The Great Commission

Matthew 28:11–20

Works of art by Joaquín Villegas, John Valentine Haidt and Paula Rego

An American Miracle

The Virgin of Guadalupe is one of the most important icons of Catholic Christianity, but little is known about her origins and early significance.

The fully documented story of the original painted image begins in 1648. What happened before that date can only be discerned in outline: soon after the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1521, a local master must have created an image of the Virgin following a popular model. (This image-type would eventually be codified in Francisco Pacheco's Arte de la Pintura of 1649 as the Immaculate Conception, and is widely present in Spanish art.)

This image is based on a vision of the seer John: ‘a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars’ (Revelation 12:1). It is an apocalyptic image of peace.

In 1648 and 1649 legends about the origin of the icon were published. The Mother of God had appeared to the indigenous Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, but the Spanish archbishop of Mexico did not believe him. Until, that is, Cuauhtlatoatzin spread out his tilman, the traditional Aztec outer garment, in front of him—and this image of Mary appeared on it.

Another 100 years later, around a dozen paintings were created that celebrate this miracle. Like this example by Joaquín Villegas (1713–53), they offer a glimpse into the trinitarian ‘studio’: angels hold the canvas in front of God the Father, who has brush and palette in his hands. His Son is beside him, and the dove of the Holy Spirit above them both. This painting provides a radical answer to the age-old question of how a Christian image of the divine could be possible: God himself painted it—an irrefutable ground for being counted a vera icon.

In order to understand this iconography, it is necessary to remember the crucial conflict in colonial Mexico between the criollos, New Spaniards born in Mexico, and the pensinsulares, who came from Spain. The Creoles used the Virgin of Guadalupe, with her divine origin, to assert themselves against domination by the Peninsulares: she was the ‘American miracle’ that proved that the divine no longer resided in Europe but had moved to Mexico. Like the Gospel that the apostles were charged to preach to all nations, she had crossed continents.

References

Claussen, Johann Hinrich. 2024. Gottes Bilder. Eine Geschichte der christlichen Kunst (C. H. Beck: München)

Cuadriello, Jaime. 2002. ‘El obrador trinitario o María de Guadalupe creada en idea, imagen y materia’, in El divino pintor. La creación de María de Guadalupe en el taller celestial (Museo de la Basílica de Guadalupe: Mexico City), pp. 61–205

Katzew, Ilona. 2017. Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici (Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Los Angeles)

Lara, Irene. 2008. ‘Tonanlupanisma: Re-Membering Tonantzin-Guadalupe in Chicana Visual Art’, Aztlán 33.2: 61–90

Pérez, Laura Elisa. 2007. Chicana Art: the Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Durham: Duke University Press)

Román-Odio, Clara. 2013. Sacred Iconographies in Chicana Cultural Productions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan)

Be Fruitful…

Commentary by Johann Hinrich Claussen

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The first Protestant missionaries to set out from Germany commissioned an astonishing painting. It may not be a masterpiece of art, but it is nevertheless of epochal significance.

The Moravian Church was founded in Saxony in 1722. Just ten years later, in 1732, the first of the Bohemian Brethren travelled overseas. They meant their mission to be free of imperialist interests or racial prejudices. However, it was impracticable without the help of the colonialist system of the time, on which it necessarily relied.

In 1747, in order to present their missionary project at a great synod, Johann Valentin Haidt, a painter and minister, created a group portrait that perhaps for the first time depicted people from overseas as individuals—and not wholly as ‘exotic’ types or racist clichés. The painter knew all of them by name and many even personally.

The picture shows the twenty-one ‘first fruits’, that is, the first to have died in the new faith. They are gathered around Christ in heaven, carrying palm branches as a sign of their victory over death. An angel to the left of Christ brings more branches for those who are yet to come. An angel above Christ holds a verse from Revelation in his left hand: ‘these have been redeemed from mankind as first fruits’ (14:4). Missionaries are not represented in the picture. Light-skinned figures are also absent, apart from Christ and the angels.

This painting proclaims the belief of the Moravians that all human beings have the same dignity before God—that is, that God makes no distinctions according to origin, skin colour, gender, age, or social status (free or enslaved). It tries to imagine a global Christianity in which those who were not generally considered worthy of being painted by the Western colonialist societies of the eighteenth century are invited to join Christ and his angels in a celestial group portrait.

However, there is also something disturbing about this painting—apart from the conspicuous whiteness of Christ and the angels. After all, these children, women, and men were brought to Germany from South and North America, Africa, and Asia without much consideration for their welfare or personal wishes—and thus put in extreme danger. Most of them died within a year or two of their arrival in Europe, mainly from infectious diseases. This gives the word ‘first fruits’ a bitter ambivalence.

References

Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, Pa. 2007. ‘Haidt’s Painting of the First Fruits,1747, March 2007’, This Month in Moravian History 17

Kröger, Rüdiger. 2012. ‘Die Erstlingsbilder in der Brüdergemeine’, in Unitas Fratrum. Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Gegenwartsfragen der Brüdergemeine, 67/68, Herrnhut: 135–163.

Tasche, Andreas. 2021. Durchdringt die Welt mit meiner Liebe. Wie die Herrnhuter Mission den ‘Missionsbefehl Jesu’ verstanden hat und ihm nachgekommen ist, (Dresden-Wilschdorf)

…and Multiply

Commentary by Johann Hinrich Claussen

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Paula Rego (1935–2022) was ahead of her time among twentieth-century artists in the extent and intensity of her critical engagement with the history of colonial guilt.

She grew up in Portugal during the Salazar dictatorship. Her homeland had colonies overseas for longer than any other European nation. Her indignation at colonialist exploitation and violence is already evident in the titles of two wild, angry early works: Salazar Vomiting the Homeland (1960) and When We Had a House in the Country We’d Throw Marvellous Parties and Then We’d Go Out and Shoot Black People (1961).

More than thirty years later, Rego created something rather more quiet, but deeply sad. A woman lies on a bed, heavily pregnant. Behind her on the wall hangs a reproduction of a painting that used to be extremely popular in Brazil: The First Mass in Brazil (1859–61) by Victor Mereilles. It depicts the moment when the Brazilian nation is believed to have been born, that is, when the Portuguese invaders celebrated the first Catholic mass on the beach.

The propagandistic intention is clear: the indigenous people together with the ‘untouched’ natural landscape form a dark frame, while in the bright centre fully clothed white men bring Christian civilization to the country by celebrating their faith. Both groups of people are clearly differentiated from each other, but the atmosphere is peaceful. Mission and colonization—so the painting claims—were non-violent.

Rego has reproduced Mereilles’s painting very freely, and in mirrored inversion. She has left out some details and added others, such as the sea and the two ships. In the room there are several symbolically charged objects—a doll covered in blood, a turkey, lilies, two dead fish. But much more important is the contrast between the woman's burdened body in the centre and the male propaganda in the background. The woman is lying with her back to the painting. Her gaze is directed in the other direction, into the distance, into a void.

How are we to read her? As a woman abandoned, or sacrificed, or herself colonized (Holloway 2000: 700)? In her juxtaposition with the image of missionary expansion on the wall behind her, she invites us to interrogate the complex legacies of the enterprise of making disciples of all nations. What happens when Christians ‘multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it’ (Genesis 1:28)?

References

Crippa, Elena (ed.). 2022. Paula Rego (Museo Picasso: Málaga)

Holloway, Memory. 2000. ‘Praying in the Sand: Paula Rego and Visual Representations of the First Mass in Brazil’, in Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, 4/5: 697–705

Lisboa, Maria Manuel. 2019. Essays on Paula Rego: Smile When You Think about Hell (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers)

Retellings and Reterritorializations

Comparative commentary by Johann Hinrich Claussen

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Like the history of Christianity in general, the history of Christian mission is full of ambivalences and paradoxes. On the one hand, it is an expression of a perceived universality of the Gospel. Faith in the one God, revealed in the risen Jesus Christ, helps to fuel an understanding of global humanity: God's love is for all people, his justice should reign throughout the world. On the other hand, the spread of this faith in modern times is inseparable from—even if not identical with—the European subjugation of the world.

It is remarkable that it was only in modern times that ‘The Great Commission’ was understood in Europe as a call to a global mission. The missionary theologian Ravinder Salooja dates this new understanding of the scriptural text to 1792, when the Baptist preacher William Carey from Leicester made Matthew 28:18–20 into the biblical basis for the obligation of Christians to evangelize ‘the Gentiles’.

Previously, other biblical passages had been important. For the Jesuit Roberto de Nobili, who worked in India in the seventeenth century, it was 1 Corinthians 9:20: ‘I became as a Jew to the Jews, that I might win the Jews’.

Part of what is astonishing about the fact that ‘The Great Commission’ became a guiding principle so late is that the unbounded reach of the proclamation of the risen Christ is here expressed so clearly. The new salvation and the new righteousness offered in Christ are presented as knowing no borders. Christ promises his support to all those who carry the faith in him and his commandments into the wide world.

However, it was not the large churches, but small groups, associations, and networks of enthusiastic activists—forerunners of today’s NGOs—that tried to put this into practice. Many of them saw themselves as the antithesis of Europe’s military and economic power. But they could only do their work within the structures of their time, that is, European and North American imperialism. The Moravians are a good example of these ambivalences. They were full of empathy for people in distant parts of the world, with little conscious desire for power. This attitude contrasts starkly with that of the colonizers, who considered the proselytization of indigenous people to be pointless.

The Herrnhuters recognized in indigenous people and enslaved peoples their fellow human beings. But just to get to them, which they believed was their calling, they had to use the means of transport of the imperialist powers and to reach an agreement with the colonizers. In some rare cases, they even owned enslaved people themselves, as has recently been discovered. What distinguishes the Moravians today—like several successor organizations of earlier missionary societies—is that they are now coming to terms with their ambivalent history.

Not only ambivalences, but also paradoxes characterize the history of Christian mission. Contrary to what ‘The Great Commission’ suggests, mission was never just the transfer of a message from one place to another. It inevitably changed depending on the culture it penetrated, the social needs it encountered, and the conflicts it became involved in. The story of the Virgin of Guadalupe shows this more clearly than any other Christian image. At first, she was a figurative import from Spain. Then she was transformed into the icon of the Creoles in their fight against the Peninsulares. After the end of the colonial era, she served the mission of the indigenous people and became the symbol of Mexican nationalism. Today, in times of migration and mass-media popular culture, she is present in many places in Central, South, and North America—from graffiti to tattoos—and of course digitally.

After the end of the colonial era, the history of mission began to be critically examined. Since the 1970s, leading missionary organisations in Europe have turned away from the imperialist model of a mission aimed at conversion and have switched to partnership work—in some countries more quickly than in others. Portugal was particularly late, although the country’s most important artist, Paula Rego, was one of the first to create works that were decidedly critical of colonialism and missions. And rightly so, because a critical view of one’s own history is the basis for a better future. This applies to politics, economics, art, and of course religion.

A self-critical reappraisal of missionary history is the prerequisite for Christianity being able to make a contribution to a global culture of human rights today. However, it could also be of interest to the secular successors of Christian missionary organizations, who today advocate new moral universalisms, and on this basis travel to distant countries to spread their message.

References

Maier, Bernhard. 2021. Die Bekehrung der Welt. Eine Geschichte der christlichen Mission (München: C. H. BECK)

Salooja, Ravinder. 2024. ‘Climbing High Mountains’: Colonial Entanglement and Postcolonial Reflections (Leipziger Mission: Leipzig)

Sánchez, David A. 2008. From Patmos to the Barrio: Subverting Imperial Myths, Minneapolis: Fortress Press)

Next exhibition: Mark 1:12–13