Robinson Crusoe tries again

Werner Ustorf 

Robinson Crusoe 

tries again 

Missiology and European 

Constructions of “Self” and “Other” 

in a Global World 1789–2010 

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

Werner Ustorf, Robinson Crusoe tries again 

© 2010 Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen 

ISBN Print: 978-3-525-60444-1 — ISBN E-Book: 978-3-647-60444-2


Research in Contemporary Religion 

Edited by 

Hans-Günter Heimbrock, Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati, Bryan P. Stone, 

Heinz Streib, Claire Wolfteich, Trygve Wyller 

In Co-operation with 

Sunhee Ahn (Seoul, Korea), Bärbel Beinhauer-Köhler (Frankfurt/Main, 

Germany), Wanda Deifelt (S¼o Paolo, Brazil), Jaco S. Dreyer 

(Pretoria, S. Africa), Mehmet Emin Köktas (Izmir, Turkey), 

Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore (Nashville, USA), Siebren Miedema 

(Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Bradd Shore (Atlanta, USA), David M. 

Wulff (Norton, USA), Margaret Yee (Oxford, UK), Dale P. 

Andrews (Boston, USA), Hanan Alexander (Haifa, Israel), William 

Storrar (Princeton, USA), Carla Danani (Macerata, Italy) 

Volume 9 

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 




Werner Ustorf 

Robinson Crusoe tries again 

Missiology and European Constructions 

of “Self” and “Other” 

in a Global World 1789 – 2010 

Selected essays edited 

by Roland Löffler 





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Contents 

Roland Löffler 

Introduction. Robinson Crusoe tries again or: Werner Ustorf’s way of 

developing missiology into a research concept of global and pluralistic 

Christianity . ................................ 7 

Part I: Religion in a Revolutionary Age 

1. Bremen: Believing Revolutionaries – Revolutionary Believers . . . 21 

2. London: Equiano and the Black Spirituality of Freedom . . . . . . 31 

3. Weimar: the Fusion of the Enlightenment and Christianity 

according to Herder . . . ....................... 46 

Part II: Religion in the Colonial Twilight 

4. Dreams of Empire and the Christian Transcendent . ........ 59 

5. A Wounded Healer: the Missionary Self . . ............. 74 

6. Cognitive Violence: the Missionary as a Scholar . . ........ 86 

7. Protestant Missions – a Retrospective . . . ............. 100 

Part III: Dark Transcendence: the Totalitarian Resurrection 

8. Prophet of Post-Christianity – Hauer’s Project of Liberating the 

“Nordic Soul” . . ........................... 115 

9. Strange Attraction: the Missions and the “Brown” Revival . . . . . 133 

10. Theological Discernment: “Political Religion” . . . ......... 146 

11. The Muscular Church: Three Drafts of a Post-War Christian 

Europe ................................. 174 



6 


Contents 

Part IV: Church Decline and Religious Innovation in “God’s Continent” 

12. Reverse Mission – Treating Europeans as Africans . ........ 189 

13. Charting the Future – Mapmakers and Local Scouts ........ 203 

14. The Rediscovery of “Primal” Religion . . . ............. 216 

15. Theological Responses to Europe’s Multi-Religious Turn . . . . . . 238 

Postscript . . ................................ 251 

Bibliography Werner Ustorf, 1975–2010 ................. 255 

List of PhD Theses supervised by Werner Ustorf at his Chair of 

Mission, University of Birmingham and awarded between 1993 and 

2009 ..................................... 265 

Index of Persons . . . ........................... 269 




Roland Löffler 

Introduction. 

Robinson Crusoe tries again or: 

Werner Ustorf’s way of developing missiology 

into a research concept of global 

and pluralistic Christianity 

When Robinson Crusoe discovered the stranger on his desert island, he did 

something essential: he gave this man a name, Friday – according to the day 

he found him. Naming an adult is a quite unusal, if not to say an imperial act, 

because it reveals a structure of power and the incorporation of the named 

personintotherealm,orlifeoftheonewhodoesthenaming.Thisistheone 

side of the coin. If we turn to the other side, we can also say: naming is a 

rather human act. A person can be identitfied as a specific person by his or 

her name. Or to put in another way: identity-formation is processing two 

requirements at the same time: by combining the “Self” and the “Other” in 

accepted interaction, but keeping as well their essential distinctiveness. The 

“Other” is not the “Self” – even if one treats it as a respected, and equal, 

“Self”. Still, the way human persons or social groups relate to each other is 

and was manysided in history – and was not always framed by equality or 

respect. Long periods of conquest and domination shaped the encounter 

between “the North” and the rest of the world – be it the so-called “South” or 

the “Near” and the “Far East”. 

What holds true for European history in general, can also be found in 

European religious history. One of the most interesting, but also ambivalent 

parts of the Christian heritage is mission history. Mission is basically the outer 

form of the communication of the Gospel. Whether one likes it or not, this 

form of communication is a fundamental element of Christianity (in the 

biblical tradition based on the final commandment to his disciples given by 

the risen Christ himself, Mt 28). Various ideas of mission are not unknown in 

some other religions too, e.g. Islam. Many major religions have an inbuilt 

impetus to spread their belief- and value-systems to others – inspired by the 

conviction of a final revelation or to save people from a however conceived 

final judgement. The eschatological dimension always catalysed great energies 

and made people move to distant parts of the world, risk their life, but also 



8 


Introduction 

dominate others – in a strange mixture of idealistic, paternalistic, theological, 

anthropological elements and sometimes also with a specific ethos of a certain 

politico-theological world order. In Christianity, the result was and is the 

emergence of a still growing world-wide religion, but also a history of pain and 

suffering – be it among missionaries themselves, both spiritually and 

physically – and also among the nations, groups, communities, and 

individuals that missions attempted to conquer and convert. One needs in 

this regard only refer to the extremely difficult past when modern missions 

(who had started before colonialism and often in the spirit of reconciliation) 

became agents of the state in the time of imperialism. 

Surely, when a new faith – such as the Christian one – penetrated an 

“undiscovered” part of the world, let’s say in Black Africa, the encounter 

would lead to changes in the perception of “Self” and “Other”. Before the 

African self progressed from its “heathen” condition to “Christian” 

maturity, the missionary on the spot or his headquarters back in Europe 

must have had a certain, defined idea how the “Other” would look like and 

how he had to be treated, converted, and turned to a “civilised” Christian 

personality. To re-define human persons in accordance with clearly designed 

religious programmes, is a typcial characteristic of the last two centuries. 

Christian Mission can look back over a history of 2000 years, but the interconnection 

of civilisation, modernity, politcs, colonialism, economics, 

nationalism, revolution, urbanism, ideologies, and religion – is a specific 

new and modern variation of an “old story”. This deliberately modern 

history of mission is the topic of this book, which brings in four thematic 

chapters together fifteen exceptional articles plus one postscipt by one of the 

leading missiologists and mission historians in international research, 

Werner Ustorf, who, from 1990 to 2010, held the Chair of Mission at the 

University of Birmingham. Ustorf’s opus has a very wide dimension 

covering the entire period of modernity from the French Revolution into our 

days, which should be mirrored in this book. 

Looking back over the last two centuries of the Protestant as well as 

Catholic “mission project”, one can see two results: an enormous success 

evident by the ubiquitous presence of Christianity today, and the failure to 

win over the majority of the world’s population. The conclusion to be drawn 

from these two developments is in Ustorf’s view clear enough. In January 

2010, at the Aarhus conference “2010 and Beyond. Church and Mission in the 

Third Millennium“, he stated: “The period of foreign mission in the life of 

the Christian religion is over because it is now abundantly clear that today’s 

context is so very different from that of the 18 th and 19 th centuries when the 

modern idea of foreign mission was conceived. We are dealing today much 

more with the theological and practical issues that exist among the churches 

of the world; that is to say, with ecumenical matters. Using government as an 

analogy we could say that mission matters are no longer handled by the 

foreign secretary, but, rather, by the home secretary or the ministry of the 




Introduction 9 

interior. Our task now is to acknowledge that our religion is a global player, at 

home everywhere, acting with and among others. World Christianity is 

indeed currently seeking to accommodate itself to the new post-foreign 

mission situation and is consequently negotiating a steep learning curve. 

However, our progress is strewn with obstacles arising from our remembrance 

of previous failures that make it difficult for us to proceed. […] My 

hypothesis is that mission is inhibiting its own progress because of its 

fixation with modernist conceptions of its task; that is to say, with memories 

and ideas that have their origin not simply in the Bible, but, more 

specifically, in Western dreams of control and knowledge.” This is one aspect 

that permeates Ustorf’s texts. The other focuses on the enriching 

experiences of “global Christianity”. While the missions since 1789 

represent what Ustorf calls “the early learning phase of Christianity, an 

important step on its way to becoming a global religion”, the church decline 

in Europe is a sign of a crisis. For the Birmingham missiologist this crisis is 

no surprise or shock, but a rather normal aspect of the development of 

Christian history. However, in reading his sometimes very harsh analyses of 

the downfall of European churches, one could critically ask whether his 

perception is to a certain extend too much focused on the surely frustrating 

religious situation in the traditional churches in the cities on the British Isles, 

because the last decade brought to other European countries a new public 

interest in Christianity, although this does not necessarily push up regular 

Church attendance. 

At any rate, the point of interest in Ustorf’s argumentation lies somewhere 

else. In his article “Why Christian Experience in Europe Matters” (2005) he 

pledges for a more tolerant and inclusive perspective on modern persons’ 

religious minds. He acknowledges the “invisible religion” of “Others” 

respectfully without ignoring the importance of the Christian essentials and 

their on-going impulses for present day European cultures. He writes: “The 

downfall of European church life is neither ‘atypical’ nor can it be explained by 

the emergence of a ‘not-gospel-friendly’ culture. Those who leave the church 

do not go because they have no ‘faith’. They often go for the right reasons, 

among which is their refusal to submit to institutionalized spiritual greed and 

their critique of the churches’ embrace of power. Among those who stay 

various narratives of exile are generated. Such narratives will be important for 

the formation of faith in a late-capitalist society.” Ustorf contiunes to argue 

that Europe’s distinctive Christian experience is not irrelevant, “but provides 

us with a genuine opportunity to ask fundamental questions about Christianity.” 

These two basic aspects of his research agenda signal Ustorf’s understanding 

of his own discipline: 

a) Due to the assumption that the concept of foreign mission is anachronistic, 

missiology becomes more than ever an analytical theological instrument 



10 


Introduction 

to ask how, where, when and in which way one can speak with responsibilty 

of God and the Gospel. Who expects to find a handy booklet on “How to do 

mission these days” by Werner Ustorf, will be disappointed. 

b) Ustorf’s theological approach is essentially critical – more implicitely 

than explicitly in the tradition of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt 

School, because he rarely refers to their authors – and if so more to Walter 

Benjamin, who felt more affected by religious topoi, then to Theodor 

Adorno. 

c) With this critical approach, it is obvious that for an academic with great 

sensitivity for a sharp methodology, the historical analysis is both, a safe 

haven as well as a rich source for clarifying the phenomena of “longue 

dureØ” in Christian mentality. 

d) Global Christianity as the actual state of affairs is to a large extent a result of 

mission. But the world and the faith have changed – Christianity becomes 

more and more a “Southern religion”. It might be worthwhile adding some 

facts: whereas at the beginning of the 20th century 80 % of the believers 

lived in Europe, Russia, and North-America, the figure decreased in 2000 

to only 40 %. Christianity in Africa and Asia, however, grew in the same 

time from 5 % to 32 %. Christians from Africa, Latin America and Asia 

articulate their Christian faith in new ways, trying to inculturate their own 

traditions, combining them with the basic belief in Christ’s passion, death 

and resurrection. Mission certainly was an agent of the globalisation of 

Christianity in the course of the last two centuries – and this means also 

that through, in, and after mission, the variants of Christianity world-wide 

have greatly increased. Thus, missiology becomes “Intercultural Theology”. 

e) Missiology or Intercultural Theology, he argues in the above mentioned 

Aarhus-paper, needs to be updated. In order to do this, a Christian 

understanding of mission has to free itself from the ,safety in numberssyndrome’, 

stopping to manage the faith of others and acknowledging the 

pain produced by acts of religious domination. 

f) Speaking of a critical agenda, Ustorf does not only confront churches and 

mission agencies with their own mistakes and historical burdens. He also 

blaims Western historians and sociologists for their marginalization of the 

religious dimension of European culture. The old secularization thesis of 

the 1960s – with a very strong resonance in the humanities for nearly 40 

years – assumed that religion was becoming a quantitØ negliable, a private 

undertaking of and for somewhat backward individuals; but this thesis 

needs updating as well. The dialectics between secularization and the 

Enlightenment is obvious, and again Ustorf can show most refreshing 

insights, for example, how seemingly atheist or secular political agendas 

regularly worked with basically theological and missionary implications 

or metaphors. 





Therefore, missiology as both historical analysis and intercultural theology 

proves to be a highly interdisciplinary and innovative field of research which 

helps to understand the religious traditions in the North and the South and 

their mutual interaction much better than before. The potential for fruitful 

research was, is and will be high – and this is true not least thanks to Werner 

Ustorf’s engaged work for 35 years. 

The agenda remains broad, and so is Werner Ustorf’s intellectual mind. In 

some regard, it might be allowed to argue that his personal biography and his 

own way of thinking paved the way to his academic agenda. Looking at the 

places where he actually worked, Werner Ustorf’s life does not offer major 

interruptions or greater changes. At least at first sight. He was born in 1945 in 

Hamburg, did his baccalaureate there, and read medicine, geography, 

education as well as history at the alma mater of Germany’s northern 

metropolis. Theology was more kept as an intellectual hobby. He has been 

brought up in a family with inner unrest and without any closer links to the 

Church. Thus, when he turned 14 or 15 years, his interest in religious matters 

helped him also to find his own way and develop his personality beyond the 

frame set by his family. He was looking for alternative forms of life and 

meaning, and was fascinated by Christian faith. However, after some years of 

intensive participation, readings, and debates in church youth groups, he also 

worked himself into the tradition of the critique of religion by Nietzsche, 

Marx, and Feuerbach. Was faith a construction of the human mind? Ustorf 

started to think about his own doubts and understood the complexity of 

Christian faith in the modern, urban world. He felt that a modern version of 

Christianity had to face the tensions of belief and unbelief. In a way, this 

approach remained the cantus firmus of his life. He never tried to reconcile 

doubts and faith completely. In his typcial dialectic and somewhat ironic way 

of thinking, he labels himself as an “atheist before God” – an allusion to similar 

thoughts by Diedrich Bonhoeffer, and Dorothee Sölle (“Glauben, als ob es Gott 

nicht gäbe” or “Atheistisch an Gott glauben”) or the Anglican Bishop of 

Wollwich, John A.T. Robinson (“Honest to God”-debate in the 1960 s). – Those 

who know him say that he can believe and trust in God like a Pentecostal, but 

the next moment he would challenge ideas of eternal harmony and switch to a 

penetrating critique of religion. Between those two poles lies both, his personal 

belief as well as the esprit of his research. 

The 1960 s brought about the student movement with their plegde for more 

social, private, sexual and political liberalisation and, in Germany, a profound, 

open and public analysis of the crimes of the Third Reich and the call for the 

dismissal of former National Socialists still working in high level positions in 

different branches of the State, Church and society in general. Furthermore, 

the students demonstrated against the Vietnam-war and again any form of 

political and ecomomic imperialism. Werner Ustorf was active in this time – as 

a member of an international and left-wing student group. 



12 


Introduction 

One strategy during the 1968 “student revolution” was the blockade or 

aggressive disruption of lectures to force the professors to discuss topics of 

actual political significance (and not “academic stuff”) with the students. 

Normally, this provoked clashes among students and teaching staff, who – 

especially those from a conservative background – had no interest to 

participate in such “happenings”. The only professor who showed an interest 

in discussing with the students was the ecumenist and missiologist, Hans 

Jochen Margull. Out of such “sit-in”-debates, Ustorf developed in the course of 

the following years a life-long academic relationship with Margull. His “guru”, 

as he labels him, was able to make clear to him that in a fundamental sense his 

quest for peace, justice, reconciliation, and the keeping of the memory had a 

theological dimension. And somewhat “out of the blue”, Ustorf became a 

missiologist. Like himself, not a few of the members of the rebellious student 

group turned to theology and wrote PhD-theses under the supervision of 

Margull. Many of them gained academic recognition in Germany and some 

internationally. 

During two years of teaching religion, geography and history at a Hamburg 

grammar school, he managed to finish his PhD on African prophetism, 

published as African Initiative. The Active Suffering of the Prophet Simon 

Kimbangu in 1975 as volume 5 of Studies in the Intercultural History of 

Christianity, the series, he later edited himself. Here, he showed how Africans 

themselves appropriated Christianity in their own ways in the dialectics of the 

mission situation – no better, no worse than in “old Europe“, with problematic 

effects as well, but still with a high level of independence. 

Ustorf then worked as Margulls “Research Assistant” until 1982, when his 

inspiring supervisor passed away. The next years, Ustorf learned from two 

other great figures of missiology, Hans-Werner Gensichen and Theo 

Sundermeier at the University of Heidelberg, who helped him to shape his 

historical and theological framework. In Germany’s oldest university-city, 

he wrote his second doctoral thesis (the “Habilitation”) on The Missionary 

Method of Franz Michael Zahn and the Building of the Church in West Africa 

– a masterly study on the activities of the Bremen-based “Norddeutsche 

Mission” in the South of Togo and the Gold Coast in the late 19th century, 

which combines theological and historical analysis. The topic is in itself 

extraordinary, because Zahn represented the rather rare example of a liberal, 

anti-colonial and at the same time Pietist mission strategist with many 

contacts into academia; e. g. the doyen of German missiology, Gustav 

Warneck, was his close friend and the intellectual exchange between both of 

them was remarkable. Zahn’s missionary concept did not focus on the 

making of established churches, but had an eschatological approach, 

integrating believers in the coming “Kingdom of God”. God’s Empire, 

however, had to start in the individual, purifying their “hearts”, changing 

their life’s circumstances, which is why he was more interested in vivid local 

congregations than great ecclestiastic networks. The actual situation of the 





people became his main focus of interest – in theological as well as social 

terms. He had the intention to preach the Gospel in its essence, but to liberate 

it from certain characteristics or styles which had been formed by the 

European history of theology and mentality. He was open to the idea that 

Africans would articulate their own answers. Politically, he shared with 

Warneck a strong critique of the actual state of affairs of the churches in 

Germany as well as the interaction of colonialism and the missionary 

movement. De facto, however, Zahn’s ideal vision of a provisional church 

which would develop its contours in the local “Ewe”-population was much 

more tricky than anticipated. The education process itself, but also the 

making of an indigenous middle-class were more ambivalent than expected, 

because the local congregations became participants in the struggle for 

power. Ustorf’s book is deeply source-based – as many of his articles in the 

following years – and is written with a critical sympathy for Zahn, the 

theologically interesting outsider of mission history. In a way, some aspects 

of Ustorf’s own approach can be seen here: a strong interest in the 

eschatological dimension of the Gospel (Reich Gottes-Theologie) with both, 

the trust in God’s own sovereign activity towards humankind and the critical 

challenge of the “world” and the “church” in order to promote social justice 

and political changes. And it also casts some light on his interest how the 

missionary changed in the missionary field through the interaction with his 

“missionary objects”, who started to become subjects of local Christianity. 

These dialectics formed his research agenda for the next two decades, when 

he succeeded the famous Swiss missiologist Walter Hollenweger in 1990 as 

Professor of Mission in the University of Birmingham, one of leading places 

for intercultural and interreligious research and dialogue in Europe. British 

liberalism in society, the churches, and the university fitted his temperament 

very well, which is why he felt at home in the Midlands. One has to say as well 

that a critical author such as Ustorf, a layman showing no trace of any sort of 

ecclesiastical career in the established church, would have at the time had 

some difficulty in obtaining one of the rather limited missiology chairs at a 

German university, given that the churches there have a constitutional right to 

veto appointments. 

In Birmingham, Ustorf became a well-acknowledged researcher and 

teacher. 45 PhD-students from all parts of the world are in his eyes the most 

beautiful result of his academic career – especially because he never 

understood himself as an academic teacher in the classical sense, but as a 

learner among other learners. Those who know Werner Ustorf closer, are 

always touched by his openess, modesty and his constant will to develop 

himself further. Thus, in Birmingham he extended his research not only 

writing on the rise and fall of northern Christianity, the indigenisation of 

southern Christianity, the changes of Christian “Self” and “Other” in a 

Christianity that has gone global, and most recently, “implicit religions”, but 

also picking up difficult memories of the “century of the extremes” (Eric 



14 


Introduction 

Hobsbawm). Numerous publications are related to a topic that moved him 

since his student days: political religion and the interaction of the churches, 

theology, and the mission agencies with National Socialism. 

In the 1990 s, historiography underwent interesting turns. Social historians 

saw the limitations of their often neo-Marxist agenda, because human beings 

and social groups were more than only “classes”, strata groups etc. Norms, 

values, convictions were discovered as motivating factors for social interaction – 

and with the (re-)birth of cultural history, religion re-gained a place of higher 

interest for historians. In such a context, mission history was also seen in a new 

perspective. The secular, purist view that missions were only instruments of 

imperialism was given up (though the historical critique of mission is without a 

doubt still necessary), the cultural exchange and encounter, the contribution of 

missions to the development of certain regions of the Earth in implementing 

social infrastructure, enabling new and sometimes more liberal forms of 

religion, the missionary contribution to academia (anthropology, archaeology, 

theology, medicine etc.), but also the responses of the local cultures to the 

missionaries and, on the next level, to their home organisations and churches, 

proved mission history to be a very wide and extremely rich field of academic 

inquiry. In this change of the parameters of discourse, Ustorf gained an 

important role, firstly on a conceptual basis, secondly as a source-based 

researcher with a theoretical framework and clear questions to ask, and thirdly 

as a bridge builder between the Anglo-Saxon world and that of the European 

continent. In a more and more global world, academia often becomes extremely 

regional, because academics on both sides of the Atlantic unfortunately tend to 

ignore the languages spoken by their colleagues on the other side. – His latest 

project deals with “Art, Religion, and Survival in Central Australia”. The project 

is situated in four disciplines – anthropology, mission history, art and theology. 

Ustorf focuses on the formation of an almost unknown Aboriginal church, their 

theology and their narratives. 

This “tour d’horizon” through Werner Ustorf’s biography and academic 

production will be reflected in this book, which has twofold purpose: 

Firstly to honour an academic teacher and researcher, who is celebrating in 

2010 his 65th birthday and the retirement from his Chair in Birmingham. The 

editor – as many other of his students – is highly obliged to him as he was the 

un-orthodox and most inspiring co-supervisor of my PhD-Thesis on mission 

history in the Middle East. 

Secondly, this volumne tries to collect and present Ustorf’s extraordinarly 

interesting interpretation of the “Self” and the “Other” in mission history, of 

modern Christian identity, and last but not least of an innovative and critical 

concept of missiology as well as mission history as a form of analysis of global 

Christianity addressed to an international and interdisciplinary audience. The 

literary figure of “Robinson Crusoe” is a metaphor for the encounter between 

the “North” and the “South”, which continuously pops up in Ustorf’s texts. 

Thus, it seemed to be the fitting phrase for the book’s title. This essay-collection 





hopes to make a substantial contribution from the perspective of missiology – or 

one could also say, from intercultural theology – to the dialogue on the 

“Research in Contemporary Religion”. I am therefore highly indebeted to the 

editors of this prestigous academic series, first and foremost Professor Hans- 

Günter Heimbrock, the Dean of the Faculty of Protestant Theology at Goethe 

University of Frankfurt, who opened the doors for this project. My second word 

of thanks goes to the publisher Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht for a most friendly, 

professional and uncomplicated cooperation. 

The volume contains four parts to cover the different aspects of Ustorf’s work 

– from historical studies to actual debates. It starts (Part I: Religion in a 

Revolutionary Age) with articles on Europe’s revolutions in 1798 and 1948. 

Ustorf says that the revolutions did not only challenge the churches socially, but 

also theologically, because the revolution’s sometimes atheist vision for a better 

world order had an essentially religious structure. Ustorf argues that “crucial 

moments in the Continent’s history and in its theological thinking […] seem 

always to contain a set of elements that in a precarious, often confusing and 

always ambiguous way are connected with the Christian message.” – The next 

essay deals with the question of the anti-slavery movement and the forms of 

black spirituality in the process of self-liberation from slavery, which shows that 

the black “Self” and its spirituality is an independent subject of personal, 

religious and ethical development – and not just an object to be either enslaved 

or liberated. In the paper on the philosopher and theologian Johann Gottfried 

Herder’s ideas on “Volk”, which can only approximately be translated with 

“folk”, “people”, “nation”, as well his remarkable attempt of a fusion of 

Enlightment and Christianity, Ustorf demonstrates the tremendous side-effects 

on mission. Both, the established churches and the missions, adopted the 

“Volk”-concept as a basic principle for their social agenda. However, Ustorf 

shows that one can also approach Herder in a different way. His writings could 

offer an alternative approach “to the new fact of global religious and cultural 

diversity, very different from the one that became dominant in the West in the 

19 th century”, and also to the political interpretation which deems a “Clash of 

Civilizations” (Samuel Huntington) to be virtually unavoidable. However, 

Herder’s concept was hardly ever transferred to mission. Had there been any 

reception, Ustorf argues, this could have paved the way to a different approach 

to religous pluralism: Herder “reassures us all the time that everything is 

‘organically’ interwoven and that the universe, history, and nature form together 

a single and identical process […]. The reasons for this are that, if all cultures 

and religions are transitory and will be succeeded by others, and if Europe (and, 

by implication, Christianity) is no longer the centre and yardstick of history and 

humanity, and if the world’s cultures and their respective ideas and values are of 

equal value and valid only within the parameters of their own genius, then, not 

only are they not comparable, they are also fundamentally incompatible and 

incommensurable entities.” Herder’s notion of humanity could become the 

interface of the diverse quests for the meaning of life. 



16 


Introduction 

In Part II on “Christian Faith in the Colonial Twilight”, Ustorfs draws a large 

picture from the “Dreams of Empire and the Christian Transcendent”, over the 

the problematic and often wounded “Self” of the missionary himself to the 

interesting feature of the missionary as a scholar. On the relationship of 

Christianity and colonialism, he sums up: 

“1. The modern missionary movement was not only related to colonialism and, 

later, imperialism, but also to those Christian groups in Europe who opposed the 

ideas of modernity, revolution and pluralistic thought. The ‘project of overseas 

Christianity’ served also the aim of establishing a Christian space that could no 

longer be established in Europe – a space where Christianity had a true monopoly. 

2. The emerging Christian communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America, 

however, were less interested in Europe’s ideological civil wars than in their own 

liberation and emancipation. The primal societies in particular expected 

Christianity to be the religion of freedom and liberation.” 

Part III (“Dark Transcendence: the Totalitarian Resurrection”) refers to 

another main subject by the Hamburg-born theologian: mission, religion, the 

churches and their relationship to the dictatorships of the 20th century. The 

main focus lies – like in his book “Sailing on the Next Tide” on the interaction 

of Church and State in Nazi Germany between 1933 – 1945. Masterly and 

fundamental is his long essay (so-far only printed in Chinese) on “Theological 

Discernment: ‘Political Religion’”, where he works through most of the 

important publications on the topic in the last twenty years. He analyses the 

problematic concept of “political theology” or “political religion” with regard 

to Eric Voegelin, Eric Peterson, and Paul Schütz, and draws, as mostly in his 

studies, a line from the mainstream-discourse to the debate amongst 

missiologists and ecumenists, here in the person of Hans Ehrenberg. Again, 

the missions adopt the role of the micro-historical ressonance-body of macrohistorical 

waves. Ustorf states with regard to the Christian thinkers of the 

1930 s dealing with “political theology” that they were “exclusivists in relation 

to the divine, they were pluralists in relation to religion. They used the 

category of religion to describe the central drive of National Socialism and 

other forms of the sacralization of politics. The theologians adopted this 

approach because they saw Europe increasingly as a post-Christian area, that 

is, as a missiological problem. What the discourse of the 1930 s achieved was 

not only a fresh analysis of a mutation in the history of European religion, but 

also the production of a critical tool of Christian apologetics, namely the 

theological distinction between God, on the one side, and religious order and 

political rule, on the other.” Interestingly enough, authors like Schütz, and 

Voegelin were not just intellectually but also personally, as Christians, 

opposing the Nazi regime. New research on the phenomenon of “political 

religions” have, however, to start from a new point, because the political 

context differs fundamentally from that of the interwar-years, Ustorf says and 

points to the future by assuming that “a pluralistic secularization of the 

concept of political religion is methodologically unavoidable, but that this 





does at the same time seriously diminish the critical importance of the 

concept. The full application of the concept, on the other hand, is only possible 

when a theological distinction between the divine and the religious is made, 

and this distinction is itself open to critique or, to be more precise, forms the 

object of an unfinished debate.” 

The fourth and last Part is a reference to a phrase by Philip Jenkins, with 

whom he deals extensively in all parts of this book, about the current 

situation – “Church Decline and Religious Innovation in ‘God’s Continent’”. 

In his analysis, Ustorf might be very much focused on the highly secularised 

situation in Britian. Other parts of Europe might be interpreted less radical. 

Still, Ustorf is right in justifing the transformation of religious traditions – 

even in the framework of church decline – as legitimate in principle. 

Christianity is a flexible religion, able – in its forms of communication – to 

adopt new cultural and social trends. The same is true for the exchange of 

theology with culture, politics, philosophy, history and other subjects. Thus, 

Ustorf doesn’t end the book with pessimism, because “Christianity’s 

involvement in modern Europe is as yet unfinished, in the sense that the 

course and direction of its future development is not predictable. The 

current decline of the established churches is, as we have seen, not really a 

new phenomenon. It has been taking place, to a greater or lesser extent, 

sometimes at a truly astonishing pace, for the last two hundred years, though 

the churches’ current demographic (sociological and statistical) base seems 

to be rather limited. […] If there is a more general kind of conclusion to be 

drawn from this, it would be the entirely conjectural one that Christianity, in 

a variety of forms, will not only be around as a functioning part of Europe’s 

history, but that it will also make itself heard and felt in this arena.” 

The fifteen texts collected in this volume originated in Birmingham in the 

last decade or so. They represent the various steps which Werner Ustorf took 

in his attempt at exploring the diversity of Christian experience in modern 

Europe on the background of this religion’s global spread. Ten of the texts were 

previously published in English (Chapters 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13 and 14), four 

in German (2, 6, 9 and 15), and one in Chinese (10); exact bibliographical 

reference is given in the footnotes. It is gratefully acknowledged that the 

following publishers gave permission to reprint the texts: Blackwell Publishers, 

Oxford; Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, London; Franz Steiner 

Verlag, Stuttgart; Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden; Instabook; LIT Verlag, 

Berlin; Selignow Verlag, Berlin; Sungkonghoe University; Swedish Institute of 

Missionary Research, Uppsala; Waxmann Verlag, Münster; Wuhan University. 

One paper is published here for the first time (Chapter 1). In the interest of the 

coherence of this volume, Werner Ustorf has translated and reviewed some 

texts and updated and partly re-written others. He provided also the 

Postscript. A special word of thanks goes to Mr. William Barker, Birmingham, 

who has proof-read all of these texts. 

Last, but not least, I would like to thank the following institutions for their 



18 


Introduction 

generous financial support, which made the print of this book possible: 

Bremische Evangelische Kirche, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Missionswissenschaft, 

Evangelische Kirche von Kurhessen-Waldeck, Evangelische Kirche in 

Hessen und Nassau, Norddeutsche Mission Bremen, Vereinigte Evangelisch- 

Lutherische Kirche in Deutschland. 




Part I: 

Religion in a Revolutionary Age 







1. Bremen: Believing Revolutionaries – 

Revolutionary Believers 

Europe’s revolutions are crucial moments in the continent’s history and in its 

theological thinking and seem always to contain a set of elements that in a 

precarious, often confusing and always ambiguous way are connected with the 

Christian message. These particular elements seem to push revolutionary 

thought in a certain direction: namely, towards a fundamental assumption – 

perhaps a “dream” – that tells us that society, life, and thought – indeed the 

world in general – not only could, but should, be changed for the better. Here, 

we touch on a deep-seated mythology or, in the case of Christianity, eschatology, 

that can be at work in a religious or a secular tradition. 1 To explore the 

presence of this “dream” in the religious and the secular world is perhaps the 

best way of describing the purpose of the next three essays. It is popularly 

assumed that the French Revolution of 1789 was “anti-Christian” by 

definition. The alleged atheism or “godlessness” of the Revolution forms an 

often cherished stereotype of counter-revolutionary thought. There can be no 

question that the Revolution regarded the Church, in particular the Catholic 

Church, as part and parcel of the much hated ancien rØgime and, therefore, 

tried to abolish its political authority, its landed property and, most 

importantly, its ideological hold over the masses. The French Revolution 

was clearly anti-Church, but that does not imply that it was also anti-religious. 2 

The political and social double revolution of 1848 presents us with a picture 

1 Walter Benjamin, man of letters and close to the Frankfurt School of Philosophy, said more than half 

a century ago: “To articulate historically things of the past does not mean to discover how the past 

actually was. It means to take hold of memories that flare up in the moment of threat. […] For the 

Messiah does not only come as the Redeemer, he comes as the conqueror of the Anti-Christ. Only 

that historian will have the gift to inflame in the past the spark of hope, who is imbued with the 

following: even the dead will not be safe from the enemy, if he wins. And this enemy did not stop 

winning.” Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften I/2, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann/Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 

Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974, 695. Translation is my own. 

2 In a retrospective of 1868, the celebrated historian of the French Revolution, Jules Michelet, Histoire 

de la Revolution FranÅaise, introduction to 2nd edition, Vol. 1, ed. by GØrard Walter, Paris: Gallimard, 

1952 wrote: “La rØvolution, a-t-on dit, a eu un tort. Contre le fanatisme vendØen et la rØaction 

catholique, elle devait s’armer d’un Credo de secte chrÞtienne, se reclamer de Luther ou Calvin. Je 

reponds: Elle eut abdiquØ. Elle n’adopta aucune Eglise. Pourquoi? C’est qu’elle Øtait une Eglise elle-mÞme”. 

The French Revolution being a “church” itself combined political and religious power in a 

completely new way; a process that resulted in the sanctification or the sacralization of the 

nation. Cp. Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy. [1993], Cambridge/Mass.: 

Harvard University Press, 1996, 2. The revolutionaries, therefore, though they were anti-Christian 

in general, did have some kind of “belief”. 



22 



blurring the distinctions between religious, Christian and secular thought 

even more. We shall explore this by way of looking at the history of the 

Hanseatic republic of Bremen. 

Bremen 1848 

The revolution of 1848 is usually regarded as a failed revolution – and this is 

true in particular for the case of Bremen, where the leader of the revolution was 

Rudolph Dulon, a Christian theologian and minister. 3 Defeat and failure are 

rather ambiguous categories, and a lot depends on who defines them and with 

what kind of interest in mind. At any rate, it is appropriate to recall here the 

words of Tschou en-Lai, who, when asked for his verdict on the importance of 

the French Revolution, replied that it was still too early to tell. This judgement 

is equally applicable to the revolution of 1848, and perhaps also to a 

revolutionary believer like Dulon. For three or four hectic years, Dulon 

defended the revolution in Bremen in every conceivable way, not least through 

a series of swiftly written theological books and pamphlets that clearly took 

side of the “people”, whom he loved and, as a bourgeois leftist intellectual, 

tried to “educate”. Rudolph Dulon was not a born revolutionary. Historical 

circumstances would instead sweep him on to a stage that had already been 

constructed in the Bremen of 1848 by the preceding industrial and social 

transformations. 4 Once on stage, however, he “became” a revolutionary and 

then tried to come to terms, theologically and practically, with this period in 

history that we often call “modernity”. For this reason, before analysing two of 

Dulon’s works – both of which achieved a fair degree of prominence at the time 

– in which he attempted a theological interpretation of the revolution, it is 

worth spending a little time (though limited space precludes a detailed 

economic and social history) to consider the context in which this work was 

produced, reflecting in particular upon Dulon and his relationship to the city 

of Bremen and his position within the tradition of German revolutionary 

thinking. 

Dulon is one of the dead mentioned by Walter Benjamin, one of those who 

died a second time because the victors of history tried to erase even his memory. 

3Cp.AlistairKee,Marx and the failure of liberation theology, London-Philadelphia: Trinity Press 

International, 1990. 

4 Cp. Werner Ustorf, Theologie im revolutionären Bremen 1848-1852. Die Aktualität Rudolph Dulons. 

Bonn: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1992. This study is a sort of by-product of my research on the Bremen 

Mission Society. However, this by-product throws up missiological questions I had so far addressed 

only in the context of non-western cultures: where does the theologian belong in relation to the 

everyday struggles of the people? Why is it so difficult to “inculturate” the gospel in modern western 

culture? What would a Christianity look like which tried to answer the questions left over by the 

revolutionary tradition? And finally: it had been the expert opinion produced in the early 1850 s by 

the Theological Faculty of Heidelberg University, which gave the counter-revolution the opportunity 

and occasion to end the revolution in Bremen. I did my second doctorate at Heidelberg. None of the 

publications related to the 600th anniversary of that university (1986) recalls its participation in the 

destruction of democracy in Bremen, 1852. 




Bremen: Believing Revolutionaries – Revolutionary Believers 23 

Regarded as an outsider, Dulon was sidelined by the theological world (and by 

academia in general) for a very long time. Born in 1807, in a place close to 

Magdeburg, he died in 1870 in the USA, his second home since being compelled 

to leave Europe in 1854. Between 1848 and 1852 he was a pastor at one of the 

leading reformed churches of Bremen and, in the years 1849–1851, a member of 

the revolutionary Bremen parliament, where he was the most popular leader of its 

leftist majority. Dulon found his political constituency among the broad masses 

of the population: the dockers labouring in the port, the tobacco industry 

workers, and the numerous domestic servants employed by wealthy overseas 

merchants. He became an idol of the lower classes, whereas liberals and the city’s 

financial aristocracy regarded him as a dangerous demagogue. Karl Marx and 

Friedrich Engels were rather outspoken in their contempt for him. They called 

him the “north-Germanic, lower-Saxon wailing Willie-democrat”. 5 For his part, 

Dulon was utterly opposed to “Communism”, though he maintained close 

contacts with those German radicals who were active in Paris and London, the 

most common places of political exile during these years. 

I would like to emphasise two characteristic developments of these years: on 

the one hand we have a speedily developing revolutionary discourse. In 1834, for 

example, a famous pamphlet by the novelist and poet Georg Büchner 

(1813–1837) appeared, proclaiming “peace to the shacks – war to the palaces!” 

But this pamphlet also revealed the second characteristic: namely, that most 

people in Germany, in particular the “less educated” lower classes, were still 

thinking within a religious, i.e. a Christian, framework and terminology. For this 

reason, the radical churchman Ludwig Weidig had edited Büchner’s political 

analysis using biblical language and symbolism, so that it should be both 

understandable and acceptable to the people (a process which is perhaps not 

unlike that used in developing the iconography of the Human Rights Declaration 

of 1789). 6 In the 1830 s the German masses had only the language of Christianity 

5 Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels, Marx Engels Werke, ed. by Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim 

ZK der SED (Vol. 1–42) and Institut für Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung (Vol. 43), 43 vols., 

Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956–1990, vol. 8, 289; vol. 27, 166; vol. 28, 511/597. 

6 On 26 August 1789 the AssemblØe Nationale adopted the Declaration of Human and Civil Rights. The 

Declaration’s preamble explicitly puts human rights under the protection of “l’Étre supr›me”. The 

language of the sacred is even more conclusively established in the symbolic imagery that the 

revolutionary artists chose in order to depict the Declaration in countless paintings and placards. 

Clearly, in content and iconography, the reception by Moses of the tables of the law (the Decalogue) on 

Mount Sinai is the model. This very particular quotation from biblical imagery gives the Declaration 

both its artistic shape and its symbolic meaning. The Declaration, therefore, is typically represented 

as having been cut into two stone tablets; a broken chain recalls the Exodus of the Hebrews from 

Egyptian slavery, and an angel sits ontop of the tablets, pointing to the eye of God, whose light radiates 

from above. There can be hardly any doubt: the Declaration of Human Rights is seen here as the new 

Mount Sinai event in God’s story with humankind. The French Revolution not only introduced 

self-consciously a new calendar, the beginning of a new epoch in human history, but also a new 

anthropology and, consequently, a new theology. The point at issue here is not only the clear assertion 

of a new epiphany of God, an interpretation of the new event of God’s working in history, which seeks 

to take the place of the older tradition, that of the Church (or of Christianity), but also, and im- 



24 



with which to express the unbridgeable gulf that existed between their hopes and 

expectations of a radical change, and their everyday experience of oppression 

and the accompanying immaturity that was forced upon them. A well-known 

example of this predicament is offered to us here by Wilhelm Weitling, who like 

Dulon came from Magdeburg and who, though a tailor by profession, spent time 

in exile in Switzerland and France, where he emerged as one of the leading 

theoreticians of proletarian revolution before Marx. Weitling’s work is perfect 

testament of this tendency to understand the desired social revolution in 

religious terms. For him, revolution meant a return to primitive (original) 

Christianity. One of his poems for children says: 

I am a small communist, and do not care for money, 

since our master Jesus Christ too, does not think much of it. 

I am a small communist, in love and faithfulness. 

I am a good Christian too, 

and one day I will join the worker’s association. 7 

Society, plausibility structures, and religion were not yet divided in these 

circles. The protest still took the form of an inner-Christian debate. Heinrich 

Heine (1797–1856), however, another poet, and like Marx in exile in Paris, 

quite rightly concluded: “If heaven is revolutionised, earth cannot remain 

unchanged.” For his part, Weitling was already attempting to change the 

structure of heaven, offering a new image of God that portrayed him as being 

on the side of the oppressed. The prosperous bourgeoisie on the other hand, 

though, of course in quite a different way, did the same; they also came up with 

a self-serving image of God. The French poet Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) 

discovered shortly before the 1848 revolution that private ownership in the 

eyes of well-to-do people was a value “high as religion, and becoming one with 

God”. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), and more belligerently Karl Marx, 

regarded the new religious imagery of divine capitalism as an attempt to 

disguise political and economic conflicts with a mask of religion. The 

“Forward of Paris”, a journal for which Marx, Engels and Heine wrote, 

welcomed the year 1845, for example, with these words: 

In your cities misery is whimpering, stupidity is acting posh, money is 

feasting, murdering and raping – and in your books you pretend to be wise 

and honest, you overflow with tenderness, honey words, restraint, piety and 

portantly, that the French Revolution handles the semantic potential of the biblical tradition structurally 

in the same way as the Christians of the Early Church handled that of the Hebrew Bible. Islam, 

in its turn, reformulates the Jewish and the Christian tradition and owns it in a specific way. The 

promise of salvation is each time borrowed from its old owners and is appropriated by the new 

inhabitants of the tradition. Finally, it does not take long before the “new” believers start upgrading 

themselves and claim to be the “actual” People of God, howsoever this god may be understood. 

7 Quoted by Veit Valentin, Geschichte der Deutschen Revolution 1848-1849, 2 vols., Aalen: Scientia 

Verlag, 1968 (reprint), here I, 281. Translations from Valentin are my own. 




Bremen: Believing Revolutionaries – Revolutionary Believers 25 

good manners – and you dare to make us believe that your written God and 

your written wisdom be better than your crimes that happened in reality? 8 

These views were no longer limited only to poets, philosophers and socialists. 

The middle classes and the workers by then began openly to question that they 

should discuss the transformation of society in religious terms. Why not treat 

politics simply as politics? This new paradigm, which represented a coming of 

age, began to take roots in the masses. Why not, from this point, try to 

understand human life without the questionable help of a church or a religion, 

which had – in the experience of the populace – sided with the rich and 

powerful? In his introduction to a critique of the Hegelian philosophy of law, in 

1844, Marx had stated that the abolition of religion, the latter being an illusion 

of human happiness, was in effect equal to a demand for the real happiness of 

the people. And since the hereafter of truth had been dissolved, it would now 

be the task of history to establish “the truth of the earth”. 

This sort of public discussion immediately preceded the revolution of 1848, 

and it led to the uncomfortable situation of a man like Dulon, whose explicit 

concern it was that God should not be driven out of modernity. This he 

attempted, however, at a time when the revolutionary tradition was already 

prepared to proceed without the help of the Church and Christianity. Dulon was, 

therefore, constantly driven to radicalise his religious thinkingandtokeeppace 

with the rapid advance of secular thought. This in turn would force him to fight 

on a second front; that is to say, against the conservative, if not indeed 

counter-revolutionary, church establishment, which was quite happy to make its 

peace with modernity and revolution – as long as the church and theology 

themselves were granted their own territory in which to continue life as though in 

a kind of parallel world. 

The proximate cause of Dulon’s career as a revolutionary was the violent coup 

d’Øtat of the King of Prussia in Berlin in December 1848. The forced introduction 

of a more or less pre-revolutionary constitution in Prussia destroyed the hopes 

for German unification and for a democratic society. Bremen, however, still had a 

revolutionary constitution. It was a relatively small and insignificant Hanseatic 

Free State, and as far as Berlin and Vienna were concerned was at the bottom of 

the counter-revolutionary agenda. It was Bremen’s very insignificance within the 

overall political context that allowed it to become one of the centres of political 

opposition to the ancien rØgimes, which were now everywhere regaining their 

strength. By January 1849, Dulon had already managed to get his political 

broadsheet “On National Liberation Struggle” printed. 9 It brought him a certain 

reputation on the continent, and he became a member of the Bremen parliament 

in March 1849, with nearly 80 % of the popular vote. “On National Liberation 

Struggle” is an attempt to re-interpret (or re-discover) a revolutionary process 

8 Quoted by Valentin, Geschichte der Deutschen Revolution I, 285. 

9 Rudolph Dulon, Vom Kampf um Völkerfreiheit. Ein Lesebuch fürs deutsche Volk, 2 vols., Bremen: 

Verlag von A.D. Geisler, 1849 and 1850. 




Research in Contemporary Religion, Vol. 9 

�� www.v-r.de 

9 78352 5 604441 

The Christian experience in modern Europe is fragmented. It shows 

great diversity in various contexts. One aspect of Western religious 

communication is mission. The spread of Christianity into the ‘Global 

South’ has been ambivalent in character. The missions built up Christian 

education, social infrastructure, congregations, and models of 

peaceful confl ict resolution. But the darkness of the encounter between 

the European “self” and the many “others” often had disastrous 

consequences for indigenous people. 

Werner Ustorf has been a leading missiologist worldwide for a period 

of thirty years. This book analyses the historical construction of missions 

and individuals, religion and politics, non-religious interpretations 

and cultural phenomena. It also proves the analytical strength 

of theology in conceptualizing the future Christian experiences in 

Europe. 

The Author 

Dr. theol. Werner Ustorf, 1990–2010 Professor of Mission at the 

University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. 

The editor 

Dr. theol. Roland Löffl er is Director of the programme “Trialogue of 

Cultures” at the Herbert Quandt-Foundation, Germany.

Robinson Crusoe tries again

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