Christian Missions And The Enlightenment

Addresses the nature of the influence of the European Enlightenment on the beliefs and practice of the Protestant missionaries who went to Asia and Africa from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, particularly British missions and the formative role of the Scottish Enlightenment on their thinking.

Includes regional studies of missions in India, the Cape Colony, and the South Pacific, as well as analyses of debates in Scotland and England over whether missionaries should first seek to "civilize" or whether conversion to Christianity offered the only sure route to "civilization." The volume concludes with a theological perspective on what it may mean to uphold Christian orthodoxy in mission encounters in an age no longer bounded by the horizons of modernity."--Jacket.

Following an analysis of the postmodern world, the legacy of the Enlightenment, and Christian faith into a postmodern age, Professor Bosch sketches the contours of a missiology of Western culture. The latter includes considerations of mission as social ethics, mission and the Third World, and God-talk in an age of reason. A concluding section summarizes the five ingredients of a missiology of Western culture, that is, that it include an ecological dimension, that it be countercultural and ecumenical and contextual, andthat it be primarily a ministry of the laity.

A unique book that focuses exclusively on the history of evangelical cross-cultural missions from the eighteenth century through today, The Great Commission will interest anyone who is passionate about the spreading of God's Word.

Essays written in honour of Brian Stanley on the entangled nature of ecumenism and independency in the modern global history of Christianity. They demonstrate transnational connectivity as well as local and contextual expressions of Christianity.

After-Mission touches on on three questions.The first question is about self-perception and identity-formation strategies, and the various views that we have on the Protestants’ relation to their Arab Muslim Middle Eastern context. The second question, about the theological dimension, asks what kind of a theological discourse do the Protestants need to develop, and how do they need to re-form their own theological heritage, in such a manner that will allow them to heal the historical enmity and suspicion towards them from the Eastern Orthodox Christian community in the region? Finally, the third question touches on the Protestants’ future in the Arab Muslim Middle East by viewing this inquiry from a broader perspective that is related to all the Middle Eastern Christian communities’ presence and role in the Muslim-majority context. The question of identity formation, and the managing of difference without trapping it in the mud of ‘otherizing and self-otherizing’, will also be tackled, so that the theological dimension is integrated with the broader, multifaceted contextual one.