Of Ivory Towers and Ashrams: Some Reflections on Scholarship and the Christian Mission
A short programmatic essay from 1975 in which Andrew Walls asks what sort of institution, and what sort of scholar, the study of Christian mission actually requires. Walls wrote it from a Scottish university post, but out of the disorientation of his earlier years teaching in West Africa, where he found that the church history he had been trained in and was passing on bore little relation to the living Christian community around him. The essay is his attempt to name the problem structurally rather than personally: the Western academic study of religion had inherited a set of habits, buildings, career paths, and standards of respectability, and those habits were not obviously suited to understanding a faith that was in the process of relocating its numerical center to Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
The argument runs on two images. The ivory tower stands for the university's genuine gifts — disciplined method, freedom from ecclesiastical or political supervision, the refusal to let usefulness dictate conclusions — and also for its besetting sin, a detachment that turns the church's life into raw material for someone else's advancement. The ashram stands for a different model of learning altogether: study pursued in shared life, under a teacher, inseparable from devotion and obedience, answerable to a community that has a stake in the answers. Walls declines to choose. He insists that scholarship serving the Christian mission needs the rigor of the one and the accountability and spiritual seriousness of the other, and that institutions can be built which hold both. He is correspondingly wary of two failures: theological education in the newer churches that simply reproduces European faculties and their preoccupations, and Western research on non-Western Christianity conducted as extraction, in which the material flows north and nothing comes back.
The essay reads now as a founding document for the field Walls went on to help create. The centers, journals, and doctoral programs in world Christianity that emerged over the following decades were built on something close to this brief. Its questions have not been settled: who owns the study of a church one does not belong to, what makes a scholar accountable, whether the academic guild can house a discipline whose subject is the mission of God.
Who should read this: those who teach or design theological education, especially across cultures; graduate students weighing what their research is for and whom it serves; anyone drawn to Walls's better-known essays on translation who wants the institutional argument underneath them. Not a devotional work, and not a practical curriculum guide — it is an argument about vocation and structure, and readers wanting technique should look elsewhere.