Today (August 17, 2011) marks the 250th birthday of William Carey, the “Father of Modern Missions.” In addition to the new International Development Journal which is being published by the U.S. Center for World Mission and William Carey International University to celebrate this very occasion, I will be coming out with a book on William Carey next year (published by Wipf & Stock) to mark this occasion. The following is an article Written for the first issue of the William Carey International Development Journal entitled “William Carey’s An Enquiry: The Magna Carta of Missions Documents”.
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The noted Yale church historian Kenneth Scott Latourette dubbed the nineteenth century the “Great Century of Missions” because it was “the age of the most extensive geographic spread of Christianity.” This was the era of missionary heroes like David Livingstone, Adoniram Judson, and Hudson Taylor, when Romanticism replaced Enlightenment and imagination triumphed over rationalism. It was a time when evangelical Protestantism was at its height and Catholicism was in decline in many parts of the world, and grassroots movements like missionary societies (CMS, LMS) and prayer/revival movements (Haystack, Great Awakening) were the spiritual engines behind the new expansion of Christianity. Ironically, secular factors also contributed to this Great Century, such as a greater knowledge of the sciences (biology, geology, astronomy) and advances in technology (industrialization, agriculture, and ships aiding colonization).
These two factors led to the development of the scientific method and the search for objective truth. Evangelical Christianity has long had an ambiguous relationship with Modernism: on the positive side because of the insistence on absolute truth; and on the uncertain side because of the struggle with science being sometimes a validation of, or sometimes an opposition to, Christianity. But the most positive aspect of this liberalizing of mentality about the world paved the way for World Christianity today: the idea that all cultures and peoples were equal before God, worthy of respect, and deserved the Gospel. There were many other factors that made the nineteenth century “Great” but the population explosion that came as a result of advances in technology and medicine went hand-in-hand with the explosion of the Christian faith, and that, more than anything, characterized the Great Century of Missions.
The boundaries of the Great Century were not merely the beginning and end of the nineteenth century, but from the year 1792 to 1910. The 1910 date was a result of the landmark Edinburgh World Missionary Conference, often considered the “birthplace of the modern ecumenical movement.” Edinburgh 1910 ushered in a new age of mission which was more about ecumenical cooperation than numerical expansion, but catastrophic world events like the World Wars, the Great Depression, and the Cold War, effectively stifled the extraordinary growth of Christianity during the twentieth century.
The year 1792 marks the beginning of the Great Century because of the publication of "An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens", the Magna Carta of missions documents, written by none other than William Carey, the Father of Modern Missions himself. This document was a clarion call to the Western world to bring the Gospel to the ‘heathen’ nations of the non-Western world (such was the way that mission was conceived at the time).
Though the contemporary understanding of mission has changed since Carey’s time, Carey framed the way that mission would be understood for the next century and a half to follow. His An Enquiry (in five parts) was published by Joseph Johnson, on the same printing press that produced Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women. In other words, in keeping with the character of Baptists in England and with Paine’s and Wollstonecraft’s books, it was nonconformist and dissenting, and had an impetus to effect change from the grassroots and for the disenfranchised, tearing down established powers and those in privileged classes. This document, as such, would mobilize the laity for missions like never before.
The first part of An Enquiry (probably the most important part), posited the Great Commission, of which the most famous form is the Matthean version, as binding on all Christians. This idea, which is so often taken for granted by evangelical Christians today, was one of the lasting legacies of Carey’s pamphlet. This 1792 theological impetus also affected the Edinburgh 1910 conference, as John Mott (the chairman of the conference) based his watchword of the Student Volunteer Movement, “The Evangelization of the World in this Generation,” off of the Matthean Great Commission. Some of the lasting effects of this on the Western Christian psyche are the ideas
- That mission is individualistic
- That salvation had to do with a personal relationship with Jesus Christ,
- That mission is a geographic sending from the West to the non-West,
- That making disciples was more important than baptizing or teaching,
- and that Christianity must look like the forms that are found in the West
Of course these concepts are largely overturned today, but they have shaped the Western Christian mind for much of the last two centuries and are still very ingrained in people’s minds. The Markan form of the Great Commission also had some bearing on his theology, as he translated the idea of preaching the Gospel “to the whole creation” (as is implied in the Greek) as preaching “to every creature,” thus magnifying the individualistic nature of conversion.Parts Two through Five of An Enquiry contained a history of the missionary movement, statistics on every country in the world, an apologetic for every Christian to be committed to missions, and a call for the establishment of mission societies. After Part One, perhaps Part Five was the most important in serving to shape the way that mission was done during the Great Century. William Carey made mission into a scientific enterprise based on hard data, mixed with spiritual/biblical proof-texts, and a call to action.
Some may wonder at William Carey’s Calvinist theology and how someone convinced of predestination could ever be a missionary. In fact there is a famous story associated with this: an elder in Carey’s church in England said to him prior to his mission,
“Young man, sit down. When God pleases to convert the heathen, he will do it without your aid and mine. If it was in God’s plan to save the heathen, He would find his own way.”
Carey’s rebuttal lay in his "An Enquiry":
“It seems as if many thought…that if God intends the salvation of the heathen, he will some way or other bring them to the gospel, or the gospel to them. It is thus that multitudes sit at ease, and give themselves no concern about the far greater part of their fellow-sinners, who to this day, are lost in ignorance and idolatry.”
In other words, he brooked no excuse for Christian complacency when it came to missions, even if they did believe in God’s preordained plan for every man.Whatever William Carey’s theology or faults in the interpretation of biblical texts, he at least read his culture and time correctly: the Western world of his day was a church ready to be mobilized, and his tract An Enquiry did just that. It was the catalyst that drove generations of Christians for 150 years to bring the Gospel to the ends of the earth, and surely more good than harm was done through this endeavor. An Enquiry was the document that kicked off the Great Century of Missions, turned common people into heroes, and caused Christianity to go global for the first time since the first millennium.
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