Andrew Finlay Walls (1928–2021)

Early life

Andrew Walls was born in New Milton, Hampshire, England, on April 21, 1928, of Scottish parents who had moved to the south of England in search of work. He studied theology at Exeter College, Oxford, gaining a first-class degree in 1948. He undertook graduate work under the renowned patristic scholar F. L. Cross, who influenced him deeply, on the early third-century theologian Hippolytus of Rome. This led to the award of the Oxford postgraduate degree of B.Litt. in 1954. National service in the Royal Air Force interrupted his studies but happily led to his marriage to his first wife Doreen Harden: “she was my commanding officer,” Andrew once told me with a wry smile. It also led to a conscious choice to make Methodism his denominational home. He said, with characteristic self-teasing, “I have never been able to make up my mind whether I am a Calvinist or a Quaker (I have had a shot at each), and Methodism allows me the space to navigate between the two.” In 1953 he became a Methodist local preacher, a vocation that he continued to fulfill until very recently in the Methodist chapels of northeast Scotland. In the previous year he had been appointed librarian of Tyndale House in Cambridge, an evangelical center for biblical research established by the Inter-Varsity Fellowship in 1945. The post carried with it secretarial responsibility for the Tyndale Fellowship for Biblical Research, a body that was subsequently to exercise a major influence on the shape of evangelical biblical scholarship in Britain. His earliest publications during the 1950s were in biblical studies and patristics, and they contained no hint of the future direction of his academic career. Andrew developed generous sympathies that extended across the whole spectrum of Christian affiliation and beyond, but his personal theological perspective remained evangelical throughout his life, shaping his scholarly emphases on individual spiritual initiative and the autonomy of missions from the state religiosity of European Christendom.

Learning from Africa

In 1957 Andrew joined the staff of Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone as a lecturer in church history. At this time “church history,” even when taught on African soil, meant the history of Christianity in the Western tradition. His charge was to instill lessons from the first three Christian centuries into the minds of the emerging church leadership of the British colony, but he soon reached the conclusion that what he could impart to his pupils about the Ante-Nicene church was less significant than what they could teach him about the challenges of living in a second-century church. “The experience,” he relates, “changed this academic for life; instead of trying to extrapolate from that ancient corpus of literature and apply it, I began to understand the second-century material in the light of all the religious events going on around me.”

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Andrew Walls listens attentively to Lamin Sanneh, the late professor of missions and World Christianity at Yale Divinity School, during a panel discussion at OMSC in April 2014. They were the founders and presiding fathers of the annual Yale-Edinburgh Group on World Christianity and the History of Mission.

Thus began Andrew’s intellectual evolution from a historian of the early Christian centuries to a scholar of Christianity and its missionary expansion in modern Africa, and in the non-Western world as a whole. If there is one simple message that Andrew sought to communicate through his subsequent writings and teaching, it was that the “old” church of the Northern Hemisphere needed to relearn the essentials of Christianity from the new “early church” growing on the African continent. Such learning, however, required the development of entirely new models of studying, and teaching, Christianity and religious studies. This was the challenge confronting Andrew in his second African post, from 1962 to 1965 as head of the new Department of Religion at the University of Nigeria at Nsukka. Nsukka was in an area of eastern Nigeria where African Instituted (or African Initiated), especially Aladura, Churches were numerous. Their serious and sympathetic study became a priority for Walls’s New Zealand colleague and friend Harold W. Turner, and for Andrew himself. Unlike some commentators, however, Andrew never took the view that these churches represented the authentic voice of African Christianity and the so-called mission churches the inauthentic; he knew his mission history too well and respected African capacity too highly to imagine that the latter were products of European initiative alone. The Nsukka department pioneered an approach to the study of “primal” religions that Andrew developed further during his years teaching at the Universities of Aberdeen (1966–86) and Edinburgh (1986–97). At Aberdeen from 1970 he headed the first department of religious studies in a Scottish university, being promoted to professor in 1979.

The notion of “primal religions” owed much to the work of two earlier English Methodist missionary scholars of African religions—Edwin W. Smith and Geoffrey Parrinder. Turner and Walls defended the concept against their critics as being free of any derogatory implication of primitivism. Primal societies were those in which humans maintained a vivid awareness of the proximity of the unseen world of ancestors and spiritual powers, and whose “religions” were comprehensive frameworks of understanding and ritual negotiation with these multiple unseen realities. These frameworks were basic and in principle universal, underlying all subsequent religious development, though often obscured by it. Andrew’s experience in Africa taught him that societies in which such frameworks remained highly visible were much more open to the New Testament message of the supremacy of Christ over the principalities and powers than were the post-Enlightenment societies of Western Christendom. Contrary to what most Western missionaries had long assumed, it was such societies, rather than those apparently more “advanced” civilizations that had erected a superstructure of the so-called world religions on these primal foundations, that held the promise of Christianity becoming more truly a world religion than it had ever been before. Patterns of conversion over the last century or more in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific have confirmed that this promise is indeed being realized.

Mission studies and World Christianity in mutual relationship

Andrew never felt any dissonance between being a historian of the missionary movement and a scholar of the contemporary reality of World Christianity. His knowledge of the history of Western missions across a range of Protestant and Catholic traditions was encyclopedic; pride of place should perhaps go to his extraordinary knowledge of the various strands of the Scottish missionary tradition, as demonstrated in his twenty-eight-page double-column article “Missions” in the Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology (1993). The southward shift in the center of gravity of Christianity, about which Andrew wrote so frequently, did not for him imply that Northern missionary personnel or teachings were now irrelevant or unworthy of study. In part, his view mirrored the reverence with which most grassroots Christians in the Global South still regarded their missionary forefathers and ‑mothers. More fundamentally, it reflected his understanding that what has taken place over the last century is a transformative process of renewal or revitalization of Christian traditions as they have been transmitted to new cultural contexts. One of the best-known themes of Andrew’s work is that Christian conversion should be understood not as an obliteration of existing religious traditions but as their reorientation toward acknowledgment of the lordship of Christ. However, a parallel theme, more implicit than explicit in Andrew’s writings, is that the conversion of Western Christian traditions evident in a host of non-European contexts is, again, not a matter of their total replacement but, rather, one of their substantial reorientation, often in the hands of indigenous evangelists, toward new sociocultural settings and the new questions they pose. No longer can mission history be studied from a narrowly Western or institutional perspective. But neither can contemporary World Christianity adequately be analyzed without careful excavation of the numerous missionary quarries from which its rich variety of stone has been hewn. Andrew’s numerous writings, therefore, have posed a challenge to two diametrically opposed groups. On the one hand, they call into question all Western missionary approaches that still fail to grasp the enervating partiality of many European understandings of Christianity. On the other, they remind both theological and social-scientific analysts of World Christianity that mission history, for all the fallibility of its actors, can be neither ignored nor dismissed.

Legacy

Although Andrew never completed the monograph on Christian conversion, which was his long-standing ambition, a good number, but by no means all, of his conference addresses and journal articles have been collected in three widely used published volumes: The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (1996), The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission and Appropriation of Faith (2002), and Crossing Cultural Frontiers: Studies in the History of World Christianity (2017). He was the founding editor of no less than four academic periodicals: Sierra Leone Bulletin of Religion (1959), Bulletin of the Society for African Church History (1963), Bulletin of the Scottish Institute of Missionary Studies (1967), and Journal of Religion in Africa (1967). Although the first three titles have not survived to the present, the last one remains as the world’s premier journal in African religious studies.

The enduring legacy of Andrew Walls is also embodied in several institutional forms. He was a member of the founding executive committee of the International Association for Mission Studies (1972) and its second general secretary (1974–76). Andrew’s passion to preserve the archival and bibliographical heritage of missions and World Christianity inspired him to initiate the Documentation, Archives, and Bibliography (DAB) working group in IAMS; he chaired its first conference in Rome in 1980. As a historian, Andrew believed that documentary preservation came first; postgraduate students would surely follow, as bees to a honeypot. That proved to be the case in the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World, which Andrew established in the University of Aberdeen in 1982. It relocated to the University of Edinburgh in 1987, where it continues to flourish under the title of Centre for the Study of World Christianity. In both universities Andrew proved his mettle as a canny, even obstinate academic politician, always prepared to fight to defend the interests of his Centre and his students against any university administrators who had different priorities. The vast collection of missionary and other archives that Andrew accumulated for the Centre over the two phases of its existence is now safely preserved for posterity in the Centre for Research Collections of the University of Edinburgh Main Library, while the majority of the books that made up the Centre’s originally autonomous library are now to be found, with an identifying bookplate, on the shelves of New College Library in Edinburgh. Duplicate volumes and sets of some English mission periodicals, supplemented by much of Andrew’s personal library, found their way to the new center opened at Liverpool Hope University in 2008, the Andrew Walls Centre for the Study of African and Asian World Christianity.

With his close friend and former Aberdeen colleague Lamin Sanneh, professor of missions and World Christianity at Yale University from 1989 to his death in 2019, Andrew in 1992 established the Yale-Edinburgh Conference, initially as a small group of scholarly friends who were working on the history of mission and World Christianity. “Yale-Edinburgh” soon became an annual event, and grew into a major conference, involving a partnership between Yale Divinity School, the Centre in Edinburgh, and the Overseas Ministries Study Center (from 1987 to 2019 located adjacent to Yale Divinity School, before its relocation to Princeton Theological Seminary). OMSC was an institution that was always close to Andrew’s heart; he visited it many times, to lecture, mentor students, and pursue his research in the treasures of Yale’s Day Missions Library. Now there is a new OMSC House at the center of Princeton Theological Seminary, where there is an Andrew F. Walls seminar room that invites use by visiting scholars.

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(Top) The 2017 Yale-Edinburgh Conference was the setting for the unveiling of the Andrew F. Walls Conference Room in New Haven. More than 85 people were in attendance as OMSC executive director Tom Hastings (left), former director Gerald H. Anderson, and board members Dana Robert and Lamin Sanneh paid tribute to Walls. (Bottom) As OMSC global partners and guests enter the newly renovated OMSC House in the center of the Princeton Theological Seminary campus, they will discover the Andrew F. Walls Seminar Room.

Although the growth of Yale-Edinburgh was dependent on the hard administrative labors of Martha Smalley at Yale and Margaret Acton in Edinburgh, Andrew and Lamin remained the presiding fathers of the conference. The Yale-Edinburgh electronic listserv now has approaching one thousand members and has become a valued international forum for exchange of information on the history of World Christianity and mission. Although clearly not well, Andrew still contributed the closing reflection to the latest (on-line) Yale-Edinburgh conference, based in Edinburgh in June 2021.

Perhaps the richest seams of Andrew’s legacy are to be found in the great company of PhD students whom he supervised over the years, notably in the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World. They include many who have themselves become leaders in World Christian scholarship or in academic institutions with global reach. To name but a few, among them were the late Kwame Bediako (d. 2008), founder of the Akrofi-Christaller Center (later Institute) of Theology, Mission, and Culture in Ghana; former OMSC director Jonathan Bonk; Jehu Hanciles of Candler School of Theology at Emory University; Jooseop Keum, now director of the Council for World Mission; and Elizabeth Grant, currently director, Global Health Academy and assistant principal, University of Edinburgh. Andrew was the recipient of two festschriften: the first, Essays in Religious Studies for Andrew Walls, was edited as long ago as 1986 by a colleague at the University of Aberdeen, James L. Thrower; the second, Understanding World Christianity: The Vision and Work of Andrew Walls, edited by Bill Burrows, Mark Gornik, and Janice McLean, was published by Orbis Books in 2011.

Andrew, man of many parts

Andrew, as befitted his eminence, was a much-traveled man who set himself a punishing schedule. At times he could keep journal and volume editors waiting, and still waiting, for the promised copy, but when the sparkling article finally landed in their in-tray, they, almost always, forgave him. Similarly, his PhD students awaiting a supervision could find him exasperatingly elusive. But they always found him generous, supportive, and full of stimulating critical insights. Above all, they, along with countless colleagues and academic collaborators, came to value Andrew as a faithful friend and counselor.

For many years, Andrew’s first wife, Doreen, was his helpmeet academically as well as domestically. She worked for many hours on the Centre’s library collections and entertained many students in their home. They had two children, Christine and Andrew; Andrew is reader in immunopharmacology at the University of Southampton. Doreen suffered from deteriorating health in later years, and Andrew, despite a long-standing heart condition of his own, proved a devoted companion and caregiver. She passed away in October 2009. To the delight of his friends, in 2012 Andrew announced his engagement to Dr. Ingrid Reneau, a mission partner of the Presbyterian Church (USA) in South Sudan. They were married (by a fellow church member, the distinguished New Testament scholar I. Howard Marshall) in Andrew’s home congregation, Crown Terrace Methodist Church, Aberdeen, on July 23, 2012. Ingrid, who hails from Belize, proved a source of great joy and support to Andrew in his final years, accompanying him on his travels and sharing his ministry in many locations, notably at the Akrofi-Christaller Institute, of which she became a research fellow. A further source of rejoicing was the birth of a granddaughter, Alice, in 2018.

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Countless colleagues and academic collaborators came to value Andrew Walls as a faithful friend and counselor. Here, Bishop Mano Rumalshah, Anglican bishop emeritus of the Diocese of Peshawar, Pakistan, consults with Andrew on the sidelines of a 2012 conference at OMSC.

Andrew was a person of many parts, some of them largely concealed from those who knew him only in the context of his academic specialism. He was well connected with the higher echelons of the Scottish Labour Party. In Aberdeen he became a city councilor, and in 1970 he stood for Parliament as the Labour candidate for the Banffshire constituency. He was a devotee of the arts and was extremely knowledgeable about the works of his favorite authors—Jane Austen (on whom he published two serious articles) and P. G. Wodehouse. When attending academic seminars, he rarely spoke, though when he did so, the whole seminar listened attentively. His many lectures were often completed during the night hours before delivery and were written in a hand that latterly he struggled to read himself, but they were typically masterpieces of narrative, full of penetrating insight and human interest. Andrew Walls gave his long life to the vocation of expounding to a frequently resistant and insular theological constituency the full implications of the words of his beloved Charles Wesley, “The arms of love that compass me would all mankind embrace.” Very many, from all parts of the church and theological academy, will miss him greatly. We extend our heart-felt condolences and expressions of deep gratitude to Ingrid and all the family.

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