The 16th-century Reformers had a poorly-developed missiology and overseas mission was an area to which they gave little thought.
That is what is said. ‘Yes’, this argument runs, ‘they rediscovered the apostolic gospel, but they had no vision to spread it to the uttermost parts of the earth.’ Possibly the first author to raise the question about this failure of early Protestantism was the Roman Catholic theologian and controversialist, Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621). He argued that one of the marks of a true church was its continuity with the missionary passion of the apostles. In his mind, Roman Catholicism’s missionary activity was indisputable and this supplied a strong support for its claim to stand in solidarity with the apostles.
But such a characterisation fails to account for the complexity of this issue.
The explanation?
First, in the earliest years of the Reformation, none of the major Protestant bodies possessed sufficient naval and maritime resources to take the gospel outside of the bounds of Europe. The Iberian Catholic kingdoms of Spain and Portugal, on the other hand, who were the acknowledged leaders among missions-sending regions at this time, had such resources aplenty. Moreover, their missionary endeavours were often indistinguishable from imperialistic expansion.
It is noteworthy that other Roman Catholic nations of Europe, like Poland and Hungary, also lacked sea-going capabilities and evidenced no more cross-cultural missionary concern at that time than did Lutheran Saxony or Reformed Zurich.
Second, it is vital to recognise that, as Scott Hendrix, Emeritus Professor of History, Princeton Theological Seminary, has rightly argued, the Reformation was the attempt to ‘make European culture more Christian than it had been. It was, if you will, an attempt to re-root faith, to re-christianise Europe’.
Re-evangelising Europe
In the eyes of the Reformers, this programme of re-evangelising Europe involved two convictions. First, they considered what passed for Christianity in late mediaeval Europe to be sub-Christian at best, pagan at worst. As John Calvin (1509–1564) put it in his reply to Sadoleto (1539): ‘… the light of divine truth had been extinguished, the Word of God buried, the virtue of Christ left in profound oblivion, and the pastoral office subverted. Meanwhile, impiety so stalked abroad that almost no doctrine of religion was pure from admixture, no ceremony free from error, no part, however minute, of divine worship untarnished by superstition.’
Second, the Reformers viewed their task as a missionary one: they were planting true Christian churches. A brief examination of the missiology of John Calvin in this month’s article and that of the next few months clearly shows the error of the perspective that the Reformation was by and large a non-missionary movement.
Advancing Christ’s Kingdom
A frequent theme of Calvin is the victorious advance of Christ’s kingdom throughout the entire world. God the Father, says Calvin’s prefatory address to Francis I in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, has appointed Christ to ‘rule from sea to sea, and from the rivers even to the ends of the earth’. The reason for the Spirit’s descent at Pentecost, Calvin notes in a sermon on Acts 2, was in order for the gospel to ‘reach all the ends and extremities of the world’.
In a sermon on 1 Timothy 2.5–6, one of a series on this chapter, Calvin underlines again the universality of the Christian faith: Jesus came, not simply to save a few, but ‘to extend his grace over all the world’. In that same sermon series on 1 Timothy 2, Calvin declares that ‘God wants his grace to be known to all the world, and he has commanded that his gospel be preached to all creatures; we must (as much as we are able) seek the salvation of those who today are strangers to the faith, who seem to be completely deprived of God’s goodness’.
It was this global perspective on the significance of the gospel that also gave Calvin’s theology a genuine dynamism and forward movement. It has been rightly said that if it had not been for the so-called Calvinist wing of the Reformation many of the great gains of that era would have died on the vine.
