Hutchison, William R. Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

In this excellent study of American Protestant missionary efforts, Hutchison focuses on the changing relationship between Christ and culture, evangelizing and civilizing, in the mission ideology of American Protestants. This dynamic gets right at the core of questions about what the nature of the Gospel is, what it means to preach it, and what the proper motivations behind such efforts should be. In charting the development of American answers to these questions reflected in mission ideology, Hutchison is attentive to the broader trends set out his earlier study, The Modernist Impulse (1992). The reader is grateful, however, that the fluid prose of Errand far surpasses the style of The Modernist Impulse.

The temporal scope of Errand to the World stretches from Roman Catholic precursors in the sixteenth century to the 1980’s, but the bulk of the book is concerned to chart the course in America in the 19th century and first half of the 20th. His approach is to focus not on the missionaries themselves but on the mission ideologies developed largely here at home in dialogue with what was going on in the mission field as well as in American social, political, and religious life. As such, it is the first major study of its kind and must be the benchmark by which future studies will be measured.

Hutchison begins with a discussion of precursors and early attempts. Despite some exceptions like those of the Quakers and Roger Williams, early Protestant attempts to bring Christianity to the “Indians” were basically carried on according the same strategies as had been previously employed by Roman Catholic missionaries: “they found that civilizing was a prerequisite for converting, and that it required much more emphasis than they would have liked” (24). This was the case even with figures such as John Eliot (1604-1690) and David Brainerd (1718-1747), both of whom would become sources of inspiration for Protestant missions in the nineteenth century. Another source of inspiration would be the “new departure” in Calvinist theology signalled by the postmilleniallism of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards. Intentionally or not, such confidence in the growth of the Kingdom on earth, with America given a special place in that plan, served to legitimize the civilizing efforts of Western missionaries. The key difference from earlier positions, Hutchison says, was that these civilizing efforts came to be seen as inherently good, rather than an unfortunately necessary prerequisite to preaching the Gospel.

While it would not be until the later nineteenth century that such exuberance would reach its pinnacle in combination with the tide of Protestant liberalism, early nineteenth century ideologies did express confidence in America’s providential role in God’s plan. The (progressive) Edwardsean Samuel Hopkins is a good example. Hopkins set forth a program of “disinterested benevolence,” wherein the missionary engages in his activity out of gratitude for God’s blessings. While such a program might be built on a certain self-righteousness, it was motivated by a compassion for the less privileged that would characterize many later missionary efforts. The early efforts of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), founded in 1810, tell a story of attempts at relative restraint. While the ABCFM encountered fantastic success in the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), many feared that such success was at the cost of over-involvement in the Hawaiian culture. The missionaries were depicted by figures like Melville as having been complicit in the westernizing corruption of a once innocent culture. Responding negatively to the cultural embeddedness of missionaries in the ABCFM missions in Hawaii, India, and elsewhere, the ABCFM Secretary Rufus Anderson adopted a controversial position. Rather than bringing civilization (like schools for English) or even forms of church government, missionaries should bring the Gospel only and then get out, trusting the Holy Spirit to enable the Gospel to flourish, transforming the culture as necessary. The missionaries on the ground often responded with “the historical civilizing formula—with its historic loophole. They agreed that they ought not to interfere in political or secular matters except where issues of religion and sound morals were involved” (72). While Anderson’s policies may not have been overwhelmingly popular, they do represent what Hutchison calls a “Christ, Not Culture” model for foreign missions, a model that would be largely forgotten in the ideologies of the later nineteenth century.

The turn to unquestioned civilizing efforts in the later nineteenth century is captured by the title of chapter four, “A Moral Equivalent for Imperialism.” As western imperialism gained tremendous momentum, Christians “felt called and fitted to spiritualize a powerful force in secular development” (93). Denominations began to run their own mission efforts, taking them out of the hands of pandenominational groups like the ABCFM. With increased denominational control came increased efforts to reproduce church polity in foreign lands and a much greater involvement in broader civilizing efforts, such as building a massive number of hospitals and schools abroad. Increased attention to civilizing efforts also meant increased lay participation, including many women.

Hutchison brings out well some of the most interesting factors of this period of missions, namely the multiple levels of irony involved on both the liberal and conservative sides of mission ideology. Liberals objected to revivalistic, personal evangelism and the Christian exclusivism that was associated with it. Yet their postmillenial vision of bringing social salvation to the world was a cultural imperialism of the most blatant sort. On the other hand, conservative premillenialists, who were not optimistic about the actual conversion of the world, still thought that the evangelization of the world and the triumph of western civilization were necessary. Perhaps the greatest irony is that liberals driven by efforts of social salvation and conservatives with their evangelistic efforts could join together in unprecedented missionary zeal. While they may not have agreed totally on what “the evangelization of the world in this generation” meant, they were allied in their unquestioned assumption of the superiority of western culture and their need to proliferate it in the name of Christianity.

After WWI, the foreign missions of the Protestant denominations came under increasingly heavy assault. From Europeans, mainly Germans, they were attacked for their “religious Americanism,” the European term for Americans’ rushed attempt to spread Anglo-American culture in the name of evangelization. American missionary efforts had wandered far from the careful efforts of its early German Pietist roots. They also came under attack by fundamentalists for de-emphasizing the evangelistic aspect of missions. In fact, many liberals appeared to embrace perspectives on the nature of religious belief that made their attitudes toward other world religions far more cooperative than fundamentalists thought tolerable.

Indeed, the advance of liberal self-criticism in the 1920’s and 30’s picked up this line of cultural relativism and further emphasized the need of mainline missionaries to be service oriented and self-consciously not concerned to impose doctrine. The 1932 publication of Re-Thinking Missions, summarizing the multi-denominational “Laymen’s Inquiry” was widely influential in setting forth this position. William E. Hocking, the chairman of the Inquiry who became a prominent spokesman for the whole re-thinking effort, considered the uniqueness of Christianity to be its unique capacity to extend God’s love in service to the world – not in any religious belief system. Responses were not, of course, all favorable. Robert E. Speer defended the uniqueness of Christianity by maintaining the belief that Jesus Christ was the only way of salvation, but his response was, by and large, still relatively moderate compared with that of J. Gresham Machen. Machen, having recently left Princeton Seminary, called the Inquiry’s report “a public attack against the very heart of the Christian religion” (172). Machen was thoroughly disappointed that moderates like Speer were allowing liberals like Hocking to hijack the Protestant missionary effort into a program that did not deserve to bear the name “Christian.”

The final chapter of the book deals rather sweepingly with the era from WWII through the 1980’s. In this period the world stage changed dramatically and so did Protestant missions. Hutchison portrays the post-War divisions as a clear one between ecumenicals and evangelicals, the former working through the mainline denominations and the latter isolated to their own organizations (though rapidly increasing numerically). Both groups claimed the heritage of the Edinburgh conference of 1910, which became a sort of “apostolic era” over which the various sides could fight for succession. The trajectory of “ecumenical” mission thinking, while having some inner diversity, seemed to be established by the 1968 Uppsala Assembly of the WCC, along with the preparatory work of the liberal Johannes Hoekendijk. Prominent themes were Christian service and allowing the “world” to set the agenda for missions, coupled with a near total absence of personal evangelism. Conservatives, bitterly disappointed and withdrawing from the WCC, felt that the liberals had in fact betrayed the world. Regrouping and holding their own international missions conferences, as well as issuing a 1966 Wheaton Declaration, the evangelicals gave renewed attention to the Great Commission and emphasized personal evangelism. Hutchison agrees with Rodger Bassham’s assessment that the early articulations of such renewal on the part of evangelicals like John R.W. Stott and Billy Graham were often “triumphalist, polemical, and lacking in either maturity or a penitent spirit” (191). However, by the 1974 Lausanne conference, evangelicals like Stott were sufficiently repentant to now adamantly assert that social and evangelistic responsibility were both crucial to the missio dei given to the church for the benefit of the world. Interestingly, Hutchison notes that Stott’s evangelical vision was not very disimilar to the one put forward by R.C. Hutchison (the author’s father, presumably) in 1927, at which time the vision was too advanced for the mainline mission board. Such evangelical moderation was, in fact, met with agreement by many (though not all) ecumenicals. A new consensus about missions, or at least working toward one, was not out of the question in the mid- 1980’s, and the profound figure of Lesslie Newbigin clearly provided signs that such an effort was worthwhile. On the whole, however, it is clear that the shift in this most recent era was one in which conservatives became the overwhelming majority in the engagement of Christian world missions.

Hutchison is self-conscious about giving a more fair (charitable?) reading to the missionaries’ efforts than many others who have vilified or been embarrased by them. One could argue the simple fact that he has given such careful attention to these missionary efforts is itself a statement to that effect. He is generally careful to understand them as people of their own time; for instance, he notes that the identification of American nationalism and Christian expansionism was not unique to Protestant missionaries. In the nineteenth century it was, in fact, a common sentiment in the social and literary culture at large. Such reminders make the missionary ideologies more understandable, even if our present standards have shifted dramatically.

As with his book, The Modernist Impulse, Hutchison does not identify denominational or geographical patterns that might help explain some of the diversity in mission ideology. His narrative, however, demonstrates that this is not just a methodological choice, for the very years that saw the increased denominationalization of the missionary effort were also the years that saw the de-emphasis of confessional commitments in missionary motivation. As cultural Christianity was on the ascendency, doctrinal distinctives seemed to play a lesser role in the effort.

We are indebted to Hutchison for this important first survey of American missionary ideology. This reader is hopeful that his assessment of the growing convergence of mission ideology on the part of evangelicals and mainline Christians is correct. (Although I am wondering if his assessment has changed to date?) Such a prospect makes Hutchison’s study worth far more than pleasant reading for the antiquarian. It opens this past to us for questions of direct contemporary relevance, as the church is still asking the same questions about the nature of the Gospel and what it means to spread it through evangelization. Even if the historian cannot answer all the questions himself, Hutchison’s book helps to provide the basis for further discussions by theologians, missiologists, missionaries, and laypeople.