Claudia Hoffmann: Mission? A Global Term in Interreligious Contact Zones

This lecture examines how the contested term "mission" is negotiated in interreligious contact zones. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it traces how Christian and Muslim actors use, avoid, and reinterpret a concept burdened by colonial history yet still central to Christian self-understanding. Rather than treating "mission" as a fixed theological category, the talk approaches it as a contact zone term: a concept whose meaning is negotiated locally. The analysis identifies three dimensions in which mission surfaces in practice: personal witness, practical love, and self-promotion. Contrary to expectations, the lecture argues that even an exclusivist missionary stance can foster (rather than foreclose) pluralistic engagement: across all four contexts, where empirical research was conducted, both Christian and Muslim interlocutors come to understand mission not as proselytizing in the narrow sense, but as relationship-building, public confession, and boundary-crossing, practices that resist confining religion to the private sphere. The case illuminates how religious communities function as interreligious contact zones and offers an empirical counterpoint to theological and historical debates on mission, diversity, and dialogue in global Christianity. A lecture by Prof. Dr. Claudia Hoffmann (Universität Heidelberg). Weniger lesen