Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 13:1 (Winter 1970)
Article: Martin Luther And The Mission Of The Church
Author: Charles Chaney

JETS 13:1 (Winter 1970) p. 15

Martin Luther And The Mission Of The Church

Charles Chaney*

Introduction

The growing ecumenical concern of most of Protestantism during the twentieth century, and also the more recent ecumenical posture of the Roman Catholic communion, has been the creation of and, at the same time, the stimulation of a most intensive interest in the doctrine of the Church throughout the Christian world. That aspect of a plenary doctrine of the Church which has aroused most interest, which still demands clear and profound expression, and which in a large measure, gave birth to the renewed interest to this doctrine in its entirety is that referred to as the “mission of the Church.”

There has been, especially since Edinburgh, 1910, a Gargantuan effort to relate properly the Church to its mission. So that now, in this eighth decade of the twentieth century, the once radical distinction or disjunction between the Church and its mission has been abolished. The Church must not be separated from its mission. To be the Church is to be missionary. To speak of the Church in the world is to speak of the Church sent to the world and for the world.

Mission and the Reformers

Protestant missiologists have, from the earliest efforts of serious investigation into the roots of the Protestant World Mission, explained with difficulty and distress the apparent hiatus in the thought and practice of the Reformers in regard to the Church’s mission to the world. Luther and Calvin have been castigated by friend and foe alike as men with a “missionary vacuum,” as men who raised “no lament” over the practical impossibility of the churches of the Reformation “discharging the missionary obligation” to the people of the newly discovered lands of the world.

One of the most severe “friendly” critics was Gustav Warneck, the great German missiologist. Warneck spoke of “the strange silence” of the Reformers in regard to missionary duty. This “silence” could be, he said,

accounted for satisfactorily only by the fact that the recognition of the missionary obligation was itself absent. We miss in the Reformers not only missionary action, but even the idea of missions, in the sense in which we understand them today. And this not only because the newly discovered heathen across the sea lay almost wholly beyond the range of their vision,…but because fundamental theological views hindered them from giving their activity, and even their thoughts, a missionary direction.1

*Mr. Chaney is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago.

JETS 13:1 (Winter 1970) p. 16

Warneck went into great detail to show that t...