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Process Theology and God as Parent

“The metaphors,” says Robert Frost, “come from the life you’ve lived.” Images abound as one lives in close contact with small children, and as I entered into those relationships I began to reflect seriously on the significance of the biblical images of God as parent. My awed elation at the birth of my first child, for instance, made incarnate in a powerfully experiential way the meaning of grace: here was a person I loved infinitely, unqualifiedly, whom I hardly knew and who certainly had done nothing at all to deserve that love. Isaiah’s comparisons of God’s love with that of a mother (49:15; 66:13), Jesus’ longing to protect Jerusalem’s children as a mother hen gathers her chicks under her wings (Luke 13:34), the impact of the prodigal son’s return on the father -- all these took on new meaning.

Like any good image, however, this one incorporates more than one intuition. Largely within the context of process theology I have come to see that the experience of parenthood can significantly organize one’s understanding of God. At the same time, I believe that the five illustrations that follow serve to validate in a concrete way some of the major observations of the process theologians.

I insist at the outset on a prefatory disclaimer: that parenthood is finally a state of mind and spirit and not only of biology. I shall be reflecting largely from my own experience, as process thought enables and indeed requires us to do; but the nature of that experience is essentially that shared by all who nurture -- whether, for example, single social workers, middle-aged adoptive parents, teachers who care about their students or, I suspect, those artists and poets who cherish and give birth to the world.

A DipolarDeity

Central to process theology is the conception of a “dipolar” God -- that is, a God who is both absolute, abstract and eternal on the one hand and relative, concrete and growing on the other. Charles Hartshorne, working in part from the thought of Alfred North Whitehead, insists that only the God who changes, who responds to his creatures, who is affected by what they do, is the God of the Bible. The classical Christian idea of an aloof, immutable, independent God, representing simplicity and rest, he argues, has much more in common with certain philosophical abstractions inherited from the Greeks. Malcolm Diamond points out that in the experiences of our everyday lives we judge that which can change in a relationship to be superior to that which cannot. He gives the example of a person looking at a tree: the person is conscious of the tree and can change as a result of that consciousness; that person is thus superior to the tree, which has no such consciousness and therefore remains unchanged in the encounter.

From this perspective God is not wholly “other” as in classical theism, but includes both the absolute and the relative, both the infinite and the finite. Such a God both includes the passing flux of events and is influenced by them.

This understanding of the nature of God gave form to my growing uneasiness with a “monopolar” perception of God as parent. There are luminous moments in beholding a very young infant in which one is aware of an absolute, timeless, pervasive peace which stems in part from a consciousness that, at least for a very short while, it is within one’s power to meet every need of another human being. (A friend, who cared for her unconscious son for a year before his death, could speak, incredibly, of this same feeling of peace as she was able to provide the child’s every need.) These are moments of grace, and it is no surprise that such moments give us some notion of the infinite magnitude of God’s love for the world.

Responding in Freedom and Responsibility

There is nevertheless in that image an incompleteness, a flaw -- namely, that mature human relationships are not like relationships with a newborn child. Already with a two-year-old, and forever after in normal circumstances, parents are negotiating with their children, compromising, changing themselves as they effect change in their children. A mature relationship with God must surely include this same interdependence, this same capacity for responding to another person in the depths of one’s being.

This is not to say that one of these relationships supersedes the other. As long as my children and I live, I will feel for them the absolute, necessary, nonnegotiable love that I experience in those moments of grace. That love, however, will coexist with my mature relationships with them, in which we will be responding to one another in our freedom and responsibility.

Whitehead uses the terms “actual entities” or “actual occasions” to refer to the “real things of which the world is made up.” There is nothing behind the actual entities (of which God is one) that is more real than they are. It has become an axiom of process thought, following Whitehead’s formulation, that “no two actual occasions originate from an identical universe.” Contingent upon this notion is the radical individuality of each human being and, theologically, the radical uniqueness of God’s relationship with each creature.

One of my many naïveties before parenthood was wonderment at how children of the same family, emerging from presumably similar genetic and environmental conditions, could vary so profoundly from one another. The startling uniqueness of each of one’s children, however, sometimes perceived even in utero, provides for parents strong confirmation of the insistence on the differentiation of individuals and moments characteristic of process thought. If more than one child is born into a family, parents become aware that they themselves are different people at the time of each subsequent birth. In addition, the enormous influence of birth order and sibling configuration is just now making its way into popular literature and social psychology textbooks.

Concern for Individuals

I have had occasion to observe one mother, a strong person in her own right, as she relates to her four adult children of vastly differing professional, political, religious and personality orientations. With each one she becomes a different person as she enters into genuine relationship with that individual -- affirming, nurturing, celebrating the special qualities of each. Yet on another level she is the same person in each relationship, clearly maintaining her own integration. In the process, they grow and she grows. From considering her, I gain another glimpse into the image of God as parent: not an omnipotent authoritarian, sternly demanding one set of behaviors for acceptance or salvation, but rather a “divine persuader” who enhances life, creativity, attainment of the good in all its myriad of forms.

Danial Day Williams in The Spirit and the Forms of Love (Harper & Row, 1968) lists individuality and taking account of the other as the first category necessary for love: “Love requires real individuals, unique beings, bringing to the relationship something which no other can bring. The individuals must be capable of taking account of one another in their unique individuality” (p. 114). Only by means of this concern for individuals, he argues, can the uniqueness and selfhood of both lover and beloved be maintained.

I have noted that honest parents are able to speak of loving their children in different ways even while loving all of them equally. Perhaps it is only by loving differently that we are able to love equally; otherwise a hierarchy of value would necessarily emerge. This, the process theologians would say, is the method of the biblical God, relating fully and interdependently with each human being. Only God, with an inexhaustible fund of loving concern, is capable of such identification with every person -- thus becoming the “supremely social Being.”

The Unity of Mind and Body

As an antidualist Whitehead thoroughly rejects the Platonic notion that there exists somewhere a spiritual realm, immutable and superior to the world of body and matter. There is, he argues, “no one perfection of order.” Such an unchanging perfection would require a schism between mind and body that Whitehead is likewise unable to accept; it would also posit a God who operates in some way outside the “actual occasions” of reality.

As one raised on Plato’s dualism and, earlier, the Bible Belt Protestant version of it, I had already come to suspect the validity of this notion before the experience of childbirth erased the last trace. Those moments were marked by such an intense concinnity of mind and body, spirit and matter, that I cannot again conceive of those two poles of my experience as separate.

Alice Rossi in her thoughtful article “A Biosocial Perspective on Parenting” (Daedalus, Spring 1977) presents a brilliant challenge to the prevailing sociological dualism that tends to discount physiological factors in social systems and relationships. Her detailed study of the implications of research in endocrinology for bonding in human families and for the interactions between hormones and social behavior serves to put the “missing body” back into sociology in some profoundly important ways.

It is the process thinkers, however, who have developed the larger framework in which to perceive this unity of mind and body -- a unity validated in a limited, concrete way by the actual birth process but more inclusively by any act of the creative imagination.

A Succession of Occasions

One of the most compelling insights of process theology is the seriousness with which it takes the world and thus the seriousness with which it takes history. All reality is experienced in finite terms. Time, therefore, is real. In Whitehead’s definition it is not an undifferentiated continuum but a “succession of momentary occasions of experience.” The longing to move out of time (which involves change and so is “bad”) into a state of timeless permanence (which is therefore “good”) -- characteristic of most post-Aristotelian philosophy and much contemporary Christianity -- is thus seen to have more in common with Platonic dualism than with biblical witness.

This notion of time also clarifies the nature of our subjective freedom in the context of our past. John B. Cobb, Jr., formulates the issue thus: “Every occasion must come to terms with the whole of its past, but it is causally effected by nothing contemporary with it. In each new occasion we receive the past as inescapably given object and repeat or modify it in our selective subjectivity” (Religion in Life, Autumn 1961, p. 530). In The Structure of Christian Existence (Westminster, 1967) Cobb puts it another way: “The new structure is discontinuous with the old, although the process by which it came into being was continuous.” It is just this dynamism we see in the New Testament, in which Jesus continually reinterprets the law and brings subjectively new insights out of and into the objective tradition of which he is a part.

Once again, the experience of parents serves to confirm this understanding of growth and change. As with the drosophila flies, we can observe evolution in our children, so rapid are the stages of development. Frequently we are surprised by some innovation, but we learn to suspect that even it was precedented in some way not known to us. Thus parents, who are confronted every day by the visible development of their children, are perhaps less likely than others to hold qualitative denial of historical processes.

A Sense of Permanence

Although for human beings all things are changing and relative, the process theologians suggest to us a possibility of permanence in the mind of God. As Hartshorne says, “God is immortal, and whatever becomes an element in the life of God is therefore imperishable.” In A Christian Natural Theology (Westminster, 1965) Cobb develops this idea further:

Not only does God experience our experience and include it within his own, but also in him there is no transience or loss. The value that is attained is attained forever. In him, passage and change can mean only growth. Apart from God, time is perpetual perishing. Because of him, the achievements of the world are cumulative. It is this aspect of the vision of God which ultimately sustains us in the assurance that life is worth living and that our experience matters ultimately [pp. 219-220].

In a limited way something of this sense of permanence is accessible to the experience of parents. Often, as I look at my children, I am conscious of things I know about their past that they will never know. I will remember their birth, their nursing, their first achievements, and they will not. A woman in her 70s, who at the age of 15 was forced to give up the only child she ever had, once said to me: No matter how old they become, you will always think of them as babies.” She and I have memory, and that bestows permanence even on that which is changing.

God as parent has memory qualitatively superior to ours, for it alone includes all time, all history, all experience. And it is that memory which ascribes permanence and value to all of creation.

I have drawn several analogies between process theology and the experience of parenthood. These comparisons are fraught with problems, to be sure, not the least of which is the charge of anthropomorphism -- a charge which Hartshorne and Williams in particular among the process theologians take care to address.

I do not mean, however, finally to leave these observations as analogies, but rather as symbols, in the sense that the symbol contains within itself the presence of that which it symbolizes. For I believe that the processes of human life are divine, and that one way -- for me, a most compelling way -- to perceive that divine Reality is to think of God as parent.

The Prize Is Life

I: Ritual

How should I act, when I get in there? What should I say? My steps sound along the empty corridor, deceptive with its yellow-papered walls and neat reproductions, linoleum gleaming.

NO VISITORS. CAUTION. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. How do you play with someone who is half-paralyzed?

I enter; the ritual begins. In the first small room I am masked, hair and forehead, nose and, lower face: only the eyes transcend, and must try to smile. My shoes are covered as well -- they hold daily communion with the betrayer, earth.

In the second room I wash compulsively, scrub hands, wrists, elbows in Betadine solution until my shoulders ache. (But how do you amuse a child preoccupied, in tête-à-tête with cancer?) Then careful rinsing, hands up so no soap or wash trickles down, stains their purity.

Then to the third room, strictly supervised. I put on the sterile gown, two pairs of surgical gloves, like an automaton. Even here, one touch of an unclean thing and the process must start over.

The nurse nods at me, I may enter the sanctum. Through the glass partition I see a small boy sitting quietly, on a bed surrounded by surreal equipment. His head is large; dark skin drawn finely over his features, subject for a painter.

What are his interests, withdrawn from life this way? I don’t see toys. But the nurse is waiting, time to make an attempt.

He looks up when I enter, stares. I sit by the bed.

“Hello, Birtis. How are you?”

“I’m all right.”

“Good . . . been doing anything lately?”

“Not too much.”

Silence. He looks away, down at his left hand hanging limply in his lap.

“Well, what about. . . a game of tic-tac-toe?”

Don’t know how.”

“That’s okay, Here, let me show you. . .”

II: Risk

It was six months ago. In Kentucky, the media focused people’s attention on a small boy with a lethal disease. He was flown semiconscious -- medically attended, in the governor’s private plane to this sterile, silent room filled with forbidding machines.

His body lay scourged by disease, strength and resistance ebbing. Hepatitis led to aplastic anemia; his bone marrow shut down operations. No red or white blood cells, no platelets were being produced. With the white cells went Birtis’s Immune system, and his life became a prize target for any malingering germ with a big ambition.

Sick, scared and bewildered, he mistrusted the unceasing attentions of staff revolving around him. They gave him shots, asked him to hold out an already scarred left arm for more blood-taking, more pain. Strong-willed by nature, he fought with them, lashed out, and had to be pinned down. Since the disease all but stopped his blood’s ability to clot, bruise marks appeared where people merely grasped him. On two occasions he nearly bled to death resisting procedures necessary to his life. Then the left side of his body was paralyzed, his eyesight impaired, by a brain hemorrhage.

His mother, sister and brother were found not to have bone marrow close enough in type to his own, and the standard transplant was overruled. In the case of identical twins, and sometimes of siblings or members of the immediate family, bone marrow can be transplanted. But the process is highly individuated. And matching grafted cells with those of the host (patient) to produce the required “state of tolerance” is a delicate matter. The hosting body is likely to reject, kill off the grafted cells.

So the doctors attending Birtis, in the great hospital fighting cancer, decided to attempt a landmark cure. They would transplant fetal liver, which produces blood cells during prenativity. With fetal liver -- from precise stages, necessarily, of gestation in the fetus -- there existed the advantage of greater antigen tolerance. The chance of cells being rejected lessened.

Thus, fetal liver was obtained from recent abortions. It was injected into Birtis’s body: the first time, ever, it was tried on a human being. Unanaesthetized, of necessity, he managed somehow to endure the pain.

III: In Limbo

“Know how to play dots?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Want to try it?”

He nods. He doesn’t say much, with a strange thoughtfulness, different from being shy. He wears a pair of rodeo pajama bottoms, cowboys, dogies and broncos, with a faded hospital top. His brown eyes grew large and warm a moment ago, sympathizing with my defeat in tic-tac-toe.

“How old are you, Birt?”

“Six on my birthday, in June.”

“Hope I’m not scaring you, in this Halloween outfit.

“Course not.”

High, thin eyebrows beneath a dark wash of hair; full nose, lips like a piece of sculpture. His drawl rises on the end of each sentence, produces few consonants.

“What’s your dog’s name?”

“Brownie. . . . Just got back from bein’ sterilized.”

He hands me a black poodle with a red, half-moon tongue.

“How old is Brownie?”

“Seven in July.”

“Mm. Now this is the way you play dots . . .”

The Reverse Isolation Room resembles a satellite compartment with complicated wires, apparatus behind the bedstead: oxygen unit, suction regulator, the intercom system. Ten by 12 feet with one entire wall, along the bed, a suctioning germ-filter. (I must never get between it and the patient.) Since last Thanksgiving Birtis has stayed in here, never leaving.

On a tall metal cart, at the foot of the bed, are shelves with medical accessories: clamps, scissors, Chux and gauze pads; sterile basins, alcohol and sterile water.

“See that bag?” he points, tiring of our dots game.

“This one?” I reach for it, start peeling the masking tape. “Say, this is like getting a Christmas present.”

He frowns. “That ain’t no present.”

A battered pink-and-blue dump truck. Back from sterilization.

Birtis stares up in my eyes . . . In my mind I begin digging for pastimes. Thumb-wrestling, would that be appropriate? Why not, it’s physical therapy. And if his hand bruises?

I tear a sheet from our pad and start on a paper airplane. Hand it to him, make another. Then a helicopter. He tosses them and watches glumly as they crash, fatally, to the unsterile floor. Birt makes a small rumbling sound, like an explosion.

“Hope the pilot got out an time. . .”

Next comes a sketch of a fishing boat, lone drawing in my repertoire.

“Guess what I’m making?” I ask, with enthusiasm.

He knits his brow. And when it’s finished: “Where’s a captain?”

“The captain?”

“Yeah, with a beard and big steering wheel.”

More labor, unlikely image. Then the cruncher: “Where’s a catfish? Make a catfish in the water.

“Sure, Birt, I’ll make one. But are you tired . . . yet?”

And he, looking up in my eyes: “No . . . Are you?”

IV: Suffering Cure

As first returns came in, from the continuing round of tests and lab readings, the new procedure seemed to work. Birtis’s susceptible body, itself sterilized and living week after week in a 99.9 per cent sterile setting, began rebuilding immunity. Its red and white cell levels had risen, but the platelet count stayed very low. To remedy this, he was put on a course of steroids and his appetite became voracious.

But now another kind of struggle began. When the physical needs are taken care of, the moral assert themselves.

Birtis learned the names of his tormentors, of staff who could also play or be friendly. On this ward, unique in New York city, one of several reverse isolation units in the world -- where four patients are treated by an entire community, as well as by presiding Science -- on this ward there was intimacy. The people who treated could also care.

But his new strength made him suffer. The days in his barren cell grew endless. Their kindness was no repayment; his nerves were frayed by the incessant rounds of medical attentions. Once he went on a hunger strike, despite his strong appetite, and he kept it up through the day with the bitter revolt of a convict. He complained of migraines, fell asleep in stressful situations -- whatever maneuver, whatever way to save himself, just this once, from treatment. He grew depressed, withdrawn.

His mother spent long hours each day in the room. They both were indoctrinated into the complex therapeutic process. Their quick mastery of it -- especially his, a five-year-old’s -- amazed. He acted out, manipulated staff for all they were worth, threw things. Those were good signs. And he did start, at times, to play and kid around, to be a boy again.

No doubt a nap in his mother’s lap was the best consolation. But a father would have helped, a father to go along with his six brothers and sisters down in Kentucky. A man with the gift of seeing his children through pain.

But his mother was there. She saw him through the worst.

The minimum, the base cost of one such hospital day was $3,200.

V: Return

Like a deep-sea diver, I struggle at treasure from a distant past. I grapple with a memory. Nurses, aides, pass by the glass cubicle and peer in, wonder how we’re doing.

“There, Birtis, there it is.”

“There’s what?”

“It’s a cootie-catcher. . . for germs.

Straight from a vague, long-submerged paradise: third grade.

“How you work it?”

“Like this, see -- takes care of all germs.”

He nods, growing restless -- looks back past the partition toward the nursing station. I relieved his mother when she went for dinner.

A nurse comes in with meds, giving the high sign. Birt frowns, more awful stuff to drink. We all must look like robots in our dull surgical costumes.

I stand, ready to move off. “Well, Birtis.”

He looks up. “You goin’?”

“Got to for now. Listen, I’ll see you Wednesday. Okay?”

He looks away, unceremonious, ready to accept his punishment. The one thing worse than medicines, perhaps, is when somebody checks out.

“Bye, then.”

I leave, via the third room, unsterile the instant I pass the threshold. Then to the second, sighing relief (shouldn’t eat garlic when I’m a spending the afternoon an a mask’). I take off the strange suit of paper clothes. In the final room -- through the glass wall he waves at me -- I know his mind has already made the leap across separation, landing safely on Wednesday.

Before Birtis goes home -- when the day finally comes -- he’ll be swabbed, inoculated with the world’s good and neutral germs so the bad ones, on the outside, can’t take over. He’ll be recontaminated into the everyday world. Fortunately, also, his left arm has grown stronger. I can see him sitting on the bed working it, with his strange thoughtfulness.

As I’m leaving, he gestures me to the phone and asks. “Hey, how you call a werewolf?”

“Hm? I really couldn’t say.”

‘You dial ‘im up long distance. Ha ha. Ha ha ha!

Trying out his laugh. In the receiver it sounds dim, muffled: a message from a far off country, from inner space. From a small boy struggling with cancer, still all future.

In the nursing station they thank me. On my way out I glimpse the three other sterile cubicles, where two babies and a Latin girl battle for their share of life and happiness. Along the empty corridor I remember someone else I met once, here in Memorial Hospital: someone who was also up against it.

An older patient, and when I entered the room he was staring up at a TV program, “Sesame Street.” He was fun to talk to, interested ever, in the volunteer worker. Before I left he showed me a book he’d just published, and the flap described Peter Medawar: the man of science, whose work pioneered the field of transplants . . . winner of the Nobel Prize.

And I’m thinking, going along the corridor, Science and the small boy, don’t they need each other, somehow -- if the struggle is to continue, and live? Because the first prize is life, and health, at whatever cost.

Just as Oedipus, blinded, having endured an ultimate contamination, went away to the sterile-seeming place of his long convalescence holding a young girl’s hand: so you, Birt, living in your natural habitat of hope which is childhood, don’t ever give way to resentment. No letting go now that you’re stronger, and have some immunity, and an encouraging prognosis.

“Bye, man. See you Wednesday. Hope one of these days I don’t see you, hope you’re back home, and strong, and beating up on kids who try to bother you like these doctors and nurses.

I leave the hospital: back among the germs, back to my everyday life of compromises, relative failures. Here’s to it, then. And to Science. And to friendship with a person whose struggle makes our lives a little nobler: Birtis the true revolutionary, Birtis the hero.

The Reinvented Church: Styles and Strategies

My personal religious pilgrimage is not exceptional. I grew up in a community church in Southern California that had evangelical leanings. It was a strong and caring group of people, even though the leadership of the church circumscribed the Christian faith with a relatively strong dose of moral legalism. In college I joined the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and discovered that some people actually think about their faith and write rather sophisticated arguments defending their beliefs. Then I read Marx, Freud, Weber and Durkheim and decided that Christianity is a social construction that sometimes operates as a crutch, is sometimes politically repressive, and in its finer moments is a source of moral challenge and social cohesion.

When my wife and I moved to Pasadena, California, we joined a group of well-educated couples who were meeting in a local Baptist church on Sunday mornings for a freewheeling discussion of life, social issues and various cultural challenges to the Christian faith. This was the early 1970s, and the countercultural revolutions launched in the '60s were in full bloom.

One Sunday morning while the 40 of us were in heated discussion, a deacon delivered an ultimatum: conclude your Sunday school class in time to attend the 11 o'clock worship service, or meet on other premises. We started shopping for a new meeting place. At All Saints Episcopal Church Rector George Regas issued our group the same invitation that he did every Sunday morning as he stood before the eucharistic table: "Wherever you are on the journey of faith, you are welcome." We could use a room free of charge and come to worship services if we wanted.

The first few times that I went to church at All Saints, I didn't know when to stand or sit. I fumbled my way through the Book of Common Prayer. The music was too sophisticated for my taste. But the preaching was riveting. The Vietnam war was raging and Regas was birthing the Interfaith Center to Reverse the Arms Race.

Furthermore, I grew to love the liturgy. Unable to accept the creed literally, I nevertheless recited it as a statement of my heritage and found myself deeply moved -- often to tears -- in a way that I had never experienced in evangelical churches. Clearly, something rather mystical and self-transcending was occurring. A few years later I was on the vestry, and learned about organizational management from a dedicated cadre of men and women. At a Sunday Rector's Forum, I listened to thoughtful people speak about the most pressing social issues of our time. In the early l980s I wrote The Case for Liberal Christianity and dedicated it to the people of All Saints Church. In this community I had come to a new commitment and understanding of the Christian faith.

Meanwhile, through conversations with my undergraduate students, I had become intrigued with a movement of churches that had roots in Southern California and was spreading across the country--churches that appealed especially to unchurched baby boomers and baby busters. With the assistance of a grant, I visited dozens of rapidly growing churches associated with the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, Calvary Chapel and Hope Chapel and interviewed several hundred clergy and lay leaders.

On the basis of my research, I wrote Reinventing American Protestantism (1997), which argued that a reformation is transforming the way Christianity will be experienced in the new millennium. Unlike the one led by Martin Luther, this reformation is challenging not doctrine but the very medium through which the message of Christianity is articulated. Like upstart religious groups of the past, these "new paradigm" churches have discarded many of the attributes of establishment religion. They are appropriating contemporary cultural forms and creating a new genre of worship music. They are restructuring the organizational character of institutional religion and democratizing access to the sacred by radicalizing the Protestant principle of the priesthood of all believers. They are harbingers of postdenominational Christianity.

In the typical new paradigm church, most members are relatively young. The church meets in a building that has no stained glass, steeple or pews. In fact, most of these worship spaces are either converted warehouses, theaters or rented school auditoriums. People (including the pastors) come dressed as if on their way to a picnic. The music is what one might hear on a pop radio station, except the lyrics are Christian. The sermon is informal and focused on exposition of a passage of scripture. The pastors are not required to have a seminary education. Typically they are individuals whose lives have been radically transformed by God and who wish to share the good news of their Christian convictions. They view God as capable of supernatural intervention in our lives; hence, they have no difficulty affirming the miracles described in the Bible and they hold to a fairly literal view of scripture.

But the worship environment is not legalistic or rigid. Sunday morning is a time of celebration. The focus is not on theological doctrines but on finding analogues in one's life to the biblical narratives. During the week, members meet in small groups where they worship, study the Bible and care for each other. For many, this small group is the extended family that they never had. These churches also offer a myriad of programs that deal with everything from divorce recovery to child rearing, money management, social outreach ministries to prisoners and unwed mothers, and food distribution. Far from being fundamentalistic, new paradigm churches tend to be tolerant of different personal styles, even while members hold to rather strict moral standards for themselves.

This type of church is culturally hip. Lay members are given tremendous freedom to develop programs. The pastor is a teacher, visionary and trainer, but the people do the basic work of ministry Many of these churches are independent, and if they do have a denominational affiliation they are part of a movement, not of a church bound by rules and policies. Many of these churches grow too large to manage, but they constantly give away members and young clergy to start new churches on the outskirts of their city and throughout the world. This makes room for more people and new leadership.

These churches have few committee meetings. Instead, when someone has an idea, he or she is empowered to try it out. These churches do not wait months and years for official clearance while an idea passes through some bureaucratic labyrinth. Instead, an individual will step forward and get it rolling, often drawing on the resources of his or her home fellowship group.

Most important of all, their pastors and lay leaders believe that God is calling them to ministry, that God speaks to them -- sometimes in rather direct ways -- and that where God leads, God will provide. Hence, there is little hand-wringing over fund raising. Instead, people seem to respond to vision, and, as faithful readers of the scriptures, they know that they have an obligation to support God's work in the world.

When I shared my findings with friends and colleagues from mainline churches, they would often roll their eyes and tell me that I had gone off the deep end. Didn't I know that these groups were part of a right-wing conspiracy and culturally retrograde> How could I find anything of value in such unsophisticated theology? When I told them about healing meetings that I had attended, or that I had witnessed what was reported by members to be the deliverance from demons, they would politely change the subject. They didn't want to hear about these things.

Some of the things that I was witnessing struck me as strange too. Yet I found these groups extremely intriguing. I appreciated the warmth of these churches. In fact, I was blown away by the affection that individuals expressed for each other. Men embraced men. People touched each other when they prayed. The small fellowship groups were like extended families of yesteryear in which people cared for one another and simultaneously held one another accountable for their behavior.

When I wandered through the nursery and primary-age Sunday school classes, I saw men teaching. When I interviewed women, they told me how much more responsible their husbands were as fathers since they had met Jesus. These women didn't seem bothered by Pauline notions of men as the head of the house. Apparently there were trade-offs in terms of changed behavior that made the patriarchal bargain worthwhile. I also found myself intrigued by the reality of God in these people's lives. God was not some abstract concept. They expected God to communicate with them, to direct their lives, their homes, their businesses. And they invited God to show up at their worship services.

I found that these new paradigm congregations exist throughout the U.S. and the world. Currently, TedYamamori, of Food for the Hungry, and I are studying churches throughout the developing world that 1)are large and fast growing and 2)have well-defined social and community outreach ministries. During the first year of this four-year project, we were in Manila, Bangkok, Nairobi, Kampala, Buenos Aires, Santiago and São Paulo. The churches that are fast growing and have active social ministries are by and large charismatic or Pentecostal. Furthermore, almost everywhere we went we were told that mainline churches were in decline, although one can obviously always find the notable exception if one searches for it. And, surprising to us, old-line Pentecostal groups -- those started through missionary activity in the first half of this century -- are often not as vital as charismatically inclined churches that were started in the past two decades.

Because our sample of churches includes some that are socially active, I hesitate to make any sweeping generalizations about all rapidly growing Pentecostal churches. What I can conclude is that being charismatic does not negate the possibility of highly creative engagement with social issues. In West Africa I was humbled by the way various churches were engaging the AIDS crisis through education as well as basic intervention in the lives of people who were dying and children who were left as survivors. In Manila I was deeply impressed by the vitality of churches in some of the slums and the upward mobility of people who were transformed by their relationship with God. In São Paulo I visited a magnificent health clinic for low-income people that was sponsored by a Pentecostal church, and I visited another congregation that sends out 12 buses every night filled with members who offer soup and blankets to people living on the streets. In addition, members and pastors of these churches cast out demons, heal the sick and believe that God is doing in their cities what God was doing in the first century -- namely, some pretty miraculous stuff!

Many of the things that I observed in U.S. churches are multiplied in these developing countries. First, these movements are led by people with immodest vision. They are not limiting themselves to doing what seems humanly possible given their resources and capacity. If they have a church of 2,000, they expect it to grow to 10,000 within a few years. If they are currently doing AIDS education in 60 churches, their plan is to blanket the entire country within five years. If they had 1.5 million people at their "March for Jesus" last year -- which occurred in São Paulo -- then they expect 2 million this year.

Second, these visions are typically not the result of megalomania, although the human element can never be fully removed. Rather, these dreams have come, quite literally, during periods of extended prayer and fasting. People have seen visions of what God is going to do in their city. Sometimes God even speaks audibly to them. In short, the very visitations that are described in the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament seem still to be happening.

Third, the ministry is being done by the people, not the pastor. Most of these churches are radically decentralized, with small fellowship groups meeting in homes. Common people are studying the Bible for themselves, praying together and taking care of each other's needs on a highly informal level. And fourth, when they gather to worship, you can't keep people from dancing in the aisles, raising their hands in praise, embracing each other and having an exuberant good time. Do they speak in tongues? Are people healed? Yes. But unlike the typical media-take on such churches, this is not the focus of their life together. It is a byproduct of what they believe to be the Holy Spirit's presence in their community.

These new paradigm churches are, I believe, cultural pioneers of sorts. They are attempting to reintegrate bodily experience into religious life. Worship is not simply a matter of the head, affirming various creeds or acknowledging normative beliefs. Beliefs are important, especially when anchored in the retelling of biblical stories -- but beliefs in themselves are sterile. Religion is a full-bodied experience that includes all the receptors -- all the senses -- with the rational mind being only one locus of information about reality.

I would first of all suggest that there are inherent strengths of the Episcopal tradition that will continue to be significant because they are strengths that the new paradigm churches lack.

For example, some members of new paradigm churches will probably grow tired of the radical contemporaneity of their worship. While these churches are effective in attracting a nonchurchgoing population, the worship experience may begin to seem shallow after awhile. Hence, spiritual seekers may shop for something that has more depth and complexity to it. The Episcopal Church will be a prime alternative.

Second, while many people may desire a religious option that offers concrete answers to life's problems, there will be a minority of well-educated people who will find new-paradigm Christianity to be simplistic in its affirmation of Jesus as the exclusive path to truth.

Third, many members of evangelical churches are tired of the narrow-minded, legalistic, anti-intellectualism that they encounter there. I know dozens of people who have become Episcopalians rather than drop out of church altogether -- I am one of those individuals.

One of the wonderful things about the Episcopal Church and other mainline traditions is their affirmation of reason and their willingness to see both sides of an argument and be open to ambiguity. The growth of evangelical churches will create a market for open-minded churches that are ready to wrestle with complex issues.

At the same time, mainline churches can learn from new paradigm churches. They can learn, first of all, the importance of religious experience. We need to bring the magic back into our worship and back into our personal lives. We need to acknowledge that the Holy Spirit reflects the feeling and experiential dimension of the religious life. We should reach deep within our tradition and rediscover those practices that connect us to God in direct ways.

In the 21st century, people will be seeking spiritual pathways to balance the flat secularism of the Enlightenment metaphysic. They will seek for something beyond the physical world and beyond the bottom line of financial accounting. It should not surprise us that young people are more inclined to believe in angels than are their grandparents. Nor should it shock us that hard-nosed rationalism and empiricism are empty methodologies for many young people. One commentator on the worldwide explosion of Pentecostalism states that there is an "ecstasy deficit" in our culture. I would add that there is also a "hope deficit." The challenge to the church is to tap its tradition for those practices that will enable people to move beyond the utilitarian ethic of our individualistic,

We need, then, to put enormous energy into worship. Our success in moral and societal transformation will correlate directly with our commitment to worship. We need to maintain our claim to reason and simultaneously produce worship encounters with the holy that are beautiful, aesthetically rich, emotionally complex and personally transformative. We should not be quick to trade in our Gothic stone churches for utilitarian warehouse space.

On the other hand, I think that we are going to continue to lose our teenagers unless we can create ways to incorporate their music and their innovative styles of participative worship into our aesthetically rich structures. Hence, we should be doing everything possible to experiment with alternative worship, partnering with youth in planning and leading these services. At the same time, we should expand the number of monasteries and retreat centers, or else encourage our parishioners to take advantage of this rich tradition within Catholicism.

Second, we need to acknowledge that innovation occurs at the local and grass-roots level. The current downsizing of denominational offices -- forced by financial exigency -- may not be altogether a bad thing. The centers of energy and creativity lie at the local, not the national, level, The really innovative ideas for reshaping the church will come from people who are addressing the needs of people in their churches and communities, not from denominational officials.

Third, mainline churches should reconsider how they develop leaders. I was struck by the fact that new clergy within new paradigm churches are almost always first identified within the ranks of active laypeople within the congregation. These individuals are then mentored and trained within the context of the local church.

Finally, I think that we should eliminate 80 percent of church committees and trust people to do the work of ministry. The committee meeting is a very inefficient mechanism and a poor structure for experiencing human community. The fastest growing and largest churches in the world are cell-based, with all of the church ministry flowing out of small groupings of people who meet weekly, worshiping together, studying together, praying together and often engaging in highly imaginative service to people in their neighborhoods.

The Future of Liberal Christianity

In this era of political and religious conservatism it is appropriate to ask: What is the long-term future of liberal Christianity? We know the short-term future: decline in attendance and retraction in the budgets of many mainline Protestant churches. But what are the prospects for liberal Christianity in 20, 50 or 100 years?

First let me state some assumptions about religion in general. More than a few social commentators are of the view that religion will, in the long term, disappear. As evidence for their position they note the way in which religion is losing its functions to other institutions. Education is no longer done exclusively under the auspices of the church; marriages can be solemnized by civil authorities; counseling is dominated by psychologists and psychiatrists, the contemporary doctors of the soul -- and the list could be continued.

Sociologists also look to the relatively low church attendance rates in Europe as evidence of the decline of religion. In England, for example, only 10 per cent of the population attends church on a typical Sunday, and in Scandinavian countries the figure is closer to 2 or 3 per cent. The United States, averaging over 40 per cent, is a strange anomaly for sociological commentators -- one often explained by denying that the higher U.S. rate is an expression of greater national religiosity, and suggesting that in America religion fulfills certain nonreligious needs: for sociability and community, for example.

One’s view of the future of religion, however, rests not on statistics regarding church attendance but on a definition of what is meant by religion. In my view, attendance at religious services may be one index of religiosity, but in itself it does not offer an adequate definition. Better to define religion as that set of symbolic expressions and activities which reflect an individual’s attempt to (1) give ultimate meaning to life, and (2) justify one’s behavior and way of life conscious of the certitude of death and the pervasiveness of human suffering. According to this definition, changing patterns of church attendance do not signify the decline of religion; they only indicate that the church is not the place where people are working out the problem of making their lives meaningful.

I do not see a religionless future. The quest for meaning is fundamental to being human. The question, then, is not whether religion is fading, but instead where ultimate questions of life’s significance, and of one’s moral responsibility, are being asked. The future of liberal Christianity depends on whether it can provide a context for pondering, celebrating and working out the problem of life’s meaning. Clearly this activity will be taking place somewhere, because human existence is too problematic for people to stop searching for ideas and ways of living that will make everyday life meaningful.

Evidence that the drive for meaning is still alive and well in contemporary society is to be found in a number of current social movements (interestingly, some of these groups find it convenient to use church facilities as their meeting place). Groups that reflect a concern with ultimate values include peace movements (specifically the growing resistance in Europe and America to nuclear armaments), ecology organizations (concerned with the preservation of nature), utopian communes (seeking to realize perfect community), psychological self-realization groups (seeking new levels of awareness and self-actualization), and revolutionary and terrorist organizations (whose members are willing to die for a political ideal).

What all of these groups or movements have in common is that they reject aspects of the dominant culture in their search for ultimate values. Their members are morally serious and genuinely seeking a better life. They are committed, sometimes almost ascetic in their devotion and practice. Above all, these movements are confronting the issue of death, an essential element of every quest for ultimacy.

The groups just mentioned are profoundly religious; they are the settings where some individuals are seeking salvation, personal and communal. The people may not talk about God, but they are committed to ideals and are not afraid to preach their gospel, often in the form of absolutistic declarations. Given time, such groups may provide the roots for a broader cultural interest in ultimate values. There are a number of cultural trends, however, which militate against the religious impulse and hence have implications for the future of liberal Christianity.

Any list of cultural trends is somewhat arbitrary. Inevitably they overlap, but by way of identifying what is happening in our everyday life it is useful to enumerate some of the forces at work in changing the character of contemporary life. My list of cultural trends is not distinctive, and perhaps therein lies its cogency; there is a great deal of consensus among social commentators regarding a number of directions of social change.

Cultural pluralism is a fact of modern life, resulting from the explosion in mass media technology in the past 100 years. We are becoming increasingly aware of different belief systems within the varied cultures of our world. To the observer, it appears that there is little agreement, either in the realm of values or in that of political forms. Peter Berger has argued that pluralism breeds a philosophical relativism in which the average person stands confused as to whether any single voice among the contending options lays claim to the truth. Many a liberal minister appears as a reed in the wind, his or her sermons being virtually reviews of books championing the latest cultural fad. No claims to ultimacy issue from these pulpits.

The breakdown of community is another phenomenon of modern urban life. The “secular city” was hailed by Harvey Cox and many others for the autonomy it offered. Persons were no longer bound by the constraints of family, community or tradition, but instead were free to be artists of their own lives. Yet with the breakdown of community came not only loneliness and alienation but also the dissolution of the structures of socialization. The result is the dramatic increase of violence in our cities. Fragmentation of community produces a war of all against all. Today there is little to celebrate in many cities. Anomie, alienation, violence and loneliness overshadow the liberation that urban life was to promise.

But just how much community is there in the average liberal church? Loneliness and alienation, it would seem, are not the exclusive property of the city.

The celebration of individualism is a third cultural trend. Judging by the number of psychological self-help books that populate drugstore and supermarket shelves, one would think that the greatest moral failure of our time is to be bound by another person’s wishes and desires. What is of ultimate value is one’s self-fulfillment. nothing should stand in the way of self-expression and self-determination. “Doing your own thing” and “Looking out for Number One” would appear to be creedal summaries of the contemporary ethic. Little is heard of self-sacrifice or self-denial -- apparently old-fashioned virtues.

Even in the liberal church the appeal of “the man for others” has a hollow ring. We would appear to be more concerned about our investments, our upcoming ski holiday in Colorado or the gloss on our newly purchased BMW.

A spirit of antiauthoritarianism is a fourth feature of contemporary life. The final authority is oneself, one’s feelings and desires. A self-satisfied narcissism overshadows any authority claimed by the community over the individual. Tradition is cast off, not respected as our mentor. Police, teachers and clergy are deemed mere functionaries of oppressive institutions, suppressors of individuality. Indeed, the traditional identity crisis of adolescence has turned into a broad-scale cultural crisis in which few within society recognize authorities higher than themselves. Surely the resistance to authority is a reflection of both individualism and pluralism; when there are no absolutes, there are no authorities. One must wonder what kind of authority the liberal church today represents for many of its members.

Materialism is a fifth hallmark of contemporary life. By materialism I mean both the passion for spending money and accumulating possessions, and the view that the material world is the only reality, with belief in a spiritual dimension being considered a throwback to primitive superstition. Consumerism and metaphysical naturalism are related. If the only reality is the physical world, then one does well to realize the kingdom here on earth.

Looking at the physical structures in which many liberal churches are housed, the outside observer might wonder whether liberal Christians have not also sought to realize an earthly heaven.

These trends could be observed with nonchalant detachment if they did not violate what it means to be human. Precisely at this point -- the nexus between contemporary trends and values and the universal and transhistorical needs of humankind -- it is, I believe, possible to make an assessment regarding the role and future of liberal Christianity. If liberal Christianity merely accommodates itself to contemporary culture, it will cease being a religion, for religion must offer ultimate meaning.

To a point, however, accommodation to culture is appropriate to the liberal church, particularly in attempting to understand the Christian faith from the perspective and insights of the arts and sciences of the time. But to compromise too thoroughly with many current trends is to deny the very character of what it means to be human. I am of the opinion that while cultures change, human nature does not. In other words, there are certain human needs and inclinations that are constant amid the sea of societal change.

Stated differently, certain features of human nature will surface and seek expression and satisfaction whatever the cultural setting or era. The future of liberal Christianity lies in its ability to provide an answer to certain basic human needs. What are these elements that define humanity?

The first constant I have already discussed; it is the need for ultimate meaning. The very depression and anxiety that haunt so many of us are an expression of this need. It is not enough to live: we want to live purposefully. Consciousness of death is a gift unique to the human species. It is also the basis of our quest for ultimates. To die a “meaningless” death is recognized as the worst of human failures. Ours has been termed the “age of anxiety” precisely because of the fear that we are committing ourselves to trivial values that lack ultimacy. The modern phenomenon of “depression” has religious, not purely contextual, origins. Depression is rooted in the problem of meaning. To summarize, the quest for ultimate meaning goes on, with the future of the liberal church resting on how well it can provide answers with ultimate appeal.

Closely connected to the need for meaning is the need for forgiveness and absolution. I posit that the experience of failure and the consequent feeling of guilt are universal, again irrespective of cultural setting or time frame. And it is precisely because we quest for meaning, and therefore establish values, rules and principles by which to live, that we then experience guilt as we violate our own self-imposed standards. Moral failure threatens our sense of meaning. Therefore we seek ways of purifying our lives, symbolically (because of our violation of ultimate values) and practically (in rectifying interpersonal relations we have damaged). The liberal church’s survival rests on its ability to make confession, the plea for forgiveness, and the rite of absolution central to the act of worship.

Another constant in human nature is the need for identity. We are not strict products of our environment, a mere amalgamation of our experiences. From birth we evolve a self-consciousness of who we are. Our self is created in the act of making commitments, choosing beliefs, and idealizing heroes. The pluralism of modern culture does much to fragment our attempts at a well-structured identity. We are tempted to express a different self with each different reference group. Nevertheless, we have a natural inclination toward an integrity of person, expressing constancy of values within each of the roles we assume. The liberal church’s future depends on whether it can enable its members to be men and women marked by integrity.

Another universal is the need for community. It is in community that we develop a self, as we are nurtured and in turn care for others. Such reciprocal actions -- such giving and receiving -- are the essence of being human. It is in community that identity is formed, because it is in community that expectations are felt, responsibilities assumed and roles tested. The attraction of liberal Christianity to others will be the quality of community to be found within the church.

Finally there is the need to strive for perfection, to overcome the inferiority imposed by the limitations of our bodies, our resources, our minds. We express this striving for superiority in positive ways in our artistic creations, inventions and achievements. We also react against our felt inferiority through the exercise of power in ways that often are not beneficial to the whole of the community or of humanity. The liberal church’s success in the future will depend very much on whether liberal clergy have a vision to express; whether they will be able to appeal to people’s moral imagination.

What shall become of liberal Christianity, the question with which this discussion began? I think it is possible to make some calculated guesses based upon current tendencies within the liberal church. I suspect we will see its splintering in five different directions, only one of which genuinely responds to the human drive for ultimacy and thus has much potential for influencing contemporary culture.

One direction the liberal church seems to be taking is toward becoming an ethical society. For the churches following this course, metaphysics and theology are of little importance. Of concern is what has been called the “civil religion”: those values which are important to the maintenance of the state. Parents of the future will bring their children to church because they believe religion builds moral character. Religion makes good citizens and will enable their sons and daughters to be contributing members of capitalist society.

Another direction for the liberal church (these alternatives may, of course, overlap) is that the church will become essentially a social center. It will be the place where knitting classes, physical fitness programs and yoga are available on weekdays. Lectures on topics of current interest will fill the evening schedule. Children will enjoy the gymnasium and summer youth club. The church facilities will be well used; the minister, as something of a social events coordinator and pop psychologist, may continue to draw a fair crowd on Sunday as he or she, almost at random, punctuates the sermon with references to Jesus as moral example.

A small number of liberal churches may become sanctuaries for mysticism. Here the mysteries of the sacrament will not be forgotten. Young and old alike will find that church rituals still contain a latent power of self-transcendence and openness to “the beyond.” But doctrine and creed will matter less than incense, candles, stained glass and finely embroidered vestments. This will be privatized Christianity at its apex, but surely such a church will not be a communion of saints.

Many liberal churches -- perhaps the majority -- will take the form of traditional folk religion and will be honored with the same reverence as a good museum. The church will host marriages, baptisms and funerals; seating will be at a premium on Christmas Eve and Easter morning. Members may pray, rather superstitiously, at moments of personal need. Figures of saints may even come to adorn the mantles of some homes, but the gospel of Christ will occupy little importance. Only the miracles will be hoped for in one’s own life, and these on almost narcissistic self-demand. Christianity will be a matter of ethnic or national identity more than of personal commitment.

That brings us to a fifth expression of liberal Christianity, one which I shall call prophetic religion, recognizing its survival historically in Judaism -- and we hope that it will also survive in Christianity. I believe that there will be a remnant seeking to carry on the true spirit of Christ. These persons will attempt to abolish idolatry from their midst, trying to avoid enthroning any human form as ultimate. They will follow in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets: feeding the poor, caring for widows and orphans, attacking economic systems that produce injustice. They will constitute a true community: unselfishly concerned for each others’ needs and rejoicing in a love freely expressed. They will worship grandly and yet will also organize effectively, combating the evils of this world. They will be disciplined persons, almost sectarian in their attitudes and commitments, but choosing to live fully immersed in this world rather than withdrawing from it.

I do not expect prophetic religion to prosper in the future: it never has in the past. But for its members it will fulfill the demands of being human: giving a sense of ultimate meaning, offering release from personal failure, creating a noble identity of integrity, fostering the richness of a caring community, and upholding a standard of perfection which will both judge and inspire. This remnant will not live in utopia. The life of its people together will be complex, the demands of being a Christian difficult, but they will find joy and peace as they seek to embody the symbol of one who gave his life for what he believed. They will form a stark contrast to the communities of violence and to the fragmented persons existing all around them, harried and compulsively consuming.

Perhaps the greatest difficulty for the prophetic church will be the evolution of a metaphysic and a theology that “make sense” within the context of the modern world. As I stated earlier, liberal Christianity is a middle road between Christ and culture in that it seeks to understand culture, not remove itself from modern science or the arts. Yet liberal Christianity must have a message for modern men and women; it cannot simply reflect contemporary values in sanctified form. There are enough social clubs in this world. Mysticism can be purchased from many a guru. If one is looking for ethics unadorned with metaphysics, the membership rolls of the Humanist Association are waiting to be filled. And folk religion offers no permanent meaning, only a salve to get one over the rough spots.

In Dostoevsky’s famous parable, the Grand Inquisitor offers his flock miracle, mystery and authority. In his view, he is accomplishing the priestly task, for these offerings give people the security which they desperately desire. But security is not enough. Meaning is of a higher order than security, and the courageous of this world will attempt to live in the very shadow of ultimate meaning. Only such a quest for ultimacy will break the grip that a vague and uneasy nausea has on the lives of so many of us. But first, perhaps, we will need to experience the ultimate emptiness of our infatuation with consumption, our striving for prestige and personal power, and our attempts to create our own meaning system. Let us give thanks for the depression and anxiety which signal our consciousness that all is not right.

Prophetic religion takes its inspiration from that power which stands beyond persons. The prophet is one who recognizes the difference between his. or her own words and the Word of the Lord. Security is not the object of prophetic religion. Søren Kierkegaard correctly identifies the Knight of Faith as one who lives with “fear and trembling.” Faith requires openness to a realm of meaning which is beyond human creation and therefore beyond human control.

The liberal Christian I have been describing will return to the wellsprings of religious experience. The new metaphysic to be generated by liberal Christians will flow out of their attempt to understand “the beyond” in their midst. Prayer and meditation will be valued as moments when one’s quietness allows for a voice other than one’s own to be heard.

But let us not believe that prophetic religion will exist only in the churches of liberal Christians. There are not a few evangelicals, Muslims and Hindus who also live by faith. It is, finally, not the external forms of religion that matter so much; they are cultural products, vessels (potential conduits) of the holy, not to be confused with the divine (such would be idolatry). What is important is the quality of life that results from one’s concourse with the God beyond gods. Perhaps the future will reveal more understanding and unity among this prophetic minority, gathered from all the great paths to God, than may ever exist within any particular religious tradition.

The Truth of the Christian Fiction: Belief in the Modern Age

Despite the growth of conservative expressions of Christianity during the past decade, many liberal Protestants and Catholics have found that Christian faith is for them increasingly perplexing and ambiguous. The membership losses in mainline Protestant denominations indicate that, at least for some sectors of the population, religious commitment is becoming more problematic. Although changes in church membership and attendance figures may stem from a variety of causes, theological reasons should not be neglected in favor of an exclusive focus on psychological and sociological explanations (that is the failure of Dean Kelley’s now-famous argument linking the decline of liberal churches to the lack of institutional demand).

A Crisis of Faith

In my experience as a more-than-casual observer, many liberal Christians are marginal in their commitment to the church for primarily theological rather than sociological reasons. The recent statement on homosexuality issued by the United Presbyterian Church, the issue of ordaining women in the Episcopal Church, and a host of other lesser and greater concerns provide the occasion for disenchantment -- but they are not its source. In my view, those individuals who are not merely switching denominations but dropping out of church participation altogether have experienced a strain in their fundamental belief structure in regard to the principal theological elements of the Christian faith. If this assertion is correct, the “precondition” for the church dropout is a crisis of faith -- an event which may take place at an almost subliminal level, given the theological inarticulateness of those churchgoers who are unable to conceptualize even to themselves the ambiguities in their understanding of their Christian identity.

In some ways this argument is a strange one for a sociologist of religion to make. My professional commitments should tend to bias me toward more subtle social-psychological explanations. But sometimes sociologists are blind to the fact that people do not attend church merely for reasons of social status and psychic relief; they are also thinking, contemplative individuals who bring an inquiring mind to their quest for meaning. My focus in this discussion, consequently, is theological; it reflects my own theological pilgrimage and my evolving understanding of the Christian faith (cf. “Returning to the Fold: Disbelief Within the Community of Faith,” The Christian Century, September 21, 1977). What follows is not so much a description as a prescription of what may constitute an adequate faith for this final quarter of the 20th century.

My argument is not addressed to those who feel comfortable in their faith, who read the Bible regularly and are nurtured by that experience, and who pray with no difficulty. Rather, my concern is directed to those who contemplate prayer with troubled spirits (wondering what kind of psychological trick they may be playing on themselves), who try to read the Bible (but question Paul’s right to tell them how to understand Jesus, let alone their own existence), and who seek an all-embracing identity as a “Christian” (but realize how divided are their loyalties).

Form and Substance

I part company with many in the evangelical camp not on pietistic grounds but on epistemological grounds. Many of those of the “born-again” persuasion believe that Reality is identical with the written text of Scripture and that salvation comes through assent to a set of doctrinal statements. In contrast to the literalism of such individuals, I must confess to having been influenced heavily by the social sciences in my interpretation of how meaning systems are created and evolve; although I view the New Testament writings as foundational to Christian faith and practice, I see them also as “social constructions” which are the natural by-product of a community’s struggle with questions of meaning and faith. Furthermore, I do not regard God or Ultimate Reality as identical with the creedal statements or liturgical forms of which we are heirs.

Having stated these reservations, I nonetheless assert that Christianity is true. I believe it is true despite the fact that I simultaneously see our conceptualizations of Jesus and God, and the liturgical forms with which we celebrate their presence within our community of faith, as the creative products of individuals wrestling with their own fate.

What may sound paradoxical in my affirmation -- namely, that Christianity is both true and a product of human creativity -- can be clarified by making a distinction between “form” and “substance.” The “form” which theological expression takes is always that of symbol and metaphor. As literal forms, these symbols and metaphors are “fictions.” God is never identical with an image or conceptualization. To identify the “form” of theological expression as fictional does not,. however, discount the “substance” or reality to which these “forms” may point. The power of a theological fiction is its transparency to the reality which it portrays. The literalist’s mistake is to think that form and substance are one and the same. Distinguishing between form and substance enables one to recognize the human element in the social construction of religious expression without denigrating the reality of that which is encountered in religious experience.

The Reification Process

Religious doctrine attempts to articulate the nature and character of the Ultimate Mystery, but it always falls short. Why? Because theology is the product of finite beings engaged in a reflective process that is always tempered by the limitations of the intellect at work. The best the Christian theologian can hope for is to contribute to the comprehension of that one, Jesus, who was most transparent to the Ultimate. Jesus, as we know him, is no less a symbolic form than the other socially constructed fictions which have emerged from the genius of individuals within the Christian community. To say that is not to discount his historical reality -- just as I do not discount the assertion that substance may underlie form -- but it is to say that reality, on whatever level, is always conceptualized from the perspective and interests of the individual.

Where religious communities (and individuals) go awry is in forgetting the human, and therefore finite and limited, authorship of all conceptualizations of the Ultimate. Reification is that process by which an abstraction or approximation comes to be treated as a concrete reality. Doctrines and creeds are in their origin a product of human imagination. The historical tendency, however, is to forget that they are mere conceptualizations and to see them as being identical with reality itself. In the words of sociologist Peter Berger, this is the moment of “alienation”: the point at which human authorship is denied and nonhuman origin attributed.

The doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture is a good example of the reification process. At the time of writing, the authors of the biblical text surely were never audacious enough to believe that they were uttering “holy writ.” They were writing letters to friends, offering churchly counsel, constructing biographical accounts, or fashioning interpretations to make sense of what they had experienced.

It was only after some historical distance had been reached that a doctrine of verbal inspiration could arise. (At a time when individuals were haggling over which books should make it into the canon, it would have been laughable to argue the line taken by some fundamentalist literalists -- that every word is inspired by God. And theologians as notable as Luther later raised arguments as to whether the early councils had indeed chosen rightly in what they had included and excluded.) To “humanize” the biblical texts by pointing to their human authorship is not to discount their importance as the foundational documents on which the church stands; but such an approach does remove the idolatrous authority with which the words are sometimes stamped, thus acknowledging their social and historical rootedness.

Fiction and Myth

For modern individuals who are the intellectual heirs of Kant, the Romantics, and the Enlightenment, the mind is better imaged as a lamp than as a mirror. A mirror reflects reality as it is; such an assumption undergirds biblical literalism. In contrast, a lamp is directional; it illuminates different things depending on where it is situated and how it is positioned. Using this model, we can see that the biblical writers were expressing the “reality” illuminated by their own interests and dispositions; they were reflectors of the discourse and concerns of their individual communities.

It is from this latter epistemological perspective that we must understand the writings which constitute our Scriptures as well as the doctrinal and creedal statements which fill church history. What is given in the Bible we read, the creeds we recite and the doctrines which guide our perceptions is what seemed important to the authors of these documents as they reflected the concerns -- social, political and psychological -- of their communities and of themselves. To call these “forms” which we encounter in Christianity “social constructions” or “fictions” is not disrespectful to their intentions. It simply expresses the way in which meaning systems come into being.

The most basic fact of human experience is the recognition of our finitude and limitations. At every point we are faced with the limits to our abilities to reflect on, and then to represent, the reality we encounter. This fact is particularly evident when we attempt to speak of what is Holy and Absolute. Fictional representation through symbol and metaphor is the only means whereby we can describe that which exceeds human comprehension. Myth enables us to structure insights that will allow us to follow our quest for holistic explanations of the cosmos and to understand the meaning of our personal existence in all its ramifications. It is from this perspective that I say Christianity rests on fiction and myth -- there being no other form which could enable us to speak of something so encompassing in its concerns.

Yet despite the abstract and metaphysical quality of some of our questions, we desire to express our religious faith in concrete and highly visible ways. Stated differently: we are both mind and body, and we consequently apperceive reality on both levels. Thus, we use highly concrete symbols in our worship, with architectural dynamics playing a not insignificant part in what one feels and experiences. The smell and taste of wine and bread, the visual ambience created by stained-glass windows, the costuming of priests and ministers -- these appeals to the senses all contribute to an impression that one is not in the profane world of everyday life. We are inextricably both flesh and spirit. Worship appeals in a highly integrated way to both these modes of perception and experience. The temptation, however, is to reify: to make these symbols holy as if they were identical with the reality to which they point -- when, in fact, they are the product of creative impulse. To reify is to engage in idolatry. Protestants and Catholics alike have forgotten the warnings explicit within the Old Testament. And that is the pathology of some forms of Christian faith and practice: individuals mistake their own creations, and those of the historic church, for the Mystery itself. Orthodox, fundamentalist and evangelical expressions of Christianity have all been susceptible to this perversion.

Vessels of the Holy

The theological confusions of many Christians at the present moment may in a strange way serve as a deterrent to idolatry. The lack of certitude about the nature of God may actually represent a healthy respect for the dangers of substituting human forms for Holy Substance. In fact, to argue that all religious forms are social fictions is to be faithful to the ancient Jewish custom of refusing to utter the name of God, as well as to the modern insight that the human elaboration of reality is as much a statement about one’s personal interests as it is a statement about the nature of reality itself. I am not arguing for solipsism -- the theory that the self can be aware of nothing but its own experiences and that nothing exists or is real but the self -- but I am suggesting that what we call reality within the religious sphere is a product of the dialectic between the individual with hand-held lamp and the truth which lies beyond the full reach of the beam’s illumination. Hence, our attempts at describing this Reality are always partial and appropriately identified as “fictional.”

But for the theologically troubled Christian who begins to identify Christianity as resting on fictive forms, the temptation is to dismiss the “forms” of the church (including both liturgy and doctrine) as being misrepresentations of the truth. This tendency rests on the mistaken idea that one could possibly have a nonfictional representation of Ultimate Reality. Perhaps most fundamentalists and a goodly number of evangelicals believe that such a thing is possible (that is, that the Bible is a “mirror” rather than a “lamp” to Reality), but I am not certain that those who embrace a post-Kantian epistemology can agree.

Ironically, many highly sophisticated individuals who forsake Christianity do so on grounds that have a closer affinity to the nonrelativistic stance of evangelicals than to any position represented by their own neo-Kantian ancestors. Which is to say, they reject Christianity because the “forms” are perceived to be socially constructed fictions, though they are aware that conceptualization of “the thing in itself” is impossible.

I see no reason why Christians cannot recite the creeds, participate in the sacrament of the Eucharist, and enjoy the rich symbolic structure of the church without feeling that they are somehow being hypocritical if they do not literally believe what they are affirming. Not to do so is to be imprisoned within a pre-Kantian world view. The power of the church’s “forms” is not that they are identical with the Divine. Their purpose is to be vessels of the Holy, vehicles that point beyond themselves to the Ultimate Reality which imbues these fictional representations with power. To recite the creeds and to read the Scriptures as part of one’s worship is to acknowledge that one stands in a history in which others have struggled to articulate the nature of the ultimate and the appropriate response to be made to it.

The Symbolic Form of Jesus

It is from the perspective outlined above that I understand “the way to God as being through Christ.” The Christ of the New Testament is that symbolic form presented to us by the Christian community of the first several centuries and is the form through which they understood their relatedness to God. It continues to be the symbolic form we use to talk to each other about the meaning of life, death and suffering. The symbolic representation of Jesus in the New Testament is not identical with the man who lived in the first century who was called Jesus. Yet this “form” symbolized in the eucharistic feast is imbued with the meaning which Jesus mediated to those early Christians who quested after a fuller experience of their Creator. The fiction which those individuals created was not without relation to the man who healed and taught and fed the multitudes, but his life was interpreted from the consciousness (and interests) of those who sought meaning for their own personal lives.

The symbolic form of Jesus changes expression as Christians of each new generation seek to understand the meaning of life in their historical period (even though the reference point is always that image presented in the New Testament documents). The theologians of the fifth, 12th, 19th and 20th centuries are many times removed from the Jesus of history. They interact not with the Jesus of Nazareth but with the symbolic representations of that man as pictured in the New Testament documents and the history of theological reflection -- the latter being the inevitable lens through which the documents of the New Testament are read.

This is not to say, however, that the theologian writing today is creating without the benefit of the Spirit. The power of Christ in our time correlates precisely with the degree to which we are able to participate in the symbolic representations of which we are heirs and therein to experience, the “substance” which lies behind the “forms.”

The possibility exists that there is nothing present within the “forms.” It is on this point that the man or woman of faith is distinguished from the one who is agnostic to the claim of an Ultimate Reality. The error of too many individuals experiencing a crisis of faith is their assumption that in identifying the “forms” as fictive they have committed themselves to an agnostic position. There is a difference between the Substance (God) and its representational forms. We are condemned to fictions -- at least on the level of human expressions or representations of the Holy. The mystery of the Christian experience, however, is that there is a Reality which stands both within and beyond our humanly created symbols.

Toward a More Mature Theology

Many liberal Christians today may be in the same position as those romantics of the 18th and 19th centuries who, having given up the God of the neoclassicists, returned to the church for solace and spiritual renewal. For these individuals, truth was not identical with the symbols of the church themselves, but these symbolic representations provided the avenue for experiencing the Ultimate. In quite a literal sense, the church was for them the repository of truth -- though in a much different way than for many of their contemporaries.

And we, I suspect, may be in a similar situation today: many liberal Christians may superficially resemble their evangelical brothers and sisters. They may say the same words and participate in the same eucharistic feast. Yet they mean something quite different when they recite the creeds or take communion. For them, the Reality is not identical with the “form” -- the “form” is fictive, the biblical accounts are mythic -- and yet tradition has proven them to be alive with meaning and consequently an avenue to the Holy. Therefore, the liberal or radical Christian may be as devoted to the church, to Christ, to the importance of worship as the evangelical who takes a more literal view of the symbols which empower the church.

Finally, to those who are experiencing a crisis of faith, contemplating for reasons of integrity their abstention from worship and the life of the church, I would argue that God can neither be experienced in the abstract nor conceptualized intellectually without tapping the fictive power of the imagination. The Christian church is a human community, and though its forms are fictive, the witness is that there is One who stands beyond final representation who undergirds these fictions. To doubt radically the validity of the symbolic representations of the Christian faith may be the first step toward embracing a more mature theology which does not mistake, in idolatrous fashion, God as being identical with the manifold expressions of God.

Missiology in a Pluralistic World: The Place of Mission Study in Theological Education

Although the study of Christian mission or missiology has begun to appear in theological academia more than a century ago,[1] this field of study did not become an established discipline for a long time. Even today, the field has not been given its due recognition in many institutions around the world. Differences in the understanding of mission and the contrariety between the different renditions of the field of study have placed missiology in a state of confusion, thereby preventing it from occupying its proper place in theological academia. The confusion is the result of drastic changes of mission understanding and the resultant multiple faces of mission. In the present work, I intend to look afresh into the problem of identifying the nature and characteristics of missiology, and suggest a viable understanding. The development of the discipline, I believe, requires a comprehensive approach to understand mission, an inclusive understanding that is critically open to both the traditional view and new forms of understandings and interpretations of mission.

The purpose of this article is two-fold. Firstly, I will critique a few major approaches and perspectives to show that any exclusivistic attempt from one point of view is problematic, and that a healthy development of the discipline requires a holistic understanding of mission. Any proposal of a comprehensive understanding is also veiled with confusion and possibilities of misunderstandings. The multidimensionality of mission not only confuses theological academia, but also hinders the discipline of mission study from finding its proper place. The best way to clarify this problem, I suggest, is to find an integrative principle or the axis of missiology to which the various dimensions of mission are integrated. Secondly, I am trying to find the role and place of missiology as an academic discipline within the parlance of theological studies, and my attention is drawn in particular to the theological education system in the religiously pluralistic India.

By way of introduction to the subject-matter, let me first spell out my “interim” definition of mission to help me clarify my own presupposition. By Christian mission, I broadly refer to the church’s endeavour to cross its boundaries[2] to serve, to share its message(s), and to interact with those outside the Christian fold. By saying this, I am trying to differentiate mission with the general understanding of the ministry of the church, which is “to provide for the inner needs of the congregation”[3] Thus, while ministry is understood broadly as that which the church provides for its members within its borderlines, mission concerns those beyond the church’s boundaries. As will be made clear later, in a pluralistic world of today one needs to recognize the fact that the crossing of frontiers is no longer a one-way direction. One may, therefore, think in terms of crisscrossing the boundaries. What are the boundaries and why and how are they crossed? At this point, let me just say that a variety of borderlines have been identified in history. While some have been abandoned, others have been given more prominence. It is in the sense of boundary-crossing, I would argue, that biblical teaching on mission such as “commissioning” (Synoptic) and “sending” (Johannine) find their relevance for today. As we will see, there has been a significant shift from understanding mission as “church-sending” to “God-sending”[4] in the last few decades.

The Concept of Mission in the Modern Missionary Movement:

What is commonly called the “modern missionary movement” among the Protestants is the product of pietistic and evangelical movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The modern missionary movement, generally speaking, aimed foremost at the saving of the souls from eternal damnation. Unless salvation is brought to the “heathens,” according to the dominant view of the movement, their souls are damned to hell. Thus, what Geevarghese Mar Osthatios calls “rescue the perishing”[5] motive served as the spiritual springboard as well as the main goal of the modern missionary movement. The idea of saving soul is backed by a concept inspired by the evolutionary theory that views the “cultured” western Christian race to be highly superior to the uncultured “heathen” races elsewhere. Missionaries were sent, therefore, not only to save the “heathen” people’s souls from damnation, but also to civilise them and to elevate the “uncultured” people to be like the “cultured” western Christians. Mission, therefore, primarily aimed at the conversion of the “heathen” into the Christian “race”, through which it expanded Christendom by inculcating its values among the so-called “heathen.” Various “strategies” were devised to achieve the goal of conversion and the expansion of Christendom. This understanding of mission, abundant in mission literature of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, continues to dominate a large number of “mission-minded” churches and individuals today. The few attempts to systematize mission studies as an academic discipline within or about the movement have been concerned mainly with “how to” convert the “heathen” and expand the Church.

The greatest biblical inspiration of the movement was the so-called “Great Commission” of the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. As disciples of Christ, according to the dominant reading, Christians are commissioned to “go” into all the world, proclaiming the gospel and baptizing new disciples (i.e., converts). Thus, the church understood itself as receiving a mandate from the words of the risen Christ to extend his kingdom by discipling and baptizing the “heathen” of the nations. As a proactive movement inspired by the command to “go”, the movement was invigorated by a crusading spirit. Lesslie Newbigin once observed, “One of the dangers of emphasizing the concept of mission as a mandate given to the Church is that it tempts to do what we are always tempted to do, namely to see the work of mission as a good work and to seek to justify ourselves by our works. On this view, it is we who must save the unbelievers from perishing.”[6]

This notion of mission so strongly dominated mission understanding in the modern missionary movement that the term “missiology” has often been related mainly to the study of Christian expansion through conversion of non-Christians to the Christian religion. Thus missiology has been understood as a discipline that studies “how to” convert or “how to” expand Christendom. To most of the so-called “mission-minded” western Christians, mission is evangelism among the non-Christians; and evangelism is defined as the proclamation of the Gospel with an intention to convert men and women to Christ.[7] Not only do conservatives identify mission with the “conversion” of the “heathens” to Christianity and the expansion of Christianity in the “heathen-lands,” but many of the relatively liberal Christians also comply with this understanding of mission, with the result that they perceive mission to be irrelevant for contemporary society. Mission, for many liberal theologians is an outdated enterprise belonging to the colonial past, and any Christian attempt to convert non-Christians to Christianity is arrogant and disdainful. Mission, therefore, is implicitly questioned on moral ground as its understood goal is aiming at the ceasing of other religions. Commenting on the views of some theologians, David Bosch states “Mission appears to be the greatest enemy of the gospel.”[8] One should note that the negative perception not only arose out of the narrow understanding of mission, but also the failure to read the development and changes of the mission conception through time. So dominant is the understanding of mission as the churches’ endeavour to multiply itself in number through conversion and civilising activities that the significance of changes and development of mission understanding in the ecumenical movement has frequently been overlooked.

Ecumenical mission thinking may be traced to have begun at the World Missionary Conference of 1910 (in Edinburgh), which is aptly called the “birthplace of the modern ecumenical movement.”[9] The development took a decisive turn at the founding of the International Missionary Council (IMC) in 1921. Issues debated and studied at the IMC meetings at Jerusalem in 1928 and at Tambaram (Madras) in 1938 signify important milestones in the development of mission thinking. A major shift in mission understanding within the ecumenical movement surfaced from the early 1950s, which changed the face of ecumenical mission permanently. Up until this time, the “why” and the “what” of mission were taken for granted and as indicated before, missiologists tackled the question of “how,” “wherefore,” and “whence” of mission.[10] The question of “why mission” significantly appeared during the IMC meeting at Willingen in 1952, especially when the theme of “Missionary Obligation of the Church” was dealt with.[11] The conference could not approve the report dealing with the theme. The question of “why” led to the question of “what,” and an exciting period was inaugurated by such prompting questions. Although it has rightly been pointed out that the emerging period was a period of crisis in mission, it was also a period of creative thinking. What was once considered an indisputable practice of the church, namely missionary activities, turned out to be the most problematic one. A well-known German missiologist Walter Freytag is quoted to have said, “Formerly missions had problems, but now they have become a problem to themselves.”[12] The problematizing of mission was neither an artificial act nor a mere academic exercise, but a natural and spontaneous outcome of the period. The impact of the international socio-political movements on mission thought was significant. Movements such as de-colonization, the rise of Communism—especially the expulsion of missionaries from China by the Communists—and the attempt to vindicate Human Rights culminating in the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) have direct and indirect impact on mission understanding.[13] The validity of mission as practiced was questioned, and the new susceptibility led to the broadening, the re-interpretation, and the re-conceptualization of mission.

Evolving Themes and Concepts of Mission:

In the process of searching for the “why” and the “what” of mission, a new and exciting period of quest for an in-depth and viable theology of mission came into being. One after another, important themes and issues surfaced attempting new interpretations of mission. The various themes of re-conceptualization that emanated in the new period includes mission as missio Dei, mission as “Christian presence,” mission as “witness” in and to the six continents, mission as development, mission as liberation, mission in relation to dialogue with people of other faiths and non faiths, mission as contextualization and inculturation. Categorically, the various themes are related. For the purpose of this paper, we shall broadly classify the themes under two major headings, namely missio Dei and Witness. The deductive reasoning at laying down the biblical-theological foundation of mission and its raison d’ être finds its consummation, so to speak, in the missio Dei concept, and all the functional definitions of mission that have emerged such as proclamation, liberation, contextualization, dialogue, and others can be interpreted as acts of “witnessing.” Thus, while the former is a deductive (theoretical) definition, the latter defines mission through its functions. One may also consider functional definition of mission (as “witness”) as “how to” participate in the mission of God. In attempting to define the term “missiology,” an American missiologist James Scherer relates two definitions dialectically.[14] The definitions are those of Johannes Verkuyl and Alan Tippett. The definition by Verkuyl says, “Missiology is the study of the salvation activities of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit throughout the world geared toward bringing the kingdom of God into existence….” Alan Tippett on the other hand defines missiology as “the study of man [sic] being brought to God in history….” Here, the starting points are different: Verkuyl begins with God (the subject) by looking at God’s activities, whereas Tippett starts with human being (object) and analyses the process and modes of missiology. The two definitions closely parallel the distinction we are trying to make between deductive and functional definitions.

Missio Dei:

Perhaps, the most influential and enduring concept, which to some extent subsumed other biblical concepts of mission, is missio Dei (mission of God). According to proponents of the concept, Christian mission should be understood as Christian participation in the mission of God by putting God at the centre and as the source and author of mission. Based on the Western medieval theology that describe the activities within the Trinity, the missio Dei concept suggests that mission should be understood as being derived from the very nature of the Triune God, that is, in the sending of the Son by God the Father, and God the Father (“and the Son”) sending the Spirit, and the Triune God sending the Church into the world.[15] Mission, therefore, is seen as “a movement from God to the world.”[16] The concept, considered to be based on sound biblical and theological grounding, has been looked upon as almost uncontestable. Furthermore, it serves as a major alternative and corrective principle to the traditional understanding of mission. The concept challenged the triumphalistic and paternalistic inclination of western missionaries under the protective umbrella of colonialism. The emphasis on the singularity of mission against the traditional notion of missions (plural) as the churches’ endeavours has a far-reaching implication. The new emphasis on the oneness of mission indirectly left important effects on the on-going discussion of mission and unity. Consequently, mission as God’s mission anticipates that mission cannot be claimed by any one particular church or region, and therefore, mission should be carried out in and to all the six continents. At the first Commission on World Mission and Evangelism (CWME) meeting in Mexico City in 1963, “mission in six continents” became “the leit-motiv.”[17] The “Message” of the meeting reads, “[the] missionary movement now involves Christians in all six continents and in all lands.”[18] The old practice of identifying the “non-Christian worlds” as “mission fields” was done away with. As the object of God’s mission, there can be only one “mission field,” that is, the world. Mission as a movement from the western Christian lands to non-Christian lands came to be considered inadequate.

The concept of missio Dei is not free from difficulties. The most serious drawback involves the problem of specifying the missionary activities of God in the world. The extent of God’s mission, especially with regard to God’s activity in the secular world, remains a point of dispute. The Willingen conference of the International Missionary Council (IMC) in 1952—where the missio Dei concept first surfaced publicly—“wrestled with the question of the relation between God’s work in the mission of his Church and his work in the secular history.”[19] The meeting could not come to a consensus. In Willingen and the period following, two major—and somewhat competing—approaches to missio Dei emerged. The first one, a dominant view in the Willingen meeting, understood mission as God’s evangelizing action through the church. The second, which raised serious opposition to the dominant Willingen view, was developed forcefully later especially in the report on the study of the “Missionary Structure of the Congregation” in the early 1960s. It conceived missio Dei as God’s activity in the secular world over and above the church, saying, “the world provides the agenda.”[20] Whereas the first approach maintains “the church [as] the principal vehicle of God’s mission,”[21] the latter tends to reduce the church’s place in God’s mission “even to the point that it excluded the church’s involvement.”[22] The conflicting convictions regarding the extent of God’s activity in the world relate closely to the conflicting theories of salvation-history (Heilsgeschichte) between Karl Barth and Oscar Cullmann. Whereas Barth and his followers identify God’s work only within the “sacred history … inaccessible to secular historical research and known only by faith,” Cullmann and his followers—among whom are well-known missiologists—view that God’s work is discernible in the secular history.[23] Here lies the distinction between missiology “from above” and missiology “from below.”[24] In other words, the missio Dei concept, which is often presumed to be exclusively a missiology “from above,” is also conceived to be a missiology “from below.”

Witness:

At the Whitby meeting of the IMC (1947) and the following years, the terms kerygma, koinonia, and diakonia were used to define the understanding of mission. The Willingen Conference (1952) added “the notion of ‘witness’, martyria, as the overarching concept,” saying “This witness is given by proclamation [kerygma], fellowship [koinonia], and service [diakonia].” As an overarching concept, “witness,” became the dominant mode of doing mission and the most “comprehensive portrayal of what mission is or is supposed to be.”[25] In the New Delhi Assembly of the WCC (1961) where the IMC merged with the WCC, the Council chose “Witness”, “Service” and “Unity” as the key concepts and primary concern of the ecumenical movement. By the first World Mission Conference of the CWME in 1963 in Mexico City, “Witness” became the catchword of the meeting and unquestionably the most dominant concept to understanding Christian mission. The influence of Orthodox mission theology was felt significantly on understanding mission as witness especially after the New Delhi Assembly of the WCC in 1961.

The new emphasis serves to rescue mission from the straitjacket of proclamation and church planting. In some circles, witness and proclamation are still seen as the two main modes of communicating the Gospel in which the former tends towards activism and the latter verbal communication. But in the ecumenical understanding since the early 1950s, attempts have been made to interpret proclamation, service, and fellowship as the means of witnessing to the Gospel. “Witness” (or martyria) is a powerful and emotive biblical keyword capturing the Christian understanding of what it means to have faith in Christ. As Jesus Christ the Word incarnate himself witnesses to what he is and what he sees (John 3:11, 31-32; 18:37) in the world, the disciples are called to be his witnesses (Acts 1:8). Witness as the all-embracing mode of mission subsumed within it most important themes that emerged in the new era such as “presence,” “liberation,” and “dialogue.” It should not be denied that the new ecumenical formula is action-oriented and tends towards activism as the main mode of doing mission. While the action-oriented nature of mission as witness serves as a corrective means to traditional missionary paradigm, it also brings with it the tendency to limit mission to social activism.

Some Implications for the Academic Study of Mission:

1. Mission as expansion of Christendom through conversion and church growth, a dominant view during the Western colonial period, as we said, is still one of the most influential positions as well as understanding especially at the grass-root level of the churches in India. The conservatives continue to cling onto the model of “how to” do mission (or “how to” convert and multiply) taking the questions of the “why” and the “what” of mission for granted. Many proponents of this model would assert that the “why” and “what” of missions are clearly answered in the Bible, especially in such texts as “the Great Commission” (Matthew 28:16-20). With this simplistic answer to the “why” and “what” of mission, this model fails to take the challenges of the world seriously but hides itself behind the security of its own religious walls. Since Christian mission directly concerns the world beyond the bounds of Christianity, or the interaction with those beyond the frontier line, any definition of mission—including deductive works on the biblical meanings of mission—has to take the world beyond the bounds of Christianity seriously. Thus, the “how” question is closely linked to the “why” and “what” questions, and the “why” and “what” could not simply be answered “from above”, but also “from below.” With regard to finding easy answers from the Bible, one needs to be aware of the subjective involvement of the reader and the influence of one’s predilection in reading the Bible. One’s predilection often determines the kind of “answer” one “receives” from the Bible. In other words, claiming simple “Biblical answer” is neither easy nor convincing.

2. The confusion in understanding the church’s place in God’s mission (missio Dei) and the conflicting convictions on God’s work in secular history led to the difficulty in identifying what is involved in Christian mission. The problem indirectly led the discipline of mission study to a perplexing state. The study of mission, with a primary understanding of mission as missio Dei, could not find its place in the existing theological education system as it clearly is an overarching discipline that holds all other disciplines of theological study within itself. In one sense, the entire arena of theological education deals with missio Dei. David Bosch has rightly noted, “[T]heology, rightly understood, has no reason to exist other than critically to accompany the missio Dei.”[26] The problem of identifying the extent of God’s works (or mission) in the concrete historical sphere also led to the difficulty of stabilizing mission as an academic discipline. Johannes Aagaard has pointed out that under the missio Dei conception, “everything we do is [easily] identified with the historical missio of God, unqualifiedly and indiscriminately.”[27] This notion leads to the obliteration of boundary or boundaries to define mission. It was such a tendency to limitlessly broaden the concept of mission under the missio Dei concept that compelled a prominent missiologist Stephen Neill to protest, “If everything is mission, nothing is mission.”[28]

3. The emphasis on action-oriented understanding of mission as “witness” is also in danger of limiting mission within the narrow confines of ethical imperatives. Loosing sight of the multidimensionality of mission easily lead to the replacement of the very term “mission” with other terms such as “justice.” This danger is not constructed merely in abstract; there are instances that can be quoted in which attempts have been made, consciously or subconsciously, to subsume mission within other disciplines such as Ethics. For instance, the “Final Statement on ‘the International Consultation on Mission and Unity’”, a consultation jointly sponsored by the NCCI and the Gurukul Lutheran Theological College, defines mission as “a process of ethical transformation characterised by the availability of justice, freedom and dignity for all.”[29] While ethical issues constitute an important dimension of mission, mission can neither be limited nor subsumed within one’s conception of ethical imperatives. Justice as an issue and a theme is an essential part of mission and the most crucial norm to judge mission activities, but mission is not limited to justice.

In providing these points of critique to the major definitions and interpretations of mission and their implications in the study of mission as an academic discipline, it is not my intention to surpass the definitions. On the contrary, I hang on these definitions to further my search for missiology’s place in theological education. My intention is to show that when taken and utilized in isolation, each of these approaches is in danger of limiting the meaning of mission within the bounds of its own pretensions and emphases. Christian mission, therefore, should not be defined with an “either/or” mindset. Christian mission is a multi-faceted discipline, and has multiple major concerns, which includes verbal proclamation of the Gospel, religious conversion, inter-religious dialogue for mutual understanding and peace, promoting social justice, uplifting the down-trodden, and many others. Christian mission has many-ness not in a fragmentary sense, but in the sense of wholeness.

The Study of Mission in Theological Education:

The multidimensional nature of mission directs its study to become an inter-disciplinary activity. Not only does mission have many modes, it has many sides and is linked with various theological and non-theological disciplines. Thus, as an interdisciplinary field of study, it has a crucial complementary role to play in the entire arena of theological study. At the same time, its inter-disciplinary nature also perplexes academicians in finding its role and place in the academic arena and impedes its independent existence within the existing theological education system.

Mission Study or Missiology (as we interchangeably use the two terms) as an academic discipline is closely related to the study of (other) living religions, and the discipline itself by definition is incomplete without its biblical-theological, historical, and practical-ethical dimensions and foundations. From the time of Friedrich Schleiermacher, who was the first to attempt to find a place for mission study within the wider theological study, there have been various suggestions to place mission study within one of the existing fields of study. Schleiermacher himself suggested that mission study should be included within Practical Theology. Although he suggested that it be included within Practical Theology, Schleiermacher made his detailed treatment of mission study in his section on ethics. While mission historians such as Gustav Warneck, John Foster and Kenneth Scott Latourette argued that mission should be included within church history, a small minority of theologians also suggested that it be placed within systematic theology.[30] The multidimensionality of mission is a problem to missiology in regard to its place in the theological education system. A century and half after Schleiermacher, theological academicians are still asking: Should mission study be an independent discipline or should it be included within other disciplines of theology? There has not been a consensus.

Recently, Laurent Ramambason has helpfully outlined the various points of view under four headings, namely “mission oriented theological studies”; “recognition of missiology as a separate subject”; "combination of missiology with some other subjects”; and “dimensional study of mission.”[31] Christopher Duraisingh advocated the first one, and forcefully argued that mission has to become “the undergirding perspective of the educational [i.e., theological education] process itself.”[32] In a context where mission study exists only at the margin of theological education, Duraisingh’s proposal appears to be too ambitious and unrealistic. Following Schleiermacher, Wolfhart Pannenberg proposes that missiology should be included within or combined with Practical Theology.[33] A number of institutions are still following this approach, and placed mission studies within or combined with Pastoral Theology; while others combined it with Church History, some combined it with or relate it closely to World Religions. Taking the multi-dimensional nature of mission seriously, some scholars propose that the various dimensions may be taken care of by various fields of study: Biblical, Systematic Theology, Church History, and Practical Theology. The problem with this proposal as well as the previous one (i.e., combination with other fields), says O. G. Myklebust, is “whenever missiology is integrated into one or more of the other disciplines, it does not receive its due.”[34] With few exceptions, scholars of other fields rarely give importance to missiological dimensions within their fields of expertise. The central puzzle continues to be how to deal with the multi-dimensional nature and the inter-disciplinary function of missiology. I join a number of mission thinkers in insisting that missiology is a complementary discipline and could not exist independently from other fields of theological study. At the same time, to expect other fields of study to take care of missiological issues and concerns within or from their fields is nonrealistic and self-defeating.

James Scherer has done a good analysis on how missiology is complementary to various other fields of study.[35] He listed five fields of study with which missiology has to be related, namely Biblical Studies, Church history, Systematic Theology, Social Sciences, and World Religions. I will not repeat what he says except to emphasize his strong insistence on “missiological controlling [or driving] principles”[36] to be operative as criteria for relating with such fields. One also gets a strong impression that none of the fields in themselves bother to give due emphasis to missiological themes, and any limitation of missiology within each field would do great injustice to missiology. The most important contribution of Scherer, in my opinion, is his insistence that there should be “essential missiology” to determine what is “normative missiologically.”[37] To set the norms, he chose not to draw boundary line or lines, but look for a centre or the essence. The complementary approaches cannot work without “the integrating missiological center,”[38] he says. I think Scherer is right in insisting that “essential missiology” should be operative in relating or integrating missiology with other fields. However, in spelling out “the integrating missiological center” or “essential missiology,” Scherer surprisingly moves backward historically and conceptually to “the basic traditions and conceptual principles embodied in the works of [Gustav] Warneck, [J. H.] Bavinck, and [Johannes] Verkuyl.”[39] An “essential missiology,” he says, should “touch with the roots, motives, classical foundations, and goals of the discipline—i.e., God’s glory, ‘conversion of the Gentiles,’ planting of the church, hastening and preparing for the kingdom.”[40]

I agree with Scherer methodologically. It is impossible to rigidly set limits to the multidimensional missiology, and the best way to approach the problem is to find the centre, or I would rather call it the axis, that would hold together various dimensions of missiology. This centre should determine what is missiological in the process of integration with other fields of study. However, I do not agree with Scherer with regard to what the integrating principle is. In identifying the integrating principle or principles, one should have in mind and look for the distinctive contribution missiology must make to the existing theological education system. For this purpose, the function of what Lesslie Newbigin and Hans-Werner Gensichen call “dimensional aspect” of missiology, which is “to permeate all disciplines … of the theological encyclopedia”[41] has to be temporarily abandoned, and one should concentrate on “the intentional aspect”[42] of missiology. In other words, for the purpose of finding the core or axis of missiology, we should dispense with what we earlier called a “deductive definition” of mission and focus on a “functional definition.” Although missiology must be concerned with “God’s glory”—taking an example from Scherer’s list—there is nothing distinctively missiological about “God’s glory” as all fields of theological study must also be concerned with it.

Integrating Principle of Missiology:

To suggest the axis or integrating principle of missiology, let me return to my interim definition of mission for a moment. Christian mission, I have said, is about the boundary-crossing activity of Christians or the Church following God who crossed the boundary between God and the world (missio Dei) in and through Jesus Christ. The word “crossing” is noteworthy especially in today’s context of conflict between fundamentalist groups of various religions. Here, one ought to note that the call is “to cross” and not “to crush” the boundaries. In the light of this definition, we may ask if the attempts of various fundamentalist groups of different religions (including Christian fundamentalists) to crush the boundary by destroying the cultural differences be considered mission. What are the boundaries the Church in mission is called to cross? Drawing from the history of Christian mission, let me suggest three types of boundaries from which I will make my option; these are, religio-territorial boundaries, cultural boundaries, and religious boundaries. The distinction between cultural boundaries and religious boundaries cannot be precise because culture and religion are often too difficult to distinguish. In the modern missionary movement up to the early twentieth century, religio-territorial was undisputedly the defining boundary which Christian missionaries were understood to cross. Missionaries were considered missionaries when they crossed over from Christian Europe to non-Christian Asia, Africa, Latin America and others. The reaching out from Christendom to “mission fields” in the “non-Christian lands” was the basic way of doing mission. At the collapse of Christendom and when the major direction of mission changed from “foreign mission” to “world mission,”[43] the notion of identifying “non-Christian lands” as “mission fields” was gradually abandoned. As described earlier, the World Mission Conference of the CWME in 1963 (Mexico City) declared that mission “is not just to three continents, but six [or all the continents],” involving Christians in all lands.[44]

Secondly, mission has been conceived popularly in recent times as crossing of cultural boundaries. Especially in western countries, Christian mission has been closely related to the so-called “cross-cultural ministry.” All kinds of ministry done cross-culturally are often interpreted as mission activities. Culture plays a central role in mission and cultural boundaries are often the most sensitive and difficult parts in mission activities, but mission cannot be limited to cross-cultural ministry. Since Christianity does not have a specific culture of its own, and culture differs between different communities who claim to hold the same religion, every crossing of cultural boundaries does not consist in doing mission.

In my opinion, it is the religious boundary that defines the function of mission in the most specific way. Religious boundaries, which are also essentially part of cultural boundaries we have discussed, have endured the changes in the concept of mission in history and continue to be an important defining factor of mission. Although we try to differentiate religious boundaries from cultural boundaries, the two are intrinsically related and cannot be separated. Thus, when we talk about religious boundaries, to a certain extent, we also include cultural boundaries. I would argue that mission has always been conceived as witness to the Gospel across religious boundaries, and that mission is considered to have happened when an individual or group of one religion cross over into another religious domain with its message and promises. Mission in broad terms, therefore, essentially involves activities and interactivities across religious boundaries. In making this definition, I am aware of the need to be specific and realistic. I try to free myself, at least temporarily, from deductive definition because my quest involves the practical contributions missiology should make in the existing theological education system. Based on deductive reasoning, there are various attractive definitions within the broad conceptual framework of missio Dei such as mission as “the dynamic relationship between God and the world,”[45] and mission as “participation in the humanisation of the world.”[46] Such definitions, however, are too broad for our purpose.

Based on the definition of mission as witness across religious boundaries, I propose to identify the axis or integrating principle of missiology as a broadly defined “theology of religions” (theologia religionum),[47] a discipline that came into popular theological parlance only in recent decades. By theology of religions, I mean critical theological reflections on the interaction and intercourse between different religions through such means as proclamation and sharing of their different creeds and teachings, through dialogue of their adherents, and mutual challenges and partnership for common cause.[48] William Burrows differentiates two approaches to theology of religions. One approach takes “the ‘salvation’ values of other religious ways” as the central question, and the other appraises “how complex traditions …diversely envision the character of the Whole and fashion praxes consistent with these visions.”[49] Our purpose is better served by the former because our concern is not so much on the theories and concepts of religion, but on the interactions between living and active religions on such central concept as salvation. Thus, it is theology of religions that we are talking about, not theology of religion. Jacques Dupuis has made a clear distinction between the two. He says, “The theology of religion [as a Christian enterprise] asks what religion is and seeks, in the light of Christian faith, to interpret the universal religious experience of humankind ….”[50] Christian theology of religions, on the other hand, “studies the various traditions in the context of the history of salvation and in their relationship to the mystery of Jesus Christ and the Christian Church.”[51]

In formulating the above broad definition, I intend to include all schools of theology of religions, and wish to highlight that the intercourse between religions has been happening throughout Christian history. In recent years, because of the new recognition of religious plurality in most countries of the world, especially in the western countries, and the popular evolving of the accompanying pluralistic theology of religions,[52] serious thoughts have just been emerging. Few mission thinkers had prophesied a few decades ago that the challenge of other religions as well as the oncoming pluralism of religions would be the greatest challenge to the theology of mission. Max Warren is quoted to have said in 1958 that, “the impact of agnostic science will turn out to have been child’s play compared to the challenge to Christian theology of the faith of other men [sic].”[53] By 1961, Gerald H. Anderson, who now has become one of North America’s most prominent missiologists, commented on the unpopularity of the issue in the West. He wrote, “Christian theological endeavor has been more concerned with introspection, intra-Christian relations, than with the interrelation of Christianity with other faiths. Too often those most interested in the nature of the Christian faith have been those least interested in its relation to men [sic] of other faiths.”[54] By 1991, the situation of religious pluralism was so pervasive even in the West that another American theologian Carl Braaten pleads, “Christianity needs a theology of religions.”[55] Some conservative evangelical theologians such as John Sanders[56] and Clark Pinnock[57] have tried to bring home the challenge to the conservative circles. Even among those who do not recognize or experience the situation of religious pluralism, these scholars argue that the problem of salvation of the “unevangelized” people parallels the serious question posed by religious pluralism.

While western theologians tried to cope with religious pluralism and struggled to introduce theology of religions seriously only since the late 1980s, theologians in multi-religious situations like India had been working on the issue for decades under several other nomenclatures. Scholars like P. D. Devanandan and Raimon Panikkar had done pioneering theological reflections on the pluralism of religions in the early 1960s,[58] and the impact of Stanley Samartha’s work in the World Council of Churches has been felt throughout the world. In fact, if one wants to trace the historical development and the various struggles the issue of pluralism and dialogue faced in the non-Catholic ecumenical movement, Samartha’s recent autobiographical account[59] is one of the best sources. Samartha’s Christological reflections on the pluralistic theology of religions[60] remains to be one of the most original and in-depth studies on the field.

A few points of clarification are in order. Theology of religions evolved out of religious pluralism, which refers both to a conceptual condition and a historical situation. By religious pluralism, we are not referring to a mere multi-religiosity in which religions may independently exist, but a situation in which different living religions mutually recognize their existence side by side. Such situations demand dialogical existence of different religions, which is the essence of religious pluralism and an essential condition for mutual interactivities among religions. Religious pluralism and pluralistic theology of religions are not the same, and the latter should not be confused with the theology of religions. Pluralistic theology of religions is one school of thought within the theology of religions.

In suggesting the theology of religions as the essential integrating principle of missiology, I am influenced by a number of missiologists who made similar pleas for different purposes. The American missiologist Gerald Anderson has written on the issue in several places. In his 1993 article, he says, “No issue in missiology is more important, more difficult, more controversial, or more divisive for the days ahead than the theology of religions.”[61] About twenty years earlier, Eric Sharpe had argued that “the encounter between Christianity and non-Christian religions, and the Christian evaluation of other religions, acts as it were as an epitome of mission theology.”[62] Using Sharpe’s description, David Bosch declared that “the theologia religionum [or “theology of religions”]… is the epitome of mission theology.”[63] Bosch’s thought on the importance of the theology of religions to mission theology has been further explored and analyzed by Gerald Anderson.[64] I whole-heartedly agree that the theology of religions is at the heart of the theology of mission, but I would go further in suggesting that the theology of religions should be taken as the main defining principle of missiology. Not limiting missiology as such to the theology of religions, the theology of religions is to be utilized as the integrating principle of various dimensions of mission.

Conclusion:

This paper is limited to explore and analyze viewpoints on mission and missiology with an attempt to suggest ways for viable understanding. Amidst conflicting viewpoints, we suggest that we need to hold a holistic approach and define mission in a comprehensive manner even to the point of risking its cutting edge. Essential as it is, a holistic understanding of mission brings with it various problems and its implications for mission study are perplexing. For a viable way of understanding mission, we suggest a defining principle in which two modes are operative, namely deductive and functional. Inspired by the former but drawn from the latter, we use witness across religious boundaries as the defining principle of mission and from which we draw the theology of religions as the integrating principle of missiology. In putting this point forward, I would like to remind ourselves that the context is a theological education system. In proposing the theology of religions as the hub of the multidimensional missiology, we have in mind the distinctive contribution missiology is to make to the existing fields of theological study. In conclusion, let me reiterate the limits of this paper. In proposing what I believe to be the hub of missiology, namely theology of religions, this paper can come up only to the stage of identifying it, and does not explore the intricacies within it. As far as missiology is concerned, we are in a critical and crucial period; “the field is wide, but laborers are few.” A further exploration into how theology of religions integrates various aspects of mission is a task set ahead for students of missiology. This paper raises the issue, specifies the way, and sets the trend in that direction. As an inter-disciplinary field of study with an important complementary role to play to all existing fields of theological study, part of the task of missiology involves the drawing out of missiological themes and issues from those fields of study. In some fields, the task has not yet begun.

NOTES:

[1] Olav G. Myklebust, The Study of Missions in Theological Education. Volume 1 (Oslo: Forlaget Land Og Kirke, 1955), 146, and 158ff.

[2] James A. Scherer, Gospel, Church, & Kingdom: Comparative Studies in World Mission Theology (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1987), 37.

[3] Christopher Duraisingh, “Ministerial Formation for Mission: Implications for Theological Education,” International Review of Mission LXXX, No. 321 (January, 1992): 35.

[4]Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement, eds. N. Lossky, et al. (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1991), s.v. “Missio Dei” by Tom Stransky, p. 688.

[5] Geevarghese Mar Osthatios, “Divine Sharing: Shape of Mission for the Future,” International Review of Mission LXXVI, No. 301 (January 1987): 18.

[6] Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company; Geneva: WCC Publications, 1989, rep. 1994), 117.

[7] Michael Green Evangelism in the Early Church (Glasgow: HapperCollins, 1970), 10.

[8] David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 518.

[9] Kenneth S. Latourette, “Ecumenical Bearings of the Missionary Movement and the International Missionary Council,” in R. Rouse and S. C. Neill, eds. A History of the Ecumenical Movement, 1517-1948 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1968), 362.

[10] Gerald H. Anderson, “The Theology of Christian Mission among the Protestants in the Twentieth Century,” Introduction to The Theology of Christian Mission, ed. Gerald H. Anderson (New York, Toronto, London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1961), 5-7.

[11] James A. Scherer, Gospel, Church, & Kingdom, 38.

[12] Ibid., 35.

[13] For my detailed argument of this point, see Lalsangkima Pachuau, “Ecumenical Missiology: Three Decades of Historical and Theological Development (1952-1982),” A Paper presented at the International Consultation on Mission and Ecumenics, (Co-sponsored by the WCC and the UTC), The United Theological College, Bangalore, September 10-13, 1998, 1-3.

[14] James A. Scherer, “Missiology as a Discipline and What It Includes,” Missiology: An International Review XV (October, 1987): 511-514.

[15] Bosch, Transforming Mission, 390; Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement, s.v. “Missio Dei” by Tom Stransky.

[16] Bosch, Ibid.

[17] Bishop Anastasios, “Mexico City 1963: Old Wine into Fresh Wineskin,” International Review of Mission 67 (1978): 357.

[18] R. K. Orchard, Witness in Six Continents: Records of the Meeting of the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism of the World Council of Churches held in Mexico City, December 8^th to 19^th, 1963 (London: Edinburgh Press, 1964), 175.

[19] Lesslie Newbigin, The Relevance of Trinitarian Doctrine for Today’s Mission, CWME Study Pamphlets No. 2 (London: Edinburgh House Press, 1963), 23.

[20] The Church for Others and the Church for the World: A Quest for Structures of Missionary Congregations (Geneva: WCC, 1968), 20.

[21] Scherer, Gospel, Church, & Kingdom, 108.

[22] Bosch, Transforming Mission, 392.

[23] A. Richardson, ed. A Dictionary of Christian Theology, s.v., “Heilsgeschichte.”

[24] Cf. J. A. B. Jongeneel and J. M. van Engelen, “Contemporary Currents in Missiology,” in Missiology: An Ecumenical Introduction: Texts and Contexts of Global Christianity, eds. F. J. Verstraelen et al. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995), 447-457.

[25] Bosch, Transforming Mission, 511-512.

[26] Ibid., 494.

[27] Johannes Aagaard, “Mission after Uppsala 1968,” in Mission Trends, No. 1, Crucial Issues in Mission Today, eds. Gerald H. Anderson and Thomas F. Stransky (New York: Paulist Press, and Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1974), 17.

[28] Stephen Neill, Creative Tension: The Duff Lectures, 1958 (Edinburgh House Press, 1959), 81.

[29] “Final Statement on the ‘International Consultation on Mission and Unity’,” National Council of Churches Review CXIX (April 1999): 361.

[30] J. Verkuyl, Contemporary Missiology: An Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1978), 6-8.

[31] Laurent Ramambason, “The Study of Mission in Theological Schools: A Critical Synopsis,” A Paper Presented at the International Consultation on Mission and Ecumenics, Bangalore, The United Theological College, September 10-13, 1998.

[32] Chrisotpher Duraisingh, “Ministerial Formation for Mission: Implications for Theological Education,” International Review of Mission LXXX, No. 321 (January, 1992): 38.

[33] Ramambason, 5.

[34] Verkuyl, 8.

[35] James A. Scherer, “Missiology as a Discipline and What It Includes,” Missiology: An International Review XV (October, 1987): 507-522. The same article is also reprinted in New Directions in Mission and Evangelization 2: Theological Foundations, eds. James A. Scherer and Stephen B. Bevans (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994), 173-187. In this paper, I use the former.

[36] Ibid., 514.

[37] Bid., 518.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Ibid., 518-519.

[41] Bosch, 494.

[42] Bosch, 496.

[43] Significantly, when the IMC merged with the WCC in the New Delhi Assembly (1961) of the WCC, the new Division/Commission on Mission and Evangelism came to be called “Division/Commission on World Mission and Evangelism.”

[44] Ronald K. Orchard, ed., Witness in Six Continents: Records of the Meeting of the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism of the World Council of Churches held in Mexico City, December 8^th to 19^th 1963 (London: Edinburgh Press, 1964), 160-161.

[45] F. J. Verstraelen et al., “Introduction: What do We mean by Missiology?”, in Verstraelen et al, eds. Missiology: An Ecumenical Introduction: Texts and Contexts of Global Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995), 4.

[46] M. M. Thomas, Salavation and Humanisation: Some Crucial Issues of the Theology of Mission in Contemporary India (Madras: The CLS, 1971), 10-11.

[47] According to David Bosch, this “discipline” began to evolve only since the 1960s. Bosch, 474.

[48] J. Van Lin defines theology of religions as the theoretical and practical foundational ideas on the basis of which “Christians can determine their relationship to people of other living faiths.” See Van Lin, “Models of a Theology of Religions” in Missiology: An Ecumenical Introduction: Texts and Contexts of Global Christianity, eds. F. J. Verstraelen et al. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995), 177.

[49] William R. Burrows, “Theology of Religions,” in Dictionary of Mission: Theology, History, Perspectives, eds. Karl Müller et al. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997), 451.

[50] Jacques Dupuis, S.J., Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998), 7.

[51] Ibid., 8.

[52] The theology heralded its advent significantly with the book The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987).

[53] Quoted from W. C. Smith, The Faith of Other Men, 121, by Gerald H. Anderson in “Theology of Religions and Missiology: A Time of Testing” in The Good News of the Kingdom: Mission Theology for the Third Millenium, eds. Charles Van Engen et al. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 201.

[54] Gerald H. Anderson, “The Theology of Mission among Protestants in the Twentieth Century,” in Anderson, ed., The Theology of Christian Mission (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), 4.

[55] Carl E. Braaten, No Other Gospel!: Christianity among the World’s Religions (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 83-102.

[56] John Sanders, No Other Name: An Investigation into the Destiny of the Unevangelized (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1992.

[57] Clark H. Pinnock, A Wideness in God’s Mercy: The Finality of Jesus Christ in a World of Religions (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1992).

[58] See, inter alia, M. M. Thomas, Risking Christ for Christ’s Sake: Towards an Ecumenical Theology of Pluralism (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1987).

[59] S. J. Samartha, Between Two Cultures: Ecumenical Ministry in a Pluralist World (Bangalore: Asian Trading Corporation, 1997), see especially 28-130.

[60] S. J. Samartha, One Christ— Many Religions: Toward a Revised Christology (Bangalore: South Asia Theological Research Institute, 1992).

[61] Gerald H. Anderson “Theology of Religions and Missiology: A Time of Testing” in The Good News of the Kingdom: Mission Theology for the Third Millenium, eds. Charles Van Engen et al. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 200.

[62] Eric J. Sharpe, “New Directions in the Theology of Mission” Evangelical Quarterly 46 (January-March, 1974), 14.

[63] Bosch, 477.

[64] Gerald H. Anderson, “Theology of Religions: The Epitome of Mission Theology” in Mission in Bold Humility: David Bosch’s Work Reconsidered, eds. W. Saayman and K. Kritzinger (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996), 113-120.

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