Saints Who Sometimes Were: Utilizing Missionary Hagiography

A significant amount ofmission history and theology is based on or derived from missionary biography. Many missionary biographies, however, are little more than hagiography. This essay examines the nature of hagiography; suggests how hagiography can be recognized, interpreted, and utilized; and calls for biogra-phies that are shaped by historical reality rather than the perceived need to pro-mote the missionary enterprise. One of the most fertile sources of mission history-sometimes the onlysource-is found in missionary biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, jour-nals, and correspondence. In his provocative work, A History of Church History, F. 1. Foakes-Jackson says there are occasions when a church historian finds that biographies and related documents are the only resources available. When this is the case, it is impossible to reconstruct and chronicle "an account of the corporate action of the Church " because no written records exist. The only alternative, there-fore, is to try to reconstruct a history of sorts by recounting "a series " of biographi-cal studies (1939:9). For a missiologist or a church historian, however, this can be exceedingly diffi-cult. Though there are thousands of missionary biographies, trying to utilize them t