By David Dwi Chrisna
David Dwi Chrisna is a doctoral candidate in Religious Studies at Baylor University, with a focus on the historical study of world Christianity. His academic training and research interests include world Christianity, mission history, and interfaith studies, with a particular emphasis on the history of Christian-Muslim relations. He is currently engaged in a dissertation project examining an early twentieth-century indigenous Javanese mystical Christian movement in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia).
Editorial Note, Stephen Di Trolio: For the last four weeks, we have explored the theme of women and world Christianity. Highlighting the collaborative conversation between Baylor University PhD students and graduates in discussing the centrality of women within the discussion of World Christianity and their research. This series provides a path for thinking about the manifold ways in which the theme of women and world Christianity intersect in their research and study. We are grateful for sharing their research. This is the final part of the series- for part III, read here.
In the previous post, Ramsey’s examination of Teresa Urrea’s saintly life demonstrates that her embrace of Christianity led her to embody an interreligiosity that was a manifestation of both Catholicism and spiritism. While Christianity provided the impetus for interreligiosity in Urrea, across the world, it allowed the nineteenth-century Javanese princess Kartini to find an explanation for her doubts about the Islamic faith and to offer a thoughtful critique of Christian missionary practices in her day. Cases such as Kartini’s are rarely discussed and explored in studies of World Christianity and mission history. Apart from Mahatma Gandhi, we are hardly familiar with any other example where someone deeply sympathized with Christianity but refused to convert and instead provided a valuable critique of the inconsistencies of Christian practice in their time. This may be due to a greater interest in hearing and studying examples of successful Christian missionaries converting people and grounding the gospel message in the majority world.
Kartini was a princess and a member of the Javanese nobility who lived in the late 19th century when the Dutch were still colonizing her country. She was raised in a Muslim household, yet, like the majority of the population during that era, she was not allowed to receive sufficient religious education. Despite her ability to read the Quran in Arabic, she did not understand its meaning. Kartini’s lack of direct comprehension of the Quran led to a crisis in her faith in Allah. Through her correspondence with a Dutch female evangelical Christian activist and a Dutch male missionary, Kartini was exposed to biblical stories and the teachings of Jesus, but what impacted her the most was the Christian concept of God as the Father of Love. This revolutionary notion of the divine made Kartini sympathetic to Christianity and supported Christian missions in many places during her time. Interestingly, however, rather than diverting her from her family’s faith, knowing God as the Father of Love catalyzed Kartini to rediscover her Islamic faith in Allah.
Kartini’s sympathy for Christianity and Christian missions did not preclude her from critiquing the inconsistencies she observed in implementing Christian missions within her homeland. In particular, she was critical of how missionaries utilized Christian schools, primarily as a vehicle for proselytization, by prioritizing education for those who were already Christians or aspired to become Christians. She correctly asserted that if God is the Father of Love of all, then mission work done in name of God should be accessible to all people, regardless of religion, gender, or social status. In other words, her profound grasp of the Christian doctrine of the universal reach of God’s love enabled her to discern the incongruity between Christian belief and the proselytization strategies employed by missionaries during her lifetime.
Kartini is an example of the impact of the translatability of the Christian faith, which, lamentably, Christians still rarely pay attention to. In her native country of Indonesia, Kartini is only remembered as a champion of educational emancipation for girls. Her openness toward religious diversity and her critique of the Christian mission has, until now, remained relatively ignored. This may be because—to borrow Andrilenas’ and Wells’s insightful perspectives in previous posts—Kartini is a representation of an embodiment of Christian translatability that is foreign to many, given that she was a Muslim and a woman.
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As shown in this four-part blog post series, our studies are connected through the representation and experience of women as a way to perceive the history of Christianity. By intentionally focusing on women usually considered to be on the margins, we are led to ask new questions and explore new horizons. World Christianity has long attended to faith at the margins. Highlighting the stories of the peoples along the cultural and religious borders whose stories have been too often unarchived, understudied, and relativized to dominant narratives. Yet the reality is that women have never been marginal to Christianity. As scholars such as Dana Robert and Gina Zurlo have shown, women have nearly everywhere and across time have filled Christian worship spaces and beyond. Including women in the story up front immediately expands the sites for religious life and sources for research, another welcome practice among World Christianity scholars. No longer is Christianity solely a study of doctrine, congregations, denominations, or institutional religion; now, we look at songs and fabrics, migration patterns and political movements, stories and families, newspapers, novels, and social media. When women lead the way in studying World Christianity, their presence liberates our understanding of how Christianity appears. Women as preachers, saints, and interreligious theologians are not blips in the record of Christianity’s history. They may indeed be the norm.
Yet, if we had undergone these diverse studies alone, we wonder whether that reality would have seemed so clear. What may seem idiosyncrasies quickly become patterns of Christianity’s attentiveness to bodies, translation, and interreligiosity. In dialogue with each other, memories sharpen into truer pictures of historical realities, experiences shape who we become as researchers, and a vision of Christianity’s future emerges.
