout the world, while the older Presbyterian model represented a legacy of traditional Christendom that was becoming less and less important as the twentieth-century Christian world emerged.

When Maggie first sat down for a meal in our home, what leapt out at her—literally in front of her face—were pins affixed to a big map on the wall. The map covered one entire side of the family dining area; the pins, obviously, represented the missionaries whom our church supported or who were otherwise known to the family. For several missionary conferences, my father had helped construct even larger maps above the church’s baptistery, which at Calvary Baptist occupied the prominent ecclesiastical space where crucifixes hang in more liturgical churches. These maps at church were decorated with tiny light bulbs identifying the location of the church’s missionaries. The maps always presented the Mercator Projection, with North America and Europe “up” and Western Europe in the center, although at the time I was completely inert to the way in which maps convey a story about what is central and what is peripheral in world history.

In retrospect, I also am remembering that our missionary conferences functioned as an alternative liturgy. They often took place on the week between Palm Sunday and Easter, which meant that when traditional liturgical churches were observing foundational elements of the Christian past, our missionary-minded congregation was looking forward to the Christian future.

Sometime in the late 1950s, my dad built a slightly smaller map, though without electrification, for home. “And you think your interest in world Christianity,” Maggie has said to me, “came from reading books by Lamin Sanneh or hearing Andrew Walls lecture or having to make up a new course? I think it started way, way before then.”

Prompted by such biographical assistance, it has become increasingly clear that experiences at Calvary Baptist planted seeds that later sprouted as my interest in world Christianity. At least three matters were important.

First was simple awareness. Cedar Rapids was not, I believe, unusually insular by comparison with other Midwestern communities of the 1950s and early 1960s. We knew that employment at our large Quaker Oats plant depended on exports, as well as local climate and national farm policy, and that business at Collins Radio picked up considerably when technological competition with the Soviets heated up after the launch of Sputnik in 1957. Excellent teachers in the Cedar Rapids public school system taught us well in the classics of American and English literature, and also provided a solid basis in world and American history. Yet few in that setting were being exposed to as much of the world at large as those of us who, without realizing what was happening, attended even casually to the parade of missionaries passing through.

Even if missionary presentations were overwhelmingly pious in tone and almost entirely apolitical, still, who in Cedar Rapids knew anything about conditions in the Argentine pampas, or could locate the Ivory Coast on an African map, or heard firsthand about the paralyzing heat of summer in the plains of India, or learned what it was like to experience the sudden end of colonial rule in the Congo—unless they were exposed to visiting missionaries. Progressive academics for several decades have been attacking with great intensity the role of missionaries in promoting the evils of Western imperialism; recently a range of observers, including anthropologists and historians with no personal stake in Christian faith, have countered with what should have been obvious all along. However missionaries measured up against what has now become the accepted moral norm for respect of non-Western cultures, in the context of former times—and compared to all other agents out of the West—missionaries were always among the most humane, most altruistic, and most self-critical representatives of Western nations in non-Western regions. Similarly, viewed in strictly comparative terms, very few middle-class young people from small-city Iowa of my generation were introduced to as many places far, far away from the United States as were the youth of churches like Calvary Baptist that were committed to the missionary proclamation of the gospel.

This exposure to missionaries also worked at some level to influence the course that family members took. Why was my brother Craig so fascinated by foreign languages, and myself only slightly less so? Why did it seem so natural for him to spend a summer with missionaries in Alaska or later to enlist for service in Turkey with the Peace Corps? My sister, Ann, would probably be the best person to answer such questions, if they can be answered. I’m pretty sure she would say that somewhere in our family’s history there has to be a large place for early experience with missionaries.

The second thing that prompted my interest in world Christianity was an introduction to the dynamics of cross-cultural communication. Visiting missionaries, so far as I can recall, never uttered the words “indigenization” or “enculturation”; they did not dwell on foreign political systems, except to point out how strange some of them were by American standards; they rarely spoke, in our Baptist setting, about the difficulty of planting denominational churches where Western denominations were unknown. But they did let on how difficult it could be to learn Asian or African languages far removed from English; they did relate struggles and breakthroughs in communicating with native helpers; they did show slides that depicted, sometimes dramatically, how far from home their labors took them; they occasionally presented samples of native music that did not sound anything like the gospel tunes or traditional Protestant hymnody we sang; and they certainly communicated something about their “cultural distance” from a small city in the Midwest, though not by using that phrase.

Once again, seeds were going into the ground. It would take much nurture for a harvest to appear, but a hint had been provided, awaiting later development, that the Christian faith itself began, and has constantly existed, as a cross-cultural faith.

The third vital contribution from those early years was the Christianity that spurred missionary motivation—for the missionaries themselves, but much more for the Calvary faithful who placed such a high value on the missionary enterprise. I suppose outside observers would have been correct to view our church as “fundamentalist.” We had the long sermon series on the prophetic future detailed in the book of Revelation; we either sponsored or took part in well-organized revival campaigns; at the end of almost every service, we imitated Billy Graham by featuring altar calls to the accompaniment of “Just as I am, without one plea”; we disapproved of smoking, drinking, movies, and other signs of worldliness; and, although many of us had close Catholic friends, we knew there was something very wrong with Catholicism itself.

Yet if “fundamentalism” means angry zealots on the warpath, there was virtually none of that. Instead, we had a patient, loving pastor, Don Andersen, who w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Cedar Rapids
• 2. Rescued by the Reformation
• 3. First Teachers
• 4. Settling In
• 5. Moving Out I
• 6. Looking North: A Guide
• 7. Looking North: Insight
• 8. Moving Out II
• 9. Moving Out III
• 10. Missiology Helping History
• 11. Courses and Classrooms
• 12. Experts
• 13. By the Numbers
• 14. Looking South: A Guide
• 15. Looking South: Academic Insights
• 16. China Watching
• 17. Explorations with Pen in Hand
• 18. Notre Dame
• 19. The Story So Far
• Appendix: Checklist of Publications on World Christian Themes
• Index
• Notes
• Back Cover