The Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Christianity

Lamin Sanneh, Michael McClymond, Lamin Sanneh, Michael McClymond

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781118554395
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christentum

The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Christianity presents a collection of essays that explore a range of topics relating to the rise, spread, and influence of Christianity throughout the world.

• Features contributions from renowned scholars of history and religion from around the world
• Addresses the origins and global expansion of Christianity over the course of two millennia
• Covers a wide range of themes relating to Christianity, including women, worship, sacraments, music, visual arts, architecture, and many more
• Explores the development of Christian traditions over the past two centuries across several continents and the rise in secularization

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

Lamin Sanneh and
Michael J. McClymond

The worldwide impact of Christianity that made it the religion of societies and cultures emerging outside the European heartlands came into greatest prominence in the post-World War II and subsequent post-colonial periods. The scale of this post-Western resurgence was surprising, as was its timing. The retreat of Europe from its colonial territories was not, contrary to prevailing predictions, accompanied by the decline of Christianity, while nationalist mobilization and its mixed fortunes in the post-independence aftermath failed to halt the religion’s momentum. Behind the forces of nation building and the integration into the community of nations, Christianity was expanding its reach and strengthening its appeal, thanks to the effects of vernacular Bible translation and the accompanying cultural adaptation that gave the religion the advantage of indigenous credibility.

For the first time, societies and cultures that had been previously non-Christian had their idioms and ways of life increasingly penetrated by Christian ideas and values, commencing an internal process of reorientation and the recasting of the central symbols of worship, ethics, and the aesthetic life. These changes give new meaning to the pace and significance of numerical expansion. It is not simply that membership has increased, sometimes exponentially, but that the meaning of being a Christian has undergone radical change from its Western heartland connotation. In the setting of primal societies where old attachments and plural loyalties continued to carry weight, conversion created an intercultural process of ongoing reciprocal exchange. The old vocabulary was given new promise of meaning and purpose in a fast-changing world, the kind of fulfillment that challenges and assures at the same time.

This is not just the consequence of contemporary global developments since the process originated in the indigenous ferment of mother tongue engagement in Scripture, and in personal dispositions expressed in worship, prayer, dance, and music. Rather, it is the demonstration of Christianity’s character as a world religion that is not tied to Western cultural delineations but that thrives in the multiple idioms of the adopted societies. These societies are not the heirs to Western Christendom in its Catholic and Protestant streams despite the legacy of colonial rule.

Without abandoning what gives them their distinctive character, these societies have joined the Christian movement on terms amenable to their self-understanding and aspirations, whatever the common overlapping themes with Europe’s own contested heritage. The historical roots of Christianity in Palestine extended almost simultaneously to coalesce with diverse cultures in the Mediterranean world and beyond, with Jewish, Greek, and Roman influences converging with Coptic and Ethiopian materials to create a unique, expansive momentum.

As a religion with a worldwide following, Christianity embraced from a very early stage a kaleidoscopic spectrum of peoples and tongues in Asia, Africa, and Europe, drawing from the urban ethos of Roman civilization as well as from the desert and hinterland orientations of Egypt and Ethiopia a vision and an outlook that are worldwide in their scope. The formative period of Hellenization has its parallels in equally formative movements of indigenization and adaptation elsewhere and in other times.

Today, we see the religion adopted by communities stunningly diverse in their way of life and set in historical circumstances and conditions of life that defy any single uniform rule or standard. World Christianity as a rubric acknowledges this historical and cultural reality along with its resurgent contemporary expressions. We contend that these developments are not aberrations but constitutive of Christianity’s original intercultural impulse as well as with the modern missionary movement that was its primary impetus.

Archbishop William Temple was a perceptive observer when he noted in 1944 that the worldwide appeal of Christianity was “the new fact of our time.” It was not how his Western contemporaries viewed the religion’s future. The ravages of war had taken a toll on morale, and Europe was in no mood to give any thought to the fortunes of a religion that attenuated neither the causes of conflict nor prevented the disaster that followed. But the gospel is not simply a function or reflection of actions undertaken outside its scrutiny and beyond its constraint, and Archbishop Temple’s observation connects with the experience of the past and with growing evidence of the religion’s worldwide appeal. Christianity has not ceased to be a Western religion, but evidence shows that its future as a world religion is being decided and fashioned at the hands and in the minds of its non-Western followers. A post-Christian Europe now must contemplate in post-Western societies an adapted and revitalized version of the faith that Hilaire Belloc boasted was once its distinguished patrimony.

Given the pace at which social, cultural, political, and economic changes are occurring around the world, it should come as no surprise that religious change is occurring as well. What might be surprising, however, is the accelerating pace at which changes are occurring. In many parts of the world, today’s Christianity in its cultural scope differs markedly from its early forms in the high imperial era between 1880 and 1920. Even researchers whose work is focused on these changes may find it difficult to keep up. Perhaps the most obvious change is the rapid growth of Christianity in global regions that a century ago had only a small Christian population, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and parts of Latin America, and the corresponding statistical stagnation or decline in the traditional heartlands of Europe, Britain, North America, Australia, and New Zealand. In the twentieth century the two world wars in Europe, the spread of Communism, the rise of nationalism and the growth of secularism in Europe brought an end to the link between Christianity and Western culture.

Following World War II Christian expansion picked up pace in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. With only 4 million Christians in 1949, China had an estimated 117 million Christians in 2013. Moreover, in 2013 conversions to Christianity in China were occurring at a rate of 3.3 million per year, or an average of 9,000 per day. In the twentieth century in sub-Saharan Africa the Christian population mushroomed from about 9 million to 335 million – and the number is at present well over 500 million, with the pace not slackening. In Latin America, Evangelical Protestantism and Pentecostalism have competed credibly with Roman Catholicism as the dominant faith in many regions. During the last generation, millions of Dalits in India have converted to Christianity. While in the year 1900 nearly 80% of all Christians were European and North American, by 2001 the figure had declined to 40%, and by 2013 the percentage had further dropped to 34.5. As a result of these developments, it is now no longer adequate to confine Christianity to its old Western heartlands, or, indeed, to one geographical region.

These recent developments have revealed even more starkly what is true of Christianity from its origin as a religion characterized by diversity of form, style, practice, and territorial spread. The first disciples accepted the mandate of the Great Commission in the terms that embraced the whole world (Mk. 16:15, 20) and all tongues (Phil. 2:11). The time of the final consummation shall be when the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of Christ (Rev. 11:15). The Christian movement resembled what one scholar called “a patched wineskin filled with mixed wine.” The religion bore the imprint of an eclectic cultural heritage. As the Epistle to Diognetus of the second century put it, “The difference between Christians and the rest of humankind is not a matter of nationality, or language, or customs. Christians do not live apart in separate cities of their own, speak any special dialect, nor practice any eccentric way of life . . . For them, any foreign country is a motherland, and any motherland is a foreign country.” Irenaeus, the second-century Church Father of Lyons, declared that “as the sun remains the same all over the world . . . so also the preaching of the church shines everywhere.” Irenaeus pointed out that there were Christians among the Celts who professed the faith “without ink or paper.” In other words, their being illiterate was no barrier to conversion. Justin Martyr, a second-century Palestinian born of settlers in what is now Nablus, assured his contemporaries that the Gospel can boast of witnesses in every race, ethnicity, and mode of existence in which prayer and devotion continue to be made to God in the name of Jesus Christ. The early Christians believed that Christianity is a worldwide faith from the outset, that it is not a faith bound by territorial limits or by language and race. The current surge gives every reason to make that claim more credible now.

In the present post-Western phase, Christianity’s worldwide impact has become more visible with the publication of statistical studies. That fact has taken time to show itself in the consciousness of the modern West. Much of the scholarly work on World Christianity is taking place in Western academic and research institutions even though Christianity’s center of gravity has shifted to societies beyond the West. From the perspective of the West the theatre of engagement remains where scholars are preponderant and resources available, which is the case in Europe and North America. However justified this attitude may be, it creates the optical illusion of scholarly preponderance looming larger than the conversion momentum now prevailing in post-Western societies.

As the early Christians contended, World Christianity is the movement of Christianity as it takes form and shape in societies that previously were not Christian, societies too dynamic to capture with empty forms and ephemeral concessions. In Africa Cyprian, though brilliant in his own right, became bishop of Carthage at a time of restricted literacy. Political and civic leaders were untouched by the religion, a situation well expressed by the Russian proverb that says that the early church had priests only of gold and chalices of wood. In the world of the early church we catch a glimpse of what has been so characteristic of World Christianity in our day, namely, of ‘readers’ who could not actually read bound volumes but instead “use the eyes of the mind to better purpose than many use the eyes of the face.” Cyprian acknowledges the important role of illiterate converts, including illiterate clergy and even bishops in the church. Consequently, the “unnamed graves at Timgad or Souse move us more than the thrones of the mighty.”¹ Along with persecution and repression, Christians had to contend with the challenging world of syncretism that surrounded them. A member of Augustine’s congregation admitted to him, “Oh, yes, I go to idols; I consult seers and magicians, but I do not abandon God’s church. I am Catholic.”² The conclusion to be drawn from encounter with the church of the early centuries is that “Christianity, so far from being foreign, is grounded in the very lives and being of the people.”³

It behooves us, thus, to see World Christianity as being not one thing, but a variety of indigenous responses through more or less effective local idioms, and largely without the mistrust, doubt, and reservations of the enlightened mind, what one writer calls...