Landmark Essays in Mission and World Christianity Quotes

“But since none of us can read the Scriptures without cultural blinkers of some sort, the great advantage, the crowning excitement which our own era of church history has over all others, is the possibility that we may be able to read them together. Never before has the Church looked so much like the great multitude whom no man can number out of every nation and tribe and people and tongue. Never before, therefore, has there been so much potentiality for mutual enrichment and self-criticism, as God causes yet more light and truth to break forth from his word.5”
― Robert L. Gallagher, Landmark Essays in Mission and World Christianity

“Perhaps the real test of theological authenticity is the capacity to incorporate the history of Israel and God's people and to treat it as one's own.”
― Robert L. Gallagher, Landmark Essays in Mission and World Christianity

“But what was God doing in the Greek world all those centuries while he was revealing himself in judgment and mercy to Israel? Not all the Greek past was graven images and temple prostitution. What of those who testified for righteousness—and even died for it? Had God nothing to do with their righteousness? What of those who taught things that are true—that are according to reason, logos, opposed to the Great Lies taught and practiced by others? Had their logos nothing to do with the Logos, the light that lighteth every man coming into the world? Is there any truth which is not God's truth? Was God not active in the Greek past, not just the Jewish? So Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria came up with their own solutions, that there were Christians before Christ, that philosophy was—and is—the schoolmaster to bring the Greeks to Christ, just as was the Law for Jews.”
― Robert L. Gallagher, Landmark Essays in Mission and World Christianity

“Early Gentile Christianity went through a period of amnesia. It was not so critical for first-generation converts: they responded to a clear choice, turned from idols to serve the living God, accepted the assurance that they had been grafted into Israel. It was the second and third generations of Christians who felt the strain more. What was their relation to the Greek past?”
― Robert L. Gallagher, Landmark Essays in Mission and World Christianity

“Thus, when Idowu concludes with such passion that the oriśas are only manifestations of Olódùmare, and that it is a Western misrepresentation to call Yoruba religion polytheistic, the urgency in his voice arises from the fact that he is not making a clinical observation of the sort one might make about Babylonian religion: he is handling dynamite, his own past, his people's present. One can see why a non-Christian African writer such Okot p'Bitek, who glories in pre-Christian Africa, accuses John Mbiti and others so bitterly of continuing the Western missionary misrepresentation of the past (1970). It is as though he were saying, “They are taking from us our own decent paganism, and plastering it over with interpretations from alien sources.” Here speaks the authentic voice of Celsus.”
― Robert L. Gallagher, Landmark Essays in Mission and World Christianity

“But is not the sourcebook of all valid theology the canonical Scriptures? Yes, and in that, as the spaceman found, lies the continuity of the Christian faith. But, as he also found, the Scriptures are read with different eyes by people in different times and places; and in practice, each age and community makes its own selection of the Scriptures, giving prominence to those which seem to speak most clearly to the community's time and place and leaving aside others which do not appear to yield up their gold so readily. How many of us, while firm as a rock as to its canonicity, seriously look to the book of Leviticus for sustenance? Yet many an African Independent Church has found it abundantly relevant. (Interestingly, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the great nineteenth-century Yoruba missionary bishop, thought it should be among the first books of the Bible to be translated.)”
― Robert L. Gallagher, Landmark Essays in Mission and World Christianity

“In short, it is safe for a European to make only one prediction about the valid, authentic African biblical theology we all talk about: that it is likely either to puzzle us or to disturb us.”
― Robert L. Gallagher, Landmark Essays in Mission and World Christianity

“This means that Third World theology is now likely to be the representative Christian theology.”
― Robert L. Gallagher, Landmark Essays in Mission and World Christianity

“And when its historic decision opened the door wide for Gentile believers in the Jewish Messiah, there must have been many who assumed that nevertheless Gentile Christians, as they matured, would come to look as much like Jerusalem Christians as was possible for such benighted heathen.”
― Robert L. Gallagher, Landmark Essays in Mission and World Christianity

“When the elders at Jerusalem in the council of Acts 15 came to their decision that Gentiles could enter Israel without becoming Jews, had they any idea how close the time would be when most Christians would be Gentiles? And would they have been so happy with their decision had they realized it?”
― Robert L. Gallagher, Landmark Essays in Mission and World Christianity

“There is, in all the wild profusion of the varying statements of these differing groups, one theme which is as unvarying as the language which expresses it is various: that the person of Jesus called the Christ has ultimate significance. In the institutional sphere, too, all use the same sacred writings; and all use bread and wine and water in a special way. Still more remarkable is the continuity of consciousness. Each group thinks of itself as having some community with the others, so different in time and place, and despite being so obviously out of sympathy with many of their principal concerns. Still more remarkable, each thinks of itself as in some respect continuous with ancient Israel, even though only the first have any conceivable ethnic reason to do so, and though some of the groups must have found it extremely hard to form any concept of ancient Israel, or any clear idea of what a Jew might be or look like.”
― Robert L. Gallagher, Landmark Essays in Mission and World Christianity

“Our spaceman may, however, note that between the five groups he has visited there is a historical connection. It was Christians scattered from Jerusalem who first preached to Greeks and founded that vast Greek edifice he observed in 325; it is in Eastern Christianity that we must seek some of the important features and some of the power of Celtic Christian religion. That Celtic religion played a vital part in the gradual emergence of the religion of Exeter Hall. And the Cherubim and Seraphim now in Lagos are ultimately a result of the very sort of operations which were under discussion at the Exeter Hall meeting.”
― Robert L. Gallagher, Landmark Essays in Mission and World Christianity