Moving Beyond a Missionary Model to Muslims? Considering J. Dudley Woodberry Today

Introduction: An Evangelical Missionary in the Ayatollah’s Court

In 2014, at the start of nuclear negotiations with the United States, the Iranian Foreign Minister welcomed a most unlikely guest for tea and conversation. With a briefcase of gifts in hand for the Iranian dignitaries he would meet, the tall and slender American missionary stepped into the Foreign Ministry buildings in Tehran. He had been invited to facilitate understanding between the two countries as the high-stakes discussions began. Although he was a member of an academic bridge-building team, an evangelical missionary was the last person anyone expected to see as a guest in the heart of the ayatollah’s domain. And yet, near the end of a teaching career that included training missionaries to work in the Islamic world, forging a new era of study on Christian-Muslim relations, and building bridges between the West and the Middle East, Fuller Theological Seminary’s senior professor of Islamic Studies found himself with an opportunity for peacebuilding that was at once surprising and yet surreally summative of his impact as a missionary and scholar. Indeed, when introduced to one of the Muslim leaders, the Iranian exclaimed, “Yes, Professor Woodberry, we have read all about you!” The moment encapsulated the essence of J. Dudley Woodberry’s life and contributions. ¹

In this article I will expand on this symbolic anecdote and situate Woodberry as an exemplar of scholarly evangelical engagement with Islam while suggesting some limitations of his approach for mission today. After a brief sketch of Woodberry’s earliest steps into scholarship, I will locate his contributions to Islamic Studies against the backdrop of developments in the field with specific attention to his engagement with lived Islam. I then interact with responses to Woodberry’s work and reassess its relevance for Christian mission among Muslims today. Finally, I constructively appropriate Woodberry’s ideas to suggest further steps in Christian-Muslim relations through the practice of comparative theology.

The beginnings of a “contemporary Zwemer”

Born in 1934 in Shandong province, China, to second-generation missionaries, John Dudley Woodberry is considered one of the foremost Christian scholars of Islam. He has served as consultant on the Muslim world to President Carter, the State Department, and other US government agencies. ² He has also served as coordinator of the Muslim track of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization, rooting Woodberry’s participation in Christian mission within the evangelical tradition. Woodberry’s decorated missionary and scholarly career began humbly enough when, as a schoolboy in New York, Woodberry first heard Samuel Zwemer, the great missionary to the Muslim world, and heeded his challenge to “go to the most needy and difficult lands.” ³ Though he knew very little of Islam at this point, this was how God called Woodberry to the Muslim world. Much later, he would be considered a “contemporary Zwemer” for his impact on Christian witness among Muslims. ⁴

In the late 1950s, Woodberry traveled to the American University of Beirut where he began a master’s degree in Arab Studies. The period was formative, not least because it was here that he met Roberta Smith, who would become his wife and the mother of their three children. But it was also in Beirut that Woodberry first met Kenneth Cragg, who became a model for him of the serious and nuanced scholarship of Islam that was its own form of Christian witness. This period of deeper study led Woodberry to conclude that evangelicals often misunderstood Muslims and Islam. They often overlooked the cultures of Muslims, rich with art, tradition, and theological reflection. So, while Woodberry remained a missionary at heart, his time in Lebanon convinced him that rigorous intellectual study would lead to a more effective and credible witness.

Thus began Woodberry’s vocation in the discipline of Islamic Studies, which we shall now locate against developments in the field, beginning with the contributions of Woodberry’s Beirut mentor, Kenneth Cragg.

Locating Woodberry’s contributions against developments in Islamic Studies

Building on Cragg: Beirut and Harvard

In Woodberry’s assessment, Kenneth Cragg (1913–2012) was “the dean of scholars who try to enter deeply into the world of Islam.” ⁵ Coming under his tutelage in Beirut was pivotal as Woodberry began his academic training, and his later efforts can be seen as an extension of what Cragg first pioneered. An Anglican bishop, Cragg published widely for audiences both Christian and Muslim, including in such journals as The Muslim World and Journal of Qur’anic Studies. When addressing Christians, Cragg modeled the conviction that a respectful and rigorous engagement with Islam yields insights not only for Christian mission ad extra but ad intra, as well. An example of this is The Call of the Minaret, first published in 1956, just two years prior to Woodberry’s arrival in Beirut. ⁶ In this volume Cragg takes the Muslim call to prayer as a starting point to offer a nuanced understanding of Islam and goes on to argue that the adhan contains a summons for Christians, too. Woodberry would likewise draw upon Islamic concepts to encourage Christian missionaries. ⁷ Although Woodberry would publish most widely for Christian audiences, like Cragg he was also trusted and sought-after by leading scholars of Islam, as the introductory anecdote illustrates. ⁸ Furthermore, while Cragg represents an Anglican voice in Christian-Muslim dialogue, Woodberry’s is distinctly evangelical, concerned in the most respectful of ways with pointing Muslims to salvation through Christ.

OPEN IN VIEWER

J. Dudley Woodberry, an exemplar of scholarly evangelical engagement with Islam. Reprinted with permission of Fuller Theological Seminary.

Another fact about his period of study in Beirut indicates the state of Islamic Studies at the time and underscores Woodberry’s subsequent contributions to the field. Namely, in Beirut Woodberry focused on formal Islam—Qur’an, hadith, jurisprudence, and classical Islamic theology. There was a lack of teaching on “folk Islam,” the systems of lived belief and practice of many Muslims in their local contexts. These on-the-ground views fascinated Woodberry but studying them was not an option; the academic focus was on erudite imams and scholars of Shariʽa. So, in response to his conviction that deeper study would yield a more fruitful Christian witness, Woodberry enrolled in a doctoral program at Harvard where he studied under preeminent Islamics scholars, including Sir Hamilton Gibb, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and Annemarie Schimmel. While his perspective on Islam was certainly broadened at Harvard, the focus was still primarily on the Islam of texts rather than of people (who did not always practice according to the texts). Years later, when Woodberry launched his missionary endeavors in Pakistan, he was awakened to the ubiquity of folk Islam.

Taking ‘Folk Islam’ Seriously: Pakistan and Afghanistan

This love for people and their contexts led Woodberry to develop the academic study of folk Islam by Christians. At Harvard he learned about truth issues, but after observing shrine activities outside Islamabad, where local Muslims made pilgrimages to pray to departed saints, Woodberry concluded that, on the ground, power was much more critical. His was a distinctly praxeological approach to the topic. Woodberry saw that the religion of many of the Muslims he encountered extended beyond the Qur’an and traditional legal or theological categories. They prayed to ancestors and placated spirits. They practiced magic and wrestled with demonic harassment. His elite training left him ill-equipped to address such issues. Moreover, academic resources on these phenomena were scarce, so it was Woodberry who set about tracing the contours of what is now called “popular Muslim piety.” He collected talismans and incantations on the streets of Pakistan and in the markets of Afghanistan, discovering a world beyond the mosque that believed in and feared magic, curses, and jinn. ⁹ Woodberry’s field research filled gaps in the discipline, greatly influencing Fuller Seminary’s approach to Islamics.

Power encounter and the social sciences: Fuller Theological Seminary

After eleven years of ministry in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, Woodberry’s family moved to the United States where eventually he took a position teaching at Fuller and served as dean of what was then the School of World Mission from 1992 to 1999. At Fuller, Woodberry’s contributions to Islamic Studies aligned methodologically with the mission practices of his colleagues. In particular, his contributions to the study of popular Muslim piety found immediate resonance in the practice of spiritual “warfare”/conflict championed by C. Peter Wagner and Charles Kraft. ¹⁰ Practically, this meant that power encounter, one aspect of spiritual warfare, was interpreted as a way of addressing this-worldly concerns raised by popular Muslim piety, including sickness, curses, and the evil eye—what Paul G. Hiebert, another Fuller missiologist, referred to as “the excluded middle.” ¹¹ Muslims would thus come to experience the power of God through prayer and soften their stance toward a truth encounter with the gospel.

The study not only of Muslim texts but of Muslim contexts would significantly shape Fuller’s engagement in Islamic Studies. To this end, Woodberry also employed the tools of the social sciences in his research on how Muslims in Africa and Asia were coming to faith in Christ. This approach grew out of the kinds of demographic analyses employed by Fuller missiologists like Donald McGavran and Ralph Winter. ¹² By making full use of the connections and resources at Fuller, Woodberry undertook a detailed survey of one thousand Muslims from forty countries and fifty-eight ethnic groups who had put their faith in Isa al-Masih. The data was illuminating, especially from the standpoint of evangelical missionaries. Of those participating in the survey, about two-thirds indicated that a dream or vision played a crucial part in their conversion to Christianity. ¹³ The data seemed to confirm Woodberry’s hypothesis that supernatural elements, which were more commonly associated with folk Islam, played a vital role in the lives of many Muslims as well as in their reasons for conversion.

Woodberry was later asked to edit the most comprehensive study to date of how Muslims were coming to faith in Christ, entitled From Seed to Fruit: Global Trends, Fruitful Practices, and Emerging Issues among Muslims. ¹⁴ Demographic studies continued to play a significant role, with analysis of Muslim People Groups (MPGs) serving to discern, as the title indicates, global trends and fruitful practices for missionary strategy. In sum, Woodberry’s most significant contributions to Islamic Studies reflect the kinds of mission practices that flourished at Fuller during his deanship, namely, the deployment of power encounter and the tools of social science to improve Christian witness by addressing, as he put it elsewhere, how various Muslims “actually understand and practice their faith.” ¹⁵

Responses to Woodberry’s Work

Responses to Woodberry’s work range from evangelical elaboration to secular silence, as well as critical missiological self-reflection. Let us consider these in turn.

Critical Missiological Self-Reflection

Other responses are more critical of practices Woodberry espoused and reflect missiology’s more recent self-reflexive turn. ²¹ In particular, the practice of power encounter has generated much discussion and critique. ²² For instance, Tony Richie observes a pattern among world religions of “associating religious rivals with demonic activity or influence, that is, of demonizing other religions,” and warns of its harmful sociopolitical effects. ²³ In other words, the bad spirits always seem to be more active on the other side! In Muslim contexts, these harmful spirits are frequently associated with jinn, intelligent spirits of lower rank than angels, from whom many Muslims seek deliverance. In From Seed to Fruit, Woodberry’s landmark edited volume, one contributor warns that “jinn are notorious for their evil and malevolent nature toward human beings . . . they are called ‘devils’ (shayatin),” and endorses forms of breaking, healing, and deliverance prayer—forms of power encounter—to exorcise the jinn. ²⁴ Indeed, in each of the three chapters in which jinn are mentioned in the volume, only the deleterious aspects of jinn are listed. However, Amira El-Zein has demonstrated that in classical Islam jinn are in fact ambivalent and important figures in Islamic cosmology, beings created of light and fire. ²⁵ While possession and diseases are certainly attributed at times to their activity, jinn are also known to inspire poetry and even love. One is thus led to ask: Does Woodberry’s model leave space to discern these more positive dimensions of jinnic activity in the future of missiological engagement with Islam?

Finally, while it is important to note that demographic analysis in Islamic Studies has also developed within mainstream academia, ²⁶ another critical response arises from missiology’s more recent reflection on its internal relationship with the social sciences, as opposed to an external relationship that instrumentalizes the social sciences for advancing mission strategies. ²⁷ In a summative book chapter in 1996, Woodberry argues that missiology “must be interdisciplinary, involving both the traditional theological disciplines and the human sciences.” ²⁸ The general concept has aged well, as mission studies continues to become more and more interdisciplinary. Yet, a concern for “the human sciences” notwithstanding, Woodberry maintains that “[missiology] must keep in mind its central focus—educating people to cross cultural and other boundaries to evangelize and disciple the peoples of the world and form them into churches that love their neighbors, serve others, and multiply churches.” ²⁹ In other words, according to Woodberry, missiological education is chiefly concerned with Christian mission to others, and the human (or social) sciences can be used as tools to further that end. Yet, while human efforts to spread Christianity remains one central focus of mission studies, Paul Kollman has recently asserted that the discipline must also be “open to new ways of defining Christian mission that acknowledge past realities retrospectively linked to mission, and new understandings of mission that expand its scope, as discerned by scholars both theological and non-theological.” ³⁰ Put another way, mission studies have become less pragmatic and more self-reflective than during Woodberry’s deanship at Fuller a quarter-century ago. This suggests that a key difference between Woodberry’s groundbreaking approach to the social sciences in mission to Muslims (and that of his contemporaries at Fuller) is a shift away from a primarily instrumental use of the tools of social sciences to an incorporation of their logic in critical missiological self-reflection. ³¹

In summary, Woodberry’s works have formed a foundation for evangelical scholarship on Islam, been largely ignored by secular academia (insofar as confessional missiology as a discipline has also been marginalized), and been a site for critical self-reflection among missiologists.

The relevance of Woodberry’s works to Christian mission: Exemplar and limitations

Following on the previous section, one begins to appreciate how Woodberry’s impact on Christian mission is at once substantial and yet possibly limited. On the one hand, the relevance of Woodberry’s works to Christian mission is abundantly clear within a traditional understanding of evangelical missions. In many respects, Woodberry is the exemplar of an evangelism-oriented mission among Muslims. As Woodberry’s colleague Joseph L. Cumming remarks, “Dudley’s convictions as an evangelical believer in Jesus Christ are evident to all who meet him, not just by the fact that he talks about Jesus, but by the manner in which he goes about talking about Jesus.” ³² His emphasis on friendly conversation, scholarly excellence, and faithful witness (themes that were turned into the three sections of his festschrift ³³ ) constitutes an ethos of missionary engagement that will long be emulated, and rightly so. Indeed, Woodberry’s ethos lives on through a generation of evangelical scholars in Islamic Studies. One such scholar, Martin Accad, has put forward a kerygmatic model of Christian witness that, in my reading, elegantly theorizes Woodberry’s missional ethos. ³⁴ According to Accad, one significant characteristic of the kerygmatic model is that it refers both to what the message (or kerygma) is and also how it is communicated. Thus, its approach to Christian-Muslim relations, emblematic of Woodberry’s example, seeks to avoid polemical aggressiveness, apologetic defensiveness, existential adaptiveness, or syncretistic elusiveness. It does not proselytize, but neither does it stop at dialogue.

On the other hand, one must also consider certain limitations to Woodberry’s approach. The kerygmatic model, although respectful, tends to leave the Christian-Muslim encounter at a Christological impasse. Disagreements on the nature of Jesus continue to divide Christians and Muslims. While these disputes are bound to occur and are not always undesirable, one wonders whether constructive dialogue in current contexts could emerge from alternative (say, pneumatological) starting points. However, on the pneumatological front, Woodberry’s endorsement of spiritual warfare in evangelism to Muslims is also not without its challenges, as discussed above. Finally, because his emphasis remains on Christian mission to a clearly demarcated religious other, Woodberry’s contributions align less with missiology’s self-reflexive turn. Such considerations ought to factor into missiological reflection and missional praxis today.

Building upon Woodberry’s contributions: The “new” comparative theology as Christian witness

The desire to engage productively with a resilient Islam and diverse Muslim communities is generating fresh approaches to Christian mission. One such approach is the practice of comparative theology. To be sure, comparative learning is not a new phenomenon; interreligious exchange is fundamental to Christianity’s biblical roots and early development. According to the narrative in Acts 17, St. Paul sought to establish common ground at the Areopagus for his gospel witness. In doing so, the apostle honored Greek religion in his own way. Similarly, the theologians of Christianity’s earliest centuries were often steeped in their knowledge of Greek and Roman philosophy and religion. While often pugnacious, their articulation of Christian distinctiveness was nevertheless mediated through a deep appropriation of the intellectual and spiritual imagination of their Hellenistic context. ³⁵ It is thus not novel to observe that the history of Christian missionary encounters with other religions is marked by deep reflection upon, and thoughtful appropriation of, insights from other religious traditions in the promulgation of the Christian message. Drawing upon a long list of exemplars, the approaches of sixteenth-century Jesuit Matteo Ricci and the twentieth-century Methodist missionary E. Stanley Jones may be seen as case studies in this regard.

However, in the decades after Vatican II, an invigorated theological openness among Catholic thinkers to the teachings and practices of other religions proved fertile soil for a “new” genre of religious comparison that came to be referred to as the practice of comparative theology (CT). This “new” CT is defined by Jesuit scholar Francis Clooney, a pioneer in the field, as “acts of faith seeking understanding which are rooted in a particular faith tradition but which, from that foundation, venture into learning from one or more other faith traditions.” ³⁶ What makes this form of theological comparison novel is its degree of openness and vulnerability toward other religions, distinguishing it from the conversion-oriented engagement of traditional missionary practice. ³⁷ At the same time, this openness remains ballasted by the explicit foregrounding of the comparativist’s confessional commitments, distinguishing CT from the purportedly neutral ideal of its close disciplinary cousin, comparative religion, a field rooted in scientific observation rather than confessional theological commitment. By contrast, in CT the confessional dimension constitutes a prerequisite for venturing forth across interreligious borders. So—and to bring us back to a consideration of Woodberry’s legacy—while Clooney’s definition suggests that CT is not, in the main, evangelistic in nature, its confessional quality nevertheless shows its affinity with Martin Accad’s kerygmatic model of Christian witness.

Furthermore, while Catholic thinkers such as Clooney have arguably pioneered the “new” CT, a growing number of evangelical theologians have also begun to leave their mark. In fact, in the generation succeeding Woodberry at Fuller, scholars such as Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen and Amos Yong have offered a distinctly evangelical starting point for practicing CT with special attention to discerning the Spirit’s ongoing work in the wider (non-Christian) world. ³⁸ In his five-volume A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World, Kärkkäinen theologizes from the Christian tradition in terms of concepts and questions but goes on to set these in sustained constructive dialogue with four major religions: Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. ³⁹ Employing a more focused approach, in Pneumatology and the Christian-Buddhist Dialogue: Does the Spirit Blow through the Middle Way? Amos Yong provides a Pentecostal springboard for comparative work that generates productive loci for interreligious learning in areas often overlooked in other Christian-Buddhist comparative theologies, such as the encounter with the demonic and the exorcism of it in both traditions. Interestingly, while a kind of power encounter is still discussed by Yong, this theme becomes primarily a locus of interreligious learning rather than evangelistic strategy. ⁴⁰ It is also worth noting that Yong served as dean of Fuller’s School of Intercultural Studies (now reconstituted as an integral part of their School of Mission and Theology) between 2019–2023, the same position Woodberry held between 1992–1999 when it was then known as the School of World Mission.

In light of this brief introduction to the “new” CT and its growing momentum within some evangelical missiological circles, it can be argued that the practice of comparative theology builds upon Woodberry’s mission practice while also moving in different directions. It does so in three ways. First, and most straightforwardly, the very practice of CT assumes Woodberry’s foundation of respectful understanding of Islam. Comparative theology cannot take place without an accurate knowledge of the religious other through close readings of their sacred texts and practices. Second, while CT has traditionally preferred textual comparison over other methods, Woodberry would likely endorse a recent “liturgical turn” in the discipline that seeks both textual and ritual comparison, ⁴¹ with the latter emphasizing how religion is practiced in particular contexts. ⁴² While this shift is relatively new in CT, the focus on popular devotional practices fascinated Woodberry from the start. ⁴³ His trademark was to blend the best of text-based scholarship with the anthropological and sociological study of Islam as lived by ordinary Muslims. However, departing from Woodberry (and returning to Clooney’s definition) the aim of CT is not primarily to build contextual bridges for evangelism—which may occur, yet not necessarily so—but to deepen spiritual and theological dialogue between Christians and Muslims.

To do so (third, and most distinct from Woodberry) requires a pneumatology of Christian-Muslim encounter that Woodberry never fully developed. While he emphasized the need for spiritual power to deliver Muslims from evil spirits, comparative theologians take a vulnerable spiritual posture that allows those engaged in its practice to be affected by the texts and rituals of another religion. Indeed, only after being affected can the Christian comparativist discern what are the ways in which the Spirit may be at work in another religious tradition, and only then can she gain authentically comparative and theological insights with which to enrich her home tradition (and more effectively articulate her tradition to others ⁴⁴ ). Similarly, and in a trajectory similar to Yong’s work on the demonic in Christian-Buddhist dialogue, an inquiry into the non-dualistic nature of jinn in Islam might stimulate Christians to rethink the “excluded middle” as a realm not simply to be conquered through power encounter but to be engaged with both discernment and openness (1 Cor. 12:10; 1 John 4:1).

Such pneumatological avenues move beyond Woodberry’s Christocentric/kerygmatic approach. Martin Accad asserts that since “the kerygmatic approach seeks to be supremely Christ-centered, it . . . considers that Islam lacks many of the essential truths of God’s good news as revealed and proclaimed in and by Jesus Christ in the Gospels.” ⁴⁵ Thus, despite the courtesy extended to the Muslim neighbor, the Christocentric emphasis by definition marginalizes Islam’s claims to truth. While it would be unproductive to ignore the Christological question, Christian mission among Muslims that operates from a “many-spirits” pneumatology may be better suited than the narrower Christocentric model. Such pneumatological foundations are better equipped to resist dualistic antagonisms and aggressive expressions of mission that lead to spiritual “warfare.” As missiologist Kirsteen Kim explains, “A model that allows for both good and evil (or neutral or fallen) spirits at work in the world could perhaps help mission to steer a course between a priori rejection of other traditions and naive embrace of movements that do not share the Christian vision.” ⁴⁶ It would allow for both cooperation and conflict of Christians with Muslims within a plural perception of spiritual realities. Indeed, a capacity for both difference and dialogue between Christians and Muslims is of utmost importance in today’s mission context.

Conclusion

This article has highlighted biographic detail on J. Dudley Woodberry’s missionary-scholarly journey and situated his contributions within his historical setting. Doing so has demonstrated that among Woodberry’s greatest contributions was his focus on lived Islam, an evangelistic engagement with it, and his use of social scientific tools to demonstrate the missiological importance of addressing popular Muslim piety. It also considered Woodberry’s continued relevance as an exemplar of evangelical engagement with Islam, while noting potential limitations and offering the practice of comparative theology as a constructive alternative.

To conclude, while continued engagement with Islam may indeed call for different pneumatological categories and for reimagined missional practices, Woodberry’s love for Muslims and commitment to the scholarly understanding of Islam will surely remain a gold standard for years to come among those wishing to constructively engage their Muslim neighbors.