2024-2025 Faculty Research Grant
Andrew Tomkins (World Mission).
The Impact of Economic Theory and Practice on the Protestant Mission Movement.
Much work has been done on the influence religious beliefs and ideas had on the rise of market-oriented capitalism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Far less work, however, has been done on analyzing the impact of new approaches to economics and moral philosophy starting in the late seventeenth century onwards had on the Christian church and the Protestant mission movement in particular. The purpose of this research project is to uncover to what extent economic theorizing and practice had on the way Protestant faith and mission practice developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Below are the primary research questions steering this research project:
1. What kind of relationship did various approaches to economics (that caught on within significant enough segments of population to be influential) have on the Christian church, especially in its Protestant manifestations and particularly in the Protestant mission movement?
2. What motivated the sending and going of Protestant missionaries? Theologically, experientially, philosophically, etc. And how did the church measure whether or not they were achieving the desires that motivated them? These are both asked with question 1 as a backdrop.
3. How did moral philosophers, missionaries, and other key influencers articulate the relationship between the spiritual realm and the realities of everyday life specifically as it relates to economic developments?