Page 51 - Protestant Missionary Activity in the Arabian Gulf

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Dykstra* s concern with materialism was not entirely

new to the Mission, of course. As early as 1S26, the Rev.

H. A. Bilkert,in discussing the Arabian Mission’s lack of
i
evangelical success,had identified western materialism and

western science as two of the biggest stumbling blocks for

missionaries. "There is no God. Darwin is our God," several
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of his Arab students had proclaimed. In 1939, Dr. Harold
I
Storm had written of "western atheism, indifference, and

nationalism" as being by-products of the social and economic

transformation then taking place in the Middle East. 89 By

1955, Rev. Donald R. MacNeill was writing of the tides of

"sheer materialism, nationalism, dollar diplomacy and com­

munism," as the gravest crisis ever to face Arabia, Day by
day he saw these new dangers "eating into the headlands of

faith, hope and justice, collapsing all of the basic ideo-
,.90
(fik
■ logies of man, both of the Near East and of the West, And

so the advent of oil development in the Middle East, -which had

initially been welcomed by the missionaries as a victory for

western science and modernity, proved to be a much greater

challenge than any that had preceded it, Rev. B. D. Hakken,

while praising the Tfhettered economic situation11 and the

fthreakdown of fanaticism," was forced to concede that the fail­
.
. ure of the oil men themselves to attend divine services had

been a "stumbling block for the Arabs,11 who were now pledging

their allegiances ever more devoutedly neither to Islam not

Christianity but to Mammon, Dr. Harold’Storm perhaps best

expressed the missionary reaction to the new challenge in