Reformed Theology and Global Christianity

From its inception, Reformed Protestantism was an international phenomenon. Invariably, the places where European and American missionaries went were the very same locations where European powers operated a vast set of economic and political enterprises. Furthermore, because the missionaries themselves were the product of Christian developments in the West—whether the Protestant opposition to Roman Catholicism or intra-Protestant squabbles (Lutheran vs. Reformed, pietist vs. confessional)—missionaries faced a considerable challenge in trying to adapt a faith heavily bound up with Western civilization for people for whom Europe’s history, language, and culture were alien. In other words, the challenge of foreign missions was how to decouple the simple Christian message from a set of understandings and practices thoroughly situated for over a millennium in the West. The globalization of Reformed Protestantism, then, was a by-product of European expansion around the world chiefly for the purpose of commerce and conquest. This process happened in two stages. The first, as exemplified by the experience of Dutch Reformed Protestants in Africa, involved the creation and establishment of European-styled churches for Western settlers in a foreign land. The second, as the history of Presbyterianism in Korea shows, occurred through the modern missionary movement where Protestants of European descent sought to evangelize and disciple an indigenous population. In both cases, despite the best of intentions eventually to rid Christianity of its cultural assumptions, European-based patterns of theology and church life continue to set the standard for Christians around the world who constitute what some scholars refer to as ‘global Christianity’.