International Bulletin of Missionary Research

Issue 32:3, July 2008
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FULL ISSUE (56 pp., 3.0 MB PDF)

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Missionaries as Heroes and Villains

When I asked Jamie Scott, author of two articles in this issue, to suggest a visual illustration for this editorial, he sent two cover images of Sky Pilot: Fighting Missionary of the Far North, a short-lived comic series (1950–51) featuring the heroics of fictional missionary John Hawks. My search for information on the comics led me to Beau Smith’s Web site “Busted Knuckles,” where in his column of March 7, 2005, he nominated the Sky Pilot series as “Manly Comic of the Week.” “As you can see by the covers,” he explains, Hawks “was a real man . . . [who] did most of his talkin’ with his fists. There is one great scene . . . where some hopped up lumberjack is beatin’ on a helpless Eskimo. Sky Pilot sees this and steps in. As he is removing the lumberjack’s teeth with his knuckles [he says], “The meek shall inherit the earth, as it is written, but sometimes they need a little help” (www.comicsbulletin.com/busted/111023108897158.htm).

Public perceptions of missionaries have typically oscillated between eulogy and vilification. Both extremes contain elements of truth, but neither can tell the whole truth. Conspicuously religious do-gooders have always been an easy and natural target for those of us whose own standards of piety are more relaxed. Sydney Smith’s wry explanation for the Anglican Church’s opposition to social activist and prison reformer Elizabeth Fry (1780–1845) contains more than a little truth: “She is very unpopular with the clergy,” he observed. “Examples of living, active virtue disturb our repose, and give birth to distressing comparisons: we long to burn her alive” (George W. E. Russell, Sydney Smith [London: Macmillan, 1905], p. 85n.).

Since the speakers of each human language have recourse to only a limited number of words and idioms and must with these address and describe an infinitely complex and varied world, we turn naturally to the use of metaphor. Given the immensity of the linguistic task and the limitation of linguistic resources (whether spoken, contemplated, or written), we drift instinctively toward stereotypes of all kinds—racial, social, cultural, religious, and vocational. The advent of mass media—radio, film, television, and the Web—has simply accelerated the dissemination of such stereotypes and has amplified the influence of the metaphors we favor, as well as the influence of our underlying personal limitations (and sins!). The worst generalizations smooth the way for us to practice war, torture, or genocide. Euphemisms are then woven into a cover that is used to hide our pathologies from ourselves and our posterity. Other generalizations leave us simply misguided or ignorant.

Take the word “missionary,” for example. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word to the French missionnaire, which made its first published appearance in G. Sagard’s Histoire du Canada, published in 1636. Whether this derivation is correct or not, few speakers and readers of European languages during the past two hundred years can have been unfamiliar with the term, as missionaries pursued their vocations within the framework of European global hegemony. The word “missionary” has since constituted a virtual lexicon of flattery and disparagement. According to the online Wiktionary, the word means either “a person who travels attempting to spread a religion or a creed” or “a naive religious fanatic” (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/missionary).

Scott’s two essays examining the representation of missionaries in film and fiction are a first for the IBMR. His lead article, “Missions and Film,” surveys everything from silent movies to contemporary big-screen television. Whether sympathetic or hostile, visual depictions of missionaries reveal as much about those who produce the films as they do about the missionaries themselves. Literary portrayals of missionary subjects may be similarly judged. Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries have been featured in the fiction of both Western and non-Western authors for nearly two hundred years. Fiction allows for more nuanced and contextually satisfying portrayals of missions and missionaries than is possible in film, yet anyone—friend or foe—who is familiar with actual missionaries and specific missions cannot expect to be entirely satisfied, no matter how attuned they might be to the agenda of a given author.

The deeply human quest to understand and represent ourselves, our world, and the mysteries of Christian faith through language is poignantly conveyed by Stuart Foster in his article “Oral Theology in Lomwe Songs.” Not all of Mozambique’s Lomwe people read or write, but through singing and storytelling, histories are remembered, important values are reiterated and reinforced, theologies are shaped and transmitted, and the deep mysteries of faith are grasped and appropriated. Lomwe religious consciousness reflects both the unique insights and the limitations resident in the people’s communal narrative and reminds all of us, whatever our own narrative and worldview, expressed in whatever language, that we are similarly both enabled and limited.

Three articles in this issue feature missionary-scholars well known to, and admired by, many of my generation—Stephen Neill, Jacob Loewen, and John Carman. Even granted the limitations of language, it is by means of such stories that we learn how to live into our individual and collective futures.

—Jonathan J. Bonk
bonk@omsc.org

 

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Issue 32:3, July 2008
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FULL ISSUE (56 pp., 3.0 MB PDF)