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Introduction

Christian history presents a confusing interchange of movements, people and ideas: on the one hand, the great institutions of Christendom, such as the papacy, the Orthodox patriarchates and the European monarchies stand over and dominate that history at many points; on the other hand, the mavericks and mystics of the Christian tradition, such as Antony of Egypt, Francis of Assisi and Julian of Norwich, show a completely different, subversive and equally influential side to the story. When we ask, as we must now do, how Christian mission has been expressed over the centuries we are therefore asking a question that cannot be answered in a simple and straightforward way. It is a question about the whole complex and involved way the Christian tradition has developed through its institutions, people and ideas and also through its encounter with different cultures and contexts. Christian history bears ample witness to the truth of Louis MacNeice’s verse of ‘things being various’. Clearly some sifting and summarizing of that history is going to be necessary.

To begin to do this we can recall a conclusion from the last section, that the Church is only one among three players, as it were, the others being the social and cultural world in which it lives, and the inaugurated kingdom of God (which was defined as the participative and saving movement of the Trinitarian God within that world). When looking at Christian history it will therefore be important to trace the ways in which the Church has related to these other two players. This is the crucial three-way relationship which determines the essential nature of mission.

In the following survey, then, the point will not be to describe the history of Christian mission in chronological order with every key personality and movement given space in the narrative (see Neill 1964, Comby 1996, and Yates 2004 for comprehensive and accessible examples of this approach). Instead it will be to uncover the changing relationship between the three players of world, kingdom and Church. It will be to identify different stages in that relationship and examine each in turn even though some were more short-lived than others. Well-known figures and movements will need to be mentioned in so far as they contributed to the development of that relationship, but not otherwise. So, for example, Martin Luther will need to figure prominently, because he was instrumental in breaking the close identification of church and kingdom in late medieval Catholicism. Under his influence many came to see a profound distinction between the visible Church, which belonged among the kingdoms of this world, and God’s kingdom, which somehow transcended this world, and this distinction fundamentally changed the nature of mission. John Calvin, on the other hand, while very influential as a theologian, inherited Luther’s thinking on this point and mostly worked within it: for this reason he will not need to receive equal attention.

Hans Küng has provided a comprehensive and widely used overview of the terrain, employing a theory of paradigms and paradigm shifts as an interpretative tool. In the following chapters his paradigms will be employed, with each one introduced and explained and, with the help of David J. Bosch, their different approaches to mission drawn out. Also as the discussion proceeds each approach will be compared with the mission of Christ (as described above), seeing how far it embodied the Galilean principles, so that it can be compared and assessed for use within mission today.

Paradigms and paradigm shifts in the history of Christianity

Thomas S. Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd edn 1970) classically defined a paradigm as ‘an entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on, shared by the members of a given community. It is an entire world-view.’ N. T. Wright elucidates this in a helpful way: ‘Worldviews are the lenses through which a society looks at the world, the grid upon which are plotted the multiple experiences of life.’ He continues by saying that world-views may be studied through certain features such as ‘characteristic stories; fundamental symbols; habitual praxis; and a set of questions and answers (who are we? where are we? what’s wrong? what’s the solution? and what time is it?)’ (Wright 1996, p. 138).

A paradigm shift takes place when there is a leap from one world-view to another which allows the world to be explained and interpreted in a whole new way. A powerful example was the Copernican revolution, when Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543) established that the universe did not revolve around the earth (with humankind at its centre), as in Greek astronomy, but that the earth revolved around the sun. Humankind was no longer at the centre of things, in an ordered and static world: the universe was altogether a larger and more mysterious thing, with humanity on a ball of rock floating around within it. It became something that more than ever called out for investigation.

Even though Copernicus dedicated his book to the Pope, its theory was so unsettling that it was placed on the index of forbidden works. But a rubicon had been crossed: in the West a shift began to take place in the way we view ourselves and our world, a paradigm shift from an ancient to a modern outlook.

Kuhn mentions another example, the shift from a Newtonian picture of the world (which talks about particles and forces and positions and times) to the world of quantum theory (which talks about probabilities, measurements, mixtures of particles and waves) and relativity theory (where there is no fixed space or time). Such a shift of understanding was revolutionary and brought about a whole new way of seeing our place in the universe, one that has often been described as ‘relativism’.

In 1984 David Tracy and Hans Küng adopted the use of the idea of paradigm shifts to explain the evolving nature of the Church’s theology and self-understanding over the centuries (see Paradigm Shifts in Theology, 1984, English trans. T & T Clark, 1989). In Küng’s voluminous book of 1994, Christianity: Its Essence and History (English trans. 1995), he put this theory to work by mapping out Christian history and theology into six basic periods, each with its own paradigm. The movement from one to the next was a revolutionary jump in the whole ‘world-view’ or theological system of the Christian community, a paradigm shift for the Church. (See Walls 1996, ch. 2, for a similar and concise overview of Christian history which gives greater recognition to the role of cultures in changing paradigms.)

At the start of his book Küng provided an illuminating diagrammatic summary of what was to follow, and this is reproduced in an amended form as a reference point for our own survey. The diagram makes a number of key points:

(a) While there was continuity of faith in Jesus as Lord and saviour over the centuries (the dotted circle that appears in each box), the intellectual framework that held this belief in place changed from one era to the next (the square boxes that run down the page).

(b) Each of the paradigms has continued to be expressed in subsequent periods and can be found in different parts of the Christian world today. The faint lines and boxes that run to the bottom of the page represent this. The Hellenistic paradigm, for example, is still dominant within Greek Orthodox traditionalism in many parts of Eastern Europe.

(c) New paradigms have come about as a result of social, political and cultural influences (the italicized words in between the boxes) as well as the influence of certain theologians and church leaders (the people listed down the left hand side of the boxes). This shows the creative interaction of the Christian tradition with different cultures through history: it shows how Christianity has been translated from one cultural setting to another in sometimes surprising and radical ways through different eras.

Mission within the paradigms

In Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in the Theology of Mission (1991), Bosch used Küng’s framework as the basis of his own survey of the history of Christian mission, employing it to make sense of the different ways mission has been understood and practised. Bosch draws on the views of key theologians, official church pronouncements and the ways missionary work was carried out, to present concise and perceptive portraits of mission in different eras. While he does not cover every period with equal thoroughness his book gives what is generally regarded as the most comprehensive overview to be published in the last two decades. (See Transforming Mission, pp. 181–9 for a full explanation of his approach.)

A recent book by Stephen B. Bevans and Roger P. Schroeder, Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission for Today (2004) must also be mentioned. This supplements Bosch’s book with extensive treatment of movements and missionaries not described by Bosch, especially within Roman Catholic mission around the world from the Middle Ages to the modern era. It is a mine of information and insight and complements the Protestant emphasis of Bosch’s book. (See also Yates 1994 for a more detailed presentation of twentieth-century mission theology.)

Building on Bosch’s presentation, though, we can go one stage further and isolate the distinctive type of mission found within each paradigm. The category of ‘type’, as mentioned on p. vii of this book, was first used of religious subjects by Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch. A type is a genuine if stylized representation of an authentic theological tradition (Graham, Walton and Ward 2005, p. 11). At the start of the twentieth century, as we saw, Troeltsch developed what has become a classic typology of religious organizations with his distinction between a ‘church’ type and ‘sect’ type. Other writers, mostly notably H. Richard Niebuhr, have adopted and developed this approach. Niebuhr presented five types of relationship between Christianity and wider culture (Niebuhr 1951). Most recently, Elaine Graham, Heather Walton and Frances Ward have analysed and described different forms of theological reflection by employing their own helpful typology (Graham, Walton and Ward 2005, especially pp. 11–12). This book seeks to do the same for mission. Within each paradigm it identifies the distinctive feature of its mission, a feature that sums up the way in which the outreach of the institutional Church or individual Christians related to the other two key ‘players’ of (first) the social and cultural world in which it lived and (second) the coming kingdom of God. The chapters do this through comparing each paradigm with the others and identifying a phrase, such as ‘establishing Christendom’ or ‘building the kingdom on earth’, which employs key missional concepts from that paradigm in an epigrammatic way. Using the historical overviews of Küng and Bosch, then, the following chapters identify six such types of mission, types which have influenced the practice of mission down the centuries. This will enable us to locate contemporary practices in relation to the received traditions of the paradigms.

It should be added that the choice of examples for each type, examples which are indicative and exemplary of their development, reflects the Western provenance of this book. It is written within a Western setting for a mainly Western audience. If it was being written within the global South the choice of examples would to some extent be different. Also, in the same way that the book is not a survey of mission history neither is it a presentation of all mission theology. Bosch attempted to provide such a survey, especially in his presentation of twentieth-century mission theology in the massive penultimate chapter of Transforming Mission (which he optimistically entitled ‘The emerging ecumenical missionary paradigm’). This Studyguide does not attempt to do the same thing: instead it concentrates on six fundamental types and expressions of mission, believing that these lie behind much of that mission history and theology.

Discussion questions Are there some significant omissions from Küng’s list of paradigms (Figure 1)? What are the weaknesses of this kind of way of gaining an overview of Christian history, and what are its strengths?