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Edinburgh
1910: Friendship and the Boundaries of Christendom
Several
of the articles in this issue relate directly to the extraordinary World
Missionary Conference convened in Edinburgh from June 14 to 23, 1910. At
that time, Europe’s global hegemony was unrivaled, and old
Christendom’s self-assurance had reached its peak. That the nations
whose professed religion was Christianity should have come to dominate
the world seemed not at all surprising, since Western civilization’s
inner élan was thought to be Christianity itself.
The Great War of 1914–18 soon plunged the “Christian” nations into
one of the bloodiest and most meaningless paroxysms of state-sanctioned
murder in humankind’s history of pathological addiction to violence
and genocide. At least for European missionaries, the war exposed the naïveté
of missionary apologetics. Missionaries were unable to offer any
credible rejoinder to the charge that the West neither believed nor
practiced what the Bible actually taught.
Christopher Anderson’s article on the 1919 Methodist Missionary Fair
is a reminder that although old Christendom’s claim to moral
superiority had been exposed as a farce, it would take some time before
U.S. missionaries began to reach similar conclusions about their own
nation. But within the fifty years following the Second World War,
profound uncertainty arose concerning the moral legitimacy of
America’s global economic and military modus operandi, fueled by the
nation’s ethically indefensible and militarily disastrous escapades in
Central America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Only now, when it
may be too late, have Christians on this continent—for long seeing
nothing amiss in the unholy union between personal piety and blind
nationalism—begun to sense the nation’s precarious position. U.S.
Christians, at least in some quarters, seem increasingly troubled by the
thought that their nation may be on its way to joining the long list of
expired empires, each blinded by hubris, deluded by self-absorption,
addicted to exploitation, and—if need be—determined to wreak
destruction on those who stand in its way.
It is appropriate, then, that this issue of the INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN
OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH should pay modest tribute to Vendanayagam Samuel
Azariah (1874–1945), whose picture (thanks to the Indian Missionary
Society, Tirunelveli, Palayamkottai, South India) appears on the
previous page. When he attended the 1910 World Missionary Conference in
Edinburgh, he was serving with the Indian Missionary Society in Dornakal.
Within two years, and until his death in 1945, he would be the first and
sole Indian Anglican diocesan bishop. Given the continuing economic
polarities and social inequities within the global community of faith,
Azariah’s passionate appeal is at least as pertinent today as it was
when he made it nearly a century ago. “Missionaries,” he lamented,
“except for a few of the very best, seem . . . to fail very largely in
getting rid of an air of patronage and condescension, and in
establishing a genuinely brotherly and happy relation as between equals
with their Indian flocks. . . . You have given your goods to feed the
poor. You have given your bodies to be burned. We also ask for love.
Give us FRIENDS.”1
Brian Stanley’s masterful recounting of the challenges faced by
conference statisticians provides a backdrop helpful to understanding
our own reality, with the surging vitality of Christianity virtually
everywhere except in the world of old Christendom. The challenges facing
statisticians, demographers, and cartographers already at work producing
the atlas of world Christianity for Edinburgh’s 2010 centenary
commemoration are, if anything, even more daunting that those that
confronted their predecessors. The boundaries of nation-states or
continents are no longer coterminous with any vital ecclesiastical
counterpart. Christianity is now a world religion. The lands of old
Christendom, furthermore, no longer make any pretense to be Christian,
while in the United States, popular profession is consistently
contradicted by greed and voided by guns. Christianity today, as in its
earliest manifestation, is neither aligned with nor supported by the
apparatus of political, economic, and military power. It is found,
rather, in those parts of the world that have never experienced the
corrosive hubris of imagined superiority.
While neither the nature nor the extent of contemporary world
Christianity could have been anticipated by the organizers of Edinburgh
1910, Kenneth Ross reminds us that the Western instinct to political,
economic, military, and ecclesiastical domination is as powerful now as
it was then. The centenary commemoration of Edinburgh 1910 to which he
makes reference will therefore not be an occasion for
self-congratulation but an opportunity for repentance—the only ground
on which the friendship for which Azariah appealed can be built.
—Jonathan
J. Bonk
Note
______________
1. World Missionary Conference, 1910, to Consider Missionary Problems
in
Relation to the Non-Christian World (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson
& Ferrier, 1910), 9:315.
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October
2006
Defining the Boundaries of Christendom: The Two Worlds of the World Missionary
Conference, 1910
Brian Stanley
The Centenary of Edinburgh 1910:
Its Possibilities
Kenneth R. Ross
World Christianity as a Women’s
Movement
Dana L. Robert
Noteworthy
The Role of Women in the Formation of the
World Student Christian Federation
Johanna M. Selles
Sherwood Eddy Pays a Visit to Adolf von Harnack Before Returning to the United States,
December 1918
Mark A. Noll
The World is Our Parish: Remembering the 1919 Protestant Missionary Fair
Christopher J. Anderson
The Legacy of Hilda Lazarus
Ruth Compton Brouwer
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