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Witnessing Beyond our Culture - By Dr. Robert Kolb
Dr. Kolb discusses his experiences with Lutheran missions in India, as well as some of the history of Lutherans in India.
Letter to North America, July 23, 2006
Three hundred years ago, on July 9, 1706, two German students of
theology, thankful they had survived the more than seven months spent
in grueling sea voyage from Copenhagen, finally got permission from the
ship’s captain (after three days of waiting in the port) to go ashore
at the colony of Tranquebar on the east coast of India.
Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau were not the first
Lutheran missionaries to venture beyond the safe cultural borders of
German principalities, Hungarian territories, Scandinavian monarchies,
and Slavic realms, with the gospel of Jesus Christ and the message of
Martin Luther. Swedish missions had been dispatched to the northern
edges of the king’s realm to convert Lapplanders more than a century
earlier and a bit later to the Delaware Valley, where Johannes Campanus
translated Luther’s Small Catechism for the first time into a Native
American tongue. Duke Jakob von Ketteler of Kurland (western Latvia
today) received the Gambia in West Africa and Trinidad in the Caribbean
in the mid-seventeenth century as repayment for a loan from King
Charles of England, who freely gave away other parts of the world to
settle his debts. As a pious Lutheran, Duke Jakob sent not only
traders but also missionaries to his new lands. He held them only
briefly, but his presumption that sending missionaries belonged to his
calling as a prince was clear. The Danish royal government had sent
missionaries to West Africa earlier as well, but its colony in India
had three-quarters of a century of checkered history before King
Frederick IV sent Ziegenbalg and Plütschau as the first Protestant
missionaries to India three hundred years ago (contrary to the
Anglo-American myth regarding William Carey, to whom that designation
is sometimes popularly assigned in American and British Protestant
imperialistic circles; Carey arrived after a large number of both
Lutheran and Anglican missionaries had worked hard and built growing
churches in various parts of the sub-continent).
Ziegenbalg is in many ways the ideal model for missions, the dream
case study for the twenty-first century missiologist. He came prepared
to sacrifice all for the sake of bringing the message of the Gospel to
a foreign people and to convert them to faith in Christ; in fact, he
died at age 36 after thirteen years of work. He was sensitive to the
role media should play in mission, introducing the first printing press
and the first printed books in Tamil to south India. He recognized
immediately the need for the translation of the Bible, and with his
gift for languages he mastered Tamil quickly and also reached out in
the Portuguese that earlier colonizers had made popular in the region.
He was culturally responsive, making great efforts to understand his
new Hindu and Moslem neighbors, preparing cultural studies for other
Europeans so that they might be prepared to enter into conversation as
future missionaries with the members of these cultures. He made no
false dichotomy between faith in Christ and social justice,
comprehending quickly how the Hindu system of caste cried out to God as
an offense which deprived human beings of their dignity and rights.
His defense of the oppressed and poor landed him in jail when the local
Danish colonial officials feared that such intervention against
injustice would disturb the commercial activities of their merchants.
King Frederick proved to be more pious than political, more committed
to mission than to marketing, but Ziegenbalg did not know that as he
languished in the Danish jail in Fort Dansborg in Tranquebar.
Ziegenbalg and Plütschau must be counted indeed among those saints
of the Lord that Philip Melanchthon urged us to remember “so that we
may strengthen our faith when we see how they experienced grace and
were helped by faith” (Augsburg Confession, XXI [German], The Book of
Concord. The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, ed. Robert
Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000], 58.). The
Indian Lutheran churches have indeed looked to them for these purposes
as they have in this month observed the anniversary of the beginning of
the work that laid the foundation for their life in fine fashion, and
through something of a coincidence we managed to be there. My
colleague Victor Raj has urged me to come to his homeland to teach for
a decade. The principal of Gurukul Lutheran Theological College and
Research Institute, Samuel Meshack, a member of our partner church in
India, the India Evangelical Lutheran Church, invited me a year and a
half ago to teach at his institution in Chennai (Madras) this July. It
was a delight to teach on the campus where my seminary classmate
Herbert Hoefer, now at Concordia University, Portland, had once served
as principal. Under the leadership of its director, an active Lutheran
layman and retired professor of economics, Dr. K. Rajaratnam, the
campus has blossomed in the last twenty years into a center of teaching
and learning that strives to demonstrate what Lutheran theology brings
to the ecumenical conversation in the midst of the pressing social
oppression and political conflict. We were privileged and blessed to
be on that campus for the weeks surrounding the week of celebration the
College conducted in conjunction with the Tamil Evangelical Lutheran
church and the other churches, including the IELC, in the United
Evangelical Lutheran Church of India. Two seminars, one on mission in
a post-modern world, one on Ziegenbalg’s contributions to the culture
of India, brought scholars from around the world and throughout India
to discuss those topics. The College honored me with an invitation to
contribute to the first of these seminars.
The culmination of the week of thanksgiving to God for the gift of
these missionaries took place south of Chennai, in Tranquebar itself,on
July 8 and 9. One of those localities hard hit by the tsunami of
December 26, 2004, Tranquebar took the occasion to re-dedicate a number
of important buildings that had suffered damage at that time, including
the New Jerusalem Church that Ziegenbalg had had built a decade after
his arrival for his growing Tamil congregation, and the Plütschau
primary school, of more recent vintage but in need of complete
reconstruction. Several thousand members of congregations from Indian
Lutheran churches and more than a hundred foreign guests joined
together in two worship services to give thanks to God for the
blessings he has given the people of India for the work of Ziegenbalg,
Plütschau, their first Tamil brother in ministry, Aaron, and the host
of others. These others have been mostly Indian but also foreign
proclaimers of the Word. Also a significant number of missionaries
from the Missouri Synod may be numbered among the thousands who have
brought forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation in Jesus Christ to the
people of the Indian sub-continent.
The three million Lutherans of India today constitute an important
part of the wider Lutheran family throughout the world and of the whole
household of faith. We North Americans have much to learn from sisters
and brothers who give witness to their faith, sometimes at the risk of
their lives, in this pluralistic but often hostile society. The Holy
Spirit wants to bring us and them together in conversation and
cooperation that will spread the rule of our Lord Jesus Christ in both
our societies as we together answer the challenge that God’s sending us
with his Gospel into the twenty-first century poses for believers and
churches here and there.
Robert Kolb
Director, Institute for Mission Studies
Concordia Seminary, Saint Louis
Written By: admin
Date Posted: 11/16/2006
Number of Views: 1193
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