Sunday, July 14, 2019

Review: A History of Christian Missions

A History of Christian Missions A History of Christian Missions by Stephen Neill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A very complete, succint global history of Christian missions up to the 1980s. Feels dated today, because of facts it could hardly deal with, each for a different reason:
* takes an œcumenical approach, for instance to Romanist and Greek/Russian iconodulic missions;
* takes seriously liberation theory;
* ignores Reformed missionary activity in the XVI century;
* ignores the liberal destruction of mainstream European Christianity;
* predates the conservative resurgence, the Calvinistic renaissance, the global South and the revelation of the then-hidden, astonishing advance of Protestantism in China.

We still lack a more decidedly Reformed, even Evangelical, and more recent approach to the subject.

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