CONCEPTS OF MISSION - Orbis Books

Mission in Contemporary Missiology 19
time Christianity was spreading to most parts of the global South, beginning
with the fifteenth-century missionary expansion, the Protestant Reformation
had just begun. As a result of the latter, the Council of Trent (1545-1563)
was convoked. This council, intending to safeguard the unity of the church
in the face of the Protestant Reformation, initiated a Counter-Reformation.
It called for the uniformity of the entire church, including the young
churches. Therefore, missionaries had no choice but to join in the effort
toward the unity of the church and of the Christian faith (Oborji 1998, 72).
Again, in the nineteenth century, in the midst of a divided church in the
West, there arose the modernist movement. The unity of the Christian faith
was once more threatened. And in an effort to safeguard the unity of the
faith, Vatican Council I (1870) presented a theology of revelation that left little
room for recognition of elements of revelation outside the Catholic
Church (Dulles 1983, 51-52). In all this, one needs to compare the mentality
or attitude of the church with that of the rest of the world at the time. Other
world cultures or religions were as well not engaged in dialogue. Furthermore,
the underdeveloped state of social sciences, especially cultural anthropology
at the time, did not help the matter either. Cultural anthropology at
the time judged most peoples outside the North Atlantic world as peoples
without culture and civilization. Africans, more than any other race of the
human family, seemed to have suffered most from this kind of stereotype.
Invariably, this underdeveloped nature of cultural anthropology influenced
missionary theories and practice during that time. To be noted as well
is the fact that up to the beginning of twentieth century, there was no welldeveloped
theology of mission in both Catholic and Protestant circles. And
when it came to be developed, it started when the theology of adaptation
was in vogue: the salvation of souls and the implanting of the church
throughout the world as the universal means of salvation intended by God
for humankind. The two perspectives, salvation of souls and implanting of
the church, are two aspects of the church’s missionary endeavor. The latter
persisted until Vatican Council II. The former has been broadened by the
term evangelization, especially with the modern emphasis on integral evangelization.
Furthermore, several documents of Vatican II speak positively of
the necessity of adaptation in describing the same reality that the word
“inculturation” today addresses (SC 37-40).
The theological foundation of inculturation is the incarnation. The basic
argument is that just as Jesus Christ, the Word of God, became incarnate in
a human culture, in the Jewish milieu, the gospel of Jesus Christ should be
allowed to be inculturated (or incarnated) in the local culture and context
(Matt 5:17; Acts 10:34). In this case, incarnation as the theological model of
inculturation could be explained in two senses. In the first sense, it means the
process of mutual penetration of the gospel and culture so that Jesus Christ
may be present “today” in every culture. In this particular sense, the event
of the incarnation continues in time; it happens each time the gospel is made