Christian historian Woodrow Walton continues his investigation into the origins of the modern movements that inspired Christians to go and share the mission and message of Jesus throughout the world.

George Müller

When studying how living out the gospel changed the social fabric of the early nineteenth century England, Europe, and North America, several figures must be considered. How their charitable work thrust the gospel into the societies of both England and the young United States of America should not be forgotten or underestimated.

The first of these was George Ferdinand Muller [also spelled Müller or Mueller], who was born in Kroppenstedt, Kingdom of Prussia (now Saxony-Anhalt Germany) and later moved to England. In 1829, Muller offered to work with Jews in England through the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews. He gained his fame as a man who cared for 10,024 orphans during his life time and provided educational opportunities for them. He not only preached the gospel but also established 117 schools which offered Christian education to more than 120,000 children. In England, he associated himself with the Pilgrim Brethren Church. He and his wife, Mary Groves, had four children, two of which were stillborn.

The New Orphan Houses in the Ashley Down district of Bristol, England.
Image: The George Müller Charitable Trust/Wikimedia Commons

Muller, after early bouts of illness, and the death of his wife, in 1871 married again. His second wife was Susannah Grace Sanger. Together, beginning in 1871, they began a 17–year period of missionary travel that took them to the United States of America, Canada, Germany, India, Australia, Palestine, the Straits of Malacca, and New Zealand. When in the U.S.A., he was welcomed by the President of the United States of America. He died at the age of 93 on March 1898 and has been honored throughout the world ever since as the director of the Ashley Down orphanage in Bristol, England and the care of 10,024 orphans over the years, and as man who never asked for support for his work but when support was given by churches and individuals, he kept account of it and wrote “Thank You” letters to every donor. His example defies any estimate.

This article is part of The Gospel in History series by Woodrow Walton.
Image: The Books of Kells by way of Wikimedia Commons.

Simultaneous to the years of Muller’s life was the ministry of Frances Willard, the founder of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which challenged the liquor industry in the countryside and urban areas of both the frontier and growing cities. Willard was not only a stalwart defender of women’s rights but also one of the earliest of Christians to see the mission of God within the socio-cultural context and thus living out the ministry of Jesus as spelled out in the tenth chapter of the gospel of Luke. At the same time the Society of Friends and many of the Mennonites and Moravians were binding the wounds of soldiers and were given exemption from military service and recognized as peace churches, an exemption which exists into the present.

Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard (1839 –1898).
Image: Gamaliel Bradford (1919) Houghton Mifflin Company/Wikimedia Commons

Simultaneously in this era the Congregationalists, Baptists, Dutch Reformed, and Methodist churches established schools for Native Americans. After a childhood of abuse and impoverishment, William Apess [originally spelled Apes] served as a soldier in the United States army during the War of 1812, became a Christian and entered into the ministry of the Methodist Church. He rose to fame as a preacher and as a lecturer giving protest of the plight of Native Americans in New England and beyond. His autobiography, A Son of the Forest, published in 1829, was the first published by a Native American writer. In 2014, Philip F. Gura, with the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, wrote a biography of William Apess. This writer owns a copy of Gura’s The Life of William Apess, Pequot. During the years of both his ministry and his series of lectures, he gained support from churches outside of the Methodists and public recognition. Slowly but surely, co-operation among churches of Arminian and Reformed backgrounds brought them together in different areas of Christian ministry and mission outreach.

The Pietists had great impact within the colonies from the time of the Great Awakening and into the Second Great Awakening. In time, their influence was to lead to the formation of the Free Methodist Church, the Evangelical Free Church, and others who broke from synodical and presbyterian polities common among the Lutherans and Reformed Churches. It is against this background that Alexander Campbell during the Second Great Awakening welcomed any one of any Christian persuasion to participate in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. We are all “disciples of Christ,” he proclaimed. Barton Warren Stone, the “New Light Presbyterian” felt much the same but simply used the term “Christian” no matter a person be Baptist, Presbyterian, Catholic, Lutheran, Moravian, Quaker, or Mennonite. The Anglican Church in America dropped the term “Anglican” from it vocabulary and re-named itself “Episcopal.” The Methodists in America under the leadership of Francis Asbury and others shortened their identity from “Methodist Episcopal” to simply “Methodist.”

In 1826, the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance was formed. However, there were many precursors of such public charity, many from the earlier years of the Christian faith. Basil of Caesarea initiated the first hospital for the sick and feeble. In the Middle Ages, the Beguines, a laywoman’s ministry initiated in the pre-Reformation era, reached out to the neglected, the homeless, the lame, and the poor, and wrote devotional and theological works which made for conflict with some of the “professional” clergy. But of great significance to the Reformation era and the years of the global expansion of the gospel was the initiation of Sunday Schools by Hannah Ball in High Wycombe of England in the late 18^th century but carried further by Robert Raikes in 1780.

Robert Raikes the Younger (1736 –1811) promoted the Sunday school movement, raising awareness of a need for public education before state-run schools existed.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

The start of the Sunday Schools began with a school for boys in the slums. Raikes had been involved with boys incarcerated at the count Poor Law which was part of the jails at the time. Raikes believed that vice would be better dealt with school as a preventive and held on Sundays as the boys were frequently enlisted to work in factories the other six days. The best available teachers were among the laity of the churches. The basic textbook was the Bible. The originally intended curriculum began with learning to read the Bible and then progressed to the catechism of the Anglican church. The first Sunday School class started in July of 1780 in the home of a Mrs. Meredith with boys and then extended to girls. By 1782 several other Sunday Schools opened around Gloucester, England.

On November 3, 1783, Raikes published an account of the Sunday Schools in the newspaper he started. Later news of the spread of the Sunday Schools appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine and by 1784, a further account of the spread of the Sunday Schools appeared in a letter to the Arminian Magazine.

Children laboring in a cotton spinning factory in 1835.
Image: illustration from The History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (1835), by way of Wikimedia Commons.

Little by little, Jesus’ great commission was being realized as a missionary mandate that was greater than proclamation and fulfilled the whole missionary made enunciated by Jesus and recorded in Matthew 25:35-40; 28:18-19; Luke 10:2-9; 18-20; and Acts 1:8, and universalized in Mark 16-18. The missionary mandate included healing the sick, discipleship, and entering the domain of the “serpent” to release the imprisoned, the afflicted, the haunted, the down-trodden,” and penetrate the darkness of the world with the light of a greater kingdom not of this world but of the one who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

PR

Christian historian Woodrow Walton continues his investigation into the origins of the modern movements that inspired Christians to go and share the mission and message of Jesus throughout the world. In Part 3, he invites us to learn more about the Quakers and other marginalized groups whose convictions had them following God on paths often disdained by other Christians.

In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, events were unfolding in England, Europe and North America that would change how the gospel message was being proclaimed. Although little was being done in the strict evangelical sense of proclaiming the message (kerygma), much was done in the area of the living out of the Christian message and in the complexion or appearance of the total church in Europe and especially in North America.

During this time, Southern Europe, especially along the Mediterranean coastline, remained dominantly Roman Catholic, from Portugal all the way to the Balkans and no further. The Balkans were strongly Orthodox within a growing Islamic presence. Slavic Europe, outside of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was also Orthodox. Austria-Hungary and the Czech and Slovak areas remained Catholic but were quickly experiencing the effects of the Protestant Reformation and the Anabaptist Radical Reformation. The Hussite Brethren, better known as the Moravians, were leaving for western Europe and then continuing to go overseas. However, similar Brethren bodies, such as the Mennonites, the Amish, and the Hutterian Brethren, remained. These had a significant impact on the Christian complexion of Eastern Europe outside of Russia.

To see the unfolding of the worldwide Christian mission, let us look at England and Germany in particular. First, there are two Englishmen worthy of attention, George Fox and William Penn.

George Fox was born on July 1624 in Drayton-in-the-Clay, Leicester, England, and is credited with being the founder of the Society of Friends, now known as the Quakers. By the time that he turned 19 years of age, he was conscious of an “inner voice” which evangelicals and Pentecostals would identify as the leading of the Holy Spirit. Fox became an assiduous student of the Bible. He was the first person on record to argue for the equality of women with men in the propagation of the gospel. In 1647, Fox began preaching publicly. He preached in fields and markets. He attracted gatherings of people who flocked to listen to his messages. At times, they gathered in houses after the services. Originally, the new believers referred to themselves as “Children of the Light” or “Friends of the Truth” and later still “Friends,” a term which continued to be in use along with “Quaker.” Fox became a public figure, but not of his own making. Officials were suspicious of him because of the stands he took on military service, the place of women in home and in public, and how the incarcerated and children should be treated.

George Fox refusing to take the oath at Houlker Hall, 1663. From a painting by John Pettie (1839-1893).
Image: Wikimedia Commons

At the same time, he gained approval from people in prominent positions: James Naylor, a prominent preacher in London, became one of Fox’s first converts to the Quaker position. By the end of the 1650s, the Society of Friends became more organized. The British Commonwealth under Cromwell in the 1650s was also the Friends’ most creative period. Even though the restoration of the monarchy was threatening for the Friends, now characterized as Quakers, it became the era when believers migrated to North America and settled in Puritan New England. The revolt in 1661 by the Fifth Monarchists led to the suppression of the Quakers and the repression of other dissenters, instigating an exodus. It was in the aftermath of the Fifth Monarchist coup that Fox and eleven other leaders among the Friends issued a statement which became known as “the peace testimony” from which stems their stand against military conscription.

A woman preaches during a Quaker Meeting in London (circa 1723), engraving by Bernard Picard (1673-1733).
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Their stand against military conscription and for equality of rights between men and women in both civil matters and the ministry of the church. This did not sit well with many in either England or Puritan New England. When some of the New England Quakers came to London to plead their case, Fox met with them. After his release from prison in 1666 for refusing to swear the oath of allegiance to the existing political regime in England, Fox set about normalizing a system of monthly and quarterly meetings throughout Great Britain, extending to Ireland’s Quaker population, a system which has persisted to this day. In 1669, Fox married a widow with eight children, Margaret, at a Quaker meeting in Bristol. They shared together in the administration the Society of Friends. In 1671, George and Margaret Fox embarked on a voyage to the West Indies and North America where they visited groups of Quakers who had earlier left England for Barbados, Jamaica, Maryland, and North Carolina. After the travels abroad, the Foxes returned to England. It was there that George and Margaret met with William Penn and Robert Barclay, men of wealth and position who became allied with the Friends.

In 1683, Penn, who had been granted land in North America, turned 1,000 acres of land in the colony of Pennsylvania to Fox and the Quakers. Although Fox was never able to visit for himself the Quaker colony in Pennsylvania, he was overjoyed with what was granted. Penn, himself a Quaker, furthered the ministry within Pennsylvania. The Act of Toleration of 1689 put an end to the uniformity law under which the Friends and other dissenting Christians had been discriminated against and persecuted. It was a great day for Fox and the expanding Quaker movement, both within what would later become the United States of America, and in the Netherlands, Poland, Denmark and Germany. Fox died in January 13, 1691, soon after preaching at the Gracechurch Meeting House in London. He left a journal and letters and other writings which were subsequently published after his death. His name is immortalized at the prestigious George Fox University with campuses in Portland, Salem, Newberg, and Redmond, Oregon.

Of equal importance was the Quaker emphasis on the leading of God’s Holy Spirit in a person’s life and, thereby, an increase of Christian witness. The spiritual health of the witness is as important as the sermon that is preached. Walt Whitman, who was raised by parents inspired by Quaker principles, wrote of George Fox: “George Fox stands for something too—a thought—the thought that wakes in silent hours—perhaps the deepest, most eternal thought latent in the human soul. This is the thought of God, merged in the thoughts of moral right and the immortality of identity” (Prose Works, Philadelphia, David McKay, 1892). Modern Christians have taken seriously the writings of Elton Trueblood, who for years taught at Earlham University in Indiana, on how Christians are yoke-fellows in Christ’s work of outreach and ministry. This writer has met Dr. Trueblood in person at a meeting in Fort Worth, Texas, around 1956, at the Texas Christian University.

This article is part of The Gospel in History series by Woodrow Walton.
Image: The Books of Kells by way of Wikimedia Commons.

The work of Richard Foster, who inspired the Renovaré moment and the Renovaré Spiritual Formation Study Bible, is another example of Quaker influence. The Renovaré Study Bible is an inter-denominational venture that seeks to plumb the spiritual depths of the Scriptures using quotations of Christians from the past with the intent of deepening the devotional life of the believer and consequently improve the quality of Christian witness.

A side effect of Penn’s donation of land to the Quakers was to encourage the settlement of the same area by other dissident Christian groups, particularly those with pacifist leanings such as the Mennonites of the Netherlands and the Amish of Switzerland. The designated land was composed of what is now known as Lancaster County, which historians consider the birthplace of American agriculture. The new Mennonite and Amish immigrants were principally farmers and agriculturists. Their children would later migrate into the American Midwest, during James Monroe’s presidency in the early 1820s, taking their agricultural skills with them. These migrations saw the development of farmlands in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa. Cedar Rapids, Iowa, proudly displays a billboard advertising Quaker Oats as you enter the city. These families also displayed a quality of Christian life that enabled them to relate to the Native Americans of that section of our country. One of the earliest of these was the family of Daniel Boone. His earliest portrait identified him, by way of personal adornment and headwear, as a Quaker, a portrait that dispels the myth built around him by the Motion Picture industry and modern television frontier drama. Boone and his family of six children were able to balance the scales between the way of life of Native Americans and that of the immigrant settlers coming from the East.

What this did was to give a larger scope to the mission of the church beyond the preaching and purely evangelical to include the presentation of the Christian life lived out beyond that of preaching. The role of the church is not only that of the kerygma (proclamation) and the didactic (teaching) but the presentation of a kind of communal life which reaches outward beyond itself to reconcile, heal, extend mercy, befriend, encourage, and inspire.

What would become the United States of America was not merely a haven for different Christian groups from England and Europe. For many colonial American Christian leaders, it was also a model of what was envisioned by Peter the apostle when he spoke at the festival of the Pentecost a short time after Jesus’ ascension and by John, years later, when, banished to the island of Patmos, he envisioned those who were redeemed “out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9-10). It is important to note that within that vision, the redeemed were not identified by their church polity, interpretive stance, racial or ethnic origin, but having come from every tribe, tongue, people and nation whether Slavic, Germanic, Scandinavian, African, Asian, or whatever. It would take another century for some incoming church groups to set aside prejudices and begin to co-operate in both evangelism and outreach and in some cases merge.

Adoniram Judson in 1846.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In the young USA, only sixteen years old, a meeting occurred near the newly formed Williams College that sparked America’s initial entry into the Christian world mission. This event is referred to in American history as the Haystack Meeting in August of 1806. Several students of Williams College at Williamstown, Massachusetts, gathered for prayer in the shadow of a haystack close to the school. Among the students were Samuel Mills, James Richards, Adoniram Judson, Robert Robbins, Harvey Loomis, and Bryan Green. The news of Carey, his wife, and family departing from England to spread the gospel in India and translating the Scripture into the language spoken near Calcutta reached America and spread to Williams College. The news lit a fire in the hearts of the six young men. Of the six of them, Adoniram Judson decided to meet William Carey in India.

The Haystack Prayer Meeting of 1806 has been considered the beginning of America’s entry into the Christian world mission. It was, however, in 1810, that the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions was formed by Baptist churches who set aside their extreme congregationalism to in order to have a General Convention the purpose of which was to enable and support Baptist missionaries around the world. It was under this Board that Adoniram Judson and his wife were able to make contact with William Carey in Calcutta and then go on to southeast Asia.

The evangelistic outburst in mid-America, often referred to as the Second Great Awakening, was not an altogether novel idea. It was a sudden earnestness in Christian devotion and discipleship. It made headway from the leadership of Timothy Dwight, president of Yale University, grandson of Jonathan Edwards. As it spread into the trans-Appalachian west, two of the leading figures were Thomas and Alexander Campbell in Pennsylvania, Barton Warren Stone, a New Light Presbyterian, in Kentucky, and Peter Cartwright, a Methodist Circuit Rider who once took evangelism into a dance hall. He later served in the United States Congress as a representative from Illinois.

PR

Christian historian Woodrow Walton continues his investigation into the origins of the modern movements that inspired Christians to go and share the mission and message of Jesus throughout the world.

The Making of the Christian Global Mission

Part 2: Missions to the First Americans

Before proceeding to dealing with the spread and growth of the Christian gospel into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there is also the need to look at the contribution of a lone figure of Norman-French heritage who as a Jesuit missionary opened the pathway for mission and evangelism in North America. In his travels in Canada, he not only spread the gospel among a particular native American people, the Hurons, but also lived among them for several years and penned the lyrics of the first Christmas carol written and composed in North America. This song was later translated from the Huron language by Jesse Edgar Middleton in The United Methodist Hymnal, No. 244 “Twas in the moon of wintertime.”

Huron moccasins (circa 1880 CE) on display at the Bata Shoe Museum, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

I want to introduce the figure of Jean de Brébeuf, whose biography Saint among the Hurons: The Life of Jean de Brébeuf  was first written in 1949 by Francis X. Talbot and published by Harper & Brothers and most recently republished in 2018 by Ignatius Press. Brébeuf was a Norman from the north of France, the descendant of Scandinavians who invaded northern France in the early 1500s. He was born in what is now know as Condé-sur-Vire, March 25, 1593, in the diocese of Bayeux in eastern Normandy. In 1617, at the age of 24, after finishing his schooling and settling family affairs, he applied for entry into the Society of Jesus and thereby became a part of the missionary-minded Jesuits, an independent minded order not initiated by the Church but by Ignatius Loyola and which had gained later recognition as a missionary arm of the church. Even after gaining such authorization, the Jesuits were allowed to function as an independent mission arm of the Roman Catholic Church under its own umbrella, the Society of Jesus. This same independence also affected the relationship of the Jesuits with the different countries in which they operated. In some cases, they were regarded with suspicion from the political realm of the countries in which they served as missionaries of the Gospel. Mexico was one such country as were Brazil and Argentina in South America.

It was in 1625 that Jean de Brébeuf learned that the Jesuits were opening a mission in New France (Canada). This was five years after the founding of the Plymouth Plantation in New England. The year before, in October of 1624, Brébeuf met two Récollet [a Franciscan order] missionaries just returned from the New World.

This article is part of The Gospel in History series by Woodrow Walton.
Image: The Books of Kells by way of Wikimedia Commons.

In March of 1625, with full royal assent, the Viceroy of Quebec issued a decree authorizing the establishment of a residence in Quebec and other parts of New France for the Jesuits and to associate its members with the Récollets in the conversion of the “savages.” On April 24, 1625, after several delays resulting from opposition by the Montmorency Company in both Paris and Rouen to the proposal, the authorization came through, and Brébeuf and the other missionaries crossed over into the open waters of the Atlantic for New France (Canada). They entered into Canada by navigating around Cap Gaspé and through the Gulf of St. Lawrence and to Quebec. From 1625 to 1649, the year of his death at the hand of the Iroquois, de Brébeuf labored among the Huron who lived along the borderlands of the Great Lakes all the way from southern Canada to Michigan’s shoreline to Sault Ste. Marie.

The point of this short excursus is that the Jesuits did not engage in general evangelism among Native Americans but focused their attention on specific people groups, both in Canada and Brazil. The 1986 motion picture The Mission portrayed the Jesuit work and also their conflict with the political regime of the Portuguese which governed Brazil at the time of the Jesuit mission work. The independence of the Jesuits in their missionary evangelism also brought them into an adversarial relationship to the Spanish viceroys which governed out of Mexico City.

John Eliot

Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God, also known as The Algonquian Bible.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Concurrent with Brébeuf in North America was John Eliot in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the first Puritan missionary to Native Americans who concentrated on the Algonquian language of the local Massachusetts. Helping him learn the language was a young Native American named Cockenoe. The youth had been captured in the Pequot War of 1637 and was a servant of an Englishman named Richard Collicot. Eliot later wrote in his diary that Cockenoe “was the first that I made use of to teach me words, and to be my interpreter.” Cockenoe could not write English but he could speak it as well as he could speak Algonquian. He was able, thereby, to help Eliot translate the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer and other portions of the Bible and prayers. His first attempts at sharing the gospel with the Native American in 1646 were meager, if not failures, but eventually met with success. He also became able to produce printed publications for the Indians in their own language. In 1663, Eliot completed a translation of the whole Bible into the Massachusetts language, Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God. The printer who did the printing issued 1000 copies on the first printing press in the American colonies.

Three years later, in 1666, Eliot published The Indian Grammar Begun.

Through the succeeding years, fourteen towns of “praying Indians” grew up in Massachusetts Bay Colony, the best documented of which being the one at Natick, Massachusetts. Other missionaries also established praying Indian towns, one of whom, Samson Occom, was himself half Mohegan.

Eliot and his wife, Hanna, had six children, five sons and one daughter. Two sons, John Eliot, Jr., and Joseph Eliot, both became pastors of churches themselves. Joseph Eliot, a pastor in Guilford, Connecticut, and his wife, were parents of Jared Eliot, who also became a minister of the gospel was also a noted agricultural writer.

David Brainerd is another significant figure, not only in mission among Native Americans but also upon the future development of the missionary enterprise world–wide. Brainerd was born April 20, 1718, in Haddam, Connecticut, the son of a Connecticut legislator, and his wife Dorothy. Although he died young at the early age of 29 from tuberculosis on October 10, 1747, his ministry intersected with that of George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, Gilbert Tennent, James Davenport, and Jonathan Dickinson.

From David Brainerd, the apostle to the North American Indians, published in 1891.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1742, at the age of 24, he was licensed by a group of Presbyterians known as the “New Lights” which included such figures as Barton Warren Stone, Jonathan Dickinson, and the initiators of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, the first-known organized missionary society.

Brainerd’s ministry in New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and Long Island became an inspiration for William Carey, Brainerd’s cousin, James Brainerd Taylor (1801-1829), and the 20^th century’s Jim Elliot who ministered among the Aucas (Huaorani) in Ecuador, South America. Brainerd was the forerunner of the evangelical missionary enterprise[1] which emerged with William Carey in England and the Haystack Prayer Meeting of 1810 in Massachusetts.

Thomas Bray, the founder of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign parts and also the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, supported the ministry of Whitefield both in England and the English colonies which were to become known as the United States of America. Because the focus was upon North America and the British isles, the site of the activities was not global but British North America. A world, or global focused evangelical witness, first became reality with the initiation of the Particular Baptist Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the Heathen in 1792 in Kettering, England, where 12 ministers signed an agreement to support the missionary work of William Carey and John Thomas in Bengal, India. Carey and Thomas were first sent out in 1793. To this day, William Carey is considered to be the initiator of the Christian world mission with schools and organizations and a book publishing house named after him in both the United States and Canada. This first missionary society is still in operation to this date. In A.D. 2000, its name was changed to the Baptist World Mission and presently supports over 350 workers in 40 countries.

PR

Notes

[1] The reason to not consider George Whitefield and John Wesley as the forerunners of the evangelical missionary enterprise is that both Whitefield and John Wesley were more revivalists than missionaries. Their preaching missions were to revive Christian faith in believers and reinvigorate a Christian witness that would lead others to faith in Christ.

Christian historian Woodrow Walton investigates the origins of the modern movements that inspired Christians to go and share the mission and message of Jesus throughout the world.

The Making of the Christian Global Mission

Part 1: Jan Hus and the Moravians

It may seem odd to associate the making of the Christian global mission to the trans-oceanic voyages of the maritime ventures of the merchant ships of Spain, Portugal, The Netherlands, England, and the Baltic countries of Europe in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Yet it is not without reason when one considers what was happening in the world at that time. A trans-oceanic trade network was opened between East and West, North and South. The ports of entry receptive to the merchant marine also became the harbors who welcomed the newcomers who were tradesmen, many of whom were Christians.

1587 woodcut of Jan Hus by Christoph Murer.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

It would be easy to think of Western European Christians going overseas to the Americas or to the East Asian landmass without considering what was happening to Christians in central and eastern Europe, places where Christianity was more Orthodox than Catholic or Protestant. We seldom consider the reverberations of the Protestant Reformation upon those areas. We focus primarily upon Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Menno Simons, and William Tyndale who reshaped the Christian landscape of western Europe and the British Isles. We forget that it was a Christian priest in Moravia, now known as the Czech Republic, known as Jan Hus (also spelled John Huss), who lit the fire of the Reformation. Before the Lutherans, there were the makings of the Moravian Christians who in later years had a significant impact upon John Wesley. Another seldom considered contribution to the Christian world mission came out of Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church. Among the Orthodox Churches, the Russian Orthodox were probably the most mission oriented, spreading Christianity across the Asian steppes and beyond the Ural Mountains. This became more so in the late 1600s as a result of Patriarch Nikon’s move to modernize the Liturgy of Worship which caused the first major split.

Those who split referred to themselves as the “Old Believers,” and it was they who spearheaded a mission clear across the top of Asia to Siberia and to the coast of the Bering Sea. That is a story in and of itself, and it becomes part of a larger story played out through the 18^th and 19^th centuries when Slavic Christians started spreading out beyond their initial homelands.

Jan Hus at the Council of Constance, by Karl Friedrich Lessing (1842).
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Reverse image of the German or Austrian 16th century Jan Hus Centenary Medal.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

]]> https://pneumareview.com/the-making-of-the-christian-global-mission-part-1-jan-hus-and-the-moravians/feed/ 0 https://pneumareview.com/johanna-van-wijk-bos-making-wise-the-simple/ https://pneumareview.com/johanna-van-wijk-bos-making-wise-the-simple/#comments Wed, 20 Jun 2007 12:13:00 +0000 http://pneumareview.com/?p=8300  

Johanna W. H. van Wijk-Bos, Making Wise the Simple: The Torah in Christian Faith and Practice (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005), 353 pages.

Why should Pentecostal preachers read a book written by a Presbyterian scholar whose passion is a study of the “Law” which many Christians often regard as the dullest part of the Old Testament? Dr. Van Wijk-Bos, Dora Pierce Professor of the Bible and Old Testament at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, has given us many reasons in her compelling look at the relationship of the Pentateuch to Christian faith. Central to these reasons are Van Wijk-Bos’ definitions of covenant and torah (Hebrew word for “law”). Covenant provided ancient Israel their identity as the people of God while torah provided their instructions for living out that life as God’s people (p. 281). These concerns relate to Christians as well. We want to know who we are as the people of God’s new covenant and what are we to do in light of that relationship.

Van Wijk-Bos divides her study into five parts. Part I introduces her topic of how the idea of torah has been treated and mistreated by Christian hands. Her personal story of being raised in post-WWII Netherlands instilled in her an obligatory sensitivity to Jewish people and their story of faith. Thus she seeks to show the relevance of the covenant and torah for Christians while not despising the historical people who gave us the Pentateuch. She uses the theme of the “stranger” (Hebrew gēr) as a running motif throughout not just the Old Testament but the New as well.

Johanna W.H. van Wijk-Bos is the Dora Pierce Professor of Bible and Professor of Old Testament at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

Part V provides a theological summary of key aspects of the character of God and the relationship of Jesus and Paul to torah. Her presentation of the God Who Regrets, Appears, Accompanies, Is Prejudiced, and Passionate should awaken any reader to the value of Van Wijk-Bos’ book for Christians. She challenges many ideas in both Reformed and non-Reformed theological camps alike. Her discussion of the “new perspective” on Paul will bring the reader up-to-date on a contemporary scholarly issue regarding Paul’s view and use of the law.

Craig L. Blomberg, Making Sense of the New Testament: Three Crucial Questions (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 189 pages.

How do we know that the New Testament that we hold in our hands today is accurate? If we conclude that it is indeed accurate, how do we reconcile Paul’s teachings with Jesus’ teachings? And if they can be reconciled, how do we even understand the New Testament and apply it to our lives? These are arguably the three most basic and crucial questions that a Christian in the twenty-first century needs to grapple with, and Craig Blomberg helps us with this task. Blomberg, professor of New Testament at Denver Seminary, has provided us with a well-reasoned and balanced introduction to the New Testament. This is a small yet concise volume that would be beneficial for every Christian out there.

In a pluralistic world where truth is relative, it is vitally important for believers to know why the New Testament documents can be trusted and how we may apply them to our daily walk with God. From the first chapter, Blomberg gets right down to basics. He argues for the reliability of the New Testament from the standpoints of textual criticism, authorship and date, genre, internal consistency, external attestation (both Christian and non-Christian), and archaeology. He touches on the “hard sayings” and miracles, blending it all together into a thoroughly researched and logical apologetic for believing the New Testament to be what it claims (and for believing that Jesus is who he claimed to be).

Next, Blomberg asks the crucial question, “Was Paul the true founder of Christianity?” Although it is true that a cursory and superficial comparison of the gospels with the epistles may lead some to believe that Jesus’ teachings were not the same as Paul’s, this does not need to be the conclusion. Indeed, Blomberg digs deeper into these writings and shows that Paul actually did have knowledge of Jesus’ teachings (and of the gospel in general), and that Paul’s teachings do not contradict those teachings. Rather, Paul helped expand upon them and explain them more fully. From eschatology to soteriology, from the role of the law to the role of women, from christology to ecclesiology—Paul’s teachings and Jesus’ teachings are complementary to each other.

But once we know that we can rely upon the accuracy of Jesus’ and Paul’s teachings, what do we do with it? We need to take one more step down this road, moving from apologetics to hermeneutics. Professor Blomberg walks us through the entire New Testament in one amazing chapter, from the gospels and the epistles to Acts and Revelation. He briefly summarizes (with examples) all of the different styles of writing and literary forms, and shows us how to apply the principles contained within them. Finally, Blomberg concisely summarizes three chapters into three pages, and reminds us one final time why he wrote this book to help each of us: “[H]ow one responds to Jesus of Nazareth reflects the most important decision anyone can make in this life” (p. 147).

Reviewed by Michael J. Knowles

James R. Edwards, “A Unity Not of Our Making” Christianity Today (Vol 45, No 10, August 6, 2001), pp. 48-50.

“Unity in Diversity” has become one of the most popular ecumenical catchphrases. Especially among Pentecostal churches, the phrase seems to open up ways to engage in ecumenical dialogue without threatening the ecclesial independence or doctrinal commitment of the churches. James R. Edwards, Professor of Religion at Whitworth College and contributing editor to Christianity Today, has chosen to examine the phrase more closely. He is concerned about a nearly obsessive reliance on unity-in-diversity language and sees in it, rather than the desired emphasis on unity, a frequent apology for an unquestioned pluralism in Christian churches. Like light shining through a prism, the visible unity of the churches, instead of forming one body, is dispersed into many independent directions. The New Testament, however, Edwards points out, speaks of diversity that is channeled into unity and not, as the ecumenical catchphrase suggests, a unity that is being refracted into diversity. For support, he enlists the help of the Greek New Testament term homothumadon (“of one accord”).

Edwards finds that the use of homothumadon is frequently misunderstood. In secular Greek, the term does not convey the personal sympathy shared by the members of a group but a shared commitment of all to a specific cause. Thus the Greek orator Demosthenes “appealed to the Athenians to put aside their personal feelings and differences” (p. 49) and to unite in the defense against an invasion of Philip of Macedon. Edwards concludes that, like the unity of the Athenians, the unity of the church is “a compulsory unity rather than an intrinsic unity” (p. 49), produced by the extrinsic, and unmerited grace of God. The unity of believers is consequently not a sociological unity but one in correspondence and continuity with the proper understanding of God’s Word. This explains the use of the phrase “in one accord” in Acts 15:25 for an ecclesial situation that seems far from resembling a united Christian community. In order to achieve unity, the church must submit to the extrinsic Word of God, which is the great alien intolerance of human differences and divisions (John 17:11-22). The unity-in-diversity language, on the other hand, gives the impression that unity is based on the self-righteousness of the churches or their adaptability to changing social and theological norms. The true unity of the church, however, is “an alien gift of God from the outside, reflecting both God’s nature and governance” (p. 50). The goal of the church, Edward concludes, is not diversity but unity with God. It is a gift of God’s Spirit as long as the church follows God’s will as it is revealed in Scripture.