Prof. Brian Stanley, "Civilization, race, and culture: missionary discourses of human difference"
Keynote Address, Wānanga-Symposium, Waitangi, 17 November 2023 ABSTRACT The lecture examines the three categories of human differentiation—civilization, race, and culture— that have been successively prominent in the vocabulary of Christian missions, using examples drawn from a variety of British Protestant mission contexts. Although occasional reference will be made to New Zealand, the lecture aims to set the themes of the conference in a broader global and historical context. ‘Civilization’ will be discussed with primary reference to its most common antonym— ‘heathenism’, which became embedded in Anglophone usage through choices in biblical translation, culminating in the King James version of 1611. Although civilization discourse was often permeated by racial language, it was used in both white-on-white and black-on-black contexts, and hence was not intrinsically racist. In the early twentieth century the vocabulary of race assumed new dominance in mission thinking, notably at the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910. However, it was used in contradictory ways, most frequently by ‘progressives’ who employed the concept of race as a validator of some measure of plurality in Christian thought and practice, at least with reference to the so-called higher civilizations of Asia. It thus became a bridge for the entrance into 20th-century missiology of anthropological concepts of plural cultures, which were mostly grounded in translation and linguistic studies. Whilst these may appear to represent a distinct improvement on earlier vocabularies of civilization, heathenism, or race, missionary reliance on functionalist concepts of culture has brought its own problems of static essentialism. Many present-day advocates of world missions now reconcile the universalism intrinsic to Christian understandings of humanity with the obvious fact of ethnic difference by erecting hard and problematic boundaries, both between idealized discrete cultures and between the constructed categories of ‘culture’ and ‘religion’. BIO Brian Stanley was Professor of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh from 2009 to his retirement in August 2023. Previously he was based in the University of Cambridge, where he was a Fellow of St Edmund’s College and Director of the Currents in World Christianity international research project. The project spawned the Eerdmans series, Studies in the History of Christian Missions, which will come to an end with the publication in November 2023 of its 29th volume, a posthumous work by Andrew F. Walls, and edited by Brian Stanley, The Missionary Movement from the West: A Biography from Birth to Old Age. Professor Stanley’s numerous other publications include The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910 (2009) and Christianity in The Twentieth Century: A World History (2018). This wānanga-symposium, held at Waitangi, was supported by Te Tii marae, Te Pihopatanga o te Tai Tokerau, Karuwhā Trust, Laidlaw College, St John's Theological College, NZ Church Missionary Society, and Ngā Wai Hōhonu.
