The Study of Missions in its Scientific Aspect (Missionswissenschaft als Wissenschaft)

Abstract

As the Anglo-American world in particular employed “partners in obedience”, the meaningful expression coined at the 1947 International Missionary Council meeting in Whitby, Canada, in a purely pragmatic sense, so the more recent expression, “Joint Action for Mission”, is now being employed. The Christian world mission still awaits not only an adequate theology for mission, but even those who are fitted to provide such a theology. The following Memorandum presented by Professor Rosenkranz in 1956 is therefore published herewith as a stimulus to that end. Seven years later we are still faced with what Doctor Rosenkranz said about the start given to the science of missions by Gustav Warneck: “Yet… attention remained, intelligibly enough, so consistently directed towards the object of missionary study, namely mission itself and its continually changing world of problems, that the questions concerning its theoretical basis as a theological discipline faded into the background.