Mission and the Go-Between God

Anglicans are not the only Christian communion suffering from what former CMS general secretary Max Warren once described as a peculiar "ecclesiastical squint which gets virtually every important issue out of focus." This wry, self-deprecating observation, cited by Timothy Yates in his masterful article on John V. Taylor, is a reminder that even-perhaps even especially-the most theologically astute among us perceive God only "through a glass darkly." Such humble self-awareness is prerequisite to an ability to hear what the Holy Spirit is saying to the churches, regardless of the religious condition or cultural setting. Aware that they understand only the dim contours of God's self-revelation, thoughtful Christians readily attest that when it comes to being transformed into the glory of our Lord, the Spirit still has plenty of work to do, even in the most saintly among us.

The Holy Spirit, prominent at Pentecost, was active also in Old Testament times. In fact, the Spirit has been, is now, and will always be present in all places and at all times. It thus should come as no surprise that Christian missionaries to China who went to convert its people found themselves transformed by the experience. They were, after all, confronted not only with peculiar customs and exotic religions but also by the Holy Spirit, who guides into all truth.

Notto Thelle illustrates this point in his thoughtful article by telling the story of pilgrim-missionary Karl Ludvig Reichelt (1877-1952), a Norwegian Lutheran who lived in China and Hong Kong from 1903 until his death in 1952. By no means the only Christian missionary to shift from a pattern of "wholesale condemnation of the other" to an appreciative acknowledgment of the deep evidence of the Holy Spirit's presence in the pieties and practices of other religions, Reichelt was representative of a broad trend that included many theological notables. The experiences of Reichelt and others support D'Costa's contention-cited by Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen-that "the other may teach Christians to know and worship their own Trinitarian God more truthfully and richly" and that such teaching may save the church from "unwittingly practicing cultural and religious idolatry."

Reichelt's pilgrimage is reminiscent of John V. Taylor's deeply illuminating Edward Cadbury Lectures in Theology, delivered at the University of Birmingham in 1967 and published as The Go-Between God: The Holy Spirit and the Christian Mission (SCM Press, 1972). Timothy Yates concludes that it was Taylor's openness to the ongoing, "all of creation" conversion work of the Holy Spirit that made him "one of the most sensitive interpreters of things African to fellow Europeans of the twentieth century," giving him the eyes and the ears to recognize in the songs, proverbs, and riddles of African traditional religions the "desire for the Ultimate God." In these troubling times, this awareness of the go-between God will allow us to acknowledge that Islam is "neither primarily a Christian heresy nor totally a devilish abomination," a perspective characterizing Timothy I of Baghdad, the story of whose encounter with Caliph al-Mahdi is retold by Frederick Norris in this issue.

Kärkkäinen reminds us that it is this "go-between God" who spans the seemingly unbridgeable religious chasm between "blind exclusivism" and an all-encompassing pluralism. As he puts it, "The Christian, coming from a particular perspective, is both encouraged and entitled to witness to the triune God of the Bible and his saving will, yet is at the same time prepared to learn from the Other." Ecclesiastical failure to learn from and adapt to the other is identified in Robert Gallagher's portrayal of the plight of the church in Australia, alienated from the nation's "average blokes" by its imported and deeply irrelevant Anglocentric religious forms and rituals.

The black-and-white pencil sketch accompanying this editorial is appropriately enigmatic. Entitling his work Holy Spirit, Sawai Chinnawong of Thailand explains that "God's all-seeing eye takes in the whole creation, here represented by slivers of his cosmos. A great mother bird feeds us, her spiritual young." He captures something of the mystery of the Spirit at work within and throughout his creation, complementing the essays in this issue of the IBMR, gently reminding us that our culturally veiled religious minds can make us resistant to the full weight of God's glory. In the familiar words of St. Paul, "Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit" (2 Cor. 3:17-18).

Front cover: Sawai Chinnawong, Holy Spirit, ink. A former artist in residence at OMSC, Chinnawong is from Chiang Mai, Thailand.

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