John Eliot und die „Praying Indians“: Vom Scheitern einer puritanischen Mission in Neuengland
In the course of the modern imperialist era, the Catholic church built up an impressively powerful infrastructure and corps of personnel to undertake its missionary task. By contrast, protestant missionary endeavours, at least in the first centuries, were only marginal to secular expansionism. The r...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | German |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
1992
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| In: |
Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte
Year: 1992, Volume: 5, Issue: 2, Pages: 210-222 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | In the course of the modern imperialist era, the Catholic church built up an impressively powerful infrastructure and corps of personnel to undertake its missionary task. By contrast, protestant missionary endeavours, at least in the first centuries, were only marginal to secular expansionism. The reason was in part due to the Reformers' aversion to the Missionary Commission. It also stemmed -particularly in the English colonies in the New World -from the concentration on activities designed to establish their own communities, both externally and internally. The circumstances and difficulties of establishing the Puritan colonies of settlement in New England, for example, led to a sharpening of their religious fundamentalism. Their elitist sense of "chosenness", and their explicit frontier mentality, was totally opposed to any sympathetic understanding of other cultures, such as those of the indigenous population. Missionary movements, even when justified by the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, came late -around the 1640s. John Eliot (1604-1690) with his experiment of the "praying town" in Massachusetts was one of the most significant figures in this connection. Although he is even today honoured as the "apostle of the Indians" and undoubtedly did much on their behalf, there can be no doubt that he strove to replace the indigenous Indian culture with the concepts of civilisation drawn from Puritanism and from Europe. But, as we now know, the expansionist drive for possession of the land by the New England settlers left no room for the "redskins", so that Eliot's missionary endeavours were brought to an abrupt end after a few decades. |
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| ISSN: | 2196-808X |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte
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