Andrew F. Walls

Converts or Proselytes? The crisis over conversion in the early church

T word conversion has been used in Christian history in a multitude of ways. There have been at least two broad streams of usage, each with many divisions. In one stream conversion is spoken of essentially as an external act of religious change. In this usage Christian conversion refers to movement to the Christian faith, individually or collectively, on the part of people previously outside it. By extension, this usage can also indicate movement from one branch of Christian profession to another—from Catholic to Protestant, for instance, or vice versa. In the second stream of usage, “conversion” denotes critical internal religious change in persons within the Christian community, and here the varieties of meaning raise complex issues. Sometimes “conversion” refers to subjective experience, sometimes to an assumed ontological change, sometimes to both. For centuries in the Latin West, the primary meaning of “conversion” was a person’s response to vocation to the religious or monastic life, turning from the life of the world to God. In Protestant devotion it came to refer to an early stage of the pilgrimage of the soul awakened to God. Catholics, Jansenists, mainstream Protestants, radical Protestants, Puritans, Pietists, and Arminian and Calvinist evangelicals developed differing maps of the processes of salvation and differing paradigms of “normal” Christian experience. These in turn led to different assessments of the nature and significance of conversion and of its relationship to regeneration, justification, and other elements in the salvific process. They also raised the question whether conversion was always necessary where Christian nurture had been effective. New styles of evangelism, with new understandings of the saving process, that developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries complicated matters further. Whole new vocabularies of evangelism came into existence, and the word “conversion” had a place in all of them. Where the vital question is “Are you saved?” or “Have you accepted Jesus into your heart?” “conversion” is likely to mean something rather different from what it means when the question is, “How long have you been at Sinai, and what is your law work?” as it might be in the older Scottish evangelicalism, or “Have you the form of godliness, and do you desire the power thereof?” which might be raised if an inquirer sought membership of an early Methodist society. The Protestant missionary movement complicated the understanding of conversion still further. Missions aimed to bring into the Christian faith those who were outside it, but those who were most active in establishing missions were often evangelicals, who had a well-defined paradigm of “normal” Christian experience. The evangelical conversion they had experienced had taken them from the “nominal” Christianity professed throughout the society in which they had grown up to “real” Christianity issuing in a holy life. This process was typically marked by a period of deep consciousness of personal sin followed by a sense of joyous liberation dawning with realization of personal forgiveness through Christ. Missionaries with this background expected to see a similar pattern of experience in those who came to Christian faith, even in societies where there had been no previous Christian profession. In this way, the distinction between the two streams of usage—the one relating to externally recognizable adhesion to the Christian faith and the other relating to internal personal change—became blurred. This was not the first time that such blurring occurred. There had long been confusion within the first stream of usage when referring to such celebrated conversions as those of Constantine and Augustine, where “conversion” might be used equally of their identification (in their different ways) with the Christian community, or of the particular critical experiences that led them to it. This essay does not attempt to disentangle these linguistic and conceptual complexities. It seeks to focus on the simplest, most elemental feature of the word “conversion,” the idea of turning. There is ample biblical warrant for this focus in the insistence with which the Scriptures of both testaments call for turning to God. One might almost say that conversion represents the specifically Christian understanding of the response to God’s saving activity. The events that best illuminate our understanding of it are described in the New Testament.

Kwame Bediako and Christian Scholarship in Africa

International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 32, No. 4 Andrew F. Walls, founding director of the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World, is Senior Research Professor at the Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission, and Culture, Akropong, Ghana. A contributing editor, he is Honorary Professor, University of Edinburgh, and Professor of the History of Mission, Liverpool Hope University. —a.f.walls@ed.ac.uk M Kwame Dakwa Bediako, late rector of the Akrofi-Christaller Institute for Theology, Mission, and Culture, in Akropong, Ghana, was born on July 7, 1945. He died, following a serious illness, on June 10, 2008. Over many years he pointed others to Africa’s proper place in contemporary worldwide Christian discourse. He charted new directions for African Christian theology. He labored so that generations of scholars, confident equally of their Christian and their African identity, might be formed in Africa, and to that end he created a new type of institution where devotion to scholarship and understanding of the cultures of Africa would be pursued in a setting of Christian worship, discipleship, and mission. These were huge undertakings, and he was called from them at the height of his powers, when still full of visions and plans for their implementation, the institution that was meant to model and facilitate all those visions still in its youth. It would be premature, therefore, to pronounce upon his legacy Kwame Bediako and Christian Scholarship in Africa