In 1839 Alexander Duff, the renowned Scottish missionary to India
wrote about the role of Christian education in training indigenous
teachers and preachers of the Gospel. With such an aim, said Duff,
"Missionaries of the Church of Scotland have been sent forth ... in
the absence of miracles." [1] Teaching school in Calcutta, he was
apparently unaware of what other missionaries working in Burma (now
Myanmar) were experiencing during the same period in their work among
the Karens. Venturing into the mountains, Jonathan and Deborah Wade lost
their way until they came upon a Karen house. An elderly man sitting on
the veranda gazed on them for a few moments in silence and then called
out, "The teacher has arrived; the teacher has arrived!" Soon
a crowd from the neighborhood gathered, for they had received a prophecy
telling them that "the teacher is in the jungle, and will call on
you. You must ... listen to his precepts." [2] As a result, the
Gospel received a warm reception, converts were baptized, and a perman
ent mission station established.

Yet, while the educational legacy of Duff has been endlessly
recounted in histories of missions, few people today know about the
miraculous events surrounding the introduction of the Christian faith in
Myanmar. Historians of missions and missiologists have generally ignored
these kinds of reports, ironically crucial pieces to the puzzle of how
Christianity developed in non-Western countries. Consequently, this
exclusion has seriously limited the insights of historical and
missiological analysis. To correct misapprehended interpretations, such
stories must be considered. Historians may have reservations about the
wide-angle lens of providential narratives, but they cannot afford to
crop them out of the picture.

In light of discussions in the last several years about how the
history of Christianity in the former mission lands should be written,
as well as interest in the phenomenology of religion among non-Western
peoples, this inquiry briefly explores selected claims of paranormal happenings. [3] It then analyzes' why the anticipation of miracles
declined, examines views in the Protestant missionary community on the
possibility and importance of miracles, and recounts what historians
have said or failed to say about them in textbooks. While historians and
missiologists have examined aspects of how the Christian message was
inserted into various cultures and the level of acceptance it gained,
the specific relationship of miracles to missions and how missionaries
and mission leaders perceived their importance have been neglected. [4]

Pre-Reformation Claims

Precedent for miracles in missions is found from the time of the
apostles. However, their credibility has long generated disagreement in
the West because of historical, theological, and philosophical
considerations. Questions about sources, as well as the obvious
ideological agendas of the authors who controlled the evaluation of
evidence, have naturally and rightly troubled modern historians. [5]
Theological and philosophical presuppositions have been of no less
importance in the debate. The theological issue has centered in part on
whether miracles fulfilled their purpose in the first century. "No
transition in the history of the Church [was] so sudden, abrupt, and
radical as that from the apostolic to the post-apostolic age,"
wrote the German Reformed historian Philip Schaff. And then in a
pronouncement of virtually ex cathedra proportions, he declared:
"God himself ... established an impassable gulf.... The apostolic
age is the age of miracles." [6] Presbyterian theologian Benjamin
B. Warfield concurred. In his judgment the extraordinary "gifts of
power" of the apostles had served to authenticate them as the
"authoritative founders" of the church. In turn, they
conferred this capability on their own disciples. But as the latter
gradually passed off the scene, so did the demonstrations of miraculous
power. [7] Despite Anglican attempts to defend the occurrences of
miracles into the patristic age, Warfield would have none of it. In his
estimation, the "great harvest of miracles" that came with the
evolution or Roman Catholicism grew from the tares of
"heathendom." [8]

In recent years historians have challenged this thesis, including
Stanley M. Burgess and Kilian McDonnell, O.S.B., who have reviewed the
evidence and located new sources of information. Burgess insists that
"cessationists" like Warfield failed to look objectively at
the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions. None of the early
church fathers suggested that miracles and the charismata had been
intended only for the New Testament church. [9] In his analysis of
patristic sources, McDonnell finds that the charisms of the Holy Spirit,
including the gifts of tongues and prophecy, were sought for and
received during the rites of Christian initiation (baptism,
confirmation, Eucharist). Evidence provided by witnesses from around the
Mediterranean seaboard extends from the end of the second to the eighth
centuries. [10]

More directly related to missions, records attest to supernatural
demonstrations of power in the advance of Christianity, with some
analogous to phenomena found in the New Testament. For instance, Basil
of Cappadocia lauded the remarkable number of conversions in the
ministry of Gregory Thaumaturgus ("wonder-worker"), a
third-century missionary bishop in Asia Minor. "By the
superabundance of gifts, wrought in him by the Spirit in all power and
in signs and marvels," Basil reported, Gregory "was styled a
second Moses by the very enemies of the Church." [11] In Egypt the
fourth-century desert father Antony became legendary for his prevailing
in conflicts with demons, his feats being attributed to fidelity to
Nicene Christology. [12]

In the same era Nino, a slave girl taken captive to the Caucasus
region and afterward canonized by the Orthodox Church of Georgia with
the title "Equal to the Apostles," prayed for the healing of
Queen Nana. The queen in fact recovered, which contributed to the
conversion of King Mirian and the nation. [13] The connection of a
physical healing or some other kind of miraculous incident to the
conversion of an individual, tribe, or nation can be found elsewhere,
from that of the Ethiopian eunuch in the Book of Acts (8:26--40), to the
third-century King Tiridates of Armenia, to the fourth-century Emperor
Constantine, to the fifth-century Clovis, king of the Franks, all the
way to the mid-twentieth-century conversion of Gypsies in France. [14]

While much can be said for the basic reliability of these stories,
such accounts were sometimes transformed into fantastic tales. It
happened in the case of Patrick of Ireland. Though he himself credited
his escape from captivity and his calling to evangelize to the influence
of voices and dreams, later accretions distorted his actual ministry.
[15]

Medieval reports reflect the same problem. In Britain the Venerable
Bede, the eighth-century father of English history, recorded miracles
that purportedly took place during the evangelization of England.
Stories of healings, exorcisms, calming of the sea, raising the dead,
signs in the heavens, and other unusual occurrences lie sprinkled
throughout his History of the English Church and People. [16] Responding
to reports about Augustine of Canterbury and his fellow monks who were
evangelizing the country, Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) praised their
achievements and said they stood "resplendent with such great
miracles...that they seem to imitate the powers of the apostles in the
signs which they display." [17] To Gregory and others in the
ancient and medieval periods, no "impassable gulf" separated
them from the early church.

Reformation and Later Perspectives

With the coming of the Protestant Reformation, the reformers Martin
Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, and John Calvin disavowed the Catholic
doctrine of the communion of saints. In so doing, they brushed aside the
value set on the saints, holy relics, pilgrimages, shrines, and the
miracle stories that developed around them. Generally speaking, they
believed that miracles had vanished with the apostolic church, a view
shared by the post-Reformation Lutheran and Reformed scholastic
theologians as well. [18] In clearing away what they considered to be
the debris of medieval Catholicism, they rejected the miracle claims.
One could trust in the veracity of the biblical miracles, but none
afterward. Thus, Calvin contended that both Catholics and Anabaptists
sought to certify their false doctrines with spurious claims of
miracles. [19] Luther faced a challenge from charismatic prophets who
insisted that God had given them new revelations, which they viewed as
superior to Scripture. [20]

In the great bombardment of reason against Scripture and tradition
in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Enlightenment, or
Age of Reason, aimed its fusillades of skepticism on anything deemed
miraculous, whether found in Scripture or m popular religion. Humankind
had only now come of age thanks to the liberation of rational thinking
from superstition. Hence, whether from the teachings of the Reformers or
the disbelief of the rationalists, confidence in the possibility of
supernatural interventions declined or was eliminated altogether in the
minds of many people. [21]

Evangelical Christians also waded into the intellectual currents of
the time. Evangelical faith and features of Enlightenment thought,
coupled with the notion that the spirit of investigation should be
encouraged and proceed without restrictions, seemed to pave the way for
the future of Christianity. [22] When launching into missions, pietists
and evangelicals remained true to their theological convictions by
preaching to secure "heartfelt" conversions and exhibited
their optimism about human progress by pressing their educational and
social agenda. Like Duff, they did not anticipate that miracles would
accompany the verbal proclamation of the Gospel as in apostolic times.
Therefore, the likelihood of divine displays of power rarely appeared in
discourses on mission practices.

At the same time, revivalism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries brought heightened interest in the person and work of the Holy
Spirit, a development that gradually focused on the baptism and
charismatic gifts of the Spirit. The attention given to pneumatology by
the nineteenth-century Wesleyan and Keswickian wings of the Holiness
movement stirred people to seek for the fulfillment of Joel's
prophecy (Joel 2:28-29) to supply the spiritual energy necessary to
bring about societal reform and evangelize the world. Inadvertently,
revivalism also opened the door to controversial forms of behavior and
phenomena that frequently came with experiential piety, including
falling down "under the power" of the Holy Spirit, dancing,
shaking, cries, and groans, as well as visions, dreams, and signs in the
heavens. To the faithful, they too were of divine origin and constituted
valid spiritual experiences. Though notably absent in the histories of
missions, reports of extraordinary experiences found their way in to
chronicles of revivals, books that sometimes round out a more accurate
picture of events in the mission lands. [23] Unfortunately, the sources
for these publications have been underutilized for mission studies.

Paranormal occurrences often profoundly affected the reception of
the Christian faith and stimulated spiritual renewal in believers.
Records and publications from nineteenth-and twentieth-century
Protestant missions contain stories of miracles and related experiences.
Primary sources such as autobiographies, periodicals, reports, and
agency histories occasionally provide treasures of information. In some
instances missionaries considered the miracles to be pretended and the
bodily contortions to be caused by "animal excitement." [24]
Their appeal could stem only from "weaknesses incidental to human
nature, especially among a people unaccustomed to exercise
self-control" -- a perspective revealing that missionaries and
indigenous peoples lived worldviews apart. [25]

In most publications the supernatural dynamics that propelled the
early church took a back seat to other priorities. For most Protestants
the postmillennial calendar with its hopefulness of Christianizing
society nurtured the belief that after an extended period of progress,
Christ would return. In the meantime mission schools trained students in
Western learning so they would see the light of Christianity and
ultimately embrace the faith. Theoretically, civilizing and evangelizing
would work hand in hand to lead them out of heathen darkness.

Nevertheless, unplanned events frequently interrupted the process.
Following on the heels of revivals in America and northern Ireland,
"a very remarkable revival of religion" took place in Jamaica
in 1860 that impacted the entire island. [26] Lengthy prayer services
that set aside fixed liturgical practices, seekers being
"stricken" or prostrated on the ground presumably by the might
of God, and public confessions of sin marked the awakening. Impressive
results ensued. Many "rum-shops" and gambling houses closed,
separated spouses reconciled, wayward children returned to their
parents, ministers grew in spiritual zeal, sinners were converted,
churches became crowded, and the demand for Bibles exceeded supplies.
According to Richard Lovett, historian of the London Missionary Society,
"A movement of this kind among a dense population of
semi-civilized, excitable negroes was certain to produce extravagances
and much that was repugnant to quiet, unemotional people" (an
allusion to unsympathetic missionaries and o ther Euramerican
residents). But, continues Lovett, "The testimony of men of sober
judgment is that at least 20,000 souls were savingly awakened at this
period. The missionaries on the spot believed it to be a special
outpouring of the Holy Spirit in response to prayer." [27]

Such events could prove threatening to established Western
doctrines and practices. When news of the same revivals reached South
India in 1860, Christians in Tinnevelly (now Tirunelveli) experienced
similar phenomena. The revival there prompted believers to evangelize
and fostered local modes of worship. Initial approval, however, waned as
claims about the restoration of New Testament gifts (Rom. 12:6-8;1 Cor.
12 and 14) and offices (Eph. 4:11-12) exasperated missionaries, whose
status and authority now came into question. On one occasion, a
missionary complained that believers reported having visions in which
appeared the names of twelve Indians to be appointed as apostles and
evangelists, and seven as prophets. [28] To indigenous Christians, such
revelations happily demonstrated God's willingness to bypass
imported ecclesiastical structures in the appointment of church leaders.
[29]

The calling of John Stewart, an American of mixed European and
African descent, illustrates how supernatural factors could direct a
person's life and impact other people. While living in Virginia, he
heard the voice of a man and then of a woman "from the sky"
say to him, "Thou shalt go to the Northwest and declare my counsel
plainly." Afterward, a "peculiar halo" became visible and
filled the Western horizon. [30] Traveling to the northwest region of
Ohio, he began preaching to the Wyandott Indians with great success in
1816. As a result, Stewart's example helped inspire the
establishment of the Methodist Missionary Society four years later, an
agency whose personnel eventually circled the globe. The appearance of a
halo--an ancient pagan symbol adopted by early Christians and used in
the depiction of angels, saints, and the Virgin Mary--combined with what
seemed to be masculine and feminine voices of God, denotes the blending
of popular and biblical modes of piety that made "respectable"
Christians cringe.

Textbook Histories

The period of the Enlightenment, which preceded the "Great
Century" (1800-1914) in Christian missions, left no room in its
worldview for the traditional New Testament understanding of miracles or
for a recognition of the supernatural activities that characterized the
expansion of the ancient and medieval churches. The new vision of
Christianity resonated with a strong ethical orientation, acceptable to
the emerging Western mind-set and freed of the superstitions of the
"prescientific" era. Moreover, this view dictated that history
be written with complete objectivity, scientific in methodology and
interpretation. [3] As Mark Noll observes, "Christian historians
took their place in the modern academy by treating history not so much
as a subdivision of theology but as an empirical science. This choice
meant that they have constructed their historical accounts primarily
from facts ascertained through documentary or material evidence and
explained in terms of natural human relationships." [32]

The end result becomes tangible in standard histories and surveys
of missions, in required texts in Bible institutes, colleges,
universities, and seminaries, which rarely mention miracles. [33] The
word "miracle" seldom appears in the indexes. One looks in
vain for "healing," "exorcisms," "dreams,"
and "visions." "Revival" sporadically surfaces, and
the information given may briefly describe the unusual phenomena
sometimes associated with such movements. A few indexes contain
"apostolic methods." I have selected several publications to
illustrate the penchant of Protestant missiologists and historians of
missions to ignore or underrate what were in fact vital factors in the
development of Christianity in the non-Christian world. Whether they
personally believed that miracles could happen or happened the way they
were reported remains beside the point; the issue centers on the data
they chose to include and the meaning they attached to it.

In 1884 the best-known German missiologist and historian of
missions, Gustav Warneck, published his Outline of a History of
Protestant Missions from the Reformation to the Present Time. In the
introduction he refers to the apostolic age as the "heroic age of
early Christianity ... the age of classical missionary enterprise, a
model for missions in all ages." Still, he neglects to cite the
miracles associated with the ministries of Jesus and the apostles. In
retrospect, he notes that the periods of apostolic, post apostolic, and
medieval missions had been sovereignly opened and closed. Modern
missions was thus shorn of any miraculous dimension? [34]

Edwin Munsell Bliss, a former missionary to the Middle East with
the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), also
avoids reference to New Testament miracles in The Missionary Enterprise:
A Concise History of Its Objects, Methods, and Extension (1908). Oddly
enough, he mentions Gregory Thaumaturgus because of Gregory's
reputation for performing miracles? [35] In contrast, Philip Schaff
questions the "stupendous" claims about Gregory in his History
of the Christian Church (1858-92) and makes a point of noting that they
were recorded one hundred years after his death. "Deducting all the
marvelous features, which the magnifying distance of one century after
the death of the saint created," he writes, "there remains the
commanding figure of a great and good man who made a most powerful
impression upon his and the subsequent generations." [36] For
Schaff, a downsized "good man" more appropriately fit the
modern era.

William Owen Carver, a Southern Baptist missions historian, begins
his Course of Christian Missions: A History and an Interpretation (1932)
with a presentation of the biblical foundations of mission. Without
discussing the miracles of Jesus, he briefly refers to the signs and
wonders done by the apostles. The focus then predictably shifts to
expansion, agencies, and the social, educational, and medical benefits
of missions. [37] Paradoxically, in the year after its publication,
Southern Baptists in North America learned about a revival at their
North China Mission in Shantung Province, where, according to Mary K.
Crawford in her Shantung Revival (1933), "the sick are being
healed; devils cast out; men and women, boys and girls are preaching
with a power hitherto not known; hundreds are crying for mercy and are
being saved." [38] From this revival also arose the independent
spiritual gifts movement, the influence of which has continued in the
region to the present day.[39]

From a different vantage point, V. Raymond Edman, a missionary to
Ecuador with the Christian and Missionary Alliance and later president
of Wheaton College, Illinois, barely hints of miracles in the progress
of the early church in his volume Light in Dark Ages: Eighteen Centuries
of Missions from the Giving of the Great Commission to the Beginning of
Modern Missions Under William Carey (1949).[40] A similar approach
appears in The Progress of World-Wide Missions (1924), a best-selling
history and survey of missions written by Robert Hall Glover, a medical
missionary to China with the Alliance and later U.S. home director of
the China Inland Mission. He describes the New Testament as the
"most practical textbook on missionary principles and practice for
all time." The methods of Jesus and the apostles, Glover wrote,
though necessitating "reasonable adaptation," constitute the
best and most effective strategies still used in modern missions.[41]

For Glover, as for Edman, revival held the key to evangelization:
the "pentecostal experience of the Holy Spirit's infilling has
been the forerunner of every fresh missionary inspiration and advance in
the centuries" since the Day of Pentecost. Nevertheless, while
Glover highlights the importance of a post conversion baptism in the
Holy Spirit for empowerment to witness and favorably mentions several
miraculous events in the missions of the ancient church, he ignores
later claims.[42] He does so, despite his association with the Alliance,
which took one of the most extreme positions on the value of prayer for
the sick in the work of missions.[43]

More than other historians, Kenneth Scott Latourette analyzes the
issue of miracles in his History of the Expansion of Christianity
(1937-45). Acknowledging the scholarly debate about the authenticity of
Jesus' miracles, he suspects that some of the physical healings
could be explained simply as the cure of "nervous disorders."
Furthermore, the miracles were not designed "to prove the validity
of his message" but simply demonstrated his compassion for the
"unfortunate and the suffering." [44] The truth of the gospel
message, Latourette writes, did not require the confirmation of divine
displays of power. He then considers potential pagan influences behind
later miracle stories, noting that in the medieval period they had
"an appeal to the untutored mind." [45] The subject of
miracles in missions receives a mere fourteen pages in this seven-volume
work.

A noteworthy paradox emerges in two publications by J. Herbert
Kane, a missionary to China with the China Inland Mission and later
professor of missions at Moody Bible Institute and Trinity Evangelical
Divinity School. In his Concise History of the Christian World Mission
(1978), Kane favorably mentions in reference to Gregory Thaumaturgus
that "the transition from paganism to Christianity was facilitated
by the widespread use of miracles." [46] He also comments on the
importance of miracles of healing in the growth of Latin American
Pentecostalism. [47] But apart from these fleeting remarks, the Concise
History has the same orientation as the other books. Yet in his Twofold
Growth (1947), published thirty-one years earlier when he still served
in China, he acknowledges from firsthand observation that "hundreds
of our finest Christians in the Fowyang field entered the Christian fold
by way of the miracle gate. They were driven to Christ not by a sense of
sin, but by a sense of need." The "needs" usually prec
eded the sense of culpability for sin: "A parent with a sick child,
a husband with a demon-possessed wife, a woman with an opium-smoking
husband, a widow bowed down by oppression, a soldier with an infected
foot, a merchant whose only son had been kidnapped, an aged father with
an unfilial son, a bandit serving a prison term." [48] "Where
the need for miracles exists-as it surely does in heathen lands,"
Kane recalls, God "always responds with alacrity." [49] What
was appropriate for Twofold Growth, however, did not qualify for the
Concise History.

Factors Prompting Exclusion

Several factors lie behind the exclusion of supernatural claims,
among them the underlying historiographical presuppositions in the
academy that do not allow for speculation about metaphysical cause and
effect. Mission historians generally adhered to the established rules of
their profession. In a reflection of his central thesis about the
history of Christian expansion, Latourette writes: "It is clear
that at the very beginning of Christianity there must have occurred a
vast release of energy, unequalled in the history of the race. Without
it the future course of the faith is inexplicable." "Why this
occurred," he cautions his readers, "may lie outside the
realms in which historians are supposed to move." [50]

Together with other objectives, the textbook histories informed
their readers about the movement of Christianity throughout the world.
They were often crafted to portray missions in a positive light and to
inspire their readers toward deeper Christian devotion, to contribute to
missions, or to become missionaries themselves. Drawing attention to
controversial aspects of religious enthusiasm might deflect from the
credibility of the missions movement itself before incredulous Western
audiences. The top-down coverage also looked primarily to the
missionaries and their stories, not to the native believers who had
entered the faith from non-Christian religions and were more prone to
accept the legitimacy of paranormal phenomena. Finally, skeptical
assumptions about the possibility of miracles after the apostolic
period--a stance reinforced among Protestants by negative attitudes
toward Roman Catholic miracle stories like the reputed healings at the
shrine of Lourdes--clouded the authenticity of all such accounts. [51]

Consequently, gaps appear in the textbook narratives due in part to
the absence of reports about unusual phenomena. Despite making valuable
contributions, the legacy of the miraculous has been neglected in
Western interpretations of events and spiritual dynamics that shaped
Christianity outside Euro-America. Modern writers have perpetuated this
sanitized approach by highlighting the development of mission societies,
geographic extension, and charitable, educational, and social
achievements (e.g., Stephen Neil, A History of Christian Missions
[19641]); they generally offer limited insight into the spirituality of
indigenous Christians.

Theologians of mission have also overlooked the missiological
importance of miraculous happenings in their historical analyses (e.g.,
David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of
Mission [1991]). The pattern of ignoring or minimizing the worth of
paranormal phenomena turns history into a broadcast where only carefully
screened "instant replays" can be seen, filtering out other
plays equally important to the game. The exclusion of the full range of
intercultural dynamics thus produces an incomplete picture of what
actually took place. [52]

Five General Views

Missionaries and their supporters at the home base have held at
least five views toward miracles (with some overlapping of categories).
However, textbooks and other mission studies seldom treat the diversity
of opinions held by Protestant missionaries and mission leaders, whose
judgments ranged from outright rejection to hesitation to unbridled
enthusiasm. First, those with a progressive or liberal theological
persuasion blurred the definitions of "natural" and
"supernatural." Since the exorcism of demons, healings, and
other such experiences stretched their credulity, they identified divine
workings with natural processes. "The supernatural may be seen
everywhere," penned Robert A. Hume in Dnyanodaya, the Anglo-Marathi
newspaper published by the Ahmednagar Mission (ABCFM) in India.
"The signs which reveal a Power supreme in nature and in history
[direct] the universe toward an end. The supernatural is nothing else
but the spiritual working through the medium of physical nature."
[53] Another editorial specul ated that if "competent physicians
and specialists in nervous diseases" had examined the "cases
of supposed 'demoniacal possession' which have taken place in
India within the last few years," they would have recognized them
as "forms of disease well-known and described in medical
books." [54] The progress of medical science would inevitably lead
to a better understanding of Jesus' ministry of healing and signal
an advance over the traditional claims about New Testament miracles.

Second, certain missionaries of a conservative theological bent,
who affirmed the integrity of the biblical miracles, had little faith in
their prolongation after the period of the early church, even though
they believed that God answered prayer and acted sovereignly in human
affairs. Falling short of a full-scale cessationism, they dismissed the
relevance of miracles for evangelism and missions. Typical of this
perspective, Mrs. H. Grattan (Fanny) Guinness, editor of the prominent
evangelical missions magazine TheRegions Beyond (Regions Beyond
Missionary Union), asked, "What use would supernatural powers, such
as were committed to the twelve and to the seventy, be to the modern
missionary among the heathen? Miracles cannot enlighten their dark
minds, or soften their hard hearts." Speaking for the majority of
missionaries, she added, "Our aim is to enlighten, not to
astonish." [55]

Third, as a result of witnessing for themselves or learning about
unusual incidents on the mission fields, other evangelicals compared the
first-time proclamation of the Gospel in non-Christian countries to the
experience of the first-century church. Acknowledging the veracity of
such events, Johannes Warneck (the son of Gustav Warneck) saw no further
need for miracles after the successful introduction of Christianity on a
foreign field. A missionary to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia)
with the Rhenish Mission, he recorded that from the 1860s the Christian
community increased after the coming of sensational phenomena, including
dreams, visions, signs in the heavens, and several instances where
missionaries (e.g., Ludwig Nommensen) unwittingly consumed poison in
their food given by their enemies and remained unharmed (see Mark
16:18). [56] But, Warneck contended, such miraculous events "have
nothing more than a preparatory significance" and "lead no
further than to the door of the Gospel." Convinced they had
"fulfilled their purpose of pointing the stupefied heathen to the
gift of the Gospel," he saw "the power of working signs and
wonders" as simply temporary, just as they had been in early
Christianity. Nonetheless, "We must not banish such experiences to
the realm of fable. They are too well attested; and they are met with
everywhere among animistic peoples with considerable regularity."
[57]

Fourth, evangelicals of a more radical persuasion allowed for the
continuation of miracles and extraordinary spiritual manifestations, but
within limits. [58] Theodore Christlieb, a German theologian and
premillennialist, maintained in Modern Doubt and Christian Belief (1874)
that "in the last epoch of the consummation of the Church... she
will again require for her final decisive struggle with the powers of
darkness, the miraculous interference of her risen Lord, and hence the
Scriptures lead us to expect miracles once more for this period."
[59] As evidence of this position, he cites stories including one from
the life of Hans Egede, the first evangelical (Lutheran) missionary to
Greenland, who arrived there in 1721. Before mastering the languages of
the natives, he gave a pictorial presentation of the miracles of Christ.
"His hearers, who, like many in the time of Christ, had a
perception only for bodily relief, [urged] him to prove the power of
this Redeemer of the world upon their sick people." Egede to ok the
challenge and, with many "sighs and prayers," laid hands on
the sick, after which several testified to being healed. "The Lord
could not reveal Himself plainly enough to this mentally blunted and
degraded race by merely spiritual means," Christlieb adds,
"and therefore bodily signs were needed." [60]

No one publicized the occurrences of miracles in missions more than
Arthur T. Pierson, editor of the influential Missionary Review of the
World, who between 1891 and 1902 wrote a series of four books entitled
The Miracles of Missions: Modern Marvels in the History of Missionary
Enterprise. In volume 1 Pierson pays warm tribute to Christlieb, whose
insights inspired the title of his books. [61] Still, he and others in
this category did not share what seemed to be the reckless expectancy of
those who form the fifth category below. Pierson was content to discover
a broad range of divine intervention in human affairs: unusual
circumstances leading to conversions; amazing answers to prayer as in
the case of financial needs; deliverances from danger; opened doors for
ministry; the "miracles" of medical missions, advancing
technology, and transportation; and sometimes even physical healings.
[62] For example, Pierson relates the healing of a Chinese epileptic after prayer by C. T. Studd, Stanley Smith, and other me mbers of the
famous Cambridge Seven, [63] and he tells of his own healing from an ear
problem. [64]

The story of W. J. Davis, the Methodist "missionary
Elijah," further illustrates this outlook. In a Bantu-speaking part
of South Africa during the late 1840s, a severe drought caused the soil
to dry up, and cattle began to die. Fears of famine led the tribal chief
to employ the services of professional rainmakers. When they were
unsuccessful, they blamed their failure on the presence of missionaries.
Realizing the danger to his family, Davis knew that he had to act
quickly. Riding on his horse into the chief's village and
interrupting ceremonies in progress, he announced that the rainmakers
and the sins of the people were the real culprits. Emulating the prophet
Elijah in challenging the prophets of Baal to a test on Mount Carmel (1
Kings 18:17-46), he proposed to his startled hearers, "Come to
chapel next Sabbath, and we will pray to God, who made the heavens and
the earth, to give us rain, and we will see who is the true God, and who
are His true servants, and your best friends." After the chief
accepted h is offer, Davis and his fellow believers spent the next day
in fasting and prayer. On Sunday, and without a cloud in the sky, the
chief and his retinue entered the church. Then as Davis and the
congregation knelt in prayer, "big rain drops begin to patter on
the zinc roof of the chapel.... The whole region was so saturated with
water that the river nearby became so swollen that the chief and his
mother could not cross it that night, and hence had to remain at the
mission-station till the next day." [65]

Even though William Taylor, the pioneer Methodist missionary bishop
in Africa, recorded the episode in his Christian Adventures in South
Africa (1880), he doubted its enduring value. While it "seemed to
produce a great impression on the minds of the chief, his mother, and
the heathen party in favor of God and His missionaries,... signs,
wonders, and even miracles, will not change the hearts of sinners."
Taylor's opinion stemmed from his admitted disappointment that the
chief's family did not convert. [66] Although conceding that the
Africans now considered the missionary to be a rainmaker, he failed to
understand the implications of Davis's transformed status as a
shaman or how the tribe's perspective on Christianity may have
changed.

Interestingly, during the twentieth century a considerable number
of missionaries found within the foregoing categories aligned themselves
with autonomous "faith missions," whose personnel often lived
abroad without advertising their financial needs. Some went alone as
independent missionaries, but all prayed for the Lord's provision
to come through the financial support of friends and backers at home.
Critics decried the faith mission as the "Vagabond Mission."
[67] This novel and hotly debated strategy, with its own unique claim on
the miraculous benefaction of God, can be traced back at least to Edward
Irving (Missionaries After the Apostolic School [1825]) and Anthony
Norris Groves (Christian Devotedness [1825]) early in the nineteenth
century.

Turning the cessationist hourglass upside down, the radical
evangelicals, who form the fifth category, anticipated the full
restoration of miracles and spiritual gifts. Going one step further than
those in the fourth category, these leaders on the fringe of the
missions movement embraced unusual positions for their time. They
believed that missionaries should pray for the sick and trust God for
their own healing, which would serve as a witness of his power before
the heathen. This notion was premised on the belief that healing is
immediately available to every believer by the exercise of faith in the
atoning work of Jesus Christ (Isa. 53:4-5; Matt. 8:17). [68] In
addition, they believed in intercessory prayer for spiritual victory in
the cosmic realm to bind the power of satanic forces that resist the
successful evangelization of the nations. [69] Others suggested that God
might bestow the "gift of tongues" on missionaries so they
could preach immediately upon reaching their destinations, a major
concern to p remillennialists whose "zero-hour" eschatology left little time to evangelize. [70]

Together they evoked a virtually apocalyptic scenario of God's
direct intervention in "signs and wonders" (Acts 5:12) to
ensure that every tribe and nation would hear the Gospel before the
coming of Christ. The expected "last days" outpouring of the
Holy Spirit, perceived by many as the only hope for enabling Christians
to reach the world with the Gospel, led them to seek for the return of
key elements of New Testament evangelism for their overall stratagem: an
approach to mission centered largely on the action of the Holy Spirit
invading Satan's realm with great demonstrations of power to gather
out souls for Christ during the end-times harvest, [71]

Supporters of God's direct involvement in mission through
providential and miraculous events included A. B. Simpson, founder of
the Alliance and the Missionary Training Institute in Nyack, New York,
and A. J. Gordon, chair of the American Baptist Missionary Union and
founder of the Boston Missionary Training School. [72] After reflecting
on the sad state of Protestant Christianity, Simpson expressed his
discontent with the pedestrian and seemingly ineffective mission
practices of the day. He lamented that mainline Protestantism "has
lost her faith... in the supernatural signs and workings of the Holy
Ghost, she has lost the signs also, and the result is that she is
compelled to produce conviction upon the minds of the heathen very
largely by purely rational and moral considerations and
influences." [73] Now at the close of history, wrote Simpson, the
return of the extraordinary gifts of the Holy Spirit would expedite the
evangelization of the world. [74]

Other controversial proponents included Benjamin Hardin Irwin,
leader of the "fire-baptized" wing of the Holiness movement;
the colorful John Alexander Dowie, the faith healer who established the
utopian community of Zion City, Illinois; Frank W. Sandford, founder of
the Holy Ghost and Us Bible School at Shiloh, Maine; Levi R. Lupton, a
Friends evangelist, director of the Missionary Home and Training School
and the World Evangelization Company in Alliance, Ohio; Elizabeth V.
Baker, leader of the Elim Faith Home and the Rochester (N.Y.) Bible
Training School; and Charles F. Parham, a Holiness evangelist who
started Bethel Bible School in Topeka, Kansas. These and others
envisioned sending out end-times missionaries filled with the Holy
Spirit in whose ministries unusual displays of God's power would be
the norm rather than the exception.

Conclusion

Schaff's claim that no transition in the history of
Christianity was so "sudden, abrupt, and radical as that from the
apostolic to the post-apostolic age" reflects the dramatic shift
away from the miraculous that was encouraged by the Reformers,
post-Reformation scholastic theologians, and philosophers of the
Enlightenment. Because of the impact on historiography and the
ethnocentricity of historians and missiologists, accounts of paranormal
happenings have been largely excluded in the composition of textbook
histories and related mission studies.

Despite the reservations of Western academics, paranormal phenomena
have indeed played a vital role in the growth of Christianity, although
whether in every local context and to what extent must still be
determined. Far from being peripheral, they explain much about the
acceptance of the faith by native peoples whose non-Western patterns of
reasoning paralleled that of the audiences to whom the apostles and
Gregory Thaumaturgus preached. Fortunately, scholars now exhibit more
interest in learning about the worldviews of indigenous Christians. [75]
This development has important ramifications for the writing of
Christian history in the twenty-first century, for historians and
missiologists now have an unparalleled opportunity to show the
interchange between often overlooked but visible spiritual dynamics and
religious and cultural changes. [76] Though such phenomena represent
just one factor in the shaping of Christianity, their importance should
not be underestimated as the "decolonization" of history
proceed s.

American Baptist missionary Francis Mason, who recorded the early
years of missions in Myanmar for a Western audience, perceptively noted
that "the introduction of Christianity among the Karens is,
perhaps, too full of 'truth stranger than fiction' to be
believed by those who have not been actors in the scenes
themselves." [77] Incredible though it all may have seemed to him,
Mason preserved the story to enable his readers to grasp the full scope
of how the Karens became Christians. For this reason, we are in his
debt.

From another perspective, had Alexander Duff been aware of how the
Karens accepted the faith after Jonathan and Deborah Wade entered their
village, it might have broadened his understanding of the worldview of
his Indian students. He would have discovered dynamics beyond verbal
proclamation and Western learning that could have potentially influenced
their reception of the Gospel. Indigenous peoples like the Karens,
Indians, Jamaicans, Bataks, and Bantus knew much better than their
missionary mentors the relevance of Paul's description of the
founding of the church at Thessalonica for their own contexts: "Our
message of the gospel came to you not in word only, but also in power
and in the Holy Spirit, and with full conviction" (1 Thess. 1:5).

Gary B. McGee, a contributing editor, is Professor of Church
History and Pentecostal Studies at Assemblies of God Theological
Seminary, Springfield, Missouri. He wrote This Gospel Shall Be Preached
(1986), a two-volume history of Assemblies of God international
missions, and coedited the Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic
Movements (1988).

(4.) For the purposes of this article, the definition of paranormal
phenomena or "supernatural" demonstrations embraces (1) claims
of miracles, that is, events perceived as divine interventions into the
realm of humanity and nature; (2) unusual incidents viewed by those in
attendance as divine that have no biblical precedents but have some
connection to main events in Scripture; and (3) manifestations of the
"charismata" such as the gifts of prophecy, tongues, healings,
and discerning of spirits (1 Cor. 12:7-11). See Robert Bruce Mullin,
Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 1996), p. 6.

(5.) Mark A. Noll, "The Potential of Missiology for the Crises
of History," in History and the Christian Historian, ed. Ronald A.
Wells (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 113-15.

(6.) Philip Schaff, A Companion to the Greek New Testament and the
English Version, with facsimile illustrations of mss. and standard
editions of the New Testament (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1883),
p. 81.

(9.) Stanley M. Burgess, The Spirit and the Church: Antiquity
(Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 1984), p.14; idem,
"Proclaiming the Gospel with Miraculous Gifts in the Postbiblical
Early Church," in The Kingdom and the Power: Are Healing and the
Spiritual Gifts Used by Jesus and the Early Church Meant for the Church
Today? ed. Gary S. Greig and Kevin N. Springer (Ventura, Calif.: Regal
Books, 1993), pp. 277-88.

(40.) V. Raymond Edman, The Light in Dark Ages: Eighteen Centuries
of Missions from the Giving of the Great Commission to the Beginning of
Modern Missions Under William Carey (Wheaton, Ill.: Van Kampen Press,
1949).

(66.) Ibid., pp. 276-77. As it happened, neither Davis's name
nor this astonishing incident appears in Wade Crawford Barclay's
detailed multivolume History of Methodist Missions (New York: United
Methodist Church, 1949-57), published over a century later.

(69.) For example, Alfred E. Street, Intercessory Foreign
Missionaries: Practical Suggestions from a Missionary to Earnest
Christians (Boston: American Advent Mission Society Ica. 1903-ca.
1923]), pp.5-Il. The tract was also published by the Student Volunteer
Movement for Foreign Missions and later by Moody Press. A more radical
approach came with Frank W. Sandford; see his Seven Years with God (Mont
Vernon, N.H.: Kingdom Press, 1957), pp. 142-45.

(75.) For example, Julie C. Ma, When the Spirit Meets the Spirits:
Pentecostal Ministry Among the Kankana-ey Tribe in the Philippines
(Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2000).

(76.) Noll, "Potential of Missiology," p. 112.

(77.) Mason, Karen Apostle, p. 155.

Adrian Hastings Remembered

Kevin ward

Adrian Hastings, Emeritus Professor of Theology, University of
Leeds. Catholic priest, church historian, missiologist, theologian,
campaigner for justice. Born June 23, 1929; died May 30, 2001, aged 71.

Adrian Hastings, who died after a short illness while still at the
peak of his intellectual powers, was one of the great ecumenical
thinkers of our age. In particular, his contribution to the study of
Christianity in Africa is immense, important both for its grasp of
detail and complexity and for its ability to place the African story
decisively within the history of Christianity as a whole.

Born into an English Catholic family, Hastings studied for the
priesthood in Rome in the early 1950s. Determined to work as a
missionary in Africa, he encountered in Rome a generation of young
African ordinands, such as the theologian Vincent Mulago of the
Democratic Republic of Congo, who were to have an impact on the
flowering of an African Catholic theology in the era of African
independence and Vatican II. Already a radical in social and political
matters, Hastings had the temerity and inner confidence, even as a
student, to enter into a sharp debate with apologists of the Salazar
regime of Portugal. Hastings argued with measured rationality, but also
with passionate commitment, against identifying the Catholic faith with
the survival of Portuguese power in Goa.

Espousing the aspirations of the African priests he knew in Rome,
Hastings persuaded the authorities to allow him to go to Africa as a
parish priest under a local bishop rather than as a member of a
missionary order. From 1958 he worked in Masaka diocese in Uganda, whose
diocesan, Bishop Joseph Kiwanuka, was the first African Catholic bishop
ordained in modern times. After a period in parochial work at Villa
Maria, Hastings became a teacher at Bukalasa minor seminary, many of
whose students later made significant contributions to Ugandan
Catholicism and to public life. In 1966 the East African bishops
entrusted him with the task of producing commentaries on the documents
of Vatican II, interpreting them in the context of the life of the
church in East Africa. This task of considerable missiological and
pastoral significance ensured that Hastings was deeply involved in the
transformation of Catholicism as it sought to embody African values and
voice African concerns. He was subsequently able to apply those ins
ights ecumenically in his study on Christian marriage in Africa,
commissioned by the Anglican churches of eastern and southern Africa.

In the early 1970s Hastings crossed swords again with the
Portuguese regime, this time over its record of repression in its
African colonies. He publicized information about massacres at Wiriyamu
in Mozambique, in the process developing a formidable indictment of
Portuguese policy in Africa, not least the pretensions of its civilizing
and Christianizing mission.

By this time Hastings had become a research fellow at the School of
Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. He took part in a
comprehensive symposium, held in Jos, Nigeria, on Christianity in
independent Africa. This gathering resulted in the 1978 collection of
essays Christianity in Independent Africa, which Hastings helped to
compile. His fellowship also resulted in his book A History of African
Christianity, 1950-1975 (1979), which so well captured the excitement of
those years of upheaval and optimism, and the subsequent anxieties, in a
period when Christianity took on a new centrality and relevance for
African society. From SOAS Hastings went to Aberdeen, as lecturer in
religious studies, where Andrew Walls was professor.

Hastings had become acutely aware of the problems that an
insistence on clerical celibacy created for African Catholicism. In 1979
Hastings himself made the decision, difficult for a Catholic priest, to
marry. His wife, Ann, an Anglican, had grown up m Southern Rhodesia and
worked for the Anglican mission society United Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel. Between 1982 and 1985 they lived in the newly
independent state of Zimbabwe, where Hastings had gone to be professor
of religious studies at Harare University. There he wrote his
influential account of twentieth-century English Christianity.

In 1985 he was appointed professor in Leeds. His energetic
leadership resulted in a growth in student numbers and in the
international reputation of the Department of Theology and Religious
Studies. The study of religion in Africa was initiated, strengthening
the university's wide interests in development studies and in the
politics and literature of Africa. During these years he wrote his
magnum opus on Africa, The Church in Africa, 1450-1950 (1994). As editor
of Journal of Religion in Africa (in succession to its founder, Andrew
Walls), he saw the journal grow in strength and prestige. It has become
a leading forum for innovative research on Christianity, Islam, and
traditional religion in Africa. The present editor, David Maxwell, and
Ingrid Lawrie (who gave Hastings invaluable secretarial support), have
produced a Festschrift entitled Christianity and the African
Imagination: Essays in Honour of Adrian Hastings (2001). The continuing
vitality of Hastings's own intellectual concerns are shown in the
fact that, after retiring in 1994, he assumed direction of two important
projects: A World History of Christianity (1999) and the Oxford
Companion to Christian Thought (2000). He provided much of the dynamic
and the intellectual rationale for both enterprises. During the Leeds
years, Hastings had also been a leading campaigner on the Balkans. He
became particularly associated with the struggle in Bosnia to preserve
traditions of ethnic and religious diversity within a single state,
against all narrow particularism.

Hastings's writing is characterized by a remarkable scope and
penetration. He was able to summarize a movement, a person, or an era
with great lucidity and perceptiveness. His writings on Africa have an
intense humanity, a strong identification with the hopes and strivings
of his subjects, whether Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox (he had a
fascination for the historical depth of the church in Ethiopia), or
members of independent, African instituted, churches. His portraits of
individuals and of religious societies are masterful, both in
illuminating their importance and in placing them within a wider
historical movement. His corpus of historical writing on Africa was
completed before the full extent of the newer African Pentecostalism
could properly be assessed historically, but one can be sure that he
would have applied an equal perspicacity and broad sympathy to these
significant developments.

Hastings wrote, as he lectured, with great clarity and economy,
rationality and commitment. He was impatient of obfuscating theorizing;
his writing has directness and readability, and yet it springs from an
intellectual depth and sophistication, both methodologically and
conceptually. Hastings was convinced that the history of African
Christianity is an integral part of the total history of Christianity.
For him Africa was important not simply because of its evangelistic
dynamism but for the intellectual and imaginative contribution it makes
to world Christianity. As he put it in one of the last things he wrote
before his death: "But what matters even more is the emergence into
full vitality of still larger Churches in the southern continents of
Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Upon them may the future third
millennium of Christianity depend."

Kevin Ward is Lecturer in the Department of Theology and Religious
Studies, University of Leeds.

Adrian Hastings's "My pilgrimage in Mission" was
published in the INTERNATIONAL BULLETION OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH, April
1992, pp. 60-64. Ed.

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