Search Results

Beginning in the 1820s, a symbiotic relationship prevailed between the Perushim and the Protestant missionaries active in the Land of Israel such as Joseph Wolf and the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity Amongst the Jews. The missionaries saw the return of the Jews to the Promised Land as essential to the messianic process; the Perushim were happy to accept economic, medical, and other forms of material aid from the missionaries, and saw gentile involvement in the rebuilding of the land as part of the messianic process as they envisioned it. At the same time, there were tensions related to the missionaries’ efforts to convert the Jews. Matters grew more complex in the 1830s when the Perushim saw the enlightened, European (read: Christian)-style reign of Muhammad Ali as displacing to a degree the role of the Christian missionaries, and Jews and Christians throughout the world began to anticipate more intensely the fateful year of 1840. The atmosphere is vividly portrayed in Lehren’s correspondence. Ties between the Perushim’s leadership and the Christian missionaries were strengthened in the wake of the terrifying Damascus blood libel in March 1840, when the missionaries turned out to be the Jews’ only allies. At the same time, the missionaries increased their efforts to proselytize, taking steps as radical as the appointment of a Jewish convert as Anglican bishop in Jerusalem. The passing of 1840 without the Messiah’s appearance produced a crisis of faith, making many Jews more vulnerable to the missionaries’ efforts. Jewish writers (such as Aviezer of Ticktin) sought to play down the crisis, offering reasons for the Messiah’s delay.

This chapter illustrates how the foreign mission movement operated through both local and national forms of organisation and the characteristics of these organisations with reference to Edinburgh-based activity in particular. It notes that this account of Scottish foreign missions is concerned exclusively with Protestant churches and organisations, and in particular focuses on the main Presbyterian churches. It further notes that the Episcopal Church also supported missionary activity, with a Scottish Episcopalian missionary society being formed in 1846, but did not support missions directly until the 1870s. It observes that the Catholic Church in Scotland was a poor church, needing to be built up in the nineteenth century. It was not until 1933 that the Catholic missionary organisation, the White Fathers, established a foundation in Scotland.

This chapter examines the similarities in the means by which new monotheistic religions, Christianity and Islam, came to override previous religious beliefs in the central Sahel and north-west Europe. It explains the concept of animism and describes the initial stages of the implantation of Christianity and Islam, or the time of the most sustained missionary activity rather than that of established belief. It provides an overview of the religious history of the central Sahel and north-western Europe and considers religious conversion from the point of view of the converted.

This chapter explores how the Catholic and Protestant churches respectively reconceived their theologies of mission in the final four decades of the twentieth century. Particular attention is devoted to the Second Vatican Council of 1962–65, the Uppsala Assembly of the World Council of Churches in 1968, and the Lausanne Congress for World Evangelization convened by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in 1974. It was not accidental that this process of fundamental revision was concentrated on the 1960s and 1970s—decades that witnessed the rapid dismantling of the Western colonial empires, the emergence of the “Third World” as an ideological bloc, and the highly charged political atmosphere of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West. Neither the Catholic nor the Protestant missionary movements were the offspring of colonialism, but both regularly employed the language of global Christian dominion and both tried to use colonial governments to forward their evangelistic objectives. It was thus inevitable that the anticolonial invective of these decades should not leave the churches' overseas missionary activities unscathed. These years were also an era of social and intellectual ferment in European societies. Movements of revolutionary protest against established institutions and their perceived role in the perpetuation of structural injustice and international capitalism swept through university campuses. The historic churches and their governing hierarchies were often caught in the gunfire. Their formulation of their role in the world and even of their message itself could not be unaffected.

This chapter brings into the limelight James Michener's novel Hawaii. This novel is regarded to be as much a narrative of American triumphalism as it is a narrative of Hawaii's people. Michener tries to find the idealistic spirit of America in the America's missionary activity in Hawaii. Apart from being a romantic saga, the novel also strives to discover the spirit of America in Hawaii's social history. The novel follows the lives of foremost American missionaries to Hawaii. Being a multigenerational novel, Hawaii moves rapidly tracing Hawaiian history to the late-nineteenth-century period when a group of American businessmen planned to have Hawaii captured by the United States.

This chapter discusses Empress Dowager Cixi's disapproval of the growing missionary activity in China during the nineteenth century. She did not like the notion of foreigners coming to China to sway the Chinese away from their ancient religious allegiances. Yet it was really not the missionaries Cixi disliked most — it was the Chinese converts. It was they, she believed, who stirred up civil unrest by refusing to obey the laws that had been part of Chinese society for millennia, disrupting the Confucian structure of containment and order, and of respect for the authority of emperor and parents. In November 1894, the Empress was presented with a printed edition of the New Testament, a gift which, as one of her biographers puts it with pointed understatement, “is supposed to have led indirectly to very important developments.” Guangxu, having heard about the New Testament sitting unread in the Zongli Yamen (Chinese Foreign Office), ordered copies of both New and Old Testaments in Chinese from the American Bible Society at Peking, and set to work reading them with the Palace eunuchs. This was the beginning of Guangxu's interest in all things foreign, summed up by the single word “reform.”.

This chapter examines the political implications of the revisions made to Unbeaten Tracks in Japan by Isabella Bird. The idealization of the Ainu people, the culminating northern point of her journey, consigns them to historical defeat, victims of the racial struggle for existence. In particular, it investigates how editorial changes alter the character of the traveler. It also shows how representations of Japan are accordingly modified. Finally, it reviews the most conspicuous difference between the two editions — the erasing of most of the references to missionary activities in Japan. Perhaps the act of travel writing is itself an effort to redefine identity, which contact with the other destabilizes to some extent. If this is the case, differences between the first and the popular editions of Unbeaten Tracks in Japan cast an interesting light upon the ways in which cultural boundaries are redrawn in the process of recounting travel.

Protestants revitalized the missionary nature of the faith in Latin America, in large part because evangelism and missionary activity were central to their identity. Because Catholicism was pervasive in Latin America, the main way that Protestantism spread was through active and intentional sharing of its message, initially by missionaries and then by converts. In the same vein, Protestants, as converts and the children of converts, understood that they were members of a minority faith, that it had started through missionary work, and that it could only grow through continued evangelism. Many Protestants endured social stigmatization and violent persecution.

Chapter 5 explores how state and Church finally reached their goal of enforcing confession among the Russian masses. Enforcement of confession over the Orthodox population became more extensive and more rigorous. Proof of having gone to confession became a routine component of getting married, getting divorced, or filing one’s business paperwork. Being caught shirking the sacraments itself called for penance. There were more attempts to use police to enforce confession and penances in the 1850s and early 1860s in the Russian empire than at any other time—and they worked. In the middle of the nineteenth century Church and state came far closer to getting the Orthodox Christian masses to reach the same baseline level of Christian performance as the elites had a century earlier.