Review of Eitel's Paradigm Wars

In Paradigm Wars: The Southern Baptist International Mission Board Faces the Third Millenium, Keith Eitel’s primary premise is two-fold: 1) the Gospel mission got a bad reputation because Landmarkism hijacked its movement, that somehow the Gospel Mission Movement was the host and landmarkism became the symbiote, and that for this anti-missionary reputation it was rejected, and 2) the net result was that the Foreign Mission Board ended up adopting the Gospel mission’s values anyway.

After a brief introduction wherein Eitel states his thesis, Eitel begins his argument in chapter two by giving a historical background to the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in 1845 and outlining the main SBC influencers of that time, namely landmarkism and antimissionism. He then moves to a historical turn-of-the-century survey of the Gospel Mission Movement in chapter three, wherein he studies the documents of Tarleton Perry Crawford and his cohorts who left the SBC to form the Gospel Mission. In chapter four, he identifies what he calls post-modern trends in the Foreign Mission Board (FMB) from 1910 to 1997. His final chapter concludes with a restatement of his thesis that the Gospel Mission Movement has been misunderstood because of its misuse by landmarkism.

Eitel believes there has been an underemphasis of Gospel Missionism in modern missiology, largely due to the negative influences of landmarkism. He attempts to trace a symbiotic relationship between the two and then conclude that the same thing is happening today with postmodern terms. In fact, he introduces the thought with this statement: “this study concludes that the Gospel Missionism Movement was a blending of both enlightenment and post-modern missiological ideals. It was an incipient, evangelical version of a post-modern missiological paradigm that should inform contemporary missiological practices, especially within the SBC” (p. x). He expounds on that purpose by saying that “the study is designed to determine the extent to which Gospel Missionism reflects elements of both enlightenment and post-modern missiological ideals, thereby indicating whether it was indeed a prelude to post-modern tendencies among Southern Baptists and their foreign missions efforts” (p. 2). (The term “post-modern” is not to be confused with the popular rendering of the word, but to be understood within the framework of theology as a rejection of enlightenment and division, a term that Bosch later defined as “ecumenical.”)

It might be a simple guilt by association, but “when Crawford, and the other Gospel Missioners, issued a clarion call from China that was in sympathy with elements of landmark ideology, Landmarkist leaders seized the Gospel Mission Movement for their own ends and not the reverse” (p. 39). So Eitel leaves the reader with an implied question: who is possessing whom? Eitel says the Crawfords' ideas were not new at the time, “but were calling on the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board to embrace methods that were radically different from prior practices” (p. 56). Those methods, and the core values they represented, became forever intertwined. The core values were: 1) self-supporting churches, 2) missionaries actively preach, and 3) missionaries’ lifestyles to be as close to nationals as possible.

To provide a background missiological perspective on Crawford's core values, Eitel identifies Bosch’s six missiological paradigms: 1) apocalyptic (primitive Christianity), 2) Hellenistic (patristic), 3) medieval Roman Catholic Church, 4) Protestant Reformation, 5) modern enlightenment with a profound optimism for solving the world’s problems, and 6) emerging ecumenical (p. 66). In chapter three, Eitel gives a history of T.P. Crawford, how and why he broke away from the Foreign Mission Board, and his ongoing influence in the contextualization conversation of the twentieth century. Speaking about the influence of the enlightenment, Eitel says “such optimism about everything Western lent itself to a form of cultural arrogance that determined non-western cultures to be inferior” (p. 69). Using paradigm theory Eitel identifies three core values in the Gospel Missions Movement, namely indigeneity, incarnation, and responsible independence (subtly linking Crawford's, and by association the FMB's, core values with the enlightenment and emerging ecumenial paradigms. This is what Eitel believes became the core values of the FMB, thereby supporting his thesis that the Gospel Missions Movement morphed back into what later became the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. Perhaps Eitel is suggesting that there is yet another subtle attempt now by landmarkists to hijack today’s missions movement within the IMB.

In essence, the role of IMB missionaries became “ambassadors of one local church to another local church” (p. 71). Consequently, this became indigeneity via nonsubsidy and incarnation via fashion. Eitel cites the Cauthers as a typical proponent for this relationship as they dealt with the subsidy issue. “The Cauthers and Means team continued the paradoxical emphasis of encouraging indigeneity while undermining national initiatives with continued subsidy practises for both churches and institutions” (p. 93).

As a sort of precursor to short-term mission work, T.A. Patterson developed “partnership mission” wherein western laymen could go directly to the field (p. 95). And Keith Parks, in developing the CSI program, affirmed the core values of the Gospel Missions Movement. But does this mean that they really adopted those values or only came to the same conclusion? Is it possible to prove “influence”? Is this not an argument of a priori exist?

Bringing it up to Jerry Rankin, the the IMB president at that time, Eitel cites how Rankin adopted an apocalyptic missiological leadership stance, praised CSI success, but then dissolved CSI and created fourteen regions to make “CSI modus operandi normative throughout the world” (p. 106). He acknowledged CSI’s achievements in that it started “367 churches and baptized 6,548 new believers in some of the toughest places on earth” (p. 101). Also against subsidies, Avery Willis joined Rankin’s team to push what later came to be called “the Edge” mentality.

Toward the end of the book, Eitel notes several key moments as paradigm shifters. In 1845, the slavery issue led to the division of the Baptist Union in America into two separate conventions. The Southern Baptist Convention supported individual states’ rights as well as individual church’s rights to send whomever it wished, including slave-owners. According to Eitel, landmarkists began to push its agenda from 1910 and found its home within the Gospel Missions Movement, a movement that Eitel identifies as yet another division within the Baptists. Therefore, Eitel suggests that there may be yet another voice looming on the horizon today that is influencing yet another paradigm shift, the voice of ecumenism. The final question that Eitel seems to pose is whether the paradigm has really fully shifted toward an evangelical version of a post-modern model, or is this something that is yet to come.