Practicing Evangelism from the Belly of the Beast: Transcendence and Transgression in the Missiologies of M.R. Shaull and O.E. Costas

Abstract This article uses the missiologies of Richard Shaull and Orlando Costas as correctives to evangelical methods of evangelism that tend to be a-historical, a-cultural and imperialistic. The article also criticizes North American civil religion as a phenomenon that legitimizes conservative politics and denigrates and dilutes Jesus's message of radical discipleship. First, Shaull is used as a missionary model of someone who throughout his career took the poor and oppressed as the starting point for missiological reflection. He challenged Christians to transcend and transgress those church structures that are counterproductive to the reign of God. Orlando Costas's contextual evangelism from the "periphery" is also used as a corrective to evangelical mission that tends to spiritualize Christ and lacks serious social engagement. The article concludes with a visionary strategy of confrontation against power structures and a new way of moving forward based on those at the margins. ********** Ethicist Howard Harrod argued, "Transcendence is made possible through acts of grasping experience in its dimensions of depth, by turning back upon it in acts of interpretation and by leaping forward in acts of projection." (1) My intention in this article is firstly to grasp and transcend evangelistic experiences and God-language as related to North American religious and political realms and then to transgress them using the missiologies of Richard Shaull and Orlando Costas as discourses that leap forward through the projection of the subversive memory of Jesus Christ in the creation of a new world. There is a culture that some evangelical universities wish to engage and it is that of liberal America, which the universities believe they could change with their version of North American civil religion. (2) Civil religion arises for both political and theological reasons. One view of civil religion is that it is an acknowledged set of beliefs that sustains and reinforces a society's moral and political beliefs. Civil religion in this form draws from the power of familiar religious symbols and language to serve political needs. Another interpretation of civil religion ascribes it more significant theological motivations, though in this understanding civil religion still garners power by political means and maintains itself in political forms. This version of civil religion arises out of some overlapping theological consensus within the society and, consequently, cultivates a wider recognition of its bond with God and God's providence, with it often adopting the language of a national destiny and sacred purpose. Bellah argues, "Civil religion at its best is a genuine apprehension of universal and transcendent religious reality as seen in or, one could almost say, as revealed through the experience of the American people." (3) Here lies the subtitle of this essay because the two scholars mentioned show us the way of confronting North American civil religion. That way is one of taking a prophetic stance against the use and abuse of religious language that would perpetuate the misleading conviction of North America as the new Israel of God elected through an imaginary manifest destiny. North American civil religion and mission After moving back to the North American Bible Belt, the belly of the beast, after my study in Boston, I realized how powerful and ingrained is this mentality in evangelical institutions of higher learning, which coalesce various social and political issues in contemporary North American life for that life's own domination. (4) Fumitaka Matsuoka describes such a mentality as follows: The relative homogenous make up of our institutions--ethnically, culturally and its gender and class make up, particularly of their faculty and administration--makes it very difficult to find an opportunity for the emergence of a counter paradigm to go beyond the impasse. …