The Future in the Past: Eschatological Vision in British and American Protestant Missionary History

Abstract

This article examines the strategic significance of different eschatological positions in British and North American Protestant missions. By the late nineteenth century the postmillennial expectation of a world transformed through the work of missions was being challenged by premillennial emphases, particularly in the ‘faith’ missions. Premillennial mission theorists were not, however, necessarily pessimistic nor indifferent to social concerns until after the First World War. Postmillennial mission theory in the twentieth century moved first towards an expectation of religious convergence, and, after 1968, towards a theology of the kingdom being realised independently of Christian evangelism. The article concludes with some suggestions for a missionary eschatology founded on the biblical vision of a new heaven and a new earth.