This volume belongs to a series – The Complete Works of Andrew Fuller – which brings to light the contributions of Andrew Fuller to the work of the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS) and to Baptist missionary theology. As pastor of Kettering Baptist Church in Cambridgeshire, England, and the secretary of the BMS, Fuller defended the legitimacy of missionary work among the unconverted. The volume under review concerns Fuller's Apology for the late Christian missions in India, which was crafted in response to East India Company (EIC) officers and merchants who petitioned for the recall of Baptist missionaries from India. The book consists of a lengthy introductory essay by Peter Morden, who contextualises Fuller's Apology before presenting it to readers. The book describes an important moment when the Company's directors found themselves divided over whether or not to extend licences to missionaries within Indian territories under its rule. Fuller's defence of the Baptist missionaries explores the meaning of religious toleration, while also revising the High Calvinism that diminishes the significance of missions among peoples of foreign lands. The book will be of value to students of the missionary movement, missionary theology, Christian apologetics and those interested in exploring the meaning of toleration relative to the practice of evangelism.
Early on, Morden situates Fuller within a network of Particular Baptists who were influenced by Jonathan Edwards and embraced a more mission-minded Evangelical Calvinism. Fuller, along with William Carey, John Sutcliff, John Ryland and Robert Hall, played a role in founding the BMS and shaping its vision to engage in cross-cultural world missions (p. 11). The BMS sent some of its earliest missionaries to India where William Carey, Joshua Marshman and William Ward established a missionary base in the Danish settlement of Serampore. Fuller's defence of this ‘Serampore Trio’ forms the basis of his Apology; and Morden's introduction provides important background for understanding why Fuller found it necessary to defend their work.
Fuller and William Carey were both founding members of the BMS but played very different roles. Carey was a missionary-scholar who devoted himself in India to teaching Sanskrit and Bengali, Bible translation, philology, education and other activities. Fuller, who had never visited India or (from the sound of Morden's introduction) travelled beyond Britain, was a publicist who mediated missionary news to English Evangelical audiences through the Baptist Magazine, the BMS's regular Periodical Accounts and other organs.
Fuller's Apology was framed in response to a flurry of publications that attacked Carey and his colleagues for unduly interfering with the cultural and religious observances of Indians. The criticisms came in the wake of the Vellore Mutiny of 1806, where sepoys (Indian soldiers) had murdered European sentries at the Vellore fort in South India. Some had attributed this event to unrest sparked by Christian evangelism. Among Fuller's opponents in these ‘pamphlet wars’ are Thomas Twining, the tea trader who had formerly worked in Bengal for the EIC; John Scott Waring, a high ranking official of the EIC; and Charles Stuart, who served in the Company army and came to be known as ‘Hindu Stuart’ on account of his affinity for Hinduism. All three – with the EIC's interests in mind – criticised missionaries for disseminating inflammatory propaganda that inspired rebellion.
In Morden's book, we encounter Fuller's rebuttals of these and other critics of missionaries without seeing their original writings, some of which are quite lengthy, such as those of Waring which total nearly 700 pages (p. 45). Morden's introduction summarises the writings of these critics in a page or less, essentially asking readers to trust his representations of their views. For instance, Morden describes Twining's pamphlet as ‘alarmist’ (a word used throughout Fuller's Apology) and not based on evidence. To support this caricature, he does not cite Twining, but the scholar Jorg Fisch, who wrote a very detailed piece in 1985 on the pamphlet war in the Journal of Asian History.
Fuller drew heavily from the reports of Ward, Carey and Marshman to shape his own views about Indian religions. Ward, as Morden recognises, had a uniformly negative view of Hinduism and tended to make universal pronouncements based on selective evidence. ‘There is not a vestige of real morality in the whole Hindu system’, Ward wrote (p. 37). Carey's language in describing ‘Hindoos’ could be even more scathing: ‘Lying, theft, whoredom, and deceit’, he says ‘are sins for which the Hindoos are notorious’ (p. 69). Fuller (along with Ward and Carey) would have done well to learn from Adam Smith, who opposed designating any society as completely depraved and argued that such a society would cease to exist. Morden identifies the excesses and unfairness of such representations while at the same time commending Ward for basing his views on direct observation – ‘the sharp eye of a former journalist’ – rather than mere textual analysis (p. 37). Morden adopts an apologetic tone with regard to Ward's publication of a pamphlet where he mistranslates the ‘Prophet Muhammed’ as ‘tyrant Muhammed’ – an error Morden prefers to attribute to Ward's ‘heavy work load’ (p. 41) than to a Freudian slip.
Morden could have done more to problematise Fuller's tendency to defend the missionary enterprise even when it generated such a caustic, monochrome and racist picture of Indians and their beliefs. Morden noted Waring's ‘remarkably thin’ (p. 45) grasp of what was happening on the ground in India, but says nothing about Fuller, despite the fact that Waring, unlike Fuller, spent well over a decade in India and understood the EIC as a high-ranking insider (indeed, a confidant of the governor-general, Warren Hastings). The confrontational style of the Trio and other Evangelicals eventually sparked local opposition to missionary work and did not produce many converts. The BMS supported Bible translation and the training of Indian evangelists to propagate the Gospel, and in 1806 baptised 100 people. Morden views this figure as ‘surely a sign of significant gospel progress’ (p. 28), despite contexts where the numbers vastly exceeded this.
Fuller's Apology reveals two axes of tension: the EIC–missionary conflict and the missionary encounter with Indian religions. He characterises EIC's opponents of missionaries as symptomatic of Europe's drift from Christianity into deism. Deists, Carey observed, oppose evangelism and ‘wish to exterminate true religion from the earth’ (p. 65). Fuller and his fellow Baptist missionaries appear to be fighting ideological battles at home as they contend with religious difference in India. In this respect, Fuller's Apology may be viewed as a form of cultural appropriation, whereby he uses the writings of the Serampore Trio concerning Hinduism – not any direct observations of his own – to fight battles against High Church opponents of Christian conversion in India and criticisms of the missionary enterprise more broadly.
Fuller's Apology argues that Baptists, as dissenters, did not use state power to advance the Gospel in India, but expected the EIC to protect their religious freedom. As such, they cannot be accused of intolerance. If missionaries are not acting as an arm of the state, they should be permitted to translate and distribute their Scriptures, tracts and pamphlets freely (pp. 84–5) and to preach openly. In so doing, they are not responsible for fomenting anti-government sentiments or rebellions (pp. 70–2, 78, 99) and if they offend the feelings of those they seek to convert, this is the offence of the Gospel, not necessarily of poor behaviour on the part of missionaries (pp. 98–9).
Morden's book is useful for students of confessional missiology and apologetics, but lacks a firm anchor in the historiography of the East India Company and religion in India. The book raises issues of toleration, universal truth and religious sentiments which intersect with controversies over religious conversion and allegations of hurt religious sentiments in contemporary India.
