The Protestant missionary William Carey, known by many as the "Father of modern missions," repeatedly spoke of the "Great Commission" when justifying his proselytism. Jesus had recruited all Christians to missionary service when he declared that his disciples must take the gospel to every nation (Matt. 28:18 - 20), and Carey believed this included vigorous efforts of the eighteenth century to expand the religion in foreign parts of the world.[1] Missionaries in the 1990s grappled with the aftermath of colonization and sensed that paradigmatic shifts would affect the trajectory of Christian missions in the twenty-first century. In their questioning of previous missionary practices and theories, these missiologists discovered myriad interpretations of the Great Commission after William Carey that anachronistically assumed a unified understanding of Matthew 28.[2] These diverging interpretations arose out of the period of economic expansion undertaken by Roman Catholic nations of the sixteenth century and the parallel underdevelopment of missiology among the first Protestants.

By the sixteenth century, Catholic Jesuits, Franciscans, and Dominicans had already headed up efforts to proselytize the world. Though they tended not to refer to Matthew 28, these missionaries saw their commission in terms of worldwide expansionism. Gregory the Great directed missionaries to the British Isles, first with Augustine of Canterbury and later with a whole cadre of Irish monks who had trained each other in the proselytism to large clans and tribal peoples. He urged Augustine and others to fulfill the injunction of Jesus at the ascension to make disciples of all nations, though not necessarily in a global context. The church wished to establish relations with the surrounding "nations" of the time, which meant carrying the gospel to a less-distant or less-abstract community of non-Christians. Gregory's coordination with Irish monks encouraged the development of a systematic mission effort through networks of monasteries which came to dot the European countryside.[3] Mission centers connected to Rome increased throughout the Medieval period, sustaining a successful and ongoing evangelical enterprise. Later, when Ignatius of Loyola founded the Jesuit order, his staunch proselytizers insisted on yet more ambitious missions. The Jesuits' identity included the Great Commission as their main impetus for spreading the kingdom of God; they considered themselves literally sent by Jesus to preach to all the world.[4]

Roman Catholics' understanding of the Great Commission came to be tied to economic conquest as Spanish and Portuguese explorers charted the Atlantic. Thanks to European explorations of the seas, the missionaries' global vista dilated beyond their own borders which had hiterto marked the edge of civilization. Catholic friars embarked on missions to the New World via trade routes and state-sponsored explorations. In 1511, the first bishopric west of the Atlantic was set up in Santo Domingo. Less than fifteen years later, the first diocese was established in Mexico (Tlaxcala). Franciscan missionaries reported enormous conversions by 1529. "I ... baptized in this province of Mexico," Peter of Ghent wrote to the church in Spain, "upwards of 200,000 persons--so many in fact that I cannot give an accurate estimate of the number." Some days brought over ten thousand converts, others as much as eight thousand, Peter affirmed. Catholics first occupied these areas of mass conversions as colonies before missionaries noted success.[5] A few decades prior, Pope Nicholas V affirmed the right of the Portuguese to the peaceful occupation of all lands of the unbelievers that might be discovered along the west coast of Africa.[6] A successor, Alexander VI, directly managed the expansion of Roman Catholicism through exploration and colonization as evidenced in his papal bull Inter Caetera Divinae issued in 1493. By the groundswell of the Protestant Reformation, Catholics had engaged in worldwide expansionism and were interpreting their mission in terms of a commission to preach the gospel to a global audience. Protestants, on the other hand, needed time to develop a coherent missiology around the Great Commission, due to their pressing internal controversies and immediate local challenges.

Before Protestant thinkers could set their sights on reaching the whole earth with their Christian message, they faced several rivalries and contentions among many Reformers and theologians in addition to the conflicts with their Catholic critics. Matthew 28:18 - 20 remained problematic during the early Protestant Reformation due to the emergence of the Anabaptist movement and sharp polemics levied by Catholics. Anabaptists challenged the validity of infant baptism which invoked the contempt of other Protestants. These debates over infant versus believers' baptism focused Protestant attention of the Great Commission on what Jesus meant by "baptizing all nations." Martin Luther argued that this meant nothing more than baptizing every person, children included. Most Protestants followed suit; even those that disagreed with the nuances of Luther's position still read Matthew 28 in relationship to the Anabaptist controversy.[7] Catholic polemicists attacked the growing Protestant movement on their lack of missionary work. Robert Bellarmine considered Protestants heretics because such attack Christianity from within. Protestants had not produced noticeable results in converting the heathen, and for Bellarmine this revealed a chronic preoccupation with their own fellow Christians. Catholics, however, had produced significant proof of fully engaging in the conversion of heathens, the Protestants just quibbled over doctrine. Bellarmine contended that the marks of the true church included a continuing effort to take the gospel to all nations.[8] Erasmus responded with a plea that Christians engage in a world missionary enterprise, but he largely left out Matthew 28 from his scriptural argument and reference ongoing rivalries within the church in a way that almost admitted to Bellarmine's criticism.[9]

John Calvin took on criticisms like Bellarmine's and castigated the Anabaptists as much as anyone. Unlike Luther and Erasmus, he developed a theology of mission with Matthew 28 in mind, but still provided little support for a scope beyond Europe. His interpretation of Matthew 28, like other Reformers, came in response to other theological controversies of the time and not necessarily as a direct statement on Protestant mission. Calvin brought Catholic readings of the Great Commission into question, arguing that Jesus had directed his commission to the apostles and not to the body of the church.[10] Because this charge lay with the apostles, Calvin believed it would take God raising up disciples before a contemporary mission effort could be authentically established. The Reformers had been raised up, but Calvin emphasized their pastoral role as teachers of correct doctrine over their careers as proselytizers or missionaries.[11] When he coordinated his own pastoral missionary movement in Geneva, Calvin spoke of an expansion through time, the longevity of the movement, more than raw numbers of converts. While gospel teachers would need to reach the whole earth, Calvin still thought in terms of inspired and righteous teachers, and not so much of foreign missionaries. Interestingly, however, it was Calvin who organized what many consider the first Protestant mission. He sent missionary pastors to a short-lived French colony in Brazil, but the effort did not gain enough traction to last much later than 1556.[12] Perhaps Calvin eyed colonies on the American continent as the Jesuits did; even so, he failed to start an enduring mission overseas and mostly confined his pastoral ambitions to Geneva.[13]

The first Protestant missiology to include a notion of a Great Commission appears in the work of Adrian Saravia. He argued that the church still held a responsibility to preach the gospel as part of a continuing missionary enterprise. Saravia's A Treatise on the Different Degrees of the Christian Priesthood met with resistance from the branch of Protestantism that would probably most agree with him.[14] Theodore Beza, Calvin's successor in Geneva, published a chapter-by-chapter refutation of Saravia's treatise, insisting like his predecessor that missionary work was only an apostolic commission. Johann Gerhard joined in criticizing Saravia and argued further that any missionary activity had ceased with the apostles and that the church had only to concern itself with repairing its ecclesiology and theology. But Saravia's ideals did not disappear from Protestantism. Justinian von Welz just a few decades later urged all Christians of the Augsburg Confession to set up a missionary society to work toward converting all unbelieving nations. The most developed sense of the Great Commission in early Protestantism culminates in von Welz's missiology, informing later Protestant missionaries like William Carey and Alexander Duff.[15]

Once missiological ideas of a "Great Commission" formed within both Catholicism and Protestantism, a long a dynamic history of European colonization was unavoidably called into being. When Carey amplified with Saravia and von Welz had advanced centuries before, a coherent mode of proselytism through economic expansion colored his theory and methodology. The Great Commission itself gained a thoroughly modern slant. Taking the gospel to all nations meant to many missionaries in the nineteenth century taking capitalism to all nations. And true to the scientific worldview of many moderns, missionaries came to interpret the Great Commission linearly and in some cases anachronistically, assuming that Protestants had always read Matthew 28 through the lens of colonialism and globalization.[16]

Missionary societies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries frequently invoked the Great Commission, many times unintentionally, to justify economic development of Third World countries as a means to proselytize and convert non-Christians. The idea of a "Great Commission" developed alongside the economic expansion of Western Christianity and European nations and its first theorists naturally linked it to their economic ambitions, or in the very least, their modern worldview. The fact that Roman Catholics more effectively engaged in foreign mission work before Protestants, and that Protestants came to identify with the Great Commission missiology of Gregory the Great and other Catholic popes by the eighteenth century, suggests that the institutionalized networks for proselytizing on a global scale fostered an expansionist view of global mission. The structures that facilitated the growth of European influence interpreted Christian mission in global terms--in Great Commission terms--earlier than decentralized Reformation movements. While Protestants worked to elaborate and clarify their theological similarities, they naturally started with the distinctives of their movement which related to more central doctrines like the eucharist and baptism. Debates over missiology took a back seat to controversies of ecclesiology, soteriology, and theology. But once missiology occupied a more central position in the identity and worldview of later Protestants, they could not ignore the composition of the world they inherited from Western expansionism, and this provided some unity to their emerging missiology of a Great Commission and the missiology developed by Catholics centuries before.

[1] William Carey, An Enquiry Into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (Leicester, England: Ann Ireland, 1792), esp. Section I: "An Enquiry whether the Commission given by our Lord to his Disciples be not still binding on us."

[2] David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1991); Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1996); David F. Wright, "The Great Commission and the Ministry of the Word: Reflections Historical and Contemporary on Relations and Priorities," Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 25 no. 2 (Autumn 2007): 132 - 57.

[3] Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1964), 67 - 69.

[4] Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, "Of the Ninth Apparition."

[5] Neill, 169.

[6] Nicholas V, Romanus Pontifex (1454).

[7] Wright, 143 - 45.

[8] Robert Bellarmine, Controversiae, Book 4.

[9] A translation of notable passages of this exchange appears in J. R. Coates, "Scholarship and Missions: Erasmus" in East and West Review: An Anglican Missionary Quarterly Review 2 no. 3 (1936), 244 - 49.

[10] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 4:8:11.

[11] Calvin, Institutes, 4:3:4.

[12] Robert M. Kingdon, Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion in France, 1555 - 1563 (Geneva, 1956).

[13] A. W. Morrison, trans., Calvin's Commentaries: A Harmony of the Gospels Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Edinburgh, 1972), 3:250 - 55; Amy Glassner Gordon, "The First Protestant Missionary Effort: Why did it Fail?" International Bulletin of Missionary Research 8 (1984): 12 - 18.

[14] L. B. Smith, "The Contribution of Hadrian a Saravia to the Doctrine of the Nature of the Church and its Mission: An Examination of his Doctrine as related to that of his Anglican Contemporaries," Ph.D. diss., Edinburgh University, 1965.

[15] James A. Scherer, trans. and ed., Justinian Welz: Essays by an Early Prophet of Mission (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1969).

[16] Wright, 149.