James De Jong's "As the Waters Cover the Sea"

One aspect of Algonkian church history that we've largely neglected so far is called missiology. Missiology is the study of church missions. I consider missiology to be a problematic area of study for two reasons: 1)things that were written about Christian missions in early America were almost always written by whites who had certain biases or prejudices and 2)on the other hand, the current conventional wisdom (not discouraged by academic historians) is to dismiss the early American missionaries as ethnocentric if not downright pernicious.

Unfortunately, there were pernicious missionaries, but let us not forget that many of the explorers, traders, and government officials were also pernicious. White culture as a whole, not the Christian church specifically, is what American Indian nations crumbled under. And if you've been reading this blog regularly, you're probably aware that missionaries did do things for Indians that benefited them in this world.

Fortunately I've been able to find an excellent book which addresses some aspects of early American missiology, As the Waters Cover the Sea: Millenial Expectations in the Rise of Anglo-American Missions, 1640-1810, by James De Jong. As the title suggests, the book is about how the world view of American whites motivated their mission work. In one of my earliest posts, I briefly discussed millenialism and its role in the first Algonkian missions. De Jong's book takes that into much greater depth and we'll consider it thoroughly in the coming posts.

Reformation Heritage Books has this to say about As the Waters Cover the Sea:

James De Jong’s dissertation sure-footedly guides us through the complex relation of millennial expectations and Anglo-American missiology from the Puritan age to the beginning of the nineteenth century. He shows how millennial hopes varied throughout this period from an Adventist type of premillennialism to a low-keyed postmillennialism. Nevertheless, De Jong concludes that these anticipations often balance themselves out somewhere between other-worldly and secularized hopes and between the temporal and eternal aspects of salvation. This balance enabled believers to engage in mission work confidently yet realistically, setting a viable pattern for us to follow today as we continue to look to Christ in hope, drawing our vision of humanity and missiology from His word.

The Lost Tribes and the Louisiana Purchase

I have already explained what the lost tribes theory is, and the role it played as a motivator to missionaries as part of their millenialist worldview. But would you have ever thought that Thomas Jefferson gave the lost tribes theory some thought before going ahead with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803?

As you may have learned in school, Jefferson was known for his intelligence, being not only the 3rd president of the US, but also an inventor, a scientist and more. In regards to religion, he was a Deist, and didn't think of God as being active in the course of human history. But he gave the lost tribes theory some consideration.

After trading with Indians in the southern colonies for forty years and observing their speech and practices, James Adair returned to London where his book, History of the American Indians, was published in 1775. Adair devoted hundreds of pages to specific evidence which he believed proved that American Indians were lineal descendants of the Israelites. Many whites living in the thirteen colonies believed Adair and felt that finding the lost tribes and rebelling against Britain were part of a divine conspiracy that would bring on the millenium.

So Thomas Jefferson had to decide if the American Indians really were as central to salvation history as many believed, or were they, as Richard Popkin writes, "just people," who would have to "find their place or role in a secular world, not in a fanciful voyage to the Holy Land"?

In an article in Eighteenth Century Studies, Harold Hellenbrand determined that Jefferson asked John Adams his opinion about the lost tribes theory and they ultimately agreed that "Adair's evidence was superficial and inconclusive"(Popkin, page 79). As a result, Popkin concludes: "The Louisiana Purchase was for Jefferson a commitment that the United States would develop as a secular redeemer nation, solving the problems of mankind by reason and science, and not as part of scriptural history."

For Further Reading:

• Popkin, Richard "The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Indian Theory," a chapter in Hebrew and the Bible in America, Shalom Goldman, Editor. University Press of New England, 1993.
• Hellenbrand, Harold. "Not 'to Destroy But to Fulfil': Jefferson, Indians, and Republican Dispensation," in Eighteenth Century Studies, 18 (1985).

The Puritan Mind

We won't fully understand the "Red Puritans," until we understand the white ones. I will now quote from Herbert Wallace Schneider's The Puritan Mind (University of Michigan Press/Henry Holt, 1930) in order to set up posts yet to come.

According to Schneider, "The Puritans, searching the scriptures for texts relevant to their own particular needs, soon discovered the general similarity between them and the ancient Israelites. The Lord had obviously chosen them, as he had the children of Israel, to carry out his plans for the redemption of the world. They had been driven from their homes...for the sake of building a promised land..... The Puritans' constant preoccupation with the Old Testament and Mosaic law was...the natural turning for comfort and counsel to a people who seemed to have undergone a similar experience"(26).

He adds,"The belief in their divine election in a great work soon ceased to be a mere faith and came to be regarded as an empirical fact"(27).

The scrict laws that gave meaning and comfort to that culture also, of course, brought a sense of guilt to its members. This vague guilt was one of the key ingredients in the conversion experience, the outward sign that God had chosen an individual for salvation. More on that in future posts.

Schneider's comments clue us in also on the motivation of missions. This is not to say that missionaries and their supporters were not concerned about saving individual Native souls, nor to say that they didn't care about the Indians' temporal needs, but there was also something else. The conviction that God chose them for "a great work," came from Biblical passages related to the coming of the Millenium. Some thought the second coming of Christ would be brought about by the conversion of Native nations.