Deck 17: Colonization and Missions

Question 1

According to the author, which religious traditions historically believed that if you didn't belong to it you would be damned?

A) Christianity alone
B) Christianity and Islam
C) Islam and Buddhism
D) None

Answer 1

A

Question 2

What did church fathers believe about devout Jews and Gentiles who lived before Christ?

A) Jews could be saved by Christ's grace but not Gentiles
B) Jews and Gentiles could be saved by Christ's grace
C) No one could be saved before Christ
D) The author says that the church fathers seemed to have ignored this problem

Answer 2

B

Question 3

Which of the following most impressed the Portuguese and Spanish in reading Battutah's Rihla (Journey)?

A) Possibilities for expanding their empires
B) The fact that peoples of the Far East had advanced cultures
C) Possibilities for mission
D) Possibilities for trade

Answer 3

D

Question 4

Which of the following did Henry "The Navigator" explore?

A) Initially Cuba, and then Central America
B) India
C) Africa's west coast
D) Antarctica

Question 5

Who was Afonso?

A) The greatest Portuguese explorer of the fifteenth century
B) The greatest Spanish explorer of the fifteenth century
C) A Cuban refugee who ended up converting his people
D) A Congolese king who created a Christian monarchy

Question 6

What was the response of King Manuel I to reports that missionaries were abusing the Congolese?

A) He took no action
B) He was appalled and replaced the missionaries
C) He was appalled that his authority was challenged and doubled the missionaries
D) He actually seemed pleased, given his open racism

Question 7

Which European country sent representatives to Africa solely to convert the natives and without colonial interests?

A) Spain
B) France
C) England
D) None

Question 8

What did Columbus discover when he returned to Hispaniola a year later?

A) The natives had become Christian
B) The Spaniards had taken on the native's faith
C) The natives had destroyed the fort he established
D) The Spaniards had all departed to concentrate on Central America

Question 9

What did the papal bull Inter Caetera establish?

A) Missionary policies that tried to protect the native populations
B) A dividing line to indicate where Spanish and Portuguese were allowed to colonize and mission
C) A five-step process of converting the natives
D) That Rome would oversee all missionary activities

Question 10

What was the Royal Patronage system?

A) The Spanish and Portuguese Crowns would be responsible to colonization and missions
B) It was a taxation system whereby the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns received ten percent of colonization profits
C) It was a taxation system whereby the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns received twenty-five percent of colonization profits
D) Colonies could only be set up after the explorers claimed the land for the Crown

Question 11

What gave the Spanish conqueror Pizarro and his men pretext to war against Incan King Atahuallpa?

A) Atahuallpa married an Aztec princess, thus his claim as king was illegitimate
B) The Incan's were not Christian
C) Atahuallpa mocked the Eucharist
D) Atahuallpa threw the Bible on the ground

Question 12

Was the Spanish use of horses helpful in conquering the Incas?

A) Yes, they were intimidated by them
B) Yes, in that horses were considered sacred to the Incas
C) No, it turns out that horses could not travel the mountainous terrain like lamas
D) No, every horse that Pizarro brought over died of sickness before any battles actually happened

Question 13

Why was Juan Diego Chauhtlatoazin important for the Aztecs?

A) He founded the first indigenous Catholic religious order restricted to natives
B) He revolutionized Aztec resistance against the Spanish for forty years
C) He encountered Jesus's mother as an Aztec woman
D) He became the first Aztec bishop in the Americas

Question 14

Historically, did the Catholic Church think slavery was legitimate?

A) No, but they came to accept it as a fact of life during the colonial period
B) No, they saw it as a violation of the soul, though this teaching was ignored virtually everywhere
C) Yes, but only for non-Christians
D) Yes

Question 15

What did Bartolomé de las Casas do to prevent Spaniards from enslaving the American natives?

A) He led a secret rebellion, freeing many of them
B) He ordered his priests not to absolve slaveholders in the sacrament of Penance until they freed their Native American slaves
C) He started an open rebellion or civil war against his own Spanish colonizers
D) He issued civil laws forbidding the slave trade, which led to a rebellion against his rule

Question 16

Did Bartolomé de las Casas have the support of the Spanish Crown?

A) Yes, many freed slaves ended up being smuggled into Spain
B) Yes, he even received Spanish troops to defeat the rebellion against his leadership
C) Yes, it issued laws protecting the natives
D) No

Question 17

Did Rome ever get religious control over the Portuguese and Spanish missions?

A) No, it never tried
B) No, it tried in vain, but it was too weak to enforce its agenda
C) Yes, it cancelled the Royal Patronage system and regained control
D) Yes, by bribing the colonists to cede power back to the church

Question 18

The Propagation of the Faith demanded that missions inculturate. What does this mean?

A) Christians in other countries should make their faith consistent with indigenous cultural values as long as they do not contradict the faith
B) Missionaries had to learn the language of the people and not require Latin be used in the sacraments
C) Natives in other lands had to take on the cultural European values if they wanted to become Christian
D) The Propagation of the Faith exactly did not want Christianity to be inculturated

Question 19

What did Pope Gregory XVI's Supremo Apostolatus articulate?

A) It demanded missions be loyal to Rome
B) Offered support to missionary agendas
C) It unified the all Catholic Crowns' missionary agendas
D) It condemned slavery as an intrinsic evil

Question 20

In the fifteenth century, did the West know that India already had Christians?

A) Yes, Catholics and Protestants alike called them Thomas Christians
B) Yes, through the Silk Road, Rome had been supporting missions to India since the ninth century
C) No, explorers were surprised to find them
D) No, it wouldn't be until the seventeenth century that Christianity would take hold in India

Question 21

Who was Francis Xavier?

A) He became Pope Pius IX, and brought missions to India
B) He became the first bishop of India
C) He was a Jesuit priest who won vast converts among the Dalits
D) He was the first governor of the colony of Goa

Question 22

What was Roberto de Nobili's strategy to convert the Indians?

A) He appealed to the upper castes as a scholar and even adopted Hindu dress
B) He followed St. Paul's advice to be all things to all people to show them the breadth of the gospel
C) He first brought medicine to the people, and then identified its healing power with the power of Christ
D) He learned yoga and reinterpreted it according to gospel norms

Question 23

Was the initial Catholic mission to Japan successful?

A) Yes, because the Shogun was already himself a Christian before they came
B) Yes, so much so that they lacked priests
C) No, it was a virtual nonstarter, but later the mission grew
D) No, Christianity was resisted by the Japanese emperor and not allowed to take root

Question 24

How did the Japanese route out Christians in the seventeenth century?

A) Citizens were required to worship the emperor by offering him incense
B) Citizens were given the fidelity oath every year
C) Christian citizens were offered land if they renounced Christ
D) Citizens had to yearly attest that they were not Christian by stepping on a picture of Christ or the Virgin Mary

Question 25

What did Matteo Ricci do when he went to mission in China?

A) He publically recited the Confucian Analects, thus showing his respect for their culture
B) He promised that if they accepted the faith, the Spanish would not try to colonize them
C) He initially took on the robes of a Buddhist monk and then as a Confucian scholar
D) He started a monastery that resembled a Buddhist monastery

Question 26

What was the reason the Chinese emperor Yung-Cheng gave for suppressing Christianity?

A) He argued a double standard, that Christian countries would never allow Chinese religious leaders into their countries to preach their doctrines
B) He argued that Confucius predicted the foreign devil, and concluded this was Christianity
C) He said that the faith was witch craft and could not allow it
D) He said that Christianity had failed to convince the nobles and thus failed the test of truth

Question 27

Once the Dutch conquered Indonesia what did they do?

A) Made Catholicism illegal
B) Enslaved all of the Indonesian nobility
C) Enslaved many of the Indonesian lower class
D) Created a mixed culture of the best of Indonesia and best of Dutch culture

Question 28

Were Christian missions in Malaysia successful?

A) Yes, this is why Malaysia is Christian today
B) Yes, but it became corrupted by the slave trade
C) No, the Malays considered it agama orang putih (white man's religion)
D) No, the British refused to let the Catholic and Protestant missions cooperate and thus the Christian witness was undermined

Question 29

How successful was the mission to the Philippines?

A) It became successful only when the Spanish stopped the slave trade
B) It was successful early on and continued to be
C) It was initially successful, but the faith never took deep roots, which is why the Philippines is mostly Muslim
D) It was never successful in any substantive, measurable way

Question 30

Did the British economist Adam Smith think the colonization period was a success?

A) Perhaps, but not for the natives
B) Certainly, particularly for the natives as they now could lose their savagery
C) It ironically undermined European economics even though it was good for the natives culturally
D) It was an economic and cultural boon for the natives

Question 31

The author claims that both Christianity and Islam have historically believed only those saved are members of that particular religion.

Question 32

The author claims that throughout history Christianity has become the most insistent proselytizing religion in the world.

Question 33

Christians in Europe only knew about Asian peoples in the fourteenth century by way of Marco Polo.

Question 34

Portuguese King Manuel I demanded all missionaries remove themselves from the Congo.

Question 35

While Congo embraced the faith, Matamba (eastern Angola) rejected it and expelled missionaries.

Question 36

The Portuguese "discovered" Brazil while sailing to Asia.

Question 37

The encomienda-doctrina system had a single leader who would oversee the colonial territory and missionaries in it.

Question 38

Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztecs monarchy by employing the lower-caste Aztecs as foot soldiers.

Question 39

The Incans believed their leader was the sun god.

Question 40

The miracle of Our Lady of Guadalupe was an image of her on a cloak.

Question 41

The intent of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith was to free missions from colonial control.

Question 42

Portuguese colonialists and missionaries found Christians who were living by the caste system.

Question 43

Roberto de Nobili became a member of the Brahmin caste to convert them to Christianity.

Question 44

It was not until the Tokugawa Shogunate that Japan opened up to Christianity.

Question 45

In the modern period, Christian missions to Japan became only possible after the U.S. Navy forced it to open its borders.

Question 46

Thinking within a Christian framework, make an argument about the requirements for salvation.

Question 47

Slavery was socially sanctioned until the later modern era and was part of Christian society. Consider the examples listed of biblically sanctioned slavery: what difficulties does this present for biblical and theological discourse?

Question 48

Discuss examples of the way Christianity was able to inculturate itself among different peoples. What difficulties would arise from trying to separate culture from religion?

Question 49

The church fathers believed that good, moral, and wise people before the time of Jesus could be saved by the grace of Christ. They also believed that once Christ came one had to be Christian, thus the imperative for missions. How did they argue this? How was it framed in the medieval period? Do you think that their arguments are coherent and sound? Explain your answer.

Question 50

The Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith held five principles for missionary activity. Do you think they represent a respectable position even today? Why or why not.