Muslim Messiah: Evangelical Missionaries and the Controversies of Islamic Contextualization

Abstract

This thesis analyses a major evangelical missionary controversy over "insider movements", in which American missionaries encouraged Muslim background converts in South and Southeast Asia to follow Jesus while retaining their Muslim identity, triggering fractious debates over their continuing mosque attendance and use of Muslim-targeted Bible translations which had avoided rendering the term "Son of God" literally. The question of whether an indigenous Christianity might be possible within Islam led to a discussion that persisted from the early 1970s to the early 2010s, exposing fault lines within American evangelicalism over the nature of Islam, the role of Bible translation, and the line between "contextualization" and “syncretism". Drawing on rarely viewed material in archives at Fuller Seminary, Wheaton College, and the U.S. Center for World Mission, this thesis makes a critical intervention in the history of American evangelicalism's relation to Islam. It highlights a less fearful and more empathetic period of engagement during the 1970s and 1980s in which Islam was reimagined as benign culture and gospel receptacle — and evangelical missionaries themselves participated in Ramadan and some even in mosque prayers — before showing how a backlash against these approaches contributed to far more hostile conceptions of Islam from the 1990s onwards. The thesis pays particular attention to Bangladesh as an arena in which the practicalities and politics of Muslim contextualization unfolded, showing how the success of missionary experiments, the growth of Muslim-affiliated Jesus groups and the corresponding objections of the established Bangladeshi churches were all vital in shaping the larger debate.