Robinson Crusoe tries again - Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht€¦ · · 2011-11-14Werner Ustorf Robinson...

Werner Ustorf

Robinson Crusoetries again Missiology and European Constructions of “Self” and “Other”in a Global World 1789–2010

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

Werner Ustorf, Robinson Crusoe tries again

ISBN Print: 978-3-525-60444-1 — ISBN E-Book: 978-3-647-60444-2© 2010 Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen

Research in Contemporary Religion

Edited byHans-Günter Heimbrock, Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati, Bryan P. Stone,

Heinz Streib, Claire Wolfteich, Trygve WyllerIn Co-operation with

Sunhee Ahn (Seoul, Korea), Bärbel Beinhauer-Köhler (Frankfurt/Main,Germany), Wanda Deifelt (S¼o Paolo, Brazil), Jaco S. Dreyer(Pretoria, S. Africa), Mehmet Emin Köktas (Izmir, Turkey),

Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore (Nashville, USA), Siebren Miedema(Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Bradd Shore (Atlanta, USA), David M.

Wulff (Norton, USA), Margaret Yee (Oxford, UK), Dale P.Andrews (Boston, USA), Hanan Alexander (Haifa, Israel), William

Storrar (Princeton, USA), Carla Danani (Macerata, Italy)

Volume 9




Werner Ustorf

Robinson Crusoe tries again

Missiology and European Constructionsof “Self” and “Other”

in a Global World 1789–2010

Selected essays edited

by Roland Löffler




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Contents

Roland LöfflerIntroduction. Robinson Crusoe tries again or : Werner Ustorf ’s way ofdeveloping missiology into a research concept of global and pluralisticChristianity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Part I: Religion in a Revolutionary Age

1. Bremen: Believing Revolutionaries – Revolutionary Believers . . . 21

2. London: Equiano and the Black Spirituality of Freedom . . . . . . 31

3. Weimar : the Fusion of the Enlightenment and Christianityaccording to Herder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

Part II : Religion in the Colonial Twilight

4. Dreams of Empire and the Christian Transcendent . . . . . . . . . 59

5. AWounded Healer : the Missionary Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74

6. Cognitive Violence: the Missionary as a Scholar . . . . . . . . . . 86

7. Protestant Missions – a Retrospective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100

Part III : Dark Transcendence: the Totalitarian Resurrection

8. Prophet of Post-Christianity – Hauer’s Project of Liberating the“Nordic Soul” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

9. Strange Attraction: the Missions and the “Brown” Revival . . . . . 133

10. Theological Discernment: “Political Religion” . . . . . . . . . . . . 146

11. The Muscular Church: Three Drafts of a Post-War ChristianEurope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174



Part IV: Church Decline and Religious Innovation in “God’s Continent”

12. Reverse Mission – Treating Europeans as Africans . . . . . . . . . 189

13. Charting the Future – Mapmakers and Local Scouts . . . . . . . . 203

14. The Rediscovery of “Primal” Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216

15. Theological Responses to Europe’s Multi-Religious Turn . . . . . . 238

Postscript . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251

Bibliography Werner Ustorf, 1975–2010 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255

List of PhD Theses supervised by Werner Ustorf at his Chair ofMission, University of Birmingham and awarded between 1993 and2009 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265

Index of Persons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269

Contents6



Roland Löffler

Introduction.

Robinson Crusoe tries again or :Werner Ustorf ’s way of developing missiology

into a research concept of globaland pluralistic Christianity

When Robinson Crusoe discovered the stranger on his desert island, he didsomething essential : he gave this man a name, Friday – according to the dayhe found him. Naming an adult is a quite unusal, if not to say an imperial act,because it reveals a structure of power and the incorporation of the namedperson into the realm, or life of the one who does the naming. This is the oneside of the coin. If we turn to the other side, we can also say : naming is arather human act. A person can be identitfied as a specific person by his orher name. Or to put in another way : identity-formation is processing tworequirements at the same time: by combining the “Self” and the “Other” inaccepted interaction, but keeping as well their essential distinctiveness. The“Other” is not the “Self” – even if one treats it as a respected, and equal,“Self”. Still, the way human persons or social groups relate to each other isand was manysided in history – and was not always framed by equality orrespect. Long periods of conquest and domination shaped the encounterbetween “the North” and the rest of the world – be it the so-called “South” orthe “Near” and the “Far East”.

What holds true for European history in general, can also be found inEuropean religious history. One of the most interesting, but also ambivalentparts of the Christian heritage ismission history.Mission is basically the outerform of the communication of the Gospel. Whether one likes it or not, thisform of communication is a fundamental element of Christianity (in thebiblical tradition based on the final commandment to his disciples given bythe risen Christ himself, Mt 28). Various ideas of mission are not unknown insome other religions too, e. g. Islam. Many major religions have an inbuiltimpetus to spread their belief- and value-systems to others – inspired by theconviction of a final revelation or to save people from a however conceivedfinal judgement. The eschatological dimension always catalysed great energiesand made people move to distant parts of the world, risk their life, but also



dominate others – in a strange mixture of idealistic, paternalistic, theological,anthropological elements and sometimes also with a specific ethos of a certainpolitico-theological world order. In Christianity, the result was and is theemergence of a still growing world-wide religion, but also a history of pain andsuffering – be it among missionaries themselves, both spiritually andphysically – and also among the nations, groups, communities, andindividuals that missions attempted to conquer and convert. One needs inthis regard only refer to the extremely difficult past when modern missions(who had started before colonialism and often in the spirit of reconciliation)became agents of the state in the time of imperialism.

Surely, when a new faith – such as the Christian one – penetrated an“undiscovered” part of the world, let’s say in Black Africa, the encounterwould lead to changes in the perception of “Self” and “Other”. Before theAfrican self progressed from its “heathen” condition to “Christian”maturity, the missionary on the spot or his headquarters back in Europemust have had a certain, defined idea how the “Other” would look like andhow he had to be treated, converted, and turned to a “civilised” Christianpersonality. To re-define human persons in accordance with clearly designedreligious programmes, is a typcial characteristic of the last two centuries.Christian Mission can look back over a history of 2000 years, but the inter-connection of civilisation, modernity, politcs, colonialism, economics,nationalism, revolution, urbanism, ideologies, and religion – is a specificnew and modern variation of an “old story”. This deliberately modernhistory of mission is the topic of this book, which brings in four thematicchapters together fifteen exceptional articles plus one postscipt by one of theleading missiologists and mission historians in international research,Werner Ustorf, who, from 1990 to 2010, held the Chair of Mission at theUniversity of Birmingham. Ustorf ’s opus has a very wide dimensioncovering the entire period of modernity from the French Revolution into ourdays, which should be mirrored in this book.

Looking back over the last two centuries of the Protestant as well asCatholic “mission project”, one can see two results : an enormous successevident by the ubiquitous presence of Christianity today, and the failure towin over the majority of the world’s population. The conclusion to be drawnfrom these two developments is in Ustorf ’s view clear enough. In January2010, at the Aarhus conference “2010 and Beyond. Church andMission in theThird Millennium“, he stated: “The period of foreign mission in the life ofthe Christian religion is over because it is now abundantly clear that today’scontext is so very different from that of the 18th and 19th centuries when themodern idea of foreign mission was conceived. We are dealing today muchmore with the theological and practical issues that exist among the churchesof the world; that is to say, with ecumenicalmatters. Using government as ananalogy we could say that mission matters are no longer handled by theforeign secretary, but, rather, by the home secretary or the ministry of the

Introduction8



interior. Our task now is to acknowledge that our religion is a global player, athome everywhere, acting with and among others. World Christianity isindeed currently seeking to accommodate itself to the new post-foreignmission situation and is consequently negotiating a steep learning curve.However, our progress is strewn with obstacles arising from our remem-brance of previous failures that make it difficult for us to proceed. […] Myhypothesis is that mission is inhibiting its own progress because of itsfixation with modernist conceptions of its task; that is to say, with memoriesand ideas that have their origin not simply in the Bible, but, morespecifically, inWestern dreams of control and knowledge.” This is one aspectthat permeates Ustorf ’s texts. The other focuses on the enrichingexperiences of “global Christianity”. While the missions since 1789represent what Ustorf calls “the early learning phase of Christianity, animportant step on its way to becoming a global religion”, the church declinein Europe is a sign of a crisis. For the Birmingham missiologist this crisis isno surprise or shock, but a rather normal aspect of the development ofChristian history. However, in reading his sometimes very harsh analyses ofthe downfall of European churches, one could critically ask whether hisperception is to a certain extend too much focused on the surely frustratingreligious situation in the traditional churches in the cities on the British Isles,because the last decade brought to other European countries a new publicinterest in Christianity, although this does not necessarily push up regularChurch attendance.

At any rate, the point of interest in Ustorf ’s argumentation lies somewhereelse. In his article “Why Christian Experience in Europe Matters” (2005) hepledges for a more tolerant and inclusive perspective on modern persons’religious minds. He acknowledges the “invisible religion” of “Others”respectfully without ignoring the importance of the Christian essentials andtheir on-going impulses for present day European cultures. He writes: “Thedownfall of European church life is neither ‘atypical’ nor can it be explained bythe emergence of a ‘not-gospel-friendly’ culture. Those who leave the churchdo not go because they have no ‘faith’. They often go for the right reasons,among which is their refusal to submit to institutionalized spiritual greed andtheir critique of the churches’ embrace of power. Among those who stayvarious narratives of exile are generated. Such narratives will be important forthe formation of faith in a late-capitalist society.” Ustorf contiunes to arguethat Europe’s distinctive Christian experience is not irrelevant, “but providesus with a genuine opportunity to ask fundamental questions about Christian-ity.”

These two basic aspects of his research agenda signal Ustorf ’s under-standing of his own discipline:

a) Due to the assumption that the concept of foreignmission is anachronistic,missiology becomes more than ever an analytical theological instrument

Introduction 9



to ask how,where, when and inwhichway one can speakwith responsibiltyof God and the Gospel.Who expects to find a handy booklet on “How to domission these days” by Werner Ustorf, will be disappointed.

b) Ustorf ’s theological approach is essentially critical – more implicitelythan explicitly in the tradition of the Critical Theory of the FrankfurtSchool, because he rarely refers to their authors – and if somore toWalterBenjamin, who felt more affected by religious topoi, then to TheodorAdorno.

c) With this critical approach, it is obvious that for an academic with greatsensitivity for a sharp methodology, the historical analysis is both, a safehaven as well as a rich source for clarifying the phenomena of “longuedure�” in Christian mentality.

d) Global Christianity as the actual state of affairs is to a large extent a result ofmission. But the world and the faith have changed – Christianity becomesmore andmore a “Southern religion”. It might be worthwhile adding somefacts: whereas at the beginning of the 20th century 80 % of the believerslived in Europe, Russia, and North-America, the figure decreased in 2000to only 40 %. Christianity in Africa and Asia, however, grew in the sametime from 5 % to 32 %. Christians from Africa, Latin America and Asiaarticulate their Christian faith in new ways, trying to inculturate their owntraditions, combining themwith the basic belief in Christ’s passion, deathand resurrection. Mission certainly was an agent of the globalisation ofChristianity in the course of the last two centuries – and this means alsothat through, in, and after mission, the variants of Christianity world-widehave greatly increased. Thus, missiology becomes “Intercultural Theol-ogy”.

e) Missiology or Intercultural Theology, he argues in the above mentionedAarhus-paper, needs to be updated. In order to do this, a Christianunderstanding of mission has to free itself from the ,safety in numbers-syndrome’, stopping to manage the faith of others and acknowledging thepain produced by acts of religious domination.

f) Speaking of a critical agenda, Ustorf does not only confront churches andmission agencies with their own mistakes and historical burdens. He alsoblaimsWestern historians and sociologists for their marginalization of thereligious dimension of European culture. The old secularization thesis ofthe 1960s – with a very strong resonance in the humanities for nearly 40years – assumed that religion was becoming a quantit� negliable, a privateundertaking of and for somewhat backward individuals; but this thesisneeds updating as well. The dialectics between secularization and theEnlightenment is obvious, and again Ustorf can show most refreshinginsights, for example, how seemingly atheist or secular political agendasregularly worked with basically theological and missionary implicationsor metaphors.

Introduction10



Therefore, missiology as both historical analysis and intercultural theologyproves to be a highly interdisciplinary and innovative field of research whichhelps to understand the religious traditions in the North and the South andtheir mutual interaction much better than before. The potential for fruitfulresearch was, is and will be high – and this is true not least thanks to WernerUstorf ’s engaged work for 35 years.

The agenda remains broad, and so is Werner Ustorf ’s intellectual mind. Insome regard, it might be allowed to argue that his personal biography and hisown way of thinking paved the way to his academic agenda. Looking at theplaces where he actually worked, Werner Ustorf ’s life does not offer majorinterruptions or greater changes. At least at first sight. He was born in 1945 inHamburg, did his baccalaureate there, and read medicine, geography,education as well as history at the alma mater of Germany’s northernmetropolis. Theology was more kept as an intellectual hobby. He has beenbrought up in a family with inner unrest and without any closer links to theChurch. Thus, when he turned 14 or 15 years, his interest in religious mattershelped him also to find his own way and develop his personality beyond theframe set by his family. He was looking for alternative forms of life andmeaning, and was fascinated by Christian faith. However, after some years ofintensive participation, readings, and debates in church youth groups, he alsoworked himself into the tradition of the critique of religion by Nietzsche,Marx, and Feuerbach. Was faith a construction of the human mind? Ustorfstarted to think about his own doubts and understood the complexity ofChristian faith in the modern, urban world. He felt that a modern version ofChristianity had to face the tensions of belief and unbelief. In a way, thisapproach remained the cantus firmus of his life. He never tried to reconciledoubts and faith completely. In his typcial dialectic and somewhat ironic wayof thinking, he labels himself as an “atheist before God” – an allusion to similarthoughts byDiedrich Bonhoeffer, andDorothee Sölle (“Glauben, als ob es Gottnicht gäbe” or “Atheistisch an Gott glauben”) or the Anglican Bishop ofWollwich, JohnA.T. Robinson (“Honest to God”-debate in the 1960 s). – Thosewho know him say that he can believe and trust in God like a Pentecostal, butthe next moment he would challenge ideas of eternal harmony and switch to apenetrating critique of religion. Between those twopoles lies both, his personalbelief as well as the esprit of his research.

The 1960 s brought about the student movement with their plegde for moresocial, private, sexual and political liberalisation and, in Germany, a profound,open and public analysis of the crimes of the Third Reich and the call for thedismissal of former National Socialists still working in high level positions indifferent branches of the State, Church and society in general. Furthermore,the students demonstrated against the Vietnam-war and again any form ofpolitical and ecomomic imperialism.Werner Ustorf was active in this time – asa member of an international and left-wing student group.

Introduction 11



One strategy during the 1968 “student revolution” was the blockade oraggressive disruption of lectures to force the professors to discuss topics ofactual political significance (and not “academic stuff”) with the students.Normally, this provoked clashes among students and teaching staff, who –especially those from a conservative background – had no interest toparticipate in such “happenings”. The only professor who showed an interestin discussing with the students was the ecumenist and missiologist, HansJochenMargull. Out of such “sit-in”-debates, Ustorf developed in the course ofthe following years a life-long academic relationship withMargull. His “guru”,as he labels him, was able to make clear to him that in a fundamental sense hisquest for peace, justice, reconciliation, and the keeping of the memory had atheological dimension. And somewhat “out of the blue”, Ustorf became amissiologist. Like himself, not a few of the members of the rebellious studentgroup turned to theology and wrote PhD-theses under the supervision ofMargull. Many of them gained academic recognition in Germany and someinternationally.

During two years of teaching religion, geography and history at a Hamburggrammar school, he managed to finish his PhD on African prophetism,published as African Initiative. The Active Suffering of the Prophet SimonKimbangu in 1975 as volume 5 of Studies in the Intercultural History ofChristianity, the series, he later edited himself. Here, he showed how Africansthemselves appropriated Christianity in their ownways in the dialectics of themission situation – no better, noworse than in “old Europe“, with problematiceffects as well, but still with a high level of independence.

Ustorf then worked as Margulls “Research Assistant” until 1982, when hisinspiring supervisor passed away. The next years, Ustorf learned from twoother great figures of missiology, Hans-Werner Gensichen and TheoSundermeier at the University of Heidelberg, who helped him to shape hishistorical and theological framework. In Germany’s oldest university-city,he wrote his second doctoral thesis (the “Habilitation”) on The MissionaryMethod of Franz Michael Zahn and the Building of the Church in West Africa– a masterly study on the activities of the Bremen-based “NorddeutscheMission” in the South of Togo and the Gold Coast in the late 19th century,which combines theological and historical analysis. The topic is in itselfextraordinary, because Zahn represented the rather rare example of a liberal,anti-colonial and at the same time Pietist mission strategist with manycontacts into academia; e. g. the doyen of German missiology, GustavWarneck, was his close friend and the intellectual exchange between both ofthem was remarkable. Zahn’s missionary concept did not focus on themaking of established churches, but had an eschatological approach,integrating believers in the coming “Kingdom of God”. God’s Empire,however, had to start in the individual, purifying their “hearts”, changingtheir life’s circumstances, which is why he was more interested in vivid localcongregations than great ecclestiastic networks. The actual situation of the

Introduction12



people became his main focus of interest – in theological as well as socialterms. He had the intention to preach the Gospel in its essence, but to liberateit from certain characteristics or styles which had been formed by theEuropean history of theology and mentality. He was open to the idea thatAfricans would articulate their own answers. Politically, he shared withWarneck a strong critique of the actual state of affairs of the churches inGermany as well as the interaction of colonialism and the missionarymovement. De facto, however, Zahn’s ideal vision of a provisional churchwhich would develop its contours in the local “Ewe”-population was muchmore tricky than anticipated. The education process itself, but also themaking of an indigenous middle-class were more ambivalent than expected,because the local congregations became participants in the struggle forpower. Ustorf ’s book is deeply source-based – as many of his articles in thefollowing years – and is written with a critical sympathy for Zahn, thetheologically interesting outsider of mission history. In a way, some aspectsof Ustorf ’s own approach can be seen here: a strong interest in theeschatological dimension of the Gospel (Reich Gottes-Theologie) with both,the trust in God’s own sovereign activity towards humankind and the criticalchallenge of the “world” and the “church” in order to promote social justiceand political changes. And it also casts some light on his interest how themissionary changed in the missionary field through the interaction with his“missionary objects”, who started to become subjects of local Christianity.

These dialectics formed his research agenda for the next two decades, whenhe succeeded the famous Swiss missiologist Walter Hollenweger in 1990 asProfessor of Mission in the University of Birmingham, one of leading placesfor intercultural and interreligious research and dialogue in Europe. Britishliberalism in society, the churches, and the university fitted his temperamentvery well, which is why he felt at home in the Midlands. One has to say as wellthat a critical author such as Ustorf, a layman showing no trace of any sort ofecclesiastical career in the established church, would have at the time hadsome difficulty in obtaining one of the rather limited missiology chairs at aGerman university, given that the churches there have a constitutional right toveto appointments.

In Birmingham, Ustorf became a well-acknowledged researcher andteacher. 45 PhD-students from all parts of the world are in his eyes the mostbeautiful result of his academic career – especially because he neverunderstood himself as an academic teacher in the classical sense, but as alearner among other learners. Those who know Werner Ustorf closer, arealways touched by his openess, modesty and his constant will to develophimself further. Thus, in Birmingham he extended his research not onlywriting on the rise and fall of northern Christianity, the indigenisation ofsouthern Christianity, the changes of Christian “Self” and “Other” in aChristianity that has gone global, and most recently, “implicit religions”, butalso picking up difficult memories of the “century of the extremes” (Eric

Introduction 13



Hobsbawm). Numerous publications are related to a topic that moved himsince his student days: political religion and the interaction of the churches,theology, and the mission agencies with National Socialism.

In the 1990 s, historiography underwent interesting turns. Social historianssaw the limitations of their often neo-Marxist agenda, because human beingsand social groups were more than only “classes”, strata groups etc. Norms,values, convictionswere discovered asmotivating factors for social interaction –and with the (re-)birth of cultural history, religion re-gained a place of higherinterest for historians. In such a context, mission history was also seen in a newperspective. The secular, purist view that missions were only instruments ofimperialismwas given up (though the historical critique of mission is without adoubt still necessary), the cultural exchange and encounter, the contribution ofmissions to the development of certain regions of the Earth in implementingsocial infrastructure, enabling new and sometimes more liberal forms ofreligion, the missionary contribution to academia (anthropology, archaeology,theology, medicine etc.), but also the responses of the local cultures to themissionaries and, on the next level, to their home organisations and churches,proved mission history to be a very wide and extremely rich field of academicinquiry. In this change of the parameters of discourse, Ustorf gained animportant role, firstly on a conceptual basis, secondly as a source-basedresearcher with a theoretical framework and clear questions to ask, and thirdlyas a bridge builder between the Anglo-Saxon world and that of the Europeancontinent. In amore andmore global world, academia often becomes extremelyregional, because academics on both sides of the Atlantic unfortunately tend toignore the languages spoken by their colleagues on the other side. – His latestproject deals with “Art, Religion, and Survival in Central Australia”. The projectis situated in four disciplines – anthropology, mission history, art and theology.Ustorf focuses on the formation of an almost unknownAboriginal church, theirtheology and their narratives.

This “tour d’horizon” through Werner Ustorf ’s biography and academicproduction will be reflected in this book, which has twofold purpose:

Firstly to honour an academic teacher and researcher, who is celebrating in2010 his 65th birthday and the retirement from his Chair in Birmingham. Theeditor – as many other of his students – is highly obliged to him as he was theun-orthodox and most inspiring co-supervisor of my PhD-Thesis on missionhistory in the Middle East.

Secondly, this volumne tries to collect and present Ustorf ’s extraordinarlyinteresting interpretation of the “Self” and the “Other” in mission history, ofmodern Christian identity, and last but not least of an innovative and criticalconcept of missiology as well as mission history as a form of analysis of globalChristianity addressed to an international and interdisciplinary audience. Theliterary figure of “Robinson Crusoe” is a metaphor for the encounter betweenthe “North” and the “South”, which continuously pops up in Ustorf ’s texts.Thus, it seemed to be the fitting phrase for the book’s title. This essay-collection

Introduction14



hopes tomake a substantial contribution from the perspective ofmissiology – orone could also say, from intercultural theology – to the dialogue on the“Research in Contemporary Religion”. I am therefore highly indebeted to theeditors of this prestigous academic series, first and foremost Professor Hans-Günter Heimbrock, the Dean of the Faculty of Protestant Theology at GoetheUniversity of Frankfurt, who opened the doors for this project. My secondwordof thanks goes to the publisher Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht for a most friendly,professional and uncomplicated cooperation.

The volume contains four parts to cover the different aspects ofUstorf ’swork– from historical studies to actual debates. It starts (Part I: Religion in aRevolutionary Age) with articles on Europe’s revolutions in 1798 and 1948.Ustorf says that the revolutions did not only challenge the churches socially, butalso theologically, because the revolution’s sometimes atheist vision for a betterworld order had an essentially religious structure. Ustorf argues that “crucialmoments in the Continent’s history and in its theological thinking […] seemalways to contain a set of elements that in a precarious, often confusing andalways ambiguous way are connected with the Christian message.” – The nextessay deals with the question of the anti-slavery movement and the forms ofblack spirituality in the process of self-liberation from slavery, which shows thatthe black “Self” and its spirituality is an independent subject of personal,religious and ethical development – and not just an object to be either enslavedor liberated. In the paper on the philosopher and theologian Johann GottfriedHerder’s ideas on “Volk”, which can only approximately be translated with“folk”, “people”, “nation”, as well his remarkable attempt of a fusion ofEnlightment and Christianity, Ustorf demonstrates the tremendous side-effectson mission. Both, the established churches and the missions, adopted the“Volk”-concept as a basic principle for their social agenda. However, Ustorfshows that one can also approach Herder in a different way. His writings couldoffer an alternative approach “to the new fact of global religious and culturaldiversity, very different from the one that became dominant in the West in the19th century”, and also to the political interpretation which deems a “Clash ofCivilizations” (Samuel Huntington) to be virtually unavoidable. However,Herder’s concept was hardly ever transferred to mission. Had there been anyreception, Ustorf argues, this could have paved the way to a different approachto religous pluralism: Herder “reassures us all the time that everything is‘organically’ interwoven and that the universe, history, andnature form togethera single and identical process […]. The reasons for this are that, if all culturesand religions are transitory andwill be succeeded by others, and if Europe (and,by implication, Christianity) is no longer the centre and yardstickof history andhumanity, and if the world’s cultures and their respective ideas and values are ofequal value and valid only within the parameters of their own genius, then, notonly are they not comparable, they are also fundamentally incompatible andincommensurable entities.” Herder’s notion of humanity could become theinterface of the diverse quests for the meaning of life.

Introduction 15



In Part II on “Christian Faith in the Colonial Twilight”, Ustorfs draws a largepicture from the “Dreams of Empire and the Christian Transcendent”, over thethe problematic and often wounded “Self” of the missionary himself to theinteresting feature of the missionary as a scholar. On the relationship ofChristianity and colonialism, he sums up:

“1.Themodernmissionarymovementwasnot only related to colonialismand,later, imperialism, but also to those Christian groups in Europe who opposed theideas of modernity, revolution and pluralistic thought. The ‘project of overseasChristianity’ served also the aim of establishing a Christian space that could nolonger be established inEurope – a spacewhereChristianity had a truemonopoly.

2. The emerging Christian communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America,however, were less interested in Europe’s ideological civil wars than in their ownliberation and emancipation. The primal societies in particular expectedChristianity to be the religion of freedom and liberation.”

Part III (“Dark Transcendence: the Totalitarian Resurrection”) refers toanother main subject by the Hamburg-born theologian: mission, religion, thechurches and their relationship to the dictatorships of the 20th century. Themain focus lies – like in his book “Sailing on the Next Tide” on the interactionof Church and State in Nazi Germany between 1933–1945. Masterly andfundamental is his long essay (so-far only printed in Chinese) on “TheologicalDiscernment: ‘Political Religion’”, where he works through most of theimportant publications on the topic in the last twenty years. He analyses theproblematic concept of “political theology” or “political religion” with regardto Eric Voegelin, Eric Peterson, and Paul Schütz, and draws, as mostly in hisstudies, a line from the mainstream-discourse to the debate amongstmissiologists and ecumenists, here in the person of Hans Ehrenberg. Again,themissions adopt the role of the micro-historical ressonance-body ofmacro-historical waves. Ustorf states with regard to the Christian thinkers of the1930 s dealing with “political theology” that they were “exclusivists in relationto the divine, they were pluralists in relation to religion. They used thecategory of religion to describe the central drive of National Socialism andother forms of the sacralization of politics. The theologians adopted thisapproach because they saw Europe increasingly as a post-Christian area, thatis, as a missiological problem. What the discourse of the 1930 s achieved wasnot only a fresh analysis of a mutation in the history of European religion, butalso the production of a critical tool of Christian apologetics, namely thetheological distinction between God, on the one side, and religious order andpolitical rule, on the other.” Interestingly enough, authors like Schütz, andVoegelin were not just intellectually but also personally, as Christians,opposing the Nazi regime. New research on the phenomenon of “politicalreligions” have, however, to start from a new point, because the politicalcontext differs fundamentally from that of the interwar-years, Ustorf says andpoints to the future by assuming that “a pluralistic secularization of theconcept of political religion is methodologically unavoidable, but that this

Introduction16



does at the same time seriously diminish the critical importance of theconcept. The full application of the concept, on the other hand, is only possiblewhen a theological distinction between the divine and the religious is made,and this distinction is itself open to critique or, to be more precise, forms theobject of an unfinished debate.”

The fourth and last Part is a reference to a phrase by Philip Jenkins, withwhom he deals extensively in all parts of this book, about the currentsituation – “Church Decline and Religious Innovation in ‘God’s Continent’”.In his analysis, Ustorf might be very much focused on the highly secularisedsituation in Britian. Other parts of Europe might be interpreted less radical.Still, Ustorf is right in justifing the transformation of religious traditions –even in the framework of church decline – as legitimate in principle.Christianity is a flexible religion, able – in its forms of communication – toadopt new cultural and social trends. The same is true for the exchange oftheology with culture, politics, philosophy, history and other subjects. Thus,Ustorf doesn’t end the book with pessimism, because “Christianity’sinvolvement in modern Europe is as yet unfinished, in the sense that thecourse and direction of its future development is not predictable. Thecurrent decline of the established churches is, as we have seen, not really anew phenomenon. It has been taking place, to a greater or lesser extent,sometimes at a truly astonishing pace, for the last two hundred years, thoughthe churches’ current demographic (sociological and statistical) base seemsto be rather limited. […] If there is a more general kind of conclusion to bedrawn from this, it would be the entirely conjectural one that Christianity, ina variety of forms, will not only be around as a functioning part of Europe’shistory, but that it will also make itself heard and felt in this arena.”

The fifteen texts collected in this volume originated in Birmingham in thelast decade or so. They represent the various steps which Werner Ustorf tookin his attempt at exploring the diversity of Christian experience in modernEurope on the background of this religion’s global spread. Ten of the texts werepreviously published in English (Chapters 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13 and 14), fourin German (2, 6, 9 and 15), and one in Chinese (10); exact bibliographicalreference is given in the footnotes. It is gratefully acknowledged that thefollowing publishers gave permission to reprint the texts: Blackwell Publish-ers, Oxford; Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, London; Franz SteinerVerlag, Stuttgart; Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden; Instabook; LIT Verlag,Berlin; SelignowVerlag, Berlin; Sungkonghoe University ; Swedish Institute ofMissionary Research,Uppsala;WaxmannVerlag,Münster ;WuhanUniversity.One paper is published here for the first time (Chapter 1). In the interest of thecoherence of this volume, Werner Ustorf has translated and reviewed sometexts and updated and partly re-written others. He provided also thePostscript. A special word of thanks goes to Mr. William Barker, Birmingham,who has proof-read all of these texts.

Last, but not least, I would like to thank the following institutions for their

Introduction 17



generous financial support, which made the print of this book possible:Bremische Evangelische Kirche, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Missionswissen-schaft, Evangelische Kirche von Kurhessen-Waldeck, Evangelische Kirche inHessen und Nassau, Norddeutsche Mission Bremen, Vereinigte Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche in Deutschland.

Introduction18



Part I:Religion in a Revolutionary Age



1. Bremen: Believing Revolutionaries –Revolutionary Believers

Europe’s revolutions are crucial moments in the continent’s history and in itstheological thinking and seem always to contain a set of elements that in aprecarious, often confusing and always ambiguous way are connectedwith theChristian message. These particular elements seem to push revolutionarythought in a certain direction: namely, towards a fundamental assumption –perhaps a “dream” – that tells us that society, life, and thought – indeed theworld in general – not only could, but should, be changed for the better. Here,we touch on a deep-seated mythology or, in the case of Christianity, eschatol-ogy, that can be at work in a religious or a secular tradition.1 To explore thepresence of this “dream” in the religious and the secular world is perhaps thebest way of describing the purpose of the next three essays. It is popularlyassumed that the French Revolution of 1789 was “anti-Christian” bydefinition. The alleged atheism or “godlessness” of the Revolution forms anoften cherished stereotype of counter-revolutionary thought. There can be noquestion that the Revolution regarded the Church, in particular the CatholicChurch, as part and parcel of the much hated ancien r�gime and, therefore,tried to abolish its political authority, its landed property and, mostimportantly, its ideological hold over the masses. The French Revolutionwas clearly anti-Church, but that does not imply that it was also anti-religious.2

The political and social double revolution of 1848 presents us with a picture

1 Walter Benjamin,manof letters and close to the Frankfurt School of Philosophy, saidmore thanhalfa century ago: “To articulate historically things of the past does not mean to discover how the pastactually was. It means to take hold of memories that flare up in the moment of threat. […] For theMessiah does not only come as the Redeemer, he comes as the conqueror of the Anti-Christ. Onlythat historian will have the gift to inflame in the past the spark of hope, who is imbued with thefollowing: even the dead will not be safe from the enemy, if he wins. And this enemy did not stopwinning.” Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften I/2, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann/Hermann Schwep-penhäuser, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974, 695. Translation is my own.

2 In a retrospective of 1868, the celebrated historian of the French Revolution, Jules Michelet,Histoirede la Revolution FranÅaise, introduction to 2nd edition, Vol. 1, ed. by G�rard Walter, Paris: Gal-limard, 1952 wrote: “La r�volution, a-t-on dit, a eu un tort. Contre le fanatisme vend�en et la r�actioncatholique, elle devait s’armer d’un Credo de secte chrÞtienne, se reclamer de Luther ou Calvin. Jereponds: Elle eut abdiqu�. Elle n’adopta aucune Eglise. Pourquoi? C’est qu’elle �tait une Eglise el-le-mÞme”.TheFrenchRevolutionbeinga “church” itself combinedpolitical and religious power in acompletely new way ; a process that resulted in the sanctification or the sacralization of thenation. Cp. Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy. [1993], Cambridge/Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1996, 2. The revolutionaries, therefore, though they were anti-Chris-tian in general, did have some kind of “belief”.



blurring the distinctions between religious, Christian and secular thoughteven more. We shall explore this by way of looking at the history of theHanseatic republic of Bremen.

Bremen 1848The revolution of 1848 is usually regarded as a failed revolution – and this istrue in particular for the case of Bremen, where the leader of the revolutionwasRudolph Dulon, a Christian theologian and minister.3 Defeat and failure arerather ambiguous categories, and a lot depends onwho defines them and withwhat kind of interest in mind. At any rate, it is appropriate to recall here thewords of Tschou en-Lai, who, when asked for his verdict on the importance ofthe French Revolution, replied that it was still too early to tell. This judgementis equally applicable to the revolution of 1848, and perhaps also to arevolutionary believer like Dulon. For three or four hectic years, Dulondefended the revolution in Bremen in every conceivable way, not least througha series of swiftly written theological books and pamphlets that clearly tookside of the “people”, whom he loved and, as a bourgeois leftist intellectual,tried to “educate”. Rudolph Dulon was not a born revolutionary. Historicalcircumstances would instead sweep him on to a stage that had already beenconstructed in the Bremen of 1848 by the preceding industrial and socialtransformations.4 Once on stage, however, he “became” a revolutionary andthen tried to come to terms, theologically and practically, with this period inhistory that we often call “modernity”. For this reason, before analysing two ofDulon’s works – both of which achieved a fair degree of prominence at the time– in which he attempted a theological interpretation of the revolution, it isworth spending a little time (though limited space precludes a detailedeconomic and social history) to consider the context in which this work wasproduced, reflecting in particular upon Dulon and his relationship to the cityof Bremen and his position within the tradition of German revolutionarythinking.

Dulon is one of the dead mentioned by Walter Benjamin, one of those whodied a second time because the victors of history tried to erase even hismemory.

3 Cp. Alistair Kee, Marx and the failure of liberation theology, London-Philadelphia: Trinity PressInternational, 1990.

4 Cp.Werner Ustorf, Theologie im revolutionären Bremen 1848-1852. Die Aktualität RudolphDulons.Bonn: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1992. This study is a sort of by-product of my research on the BremenMission Society. However, this by-product throws upmissiological questions I had so far addressedonly in the context of non-western cultures: where does the theologian belong in relation to theeveryday struggles of the people?Why is it so difficult to “inculturate” the gospel inmodernwesternculture? What would a Christianity look like which tried to answer the questions left over by therevolutionary tradition? And finally : it had been the expert opinion produced in the early 1850 s bythe Theological Faculty ofHeidelbergUniversity, which gave the counter-revolution theopportunityand occasion to end the revolution in Bremen. I didmy second doctorate at Heidelberg. None of thepublications related to the 600th anniversary of that university (1986) recalls its participation in thedestruction of democracy in Bremen, 1852.

Religion in a Revolutionary Age22



Regarded as an outsider, Dulon was sidelined by the theological world (and byacademia in general) for a very long time. Born in 1807, in a place close toMagdeburg, he died in 1870 in the USA, his second home since being compelledto leave Europe in 1854. Between 1848 and 1852 he was a pastor at one of theleading reformed churches of Bremen and, in the years 1849–1851, a member ofthe revolutionaryBremenparliament,wherehewas themost popular leaderof itsleftist majority. Dulon found his political constituency among the broad massesof the population: the dockers labouring in the port, the tobacco industryworkers, and the numerous domestic servants employed by wealthy overseasmerchants. He became an idol of the lower classes, whereas liberals and the city’sfinancial aristocracy regarded him as a dangerous demagogue. Karl Marx andFriedrich Engels were rather outspoken in their contempt for him. They calledhim the “north-Germanic, lower-Saxon wailing Willie-democrat”.5 For his part,Dulon was utterly opposed to “Communism”, though he maintained closecontacts with those German radicals who were active in Paris and London, themost common places of political exile during these years.

I would like to emphasise two characteristic developments of these years: onthe one handwe have a speedily developing revolutionary discourse. In 1834, forexample, a famous pamphlet by the novelist and poet Georg Büchner(1813–1837) appeared, proclaiming “peace to the shacks – war to the palaces!”But this pamphlet also revealed the second characteristic: namely, that mostpeople in Germany, in particular the “less educated” lower classes, were stillthinking within a religious, i. e. a Christian, framework and terminology. For thisreason, the radical churchman Ludwig Weidig had edited Büchner’s politicalanalysis using biblical language and symbolism, so that it should be bothunderstandable and acceptable to the people (a process which is perhaps notunlike that used in developing the iconography of the HumanRights Declarationof 1789).6 In the 1830 s the Germanmasses had only the language of Christianity

5 Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels,Marx Engels Werke, ed. by Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beimZK der SED (Vol. 1–42) and Institut für Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung (Vol. 43), 43 vols.,Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956–1990, vol. 8, 289; vol. 27, 166; vol. 28, 511/597.

6 On 26 August 1789 the Assembl�e Nationale adopted theDeclaration of Human and Civil Rights. TheDeclaration’s preamble explicitly puts human rights under the protection of “l’�tre supr�me”. Thelanguage of the sacred is even more conclusively established in the symbolic imagery that therevolutionary artists chose in order to depict the Declaration in countless paintings and placards.Clearly, in content and iconography, the receptionbyMoses of the tables of the law (theDecalogue) onMount Sinai is the model. This very particular quotation from biblical imagery gives the Declarationboth its artistic shape and its symbolic meaning. The Declaration, therefore, is typically representedas having been cut into two stone tablets; a broken chain recalls the Exodus of the Hebrews fromEgyptian slavery, andanangel sits ontopof the tablets, pointing to the eyeofGod,whose light radiatesfrom above. There can be hardly any doubt: the Declaration of Human Rights is seen here as the newMount Sinai event in God’s story with humankind. The French Revolution not only introducedself-consciously a new calendar, the beginning of a new epoch in human history, but also a newanthropology and, consequently, a new theology. Thepoint at issue here is not only the clear assertionof a new epiphany of God, an interpretation of the new event of God’s working in history, which seeksto take the place of the older tradition, that of the Church (or of Christianity), but also, and im-

Bremen: Believing Revolutionaries – Revolutionary Believers 23



withwhich to express the unbridgeable gulf that existed between their hopes andexpectations of a radical change, and their everyday experience of oppressionand the accompanying immaturity that was forced upon them. A well-knownexample of this predicament is offered to us here by WilhelmWeitling, who likeDulon came fromMagdeburg andwho, though a tailor by profession, spent timein exile in Switzerland and France, where he emerged as one of the leadingtheoreticians of proletarian revolution before Marx. Weitling’s work is perfecttestament of this tendency to understand the desired social revolution inreligious terms. For him, revolution meant a return to primitive (original)Christianity. One of his poems for children says:

I am a small communist, and do not care for money,since our master Jesus Christ too, does not think much of it.I am a small communist, in love and faithfulness.I am a good Christian too,and one day I will join the worker’s association.7

Society, plausibility structures, and religion were not yet divided in thesecircles. The protest still took the form of an inner-Christian debate. HeinrichHeine (1797–1856), however, another poet, and like Marx in exile in Paris,quite rightly concluded: “If heaven is revolutionised, earth cannot remainunchanged.” For his part, Weitling was already attempting to change thestructure of heaven, offering a new image of God that portrayed him as beingon the side of the oppressed. The prosperous bourgeoisie on the other hand,though, of course in quite a different way, did the same; they also came upwitha self-serving image of God. The French poet Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)discovered shortly before the 1848 revolution that private ownership in theeyes of well-to-do people was a value “high as religion, and becoming one withGod”. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), and more belligerently Karl Marx,regarded the new religious imagery of divine capitalism as an attempt todisguise political and economic conflicts with a mask of religion. The“Forward of Paris”, a journal for which Marx, Engels and Heine wrote,welcomed the year 1845, for example, with these words:

In your cities misery is whimpering, stupidity is acting posh, money isfeasting, murdering and raping – and in your books you pretend to be wiseand honest, you overflow with tenderness, honey words, restraint, piety and

portantly, that the French Revolution handles the semantic potential of the biblical tradition struc-turally in the sameway as the Christians of the Early Church handled that of theHebrew Bible. Islam,in its turn, reformulates the Jewish and the Christian tradition and owns it in a specific way. Thepromise of salvation is each time borrowed from its old owners and is appropriated by the newinhabitants of the tradition. Finally, it does not take long before the “new” believers start upgradingthemselves and claim to be the “actual” People of God, howsoever this god may be understood.

7 Quoted by Veit Valentin, Geschichte der Deutschen Revolution 1848-1849, 2 vols., Aalen: ScientiaVerlag, 1968 (reprint), here I, 281. Translations from Valentin are my own.

Religion in a Revolutionary Age24



good manners – and you dare to make us believe that your written God andyour written wisdom be better than your crimes that happened in reality?8

These views were no longer limited only to poets, philosophers and socialists.Themiddle classes and the workers by then began openly to question that theyshould discuss the transformation of society in religious terms. Why not treatpolitics simply as politics? This new paradigm, which represented a coming ofage, began to take roots in the masses. Why not, from this point, try tounderstand human life without the questionable help of a church or a religion,which had – in the experience of the populace – sided with the rich andpowerful? In his introduction to a critique of theHegelian philosophyof law, in1844, Marx had stated that the abolition of religion, the latter being an illusionof human happiness, was in effect equal to a demand for the real happiness ofthe people. And since the hereafter of truth had been dissolved, it would nowbe the task of history to establish “the truth of the earth”.

This sort of public discussion immediately preceded the revolution of 1848,and it led to the uncomfortable situation of a man like Dulon, whose explicitconcern it was that God should not be driven out of modernity. This heattempted, however, at a time when the revolutionary tradition was alreadyprepared to proceedwithout the help of the Church and Christianity. Dulonwas,therefore, constantly driven to radicalise his religious thinking and to keep pacewith the rapid advance of secular thought. This in turn would force him to fighton a second front; that is to say, against the conservative, if not indeedcounter-revolutionary, church establishment, whichwas quite happy tomake itspeace with modernity and revolution – as long as the church and theologythemselveswere granted their own territory inwhich to continue life as though ina kind of parallel world.

The proximate cause of Dulon’s career as a revolutionary was the violent coupd’�tat of the King of Prussia in Berlin inDecember 1848. The forced introductionof a more or less pre-revolutionary constitution in Prussia destroyed the hopesforGermanunification and for a democratic society. Bremen, however, still had arevolutionary constitution. It was a relatively small and insignificant HanseaticFree State, and as far as Berlin and Vienna were concerned was at the bottom ofthe counter-revolutionary agenda. It was Bremen’s very insignificancewithin theoverall political context that allowed it to become one of the centres of politicalopposition to the ancien r�gimes, which were now everywhere regaining theirstrength. By January 1849, Dulon had already managed to get his politicalbroadsheet “On National Liberation Struggle” printed.9 It brought him a certainreputation on the continent, and he became amember of the Bremen parliamentin March 1849, with nearly 80 % of the popular vote. “On National LiberationStruggle” is an attempt to re-interpret (or re-discover) a revolutionary process

8 Quoted by Valentin, Geschichte der Deutschen Revolution I, 285.9 Rudolph Dulon, Vom Kampf um Völkerfreiheit. Ein Lesebuch fürs deutsche Volk, 2 vols., Bremen:Verlag von A.D. Geisler, 1849 and 1850.

Bremen: Believing Revolutionaries – Revolutionary Believers 25




The Christian experience in modern Europe is fragmented. It shows great diversity in various contexts. One aspect of Western religious communication is mission. The spread of Christianity into the ‘Global South’ has been ambivalent in character. The missions built up Chri-stian education, social infrastructure, congregations, and models of peaceful confl ict resolution. But the darkness of the encounter bet-ween the European “self” and the many “others” often had disastrous consequences for indigenous people. Werner Ustorf has been a leading missiologist worldwide for a period of thirty years. This book analyses the historical construction of mis-sions and individuals, religion and politics, non-religious interpreta-tions and cultural phenomena. It also proves the analytical strength of theology in conceptualizing the future Christian experiences in Europe.

The Author Dr. theol. Werner Ustorf, 1990–2010 Professor of Mission at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom.

The editor Dr. theol. Roland Löffl er is Director of the programme “Trialogue of Cultures” at the Herbert Quandt-Foundation, Germany.

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