Abstract
An adequate missiology depends, among other things, on a grasp of the present reality in which missiological reflection happens. The past few years of global political transformation invite consideration of a missiology adequate for the present fractiousness. This paper sketches three possible missiological stances for Christian communities to take vis-a-vis the world, each framed as a Benedict option. Option one derives from Rod Dreher’s book The Benedict Option and urges strategic withdrawal from the world, inspired by St. Benedict. Option two draws inspiration from Pope Benedict XVI and advances intellectual inquiry and understanding. Option three looks back to Pope Benedict XV to highlight ecclesial engagement in addressing social issues. An adequate missiology need not choose one option to the exclusion of the others. Instead it must draw upon critical theologies of Christ and church to forge missional faithfulness, an especially critical task in a fractious age.
Is our understanding of mission adequate? What about our missiology, our “systematic study of all aspects of mission” (Skreslet, 2012: 12)? Is it adequate?
The theme of 2017’s American Society of Missiology annual meeting, “Missiology’s Dialogue Partners,” arose from the conviction that adequacy in mission and missiology depends on dialogical relationships with certain partners. Such partners include theology—for example, its subfield of ecclesiology as discussed by Kristin Colberg at this year’s meeting (Colberg, this issue). Missionary practitioners represent another obvious partner, interlocutors exemplified by Hunter Farrell at the meeting’s second plenary address (Farrell, this issue). A third lies in the social sciences, represented by anthropologist Naomi Haynes in the conference’s final plenary address. Adequate views of mission and an adequate missiology require critical engagement with these realms of human and Christian practice and experience.
Here I consider another dialogue partner, one perhaps more easily overlooked than theology, missionary practitioners, or the social sciences. I have in mind the always-already larger social and political context—that is, the present moment understood as a comprehensive milieu in which we act and live, insofar as we can understand it. Besides recourse to theology, social science, and missionary practitioners, an adequate missiology also must grasp the present moment with sufficient awareness.
In focusing on the current context, one must acknowledge inescapable partiality and epistemological limitations that determine one’s grasp of the present. These are considerable for every person, and certainly for me: a male, Catholic Euro-American with secure economic and social status. Besides these unavoidable limitations, this is new territory for me, too, since most of my academic life has been oriented toward historical questions linked to Christianity and its missionary activity. Yet in this address I want to be more programmatic than usual, less descriptive and more prescriptive. How ought we think of the present moment missiologically? That is my question. Prompting me is fear of a failure of missiological imagination in the face of new missiological realities. I want our understanding of mission and our missiology to be adequate to the present.
Fear admittedly prompts me. The pioneering Catholic moral theologian Bernard Häring once allegedly said that we all have two inalienable rights: to make mistakes, and to learn from and correct our mistakes. 1 But was Häring right? Or are there mistakes too grave to ever really correct? This question haunts me.
In her award-winning 2013 novel Life after Life, Kate Atkinson considers this question. Atkinson imagines a number of alternative possible lives for her main character, a woman born in England in 1910. Throughout the novel, Ursula Todd’s life starts only to be cut short by her premature death. Then the story begins anew with another chance so early death is avoided. The novel’s seductive conceit is that second chances are possible and tragedies can be averted. Time’s arrow does not, in the novel, run in one direction. Do-overs become possible.
It is a tempting daydream. But there are more terrifying possibilities, namely that there are no do-overs. One is stuck with one’s choices. Imagine, for example, that you are a missiologist or a former missionary 70 years ago. It is 1947 and you are German, having taught missiology in Germany at a Protestant or Catholic faculty, or served in a place as missionary, Catholic or Protestant. And now it is 1947, two years after a catastrophic war has ended.
There were, after all, such people, many of them—German missiologists and former missionaries—in 1947. And not a few had been at their craft or task for over a decade, so their work spanned the rise of Nazism in their country, its total takeover in 1933 and disastrous course, its crushing defeat and ensuing national and moral humiliation. This was a fate that by 1947 was more or less fulfilled, but which in 1932 had been most assuredly truly unthinkable.
In 15 years a world had unraveled, imploded, exploded
And you are a missiologist in 1947. How would you have thought about your actions and decisions over the past 15 years? Had they been adequate? Would you want to be able to return to 1932—or some other point—and choose differently? If you had chosen differently, would you still be alive? Would anything have been different? If you could have a do-over, what might you do? What would have been the adequate course of action?
References to Nazis risk using an extreme case to make a rather mundane point through rhetorical overkill. Perhaps an example with closer direct missiological referents can serve. Gustav Warneck is often seen as a pioneer in missiological scholarship. As Piet Naude shows in his study of Afrikaner-linked theological nationalist defenses of South African apartheid (Naude, 2008), Afrikaner arguments drew upon Warneck. Unfortunately, Warneck himself drew upon approaches to communal identity from Abraham Kuyper linked to a particular Volk ideology that took the phrase ta ethne (“to the nations,” from Matthew 28) in an ethnological rather than salvation-historical direction. This dubious interpretation served to legitimize apartheid, lending support to discrimination based on a racialized definition of a “nation.” Naude argues that it took most of the Reformed churches of South Africa over 50 years to leave that trap—to stop drawing on such wrongheaded social science to defend idolatrous theology. This might count as a rather serious theological and missiological failure to be adequate.
Besides the fear from historical precedents like these, 2 two other realities frame these reflections. The first is the recent history of our society, the American Society of Missiology (ASM). At certain times in our annual meetings we have been rather introspective, that is, focused on our society itself and the discipline of missiology that is part of our name. This will not cease, nor should it, since self-awareness is important. Yet it risks become solipsistic and damaging if not properly understood.
Second, the past few years have seen a rather remarkable change in the nature of global politics, much of it within countries that are, historically at least, mostly Christian. It is far too early to determine with certainty the long-term consequences of these changes, yet missiology must address them. This second circumstance—potentially monumental global political change even since our June 2016 meeting—means we must turn back to the first, our own societal and disciplinary history of self-analysis, with new perspectives.
After considering these two realities, I will outline three potential options open to Christians—and by implication, to missiologists. I will discuss them under the rubric “Benedict Options,” drawing upon the title of the recent popular book by Rod Dreher (2017). Prompted by his vocabulary, I will outline these options with reference to three historical Benedicts as potential paradigmatic stances for Christian believers, within each of which lie implicit missiological orientations. After these portraits, I will then argue the need to find ground for missiology today within Christology and ecclesiology, that is, theologies of Christ and church. The foremost priority in missiological discernment among the Benedict options outlined, as well as among other possible ways to embrace and practice mission and missiology, lies, I believe, in reflective ecclesiology, which itself must derive from critically informed Christology.
The Recent Past of the American Society of Missiology
The American Society of Missiology has existed for about 45 years, nearly a half-century of life. In his 2014 volume, our colleague Wilbert Shenk told the story of the ASM very helpfully. With its founding in 1972 and first formal meeting in 1973, the ASM emerged when the global church faced calls for a moratorium on missionaries emanating from places that had long received them. Demands for a missionary moratorium signaled postcolonial circumstances then only a few decades in the making, circumstances that in some ways remain with us.
While certain parts of the global church of the time publicly questioned standard missionary activity in this dramatic way, institutional changes in the study of mission in traditional so called “sending” sites were also well underway. As R. Pierce Beaver noted with alarm in the early 1970s, missiological chairs in secular US universities had begun to disappear a few decades earlier (Shenk, 2014: 7–8). Though chairs in mission or missiology remained common in certain state-sponsored European universities for a bit longer, the trend was unfolding inexorably. Today very few non-Evangelical universities in the USA have positions dedicated to the study of Christian mission, and few European universities have mission-focused or missiological chairs.
Twenty years later marked another significant moment in the study and practice of mission. The theme of the 1992 ASM meeting was “Shifting Paradigms of Mission” and there were certainly shifting paradigms to consider. The 500th anniversary of Columbus’s first journey prompted widespread discussion and study of the missionary role in the colonial enterprise of the sixteenth through twentieth centuries. The Columbian anniversary signaled one paradigmatic shift, and the unraveling of the Soviet Union in the few years before indicated another: a changing global power structure. Within missiological scholarship itself, David Bosch’s 1991 Transforming Mission addressed much that was happening, and serves as a still-relevant perspective on mission and missiological history. Self-conscious historical awareness and attention to social-political transformation continued. At the 1995 meeting, the theme “Mission Studies: Taking Stock, Charting the Course” sought to name and respond to perceived changes.
I began to attend the meetings in the early 2000s, which by then had for over 15 years taken place at Techny Towers, north of Chicago, US home of the Divine Word missionaries. Compared to an earlier period, the number of participants considering themselves independent Protestants—sometimes labeled “Evangelicals” as opposed to conciliar (World Council of Churches-linked or “mainline”) Protestants—had grown considerably while the other two traditional blocs by which leadership positions were allotted—Catholics and conciliar Protestants—had shrunk. There was, however, a comparative lack of self-concern in the ASM, at least judging from the meeting themes and other addresses from the decade straddling the millennium. The late 1990s and early twenty-first century saw considerable growth and, judging from the meeting themes, consolidation within the ASM of a certain degree of self-confidence.
In 2007, however, considerable self-doubt and self-questioning reentered the ASM’s formal reflection. The society’s earlier ecumenical balance seemed off and getting worse, the number of female participants was obviously insufficient, the absence of younger participants was worrisome, and ASM participation did little to represent the ethnic and cultural diversity of the world Christian movement. In response, the board of directors in 2008 began a multi-year process of reflection on the ASM’s future.
An “ASM Renewal/Strategic Planning Group” established five task forces. Over the next two years, the task forces recommended numerous changes. They opted to move toward a meeting with larger, younger, and more diverse participation. Besides focusing on the makeup the meeting, they planned for far more opportunities for paper presentations due to parallel sessions and panels. Finally, they established a larger leadership structure to guide the society in an ongoing way.
One of those task forces, which had examined academic missiology, embarked in 2010 on another multi-year process to consider the field in a more focused manner, a process that formally concluded with the 2013 ASM meeting. At that meeting, Dana Robert offered a historical retrospective on the ASM after 40 years (Robert, 2014). Robert’s address on the history of missiology at that meeting interspersed a narrative of the discipline’s unfolding with glimpses of the ASM’s evolution. She thoughtfully charted three stages in the 40 years of the society: first, the crisis of mission and missiology in which the ASM was born; second, the maturation of the society and field; and third, the era of world Christianity of the third millennium, in which new perspectives were challenging previous assumptions.
At that same 2013 ASM meeting, Craig van Gelder culminated the multi-year process of ASM- and discipline-focused reflection with his presidential address (van Gelder, 2014). Van Gelder invited the ASM to make significant changes to address the new circumstances of its members—missional thinkers linked to the church in North America who were mindful of the world Christian movement—and the demands of theological education. Van Gelder drew a distinction between two types of changes to make his point. On the one hand, technical changes are incremental and limited. Second, adaptive changes represent more adequate responses to new circumstances. He of course urged the ASM to make adaptive changes.
The next two years saw a move away from the self-referential trend in certain ways. In 2014, the conference addressed prophetic dialogue, an influential framework originating with our colleagues Roger Schroeder and Steve Bevans through which missiology and mission have been reconceptualized. Then in 2015, under the heading of “Missio-logoi,” our meeting considered mission studies’ capaciousness as a field. President Stanley Skreslet’s book (2012) on the topic served as an important backdrop.
The theme from last year, public missiology, culminated another multi-year process in which panels and symposia in previous years had addressed the topic in an anticipatory way. Sebastian Kim’s opening address connected missiology to the emerging field of public theology (Kim, 2017). The 2016 presidential address of Greg Leffel, “The Missiology of Trouble,” was unusual in its theoretical density and prompted interesting reactions. Leffel sought to name what he discerned as a crisis in the project of liberalism, a term he unpacked with reference to historical roots in the US experiment and especially American-style Protestant Christianity, and also with reference to more recent challenges facing a so-called liberal consensus from various directions. The talk was full of technical terms from philosophical and critical/social theory: metaxis, parataxis, metaxological, meta-modernism. In describing the “post-political libertarianism” that was replacing liberalism—Donald Trump had recently secured the Republican nomination, though Leffel’s ideas (as opposed to his address itself) anticipated that fact by many months—Leffel spoke of various forms of anarchism at work among different groups and individuals. These included anarcho-loneliness, anarcho-tribalism, anarcho-narcissism, anarcho-localism, anarcho-capitalism, and anarcho-Silicon valley. In their place, Leffel urged that missiology embrace a public role in constructing “mechanisms of a middle range” that move beyond the binaries of the past and present. He expressed trust that our nation’s Christian past—even the American liberal past that forged Protestant denominationalism—possesses resources to help generate a faithful response to the present (Leffel, 2017).
I admit to finding Leffel’s address when I heard it both intriguing and confusing. There was a lot in it, much of it unclear at first hearing. Rereading it in light of events since then, however, have made his remarks more interesting, indeed prophetic.
Fractious Times
Five days after Greg Leffel’s presidential address at the 2016 ASM meeting the British people voted in favor of Brexit. This June 23, 2016 result overturned poll-watchers’ expectations, the hopes of most elites, and heartened many British—and especially English—patriots. Four and a half months later, Donald Trump was elected US president, again overturning poll-watchers’ expectations, the hope of most elites, and heartening many American—and especially Euro-American—patriots.
Much could be said about what these events mean and how they are linked to broad global trends. Such trends include the apparent rise of nationalism and suspicion of globalism more generally, the growth of Asian economic and political power at the expense of north Atlantic hegemony exercised for several centuries, and the expanding fissures among populations due to economic transformations that unmistakably produce significant value yet also increase inequality between the very rich and everyone else.
It seems a period in which we are quite consciously divided. Some are heartened by the unraveling of a perceived corrupt order. Others fear apocalyptic scenarios: domestic upheaval, international unraveling and potential warfare, and an accelerating planetary environmental crisis. Liberalism’s demise, as Greg Leffel discerned, might be unfolding. Of course, as Daniel Kahneman has reminded us, there is a most dangerous word to employ when we discuss major events: the word is “know” (and its cognates) as in “I know what will happen” or “I knew that would happen” (Shariatmadari, 2015).
There have been few extensive theological responses to the current situation of which I am aware. Indeed, the most prominent responses of a pseudo-theological sort that I know about have come from conservative pundits distressed by Donald Trump’s candidacy, nomination, and election. These include essays by three who appear often in the New York Times: onetime Evangelical turned Catholic Ross Douthat, the Christian former Republican speechwriter Peter Wehner, and the Jewish-born David Brooks, who refers to Christian theologians quite often in his columns. My own conviction is that the present circumstances—some label this upsurge “the Great Regression” (Geiselberger, 2017)—invite us into missiological reflection moving far beyond what these writers and others like them have offered. And Greg Leffel’s ASM presidential address last year represented one attempt “before the fact.”
In order to frame this reflection, I will lay out three potential paths or missiological orientations in light of this reality. I call them “Benedict options” after the book by Rod Dreher (2017) that has been discussed in circles like ours and more broadly. Dreher urges Christians to embrace strategic monastic-style withdrawal from a world that has rejected Christianity. Taking as one paradigm his view of the Christian responsibility at the present time and then outlining two other Benedict options, I want to invite reflection on how to discern a missiology that is adequate and strategic given the present reality.
These options certainly do not exhaust missiological possibilities, they do not exclude one another, and they are offered here mindful of the limitations of my own perspective—that is, tentatively. They are not meant to exemplify public missiology, last year’s theme, but have of course been informed by last year’s meeting. These remarks seek to begin a conversation on a missiology for the present fractious moment, attempting to help us avoid a failure of the missiological imagination before new missiological responsibilities. 3
Benedict Options
Benedict Option 1
Dreher has popularized the term and helpfully represents the first Benedict option. A onetime Evangelical who converted to Catholicism, then later to Orthodox Christianity, Dreher argues that faithful Christians in the USA ought to admit their failure to shape broader culture through engaging it directly. Instead they should withdraw from public life, protecting and deepening their identity through practices akin to monasticism. The Benedict in question refers to St. Benedict of Nursia, the fifth–sixth-century monk from what is today Italy often seen as a foundational figure in Western Christian monastic practice.
Dreher’s book summarizes and amplifies speeches and articles prior to the book’s appearance with a similar theme. He laments that liberal social values, many connected to sexuality, have triumphed in the USA despite considerable Christian opposition. This both indicts previous default modes by which Christians have engaged the surrounding culture and warns against continuing such past unsuccessful patterns. Dreher fears that continuing such patterns of engagement risks imperiling Christian identity and morale.
In discerning Dreher’s lament over liberalism’s triumph, it is important for our purposes to recognize that the liberal values that Dreher sees as triumphing and thus prompting a different strategy for earnest Christians differ from the liberalism whose troubled status Greg Leffel discussed last year in his presidential address. Leffel meant by liberalism not one party in the US culture wars but a larger and more implicit set of assumptions and habits shared in a near consensus by nearly all in US Christian history. As Leffel writes, “Liberalism is taken here not as a political orientation, but as a central theme in the public sensitivities shared by most Americans on the left and right” (2017: 38). Dreher, on the contrary, uses “liberal” in the more partisan context of US politics.
On the face of it, Dreher’s Benedict option seems to eschew mission, at least as ordinarily understood as the work of spreading Christianity into places and peoples where it is not present. Instead, Dreher urges Christians “to embrace ‘exile in place’ and form a vibrant counterculture” (2017: 18). “Strategic hibernation”—to quote Rowan Williams’s depiction of Dreher’s suggestions, itself drawing on a term from Theodor Adorno—represents the apparent antithesis of missionary outreach that goes “to the ends of the earth” (Williams, 2017).
From a variety of perspectives, it can be temptingly easy to dismiss Dreher’s Benedict Option. Claiming that the world around you is the problem can become a self-congratulatory exercise that grows into a self-fulfilling prophecy all too easily. And there are other obvious shortcomings. The book features, for example, a selective historical perspective that underplays the role of US Evangelicals themselves—as well as mainstream Protestant churches and the Catholic Church in the USA—in creating the predicament in which he claims all faithful Christians find themselves. Strangely ignoring many potential examples within existing Christian bodies that have long sought to respond to the challenge he advances, Dreher draws support for more appropriate Christian politics based on “a hands-on localism based on the pioneering work done by Eastern bloc dissidents who defied Communism during the Cold War” (2017: 78). Finally, he focuses on “religious liberty” as the way to unite faithful US Christians in a political cause (2017: 84–88), when few issues have divided Christians as much.
Those of us familiar with missiology and mission studies can pile on. Dreher overlooks St. Benedict’s important missionary role and the way that missionary communities, far from withdrawing, served as a primary means of missionary evangelization for centuries in Christian history, and continue to carry missional energy today—in rural places around the world and in many urban settings as well. I also admit to some frustration that, in light of all the work done by so many of our colleagues over the years in considering North America missiologically—and by extension many other long supposedly Christian parts of the world—missiology and mission studies are so absent from his references. Where, for instance, are the references to Lesslie Newbigin or the Gospel in Our Culture Network, both of whom have offered sophisticated responses to the predicament Dreher identifies?
Yet a simple rejection risks overlooking important missiological insights driving Dreher’s argument. Dreher himself recognizes that his call might be seen as undermining mission, and he responds by emphasizing that his invitation responds to what he believes to be palpable and obvious current circumstances in the hope of long-term missionary success. He writes, near the end of his book, “[T]he Benedict Option is a call to undertaking the long and patient work of reclaiming the real world from the artifice, alienation, and atomization of modern life” (2017: 236). In addition, we ought to celebrate his sound view of the importance of liturgy and asceticism, his calls to form communities of faith-filled support (even if he loses faith too hastily in existing parishes and church communities), and his worries about media saturation and the prevalence of pornography.
It is also the case that distinguished theologians have argued for Christian strategies not unlike his, though in less popular formats, on similar grounds. Dreher writes, “The best witness Christians can offer to post-Christian America is simply to be the church, as fiercely and creatively a minority as we can manage” (2017: 101). This echoes ecclesiological arguments made by Stanley Hauerwas and the late John Howard Yoder that have emphasized the need for the church to be first faithful to its own identity—its own narrative—before seeking to shape the larger social and political world in which it is embedded (Wessman, 2017).
We might say that Benedict Option 1, shaped by Dreher, pushes strategic Christian withdrawal in order to protect Christian and missional faithfulness as witness—to the world and to other Christians to reinforce their faith.
Benedict Option 2
The second Benedict Option can be represented for these purposes by Benedict XVI, the now retired former pope who began his theological career as Father Joseph Ratzinger—later Archbishop and Cardinal Ratzinger. Dreher himself deeply admires Benedict XVI, referring to him as the “Second Benedict of the Benedict Option” in the acknowledgments at the end of his book (2017: 246). Instead of a strategic withdrawal to protect Christian faithfulness as Dreher suggests, Ratzinger/Benedict XVI here—and this discussion does no justice to this complex and important historical figure—represents intense intellectual engagement as a missional practice.
This is not surprising given Ratzinger’s background as distinguished professor of systematic theology prior to his entry into Catholic ecclesial leadership in the 1970s. The missiology embedded within his larger theological worldview, however, has a contradictory quality that I have discussed elsewhere (Kollman, 2014) and want to highlight here. In fact, Ratzinger/Benedict’s theological convictions support mission ad gentes in principle but they are problematic when used to consider mission in practice. That is, he has a better-developed theology of mission than a missiology in the fuller sense, so that his desire to protect mission in theory can undermine missionary activity as actually carried out.
On one hand, there can be little doubt that Joseph Ratzinger, whether as priest, bishop, cardinal, or as pope Benedict XVI, has long been concerned with maintaining—even strengthening—the missionary mandate of the church. Indeed, one way to interpret his evolving theological opinions over the past 40 or more years would be to claim that often his most decisive criticisms of other theological opinions appeared because he found that the views he attacked implicitly softened or altered that missionary mandate.
For example, Karl Rahner’s notion of “anonymous Christianity,” which Ratzinger took to task beginning in the 1960s (along with others like Hans Urs von Balthasar), putatively drew upon an openness to the wisdom of other religions—enshrined in Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate—so far that it compromised the need to proclaim the gospel to non-Christians. Liberation theology, chastened by the Ratzinger-led Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the 1980s, also drew criticism for, among other things, allegedly secularizing the gospel message with the promise of an earthly kingdom of justice, and thereby obviating the need to proclaim eternal salvation in Christ. Later, calls from those advocating pluralist theologies for more openness to other religions and for adopting a dialogic stance toward such admitted fonts of wisdom, particularly coming from Asian Christian theologians, brought forth Cardinal Ratzinger’s warnings that they watered down the centrality of Christ for salvation, suggesting that other “incarnations” of the divine could be considered to stand at the source of such religions. In a similar fashion, his later and often reiterated attacks on relativism as the sharpest danger to theology often invoked the danger of a tolerance that, in the name of accepting others’ beliefs, in point of fact encourages disinterest in those same others. And disinterest in the name of tolerance undoes the missionary impulse.
Though often accused of a Eurocentrism that predisposes him to overlook issues that press upon the church elsewhere, there can be little doubt that Ratzinger/Benedict has always cared deeply about the church’s mission ad gentes.
At the same time, however, those criticisms rarely drew upon insights deriving from missionary practice, and it was commitment to such practice that had generated the very theological opinions Ratzinger questioned. Indeed, liberation theology, interreligious dialogue, and inculturation are missiological terms of art—and each is linked to theological perspectives that Ratzinger/Benedict called into question. Even as basic a missionary impulse as meeting people where they are instead of castigating them for their shortcomings can be accused of relativism, if one’s assumptions begin with the need for the church—through its liturgy, for example—to maintain its aesthetic and intellectual integrity first and foremost. In questioning these theological programs, therefore, Ratzinger/Benedict also questioned linked missionary practices, some implicit and some explicit, but often without appreciating the particular missional contexts and problematics that helped produce them.
This creates a paradox: Benedict’s/Ratzinger’s earnest defense of mission in theory coexisted with all sorts of doubts and concerns about actual missionary evangelization. Being oriented by an intellectual focus absent practical engagement—Benedict’s actual experience of the pastoral life of the church was very thin, and he had no extended first-hand cross-cultural experience of Christianity outside of Europe—led him to be suspicious of mission-in-practice despite his passionate defense of the missionary imperative.
Benedict Option 2, therefore, certainly represents a deep missiological instinct—to understand well the gospel we preach and the worlds in which we preach and live it. Yet understanding alone not informed by actual missionary practice can generate contradictory missional impulses.
Benedict Option 3
If Benedict Option 1 prioritizes witness to the world via strategic withdrawal, and Benedict Option 2 pushes understanding the gospel and the world by prioritizing intellectual work, the third Benedict Option emphasizes Christian social engagement. The Benedict here is Pope Benedict XV, Bishop of Rome/Pope between 1915 and 1922. Elected during World War I, arguably on the basis of his diplomatic experience, the onetime Archbishop Giacomo Paolo Giovanni Battista della Chiesa began his papacy at 59 years of age. His death seven years later came earlier than expected, yet in his brief pontificate Benedict XV embarked on an activist papacy of shuttle diplomacy, attempted peacemaking, and extensive relief efforts during and after the Great War. 4
World War I was not the only issue addressed by Benedict XV, but before his election he had called World War I the “suicide of Europe” and had been engaged in diplomacy pursuing peace, a pursuit he never stopped. Prior to becoming pope, he encouraged the process that immediately declared neutrality of the Holy See and organized a call for a Christmas truce in 1914, which was ignored. His first encyclical as pope, Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum, urged negotiations for peace in late 1914 and he pursued intensive efforts to end the conflict throughout the war. His efforts were rejected by all sides, hampered by the fact that neither the Germans nor the French had diplomatic relations with the Vatican.
The failure of diplomacy led Benedict XV to focus on humanitarian efforts, though without giving up on diplomatic negotiations. He helped with care for prisoners-of-war including mail service, release from work requirements on Sunday, and an end to capital punishment; exchanges of the wounded, including thousands of soldiers injured in poison gas attacks; exchanges of civilians in occupied zones; the repatriation of corpses for burial; as well as protests against aerial war and other targeting of civilians.
Benedict XV did not restrict his activism to the Great War. He also helped Italian Catholics to engage the Italian state politically, something that had bedeviled the papacy since Italian independence nearly a half-century before. His predecessors had disallowed lay Catholics from participating in the politics of an independent Italy that was perceived as illegitimate, while he found ways to invite Catholics to be politically active on behalf of justice. He sought similar rapprochement with the French state that had cut relations with the Vatican a few decades earlier. He also oversaw the codification of the first modern code of canon law, published in 1917.
I once heard former Senator Alan Simpson say, “If you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t, then do.” 5 Clearly Benedict XV was a man after Simpson’s heart.
With apologies for the necessary truncation of each of these positions and, in the latter two cases, the figure associated with each, we see three Benedicts and three corresponding options for a church in relation to the world: strategic withdrawal, intellectual inquiry, forthright public engagement. Each generates an archetypal role for the church and its mission, and for missiology as reflection on that mission. Option 1 prioritizes witness to the world, Option 2 urges understanding of the world, and Option 3 pushes change of and service to the world. Of course, these options can also coexist with each other, and overlap. Moreover, there are other options. This framework represents an effort to generate a usable archive for missiological thinking in a fractious age, an important aspect of our current context.
Sifting Options and Claiming Foundations: Theologies of Church and Christ
Each of these options has been tried, of course, and each has been linked to failure. Dreher’s Option 1 begins with admission of the failure of US Christians, Benedict XVI’s papacy is generally not seen as a success, and Benedict XV’s efforts to end World War I failed—moreover, he was shut out of the 1919–1920 Versailles negotiations that arguably planted seeds for the next world war.
This should not disturb us. As Lesslie Newbigin wrote some decades ago, “The real triumphs of the gospel have not been won when the church is strong in a worldly sense; they have been won when the church is faithful in the midst of weakness, contempt, and rejection” (1995: 62). Indeed, one might argue that most serious transformations occur because of well-managed breakdowns. And perhaps Dreher is right, that US Christianity will rebound after a strategic withdrawal; and maybe Benedict XVI’s intellectual work paved the way for Pope Francis’s less burdened missionary outreach and impulses; and maybe the papacy’s failures to affect the conflict during World War I taught lessons that helped end the Cold War.
In pursuit of adequacy while thinking through these options, I want to suggest here the priority of notions of Christ and the church, that is, Christology and ecclesiology, in thinking with these and other missiological options. After all, Christian discipleship is meant to be lived along with other Christians in obedience to Christ. We live engaged with the world—whether through options linked to a Benedict or not—first of all as church and not primarily as individuals.
The kind of church I foresee is a listening, learning church, one that acknowledges its limitations. Recently, a church building in one of the parishes of my religious congregation in Chile was nearing completion and the local bishop was invited to bless the structure. To the embarrassment of the parish’s pastor, the building remained unfinished when the day of blessing arrived. To his credit, and creating evident relief in the parish, instead of admonishing the pastor or parishioners, the bishop rejoiced at the situation. Far from castigating the parish, he celebrated how the church building modeled a pilgrim church, a church on-the-way. He spoke of the danger to the church when a church becomes self-satisfied, as if it had arrived.
In a similar way, I believe that missiological thinkers and the church leaders who depend on them to consider how best to engage the contexts in which they find themselves must recognize the never completed nature of their task. Fixed strategies around a single option, whether Benedict-linked or not, fail to fulfill the faithfulness to which we are called in light of a world that changes. And the church must always understand its present context, for “All of us have to coordinate our ambitions with the conditions of our times” (Lemann, 2017: 4).
Perhaps an example from popular culture can support the point. The outstanding player of the 2014 World Cup, Germany’s Thomas Müller, when asked “what he was”—that is, what position he played on the soccer field—said he was a Raumdeuter, that is, an “interpreter of space.” This described his way of scoring goals from a variety of locations and in myriad circumstances. So, too, the church’s options vis-à-vis the world must change and adapt, even if our goal remains constant: We serve the Reign of God as preached by Christ, guided by the Holy Spirit. Yet our way forward toward that goal depends on circumstances.
Operative ecclesiologies shaping missiological postures derive from many sources (Colberg, article in this issue). Yet underneath them lies a view of Christ, an operative Christology, something predecessors in missiological scholarship have seen clearly. A great deal of missiological reflection has been explicit in its references to Christ: from the authority of Christ at work in so-called “power encounters” from St. Boniface to the present day; the ways the message of Christianity has served to alleviate suffering in the face of limit-experiences such as death and illness, with Christ’s own passion and crucifixion central in missionary preaching; to the alleviation of human misery through practices of healing and education, both defended with reference to Christ’s own ministry. Several decades ago, Samuel Escobar wrote, “In the final analysis, Christology is the source to which missiological exploration must turn in its search for new patterns for mission” (1996: 6). Among Catholics, John Paul II followed a long tradition in emphasizing the centrality of Christ, for example in his 1982 encyclical Redemptoris Missio and in other settings. In 2004, he wrote about how encounters with Christians can in fact be encounters with Christ himself, something Christians receive and in turn give: Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, who reaches the person in [their] day to day existence. The discovery of this road normally comes about through the mediation of other human beings. Marked through the gift of faith by the encounter with the Redeemer, believers are called to become an echo of the event of Christ, to become themselves an “event.” Christianity, even before being a sum of doctrines or a rule for salvation, is thus the “event” of an encounter. (John Paul II, 2004)
In considering Christologies that cohere with and inspire a vision of the church in line with our circumstances, I have been drawn to three passages early in the Gospel of Mark that highlight what, following Wesley Wildman (1998), might be called “modest Christology.” Mark 2:1–12, the story of the healing the one paralyzed, tells the only Gospel healing story that, to my knowledge, takes place in Jesus’ own home. The drama of the episode foregrounds the capacity of Jesus to forgive sins, which is linked to his healing in response to the faith of those bearing the one paralyzed.
What strikes me in this episode in light of our current situation, however, is not only the overlapping of physical healing and forgiveness. Instead, catching my attention is the fact that the roof to Jesus’ home is torn apart in the process. Kristin Colberg (this issue) uses the metaphor of roof-opening to highlight the need for Christian communities to discover and create new paths to unity so as to achieve the fullness of the church’s mission. For me, Mark 2:1–12 exposes Jesus’ own willingness have his house destroyed—and thus to be profoundly vulnerable—in his efforts to heal.
A few chapters later, in Mark 5:25–34, Jesus moves amid a crowd on his way to heal Jairus’s daughter. A long-suffering woman strives and touches him, and he responds, “Who touched my clothes?” having felt power move out from him. I see this story underscoring Jesus’ ignorance in another circumstance of vulnerability, something that, like the vulnerability shown by the roof-destruction in Mark 2, speaks to the contemporary church experience, in which our role as witness is often unknown, and thus we evince a lack of control. Jesus knew such a lack of control, too, Mark 5 suggests.
Finally, in Mark 6:1–6, Jesus returns to his childhood home of Nazareth and enters the synagogue. His preaching inspires his fellow villagers, but they are unable to embrace the fullness of his message since he is so familiar. Remarkably, in Mark 6:5, the text admits, “He was not able to work many wonders there, due to their lack of faith.” This admission of Jesus’ impotence—arguably changed due to embarrassment at such admission in the redactions of the same episode in Matthew and Luke—resemble the healings in Mark 2 and 5 discussed above, insofar as it highlights the limits Jesus experienced. These are limits, too, that the contemporary church knows well.
Conclusion
This reflection on three passages in Mark’s Gospel, of course, represents no fully rendered Christology. They are presented with the hope that they will help generate an ecclesiology at once vulnerable, ignorant, and impotent in important ways—in ways that make the church’s missionary self-understanding and subsequent missiology adequate to the times in which we live. Such adequacy emerges not so much from the rightly chosen once-for-all ecclesiological stance or option—whether strategic withdrawal, intellectual inquiry, or social engagement—as from faithfulness to Christ himself, a communal faithfulness buoyed by many individual pursuits of holiness within a common life shaped by Christian practices.
As long as we are here, we partake in a long Holy Saturday, a time of profound uncertainty and temptation. This is a quest in which, as Benedict XVI puts it, referring to St. Augustine, “it is not we who possess the Truth after having sought it, but the Truth that seeks us out and possesses us” (Benedict XVI, 2012). In this quest we are all learners, and always learners, relying on dialogical partners like the social sciences, larger theological exploration, those engaged in the mission, and reading of the signs of the times. As Bruno Forte has put it, we ask “the deepest questions . . . not as people who have already arrived, but as searchers for the distant homeland, who let [our]selves be permanently called into question, provoked and seduced by the furthest horizon.” Forte warns, “Human beings who stop, who feel they have mastered the truth, for whom the truth is no longer Someone who possesses you more and more, but rather someone to be possessed, such persons have not only rejected God, but also their own dignity as human beings” (Forte 2007).
Our mission lies in the reading our world in light of Christ—a Lord at once authoritative and vulnerable, omniscient and unknowing, almighty and weak. His people will inevitably bear these same profound contradictions, no matter the moment’s missiological options.