Pietist And Puritan Sources of Early Protestant World Missions (Cotton Mather and A. H. Francke)

Abstract

It is one of the peculiarities of the writing of Protestant church history that the history of Christian missions since the Reformation plays a very unimportant part within the general historical scene. The religious and theological conflicts on the European continent and the beginnings of churches in North America have claimed all the interest of the historians so that the history of missions has appeared to be a kind of subordinate subject. The reason for this underemphasizing of the history of Protestant missions is first of all the fact that there existed, as a kind of insuperable prejudice, the opinion that the Reformers—Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, and Zwingli—were not interested at all in Christian missions. Only the latest turn of clesiastical historiography has included Christian missions again in general church history and put them in the place which they deserve.