Departments
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26 June 1998 |
Vol. II, No. 1 |
Feature Article
Scholars gather at BU to reassess the missionary legacy
Historians of the Protestant missionary tradition from around the world gathered at Boston University recently for an international symposium. The event marked the culmination of the first three years of the North Atlantic Missiology Project, a research initiative of historians in North America and Britain and in former British colonies. The project, funded by the Pew Charitable Trust, is an effort to better understand the historical perspective of the missionary movement in the period of British colonialism, says one of the symposium's organizers, STH Professor of Instruction Dana Robert.
"In the '60s, '70s, and '80s, missionaries were primarily seen as agents of colonialism," she says. "But with the rapid growth of Christianity in the southern hemispheres, we have begun to reinterpret the missionary's role as not just that of a communicator of the gospel, but also as an agent who introduced nonwestern cultures to westerners, often for the first time. One of the purposes of the project is to understand both what the colonized and colonizers learned from the missionaries. They were communicators both ways."
Of the 100 historians who attended the three-day symposium, entitled Christian Missions and the 'Enlightenment' of the West, many were from former British colonies, including New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Nigeria, and India. "These scholars are very interested in missionaries as a key to helping them analyze the meaning of Christianity in their own cultures," explains Robert. "If they can understand the missionary mentality, they can distinguish what was the essence of Christianity as opposed to the cultural aspects of it which the missionaries brought with them and which their societies may or may not have wanted to keep."
The project aims to get beyond the simplistic analysis that westerners were all powerful and that the colonized rolled over and were conquered, she says.
"Although missionaries are assumed to have been unrepentant colonialists, by translating the Bible into indigenous languages they helped through literacy to empower the people they taught, enabling them to become opponents of colonialism," she points out. "It is ironic that the education the missionaries provided produced nationalist leaders who could deal with the West on its own terms and eventually repudiate its control.
"So, our historical project is attempting to liberate both the non-West from thinking that everything they received from missionaries was imposed, and to liberate the West from assuming that we didn't learn anything from our colonizing of those countries."
Boston University was picked to host the symposium partly because of its uniqueness as a university with a functioning school of theology, says Robert. "This meant we could look at theological issues within history in a larger context than would have been available in a freestanding seminary. We also wanted a university base to underline the level of discourse and scholarship that the project has attracted."
The next phase in the project, also scheduled to last three years, will include setting up three missiology research centers in North America, one of which will be at Boston University.