Calvin and Missions - World Evangelical Alliance

Calvinism and the Missionary Enterprise
(1950)
SAMUEL M. ZWEMER
Samuel Marinus Zwemer (1867-1952), nicknamed The Apostle to Islam, was
an American missionary, traveler, and scholar. After being ordained to the
Reformed Church ministry, he was a missionary at Busrah, Bahrein, and at
other locations in Arabia from 1891 to 1905. He also traveled widely in Asia
Minor, and he was elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of London.
In 1929 he was appointed Professor of Missions and Professor of the
History of Religion at the Princeton Theological Seminary where he taught
until 1951. He was influential in mobilizing many Christians to go into missionary
work in Islamic Countries. Beside editing ‘The Muslim World’ for 37
years (1911-1947) he wrote appr. 30 influential books.
© Theology Today. Originally published in Theology Today (Princeton, NJ) 7 (1950), pp.
206-216. Reprinted with permission from the publisher (http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu).
I. Calvin and Missions
It was the Roman Catholic Church historian and missionary professor,
Joseph Schmidlin of Münster, who asserted that all the Reformers, Luther,
Zwingli, Melanchthon, and Calvin were not conscious of the missionary
idea and displayed no missionary activity. Whatever may be true of Luther’s
attitude toward the Jews, the Turks, and the pagans of his day (and
there is much to be said), Calvin stood in a class by himself in this respect.
This has been clearly shown by two German scholars in articles that appeared
in 1909 and 1934. The first was by the great theologian Schlatter of
Tubingen entitled “Kalvin und die Mission” in the Evangelische Missionsmagazin
(Vol. 53) and the other by Asst. Professor Ernst Pfisterer of
Bochum in Die Allgemeine Missionszeitschrift under the title “Der Missionsgedanke
bei Kalvin” (March, 1934). Both of these writers agree that
Calvin recognized the missionary obligation of the Church both in theory
and practice.
Schmidlin asserts that Calvin did not recognize such obligation nor its
practical fulfillment. He confined his missionary ideas, says Schmidlin, to
commonplaces and declared missions superfluous. Schmidlin calls “the
67