Building a Social Science: 19th Century British Cooperative Thought by Kirsten Madden and Joseph Persky

In approaching the subject of the Protestant presence in Latin America, I believe it is necessary to take a missiological perspective. In recent times, Latin American Protestantism has come to the fore in the secular and academic press mainly because of its irruption onto the political scene. Focusing on this aspect of Protestant life, reporters and scholars have not paid attention to the totality of the Protestant phenomenon. If we add to this the hostility most Marxist and Catholic historians and social scientists we can understand why the accumulated volume of literature on the subject presents a distorted and frequently uninformed picture of Latin American Protestants. Only a missiological approach can provide a clearer holistic picture of Protestant reality. A missiological approach is inter-disciplinary. It looks at missionary acts from the perspectives of the biblical sciences, theology, history and the social sciences. It aims to be systematic and critical, but it starts from a positive stance towards the legitimacy of the Christian missionary task as pan of the fundamental reason for the being of the church. From this perspective, during this century Latin American Protestantism has been a source of puzzling surprises. Its numerical growth has gone beyond the expectations of the pioneers who introduced it, but the way in which that growth took place has been very different from what the pioneers planned. Since its appearance in the 19th century, the Roman Catholic Church has used every available means at her disposal in order to stop it, but at this end of the 20th century, some of the most dynamic sectors in that same church are adopting many of the missionary methodologies that Protestantism brought to Latin America or developed here. A missiological approach gives the observer a wider frame of reference :o place his/her perception of the surprising and at moments contradictory nature of Latin American Protestantism. Ours is the second great century of Protestant global missionary advance. As Latourette, the classic historian of missions, has demonstrated, during the 19th and 20th centuries, missionary vitality in the Protestant world bore the marks of the Evangelical ethos.(1) The Protestant missionary movement was born from the ranks of Pietism in central Europe and from the Spiritual Awakenings in the 19th century English speaking world. For Latourette, missionary activity usually stems from spiritual vitality and he submits that the vital minorities of Protestants in Europe are mainly from a tradition. Growth outside Europe corresponded to the same stream, This means that world Protestantism tends increasingly to have a puritan-pietistic-evangelical stance.(2) In choosing these three terms: puritan, pietistic and evangelical, Latourette offers a description of the kind of evangelicalism which has kept the initiative in missionary activity in the world. We may look at these terms from a missiological perspective which includes their theological content, as well as their sociological and methodological components. Thus we find in them the ethos of a movement which emphasizes individual conversion and belief followed by moral transformation, which reacts against formal religiosity bred by sacramentalism, and which creates structures that allow rank and file Christians to take part in the missionary activities of the church. At the end of this century, it has become evident that the vitality, relevance and creativity of both Catholic and Protestant churches have shifted to the South. They are now the marks of churches in Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia, right at the time when European Christianity seems paralyzed at a deadlock and becomes affected by the fatigue that accompanies a postChristendom situation. These Southern forms of Christianity that developed out of the missionary thrust of Europeans and North Americans, have now taken a form of their own. …

19th Century English historian Thomas Carlyle envisioned an heroic minority transforming the world. Although his views were repudiated by social scientists, Fredrick Jackson Turner and Elbert Hubbard revived such thinking in the New World by connecting entrepreneur-like responses with American individualism. Today, a popular vision continues to connect entrepreneurship with towering individuals. Culturally competent models and perspectives that view entrepreneurship more broadly have a significant role in avoiding ethnocentrism through the development of appropriate perspectives.

In 1971 Elie Kedourie had been working on Middle Eastern history for two decades. He then defined the 'key' to The Chatham House Version, which he had just published, as the 'wish to rescue history from prescription and prophecy'. For him accounts of the past shaped by the desire to prescribe policy or to forecast the future, according to some vision or prearranged pattern, 'failed as history'.' It is questionable whether his definition is enough to encompass all his later work. His mind and interests ranged so widely that they have defied simplistic and sometimes hostile explanations that have been advanced for his underlying motives. Nevertheless, he had the knack of expressing, slightly ironically, large and complicated issues in a succinct and arresting phrase. Kedourie's formula is perhaps as sound and consistent as any that has been offered to explain, in a single sentence, his approaches to both history and political thought. His work in both fields helped form his conception of relationships between historians and politicians. To consider his attitude to such relationships it is appropriate to recall, first, some elements in his academic work which essentially contributed to it. His fundamental view of history is certainly consistent with the insistence of many contemporary and earlier historians that history is about what happened and why, not about how events and the lives of men followed some prescribed pattern or course. About a decade after Kedourie was born, H.A.L. Fisher distanced himself from prescribers of patterns in some reflections on writing his History of Europe (1935):

<i>Building a Social Science: Nineteenth-Century British Cooperative Thought</i>, by Kirsten Madden and Joseph Persky