William R. Burrows

Mission and Missiology in the Pontificate of John Paul II

January 2006 T death of Pope John Paul II on April 2, 2005, brought to an end one of the longest pontificates in Roman Catholic history, one that began with the election of Karol Wojtyla on October 16, 1978. What follows is an attempt to bring into relief the key elements of John Paul’s missiology and theology and, in a final section, to question whether his church is able to carry on its mission under the terms he set for that task.

Catholics, Carey's “Means,” and Twenty-First-Century Mission

July 2010 I is common to observe that geography is no longer an important aspect of world mission, yet a remark made by Marshall McLuhan (1911–80)—“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future”1— describes nothing so well as the mental furniture many of us use to image mission as something done by members of Catholic religious orders and Protestant mission societies working “overseas.” Indeed, “mission” and activities directed from North to South seem embedded in the DNA of missiology, no matter how we try to shed them. These images are outmoded, yet they dominate our imagination because of the way they so nobly captured an aspect of the church’s missionary identity. The issue? Formerly missionary-exporting lands are today in greater need of evangelization than formerly missionary-receiving lands. The Roman Catholic Church, the focus of this article, thus faces a problem of where and, possibly more urgently, how pastoral care of the faithful and evangelization of the fallen away and nonbelievers should be directed. If I read the tea leaves correctly, the principal alternatives appear to be equally unattractive to the church’s episcopal and papal leadership, since (1) maintaining present policies seems to ensure that the current personnel shortage will hamstring efforts to mount a “new evangelization” in the West,2 and (2) reopening post–Vatican II debates on issues like the nonordination of women and whether to maintain celibacy for its priests threatens to dissolve basic Catholic theological and identity markers.

Book Review: Jesuit on the Roof of the World: Ippolito Desideri's Mission to TibetJesuit on the Roof of the World: Ippolito Desideri's Mission to Tibet. By TrentPomplun. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010. Pp. xvi, 302.

Trent Pomplun’s account of Ippolito Desideri’s mission to Tibet is a worthy addition to recent studies of Jesuit missioners in Asia from 1542, when Francis Xavier landed in Goa, down to the time of Desideri (1684–1733). Pomplun, associate professor of theology at Loyola University Maryland, brings to this missiological study the distinction of being a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism with a command of classic Tibetan Buddhist texts in their original language. Another distinctive feature of Pomplun’s Jesuit on the Roof of the World is the attention he gives to a detailed analysis of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola and the culture of Jesuit formation and the impact they had on Desideri and his predecessors in the Asian mission. Reading Pomplun, one understands both the evangelical fire of the Jesuits and their Renaissance commitment to understanding the religion and culture of those among whom they worked. The result is a picture of Desideri as a committed missionary with orthodox views of the missionary task as he brings both his Christocentric spirituality and his humanistic education to bear on introducing Christianity to Tibet and on understanding Tibetan Buddhism on its own terms, presenting Christianity in the light of questions raised by the Tibetan context. Pomplun’s work is critical in the best sense, bringing into relief both the genius and shortcomings of his subject. And he does it all in a book that is a really good read. —William R. Burrows

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October 2010 offer an interesting slant on the difficulty of putting ideals into practice. Hawai‘i was a stronghold of abolitionism among ABCFM missions, and several missionaries saw a parallel between slavery and the forced labor exacted from commoners by the chiefs. Awkwardly, however, the missionaries were dependent on the chiefs’ influence for the strength of Protestantism on the islands. The Gulicks’ main accomplishment ultimately was their success in inspiring their children to pursue missionary callings. The children appear in many ways to have been more interesting characters than their parents, and it is to be hoped that Putney will continue the saga of this missionary dynasty. —Paul Harris

Book Review: Introduction to World Missions: A Trinitarian Missiology for the Twenty-First CenturyIntroduction to World Missions: A Trinitarian Missiology for the Twenty-first Century. By TennentTimothy C., Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 2010. Pp. 558.

October 2008 alliance with the ibn Saud family, conquers the whole of Arabia. It is then taken to the Indian subcontinent by Syed Ahmad, where it mutates into a much more hardline and aggressive form of Islam, creating “a highly effective organisation for Islamic revival and revolution” (p. 111) with “a well-thought-out plan to overthrow the British” (p. 125). Wahhabism also inspires the Ahl-iHadith and Deobandi movements, which have had a profound influence on Sunni Islam in South Asia, inspiring resistance to all forms of Western imperialism. The line then continues through the pan-Islamism of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1920s and Jamaat-i-Islami in Pakistan in the 1940s, and then finally to Sheikh Abdallah Azzam, the most influential mentor of Osama bin Laden. Allen says in his preface: “This history offers no solutions but does illustrate patterns of behaviour, successes and failures from which lessons might be drawn” (p. xi). In his very last sentence, however, he points to one highly significant lesson: “remove the grievances and mainstream, moderate Islam stands a better chance of reasserting itself” (p. 297). If this book needs to be read in mission colleges, it is even more important that it be read in the White House, the Pentagon, and other government offices around the world! —Colin Chapman