This book is a history of Protestant missions from the Reformation to the modern era. The book covers Protestant missions in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and provides a valuable perspective on the history of Christianity and the spread of Protestantism around the world. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Science as an instrument to justify religious missions in secular society The relationship between religion and science is complex and continues to be a topical issue. However, it is seldom zoomed in on from both Protestant andCatholic perspectives. By doing so the contributing authors in this collection gain new insights into the origin and development of missiology. Missiology is described in this book as a “project of modernity,” a contemporary form of apologetics. “Scientific apologetics” was the way to justify missions in a society that was rapidly becoming secularized. Mission & Sciencedeals with the interaction between new scientific disciplines (historiography, geography, ethnology, anthropology, linguistics) and new scientific insights (Darwin’s evolutionary theory, heliocentrism), as well as the role of the papacy and what inspired missionary practice (first in China and the Far East and later in Africa). The renewed missiology has in turn influenced the missionary practice of the twentieth century, guided by apostolic policy. Some “missionary scholars” have even had a significant influence on the scientific discourse of their time.

In 1920 the League of Nations Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs captured eight decades of political turmoil over opium trafficking. Steffen Rimner shows how local protests crossed imperial, national, and colonial boundaries to harness naming and shaming in international politics—a deterrent that continues today.

This inventive work explores Mark’s Gospel within the contexts of the empires of Rome and Europe. In a unique dual analysis, the book highlights how empire is not only part of the past but also of a present colonial heritage. The book first outlines postcolonial criticism and discusses the challenges it poses for biblical scholarship, then scrutinizes the complex ways with which nineteenth-century commentaries on Mark’s Gospel interplayed with the formation of European colonial identities. It examines the stance of Mark’s Gospel vis-à-vis the Roman Empire and analyzes the manner in which the fibers of empire within Mark are interwoven, reproduced, negotiated, modified and subverted. Finally, it offers synthesizing suggestions for bringing Mark beyond a colonial heritage. The book’s candid use of postcolonial criticism illustrates how a contemporary perspective can illuminate and shed new light on an ancient text in its imperial setting.