The document discusses the history of missions from several perspectives. It examines paradigm shifts in the understanding of mission history, from the apocalyptic paradigm of early Christianity to the emerging ecumenical paradigm. It also looks at mission history from the perspectives of prominent mission historians like Stephen Neil, Ralph Winter, David Barrett, and Hans Kung. Key periods and revolutions in mission history are identified, as well as issues like how mission history has often been told from the perspective of missionaries versus converts. The challenges of deconstructing mission history and accounting for diverse voices are also noted.

1. Postmodern ‘Self’s and
Mission
Session 3
Joshva Raja
.

2. Postmodern shifts
• A Paradigm shift
• Death of Institutionalised
religions
• New Religious cults
• Decentred Self
• Different ways of Telling Stories

3. Resources
• Heelas and Mar (eds), Religion, Modernity, and Post
Modernity. Oxford:
• Blackwell,1998.
• David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics,
Religion, Hope London: SCM, 1987
• Chapter 1
• J Richard Middleton and Brian J Walsh. Truth is stranger
than is used to be. Biblical Faith in a PostModern Age.
SPCK, 1995. pp 46-80
• Phillipa Berry and A. Wernick (eds), Shadow of Spirit:
Post-modernism and Religion.
• London: Routledge, 1992.
• David Ray Griffin, God and Religion in the Postmodern
World: Essays in
• Postmodern Theology Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1989.
• Christopher Lamb and Dan Cohn-Sherbok (eds) The
Future of Religion: Postmodern Perspectives. Middlesex
University Press. 1999.

4. 1. Decentred Self
• Humans are Homo autonomous
• Greek myth of Prometheus –
giving power over creation – a
paradigm for individual
• Renaissance gives power
definitely to the individual
subject.

5. Adam and Promethus
• Pico Della Mirandola – 1487 –
Oration on the Dignity of Man
-God grants freedom from any
laws but by free will –auto (unto
himself) and nomos (law)
• Self centred ego – constantly in
the process of constructing and
reconstructing its own center,
its own identity, its own place
in the world

6. Democratic self
• Powers independent judgement,
political opinions, desire for the
social good [Kenneth Gergen]
• Modern self – imperial self
[Christopher Lasch] – endeless
search for conquering and
pioneering
• Exercises his freedom and
constructs his own identity by
mastering over the world of
nonhuman (subhuman) objects.

7. Self-centred and self-
controlled modern self
• Constructed self at the centre of
the world
• Freed from the control of
ecclesiastical authority and
imposition from rigid social order
• Self-made subject can transform
the world of objects into subjects
of the human kingdom

8. Not feeling myself
anymore
• Heroic Mastery haunting us
• Despoliation of the natural
environment
• Subjugation of people
• Metaphysics of violence – Violence
against nature, human beings and
one’s own self
• Structural control and cultural power

9. Conquered self
• Conquered by its own
• Self centred ego is a construct
• Discourses of our culture
structure how we see ourselves
and how we construct our
notions of self, in the past and
in the present
• Self is a construct or a product
of social systems – language or
discourse construct the self

10. Language and self
• No more Homo autonomos
rather Homo linguisticus –
language as autonomous
• Derrida – language is a system
unto itself - self must be placed
in quotations – representations
not reality
• Logocentric presumption is
questioned

11. Postmodern self
• Natural way to think is denaturalised
• Falling into a postmodern crisis
• Self is deconstructed
• Lost identifiable and unitary self
• Social saturation – multiplicity of
incoherent and unrelated languages of
the self
• I can be whatever I construct myself to
be

12. Decentred Self
• Play with truths, shake them
about, try them on like funny
hats.
• Like in comedy we become the
other
• Whatever is mastered,
constructed, produced is in the
end disposable even identities
• All our life is commodified

13. Multiphrenia
• Individual split into a multiplicity
of selves
• Multiple personality disorder? – to
celebrate
• Demon possessed man legion –
Mark 5:9
• Saturated self not to enter into a
relationship of commitment and
intimacy

14. Homeless self
• Selective apathy, emotional
disengagement from others,
• Moral undeciadability
• Nomadic self
• Ethical normativity – a matter of
choice
• Freedom to choose everything
at once

15. Choice of the self
• I want it all – keeping one’s
option open
• Freedom is trivialised into
market preference
• Self is driven and directed by its
own arbitrary preference
• Choice becomes not an owning
of responsibility but an escape
from allowing oneself to be held
accountable

16. Mall Culture
• Aimlessly wandering through
the mall
• Incredible range of consumer
options
• Inability to make a normative
choice
• People act, make ethical
decisions – moderns - reasons

17. Deconstructive patterns
• Uncovering our biases, interests,
assumptions… normless universe
• Normative confusion –world as home
and rules and responsibilities of
house unknown
• Moral discourse – language game
• J D Crosson – No lighthouse keeper,
no lighthouse, no dry land, only
people living on rafts made from
their own imaginations. There is sea.
• Left alone in the sea!

18. 2. Different stories
• Nature of a narrative – plot –
movement from initial
complication or tension to
denouement – tying (Aristotle) –
formal structure of enplotment –
worldview questions
• Plot conflict – question of evil –
resolution to redemption – Bible
story enplotment is soteriology

19. Narrative and worldview
• Character and setting in the
narrative
• Bible a narrative of God intent
to redeem a faller creation
• All religious narratives have
truths about the world,
humanity, evil and salvation
through stories

20. Modern Ethics
• Meaningful ethical action cannot be
rooted in anything as naïve, subjective
stories – which would make ethics as
merely an expression of a particular
cultural or religious attitude
• It is a quest for a purely rational,
objective, abstract and universal
foundation for human action
independent of any subjective point of
view

21. Ethics
• Kant – neutral human reason
and universalizable
• Aristotle – theoria
(contemplative thought) and
phronesis (practical reasoning)
• Ethical decision making to
apply universal and objective
moral principles

22. Ethics – narrative bound
• MacIntyre – ethics is tradition-
bound and narrative dependent
• Human subjectivity is intrinsic
to ethics
• Ethics developed from the
stories of the Bible – God’s
drama

23. Metanarratives
• Story is socially embodied
narrative
• Story as a way of life of an
actual community of persons
oriented toward a common
heritage and common goals
• Story as grounding and
legitimating narrative guides
the practice of a given
community

24. Mythical narratives
• Myths become normative for the
way of life
• Lived stories or sociall embodied
narratives
• Postmodernists are suspicious of
grounding or legitimating stories
• Incredulity toward
metanarratives - Lyotard

25. Problems with metas
• Epistemological – socially
constructed knowledge claims
universality – homogeneity and
closure over difference
• Oppressive and violent
• Metanarratives fictive devices
through which one imposes an
order on history and make it a
subject to us

26. Metanarrative ethics
• Claims of moral universality can
be deconstructed to see them
as legitimating of vested
interests of those who have the
power and authority to make
such universal pronouncements
• Postmodernist signals the death
of such meta-narratives
(Eagleton)

27. ideology
• Fukuyama – end of history – history is
driven by the conflicts of ideologies and
since 1989 there has been nothing to
fight about. Liberal capitalist democracy
is the highest ideological achievement
of the race.
• Fukuyama’s reading of history excludes
other perspectives
• Ideological form of genocide
• Metanarratives also result in violence

28. Beyond narrative
• All voices to be heard in the
carnival of postmodern culture
• If all are constructed no one
should be privileged, local,
marginal ones should be
encouraged
• Actions are locally justified
• To embrace heterogeneity and
differences

29. Nietzsche
• Refused to look at story or narrative
even local
• Aphorisms as a means of
communicating – a set of loosely
connected, randomly sequenced,
assorted comments. They are pithy
statements (proverbial) or poetic but
consistent point is that no series of
aphorisms constitutes a unified
totalizing structure. It is a vector
through which energy is transmitted but
no conclusion reached.

30. Critical response
• Critic of modernity – minority
voices not heard and
metanarratives of war.
• Local narratives are also violent
ethnic cleansing in Balkan
areas
• Tribal violence in South Africa

31. The need for meta-
narratives
• Humans need metanarratives
• Local tribal groups too have meta
and others become enemies
• Best and Kellner – Does not the very
concept of postmodernity
presuppose a master narrative, a
totalising perspective which
envisions the transition from a
previous state of society to a new
one?

32. Postmodernity
• It functions as the larger
interpretative frame that
relativises all other worldviews as
simply local stories with no
legitimate claims to reality and
universality.
• Contradicts – arguing against
metanarratives by appeal to a
metanarrative

33. Paradigm Shift
• A scientific revolution occurs,
according to Kuhn, when
scientists encounter anomalies
which cannot be explained by
the universally accepted
paradigm within which
scientific progress has thereto
been made

34. • When enough significant
anomalies have accrued against a
current paradigm, the scientific
discipline is thrown into a state of
crisis, according to Kuhn. During
this crisis, new ideas, perhaps
ones previously discarded, are
tried. Eventually a new paradigm
is formed, which gains its own
new followers, and an intellectual
"battle" takes place between the
followers of the new paradigm and
the hold-outs of the old paradigm.

35. Mission History
• History of People of God as part of
Salvation History
• Jesus as part of the History of God’s
plan
• Acts as History of mission of the
Early Church
• Then early Christian Fathers, their
writings and their mission
continued…
• Our mission story must be seen as
part of this history

36. Looking at the Historical Period
Stephen Neil (A History of
Christian Mission)
• The Conquest of the Roman World (100-500
AD)
• The Dark Age (500-1000)
• Early European Expansion (1000-1500)
• The Age of Discovery (1500-1600)
• New Beginnings in East and West (1600-1800)
• New Forces in Europe and America (1792-
1852)
• The Heyday of Colonialism (1852-1914)
• Rome, the Orthodox and the world (1815-
1914)

37. Ralph Winter The 25
Unbelievable Years: 1945-
1969.
• 0-400 AD Winning the Romans:
Evangelizing the empire of the Caesars
• 400-800 AD Evangelization of the
Barbarians
• 800-1200 AD Evangelization of the
Vikings
• 1200-1600 AD Evangelization of the
Saracens / Muslims
• 1600-2000 AD Evangelization of the Ends
of the Earth
(Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christianity. New York: Harper
&Brothers, 1953, pp. 181, 221-234).

38. David Barrett (Statistical
Point of View)
• 30-500 AD The Apostolic Era (Luke and Paul)
• 500-1750 AD The Ecclesiastical Era (Cosmas
Indicopleustes and Francis Xavier)
• 1750-1900 AD The Church Growth era
• William Carey, the "father of modern missions"
• Henry Venn -- "self-governing, self-supporting,
and self-propagating churches"
• 1900-1990 AD The Global Mission era (
John R. Mott and Kenneth Grubb)
• 1990- present The Global Discipling era
(Taken from Latourette, Kenneth Scott. A History
of the Expansion of Christianity. New York:
Harper, 1937-1945.)

39. Hans Kung’s Paradigm
Shift in the History of
Missions
• The Apocalyptic paradigm of primitive
Christianity
• The Hellenistic paradigm of the patristic
period
• The Medieval Roman Catholic paradigm
• The Protestant paradigm
• The Modern Enlightenment paradigm
• The Emerging Ecumenical paradigm
(Bosch book - 182)

40. History of Mission?!
1. God’s Salvation History of Israel
2. Jesus’ Movement
3. Apostolic Missions
4. Early Christian Fathers’ Mission
5. Constantism and Mission - Division of
Missions – Orthodox and Catholic
6. Reformation as mission within the
churches and Modern Missionary
Movement
7.Indigenous Missions and Parachurch
Missions
8. Pentecostal and Charismatic Missions

41. Looking at the History
of Mission
• God’s Ongoing activity in the
World through missionaries
• Expansion and Fall of
Christendom around the world
• Mission from Uncivilized to the
Civilized
• Revolutions?
• Evolutions?

42. History from whose
perspective?
• Missionaries or from Converts or from non-
converts
• Dominant readings – wives or women in
mission secondary readings
• People at the margins are often neglected
• From West to Rest – Orthodox or other
denominations
• Indigenous Mission often unrecognised
• Small movements versus Mass movements
• Successful versus failures in Missions

43. History of Mission
With what views
• Ethno
Centric/Westcentric/Sponsorcen
tric views
• Heroic or Victors views
• Teleological views
• Progressive views
• Evolutionary views
• Revolutionary views

44. Issues in the History of
Mission
• Conversion of Kings and Tribal leaders
led to mass
• Mass conversion by Force or by bread
or by social service
• Conversion of groups as expression of
liberation from oppression
• Through education, interaction and
rhetoric individual intellectuals
converted
• Through adaptation, syncretism,
enculturation, people were converted.

45. Deconstruction
• At its core, if it can be said to have
one, deconstruction is an attempt to
open a text (literary, philosophical,
or otherwise) to several meanings
and interpretations. Its method is
usually based on binary oppositions
within a text — for example inside
and outside or subject and object, or
male and female.

46. • 'Deconstruction' then argues that
such oppositions are culturally
and historically defined, even
reliant upon one another, and
seeks to demonstrate that they
are not as clear-cut or as stable
as it would at first seem. On the
basis that the two opposed
concepts are fluid, this ambiguity
is used to show that the text's
meaning is fluid as well.