Dr. Nathan Busenitz · The Master's Seminary · 60 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Nathan Busenitz, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
After the bad comes the good. The same nineteenth century that watched liberalism attack the Bible watched the gospel go to more peoples than in all the preceding centuries combined. This lecture tells that story through three lives, a shoe cobbler who translated Scripture for India, an American who suffered a Burmese death camp for eighteen converts, and a doctor who dressed as a Chinese man to reach the interior of China, and then traces the astonishing chain by which one faithful life kept igniting the next, from a Puritan translator all the way to Jim Elliot.
Revisiting Tuesday, the lecture clarifies the church's relationship to social action: doing good in society is right, but it flows from the Great Commission rather than replacing it. Liberalism kept the social work and dropped the gospel; the biblical order redeems culture by redeeming sinners within it through preaching. A story about Carl Henry pressing Karl Barth on whether a news camera would have recorded the resurrection, and answering Barth's jab with Christianity yesterday, today, and forever, marks the difference between evangelical conviction and neo-orthodox ambiguity.
Yale historian Kenneth Scott Latourette captures the century's contradiction: Christianity was rejected in the West more openly than at any time since Constantine, and yet expanded with such vigor that the 1800s demand as much space as all eighteen preceding centuries. The gospel had reached Africa and Asia in the early centuries, so this is recovery as well as pioneering, but in a post-Reformation frame the nineteenth century is the great century of missions.
John Eliot, the Puritan apostle to the Indians, translated the Bible into Algonquin by 1663, and Thomas Mayhew's family evangelized peacefully at Martha's Vineyard. Then David Brainerd's short life among the Delaware peoples, published by Edwards, planted the seed of everything to come, including in Edwards himself, who ended his ministry among the Housatonic at Stockbridge.
William Carey, father of modern missions, taught himself Greek, Hebrew, and other languages while mending shoes. A convinced particular Baptist, he stands in the long line of the course's witnesses, Whitefield, Mueller, and the rest, whose Calvinism drove rather than dampened evangelism: God has his elect everywhere, so success is guaranteed. Reading Edwards' account of Brainerd in 1785 set his course for India.
Against hyper-Calvinist objections, Carey's 1792 Enquiry argued in five sections that the Great Commission binds all believers, surveyed missions history and world need, answered objections, and called for a society, and the Baptist Missionary Society was born, first under the magnificently unwieldy name Particular Baptist Society for the Propagation of the Gospel amongst the Heathen. His sermon that year gave missions its motto: expect great things from God; attempt great things for God, the two halves, the lecture suggests, of Romans 9 and Romans 10.
Sailing in 1793, Carey mastered Bengali and Sanskrit, became a professor of Bengali, established a printing press, and drove the translation of Scripture into the languages of India, founding Serampore College for training pastors in 1818 and completing a Bengali-English dictionary in 1825. The cost was staggering, he buried two wives, but by his death in 1834 he had, in one historian's words, diffused more religious knowledge among his contemporaries than any individual since the Reformation, and a vast Christian community in India traces its heritage to him.
Adoniram Judson, a pastor's son, lost his faith in college under the influence of a deist friend, Jacob Eames. One night at a village inn he lay awake listening to a man dying in the next room, and in the morning asked who it was: a young man from the college in Providence, named Eames. God used the shattering providence to bring Judson back, and by 1809 he had resolved on missions, becoming, after studying baptism on the voyage out, a Baptist, immersed in India by an associate of Carey.
Barred from India by East India Company politics during the War of 1812, Judson went to Burma, gave himself to the language, and after ten years had eighteen converts. Suspected as a spy in the Anglo-Burmese war, he was held in a death camp, marched, and hung in leg irons while his wife fought for his release; she died months after he was freed, plunging him into a year of depression. He finished the Burmese Bible in 1834, and at his death left more than eight thousand converts and a hundred churches. In 1993 the head of the Myanmar Evangelical Fellowship counted six million Christians in the country and said every one traces their spiritual heritage to Adoniram Judson.
Robert Morrison was China's first Protestant missionary in 1807, but Hudson Taylor became its most famous. Converted at seventeen through a tract after rejecting his Methodist upbringing, he trained in medicine, reached Shanghai in 1854, and, when Western dress kept doors closed, adopted Chinese dress and culture. Shaped by George Mueller and Anthony Norris Groves toward faith missions, he translated the New Testament, founded the China Inland Mission in 1865, and had a hundred missionaries in the field by 1881 and over two hundred soon after, befriending D. L. Moody and C. I. Scofield on his American travels before dying in China in 1905.
Around the three giants stand Henry Martyn in India, David Livingstone in Africa, C. T. Studd, whose Chocolate Soldiers skewers Christians who look like soldiers but melt like chocolate, and Amy Carmichael, who as a girl envied her sister's blue eyes and in India thanked God for the brown ones that let her pass unnoticed where a Westerner could not go. A side note punctures an old error: early Pentecostal missionaries, sure their tongues were real languages, sailed without training and returned disillusioned, after which tongues were redefined as heavenly speech.
The lecture traces ten links: Eliot's example stirred Brainerd; Brainerd's diary, published by Edwards, made Edwards a missionary and, in 1785, made Carey one; Charles Simeon's 1802 sermon on Carey turned Henry Martyn from law to India; Martyn's memoirs fired Anthony Norris Groves, father of faith missions, whose Christian Devotedness shaped Mueller and Hudson Taylor; Taylor's preaching claimed C. T. Studd and the Cambridge Seven; their publicity helped birth the Student Volunteer Movement under Moody and Pierson; and Taylor's biography, read by two college students named Jim Elliot and Elisabeth, kindled the generation of Eric Liddell and the Ecuador martyrs. One life burning brightly ignites hundreds for generations.
Spurgeon puts the stamp on the century: can we sleep while the nations perish having never heard the name of Jesus? The question is not can I prove that I ought to go, but can I prove that I ought not to go. God has myriads of his elect among them; we must go and search for them. He weighed the call himself and judged his place was home, but charged every man to run the same honest test, and promised that whoever goes making the preaching of the gospel the great feature of his work goes in God's sure way of power.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all fourteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. The lecture's correction on social action holds that
2. Latourette's observation about the nineteenth century is that
3. John Eliot, the apostle to the Indians,
4. William Carey's Calvinism functioned in his missions the way it did for Whitefield:
5. Carey's famous motto was
6. In India, Carey's labors included
7. The dying man in the room next to Judson at the village inn was
8. Judson became a Baptist
9. After ten years in Burma, Judson's converts numbered
10. In 1993 the head of the Myanmar Evangelical Fellowship said
11. When Western dress kept doors closed in China, Hudson Taylor
12. Early Pentecostal missionaries who sailed without language training
13. In the chain of influence traced by the lecture, Brainerd's published diary directly ignited
14. Spurgeon reframed the missionary question as
All fourteen correct. Lecture 23 is complete.
Carey expected great things from God and attempted great things for God. Which half of that motto does your own faith find harder, and why?
Judson labored ten years for eighteen converts, and six million now trace their faith to him. How should a church measure fruitfulness on a timescale longer than a lifetime?
Spurgeon asked not whether he could prove he ought to go, but whether he could prove he ought not. What happens if you honestly run his test on your own life?
How will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how will they hear without someone preaching to them?
The lecture commends the biographies of Carey, Judson, and Hudson Taylor, Brainerd's diary, C. T. Studd's The Chocolate Soldier, and Piper's telling of Judson's conversion in Don't Waste Your Life.