Perspectives6

Week 6 - Expansion of the World Christian Movement

2022-09-21

The Kingdom Strikes Back

Ralph D. Winter

• The Bible is not a compilation of unrelated stories. It tells the drama of the entrance of the Kingdom and God’s glory in enemy-occupied territory.
• Our Western usage of the word “blessing” is misleads us when reading the Scriptures’ usage. It is not something you receive materially. It is something you become.
• There are four different “mission mechanisms”: going voluntarily, involuntarily going, coming voluntarily, and coming involuntarily.
• Avoid the “BOBO Theory” which says the Christian faith “Blinked Out” after the Apostles and “Blinked On” in our time or the Reformation. This has led many Protestants to be disinterested in what happened prior to the Reformation. What encapsulates this view is saying “there were no saints in the middle.”
• Kenneth Scott Latourette’s History of Christianity.
• When Chrisitanity became the official religion of Europe in 375 A.D., it ironically alienated peoples who were anti-Rome. Islam soon became an alternative religion. In one snese Islam was a cultural breakaway from Christianity just as Christianity had been a breakaway from the Jewish form of the biblical faith. (216)
• Gothic Barbarians did not physically devastate Rome since they were very respectful of churches because they had heard an antagnostic Arian form of Christianity. If only Western form had missionary work!

The rise of monasticism was, after Christ’s commission to his disciples, the most important—and in many ways the most beneficial—institutional event in the history of Christianity. (p.84) from Wheaton professor Mark A. Noll

• The phrase Third World comes from the days when Greek and Latin were the first two worlds and the northern barbarians were the Third World.
• Charlemagne was a second Constantine. He made the first serious attempt at public education by enlisting literate Christians—including former barbarian Irish teachers—to teach Latin in Rome.

Once more, when Christian did not reach out to them, pagan peoples came after what the Christian possessed. And once more, the phenomenal power of Christianity manifested itself: the conquerors became conquered by the faith of their captives. (220)

• The Cluny revival produced a new reforming attitude towards society as a whole. Its fruit include Hildebrand and Pope Innocent III who authorized the first mobile mission orders—the Friars.
• The Crusuades were a result of the Viking spirit in the Christian church. All of the major crusuades were led by Viking descendants.

The great lesson of the Crusuades is that goodwill, even sacrificial obedience to God, is not substitute for a clear understanding of His will. (222)

• Catholic missionaries were writing off the Protestant movement as apostate since they were not sending missionaries.

Asian Christianity

Scott W. Sunquist

• Christianity in Asia had five advances:
  • Persion (first millenium)
  • Franciscan-Mongol (1206-1368)
  • Jesuit (1542-1773)
  • Protestant (1706-1950)
  • Asian indigenous (1950-present)
• Apostle Thomas brought the gospel to India and was martyred by an angry Hindu mob.
• Syriac was the common language in Asia. It was a dialect of Aramaic which was Jesus’ mother tongue.
• The story David Kim quotes a lot: When Marco Polo returned (1271) from his 17-year sojourn in China among the Mongols, Kublai Khan had given him a letter for the Pope requesting 100 teachers to teach the Mongols about Christianity. The request was never fulfilled because the Popes in Europe were more concerned about defending themselves militarily than they were interested in extending the gospel spiritually. (241)
• Protestant missionaries differed from Catholic missions as they worked to translate the entire Bible and focuses more emphatically upon education.
• The “Back to Jerusalem” movement is the reversal of the first of the five Asian Christian advances. It was originally from West Asia to East Asian and now it is from East Asian back to the West.

The History of Mission Strategy

R. Pierce Beaver

• Boniface was the first to includ women in misisonary work when he employed them in the domestic science institutions.
• The Jesuits were creative in their missionary efforts as they engulfed themselves in the foreign culture that they might win coverts to Christ. Rome ruled against the Jesuits’ principles and banned these practices until they were abolished two centuries later.

The missionaries delivered heavily doctrinal sermons stressing the wrath of God and the pains of hell, just like those sermons given in an English congregation. But David Brainerd, who like the Moravians preached the love of God rather than His wrath, was extremely effective in moving people to repentance. (231)

• There was debate in what objective to prioritize in more primitive peopele groups: civilizing or Christianizing?
• Henry Venn and Rufus Anderson both arrived to the same “three-self” forumla of Protestant missions strategy. The three-self goal os mission was to plan and develop churches, which would be self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating.

It was with the same spirit of helpfulness and good will, along with a desire to improve the economic base of the church, that missionaries introduced improved poultry an livestock, better seeds and new crops. The great orchard industry in Shantung got started in this way (236)

The Two Structures of God’s Redemptive Mission

Ralph D. Winter

• There were Jewish evangelists preceding Christ who traveled all throughout the Roman Empire. Jesus describes them in Matthew 23:15 among his woes toward the Pharisees and Peter historically mentions it in Acts 15:21.
• The Christian movement built itself upon two different kinds of structures that had pre-existed in the Jewish cultural tradition. The Jews had their synagogues and “travelers.”
• It may be shocking at first to think that God made use of either a Jewish synagogue pattern or a Jewish evangelistic pattern. But this most not be more surprising than the fact that God employed the use of the pagan Greek language, the Holy Spirit guiding the biblical writers to lay hold of such terms as kurios (Greek for lord, originally a pagan term), and pound them into shape to carry the Christian revelation. (245)
• We seek dynamic equivalence, not formal replication.
• Jewish synagogues were considered independant from one another, but the church was adopted to match the pattern of Roman civil government in the form of dioceses.
• The harmony between the modality and the sodality achieved by the Roman Church is perhaps the most significant characteristic of this phase of the world Christian movement and continues to be Rome’s greatest organizational advantage to this day. (249)
• Great insight for today’s landscape: U.S. denominations, lacking tax support as on the Continent, have been generally a more selective and vital fellowship than the European state churches, and, at least in their youthful exuberance, have felt quite capable as denominations of providing all of the necessary initiative for overseas mission. It is for this latter reason that =many new denominations of the U.S. have tended to act as though centralized church control of mission efforts is the only proper pattern.= (252)