Global Gospel

An Introduction to Christianity on Five Continents

Jacobsen, Douglas

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781441248756
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christentum

In this pathbreaking book, award-winning author Douglas Jacobsen describes global Christianity and provides a framework for understanding the varied experiences of Christians around the world. Focusing on the five big continents of Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America, Jacobsen recounts their differing histories, contemporary experiences, and cultural theologies. In the current era of massive and dynamic global challenges, this accessible and fair-minded volume sets the stage for Christians worldwide to engage the gospel--and each other--more deeply. Global Gospel contains numerous maps, charts, and illustrations that aid comprehension. Accompanying videos can be found on YouTube's "Global Christianity" channel (www.youtube.com/globalchristianity).

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Global Christianity

A Very Brief History

CHRISTIANS HAVE HAD GLOBAL ASPIRATIONS from the very beginning of the movement. In what has become known as the “great commission,” Jesus told his disciples that they would be his “witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8; see also Matt. 28:18–20). And indeed they became his witnesses. By the end of the first century, the gospel had been preached as far west as Spain and as far east as India. In the next four centuries, Christianity was embraced by millions of people living in the Roman and Persian empires and by many people who lived in other places: Ireland, Armenia, and Ethiopia. After just four centuries, Christianity was well on the way to becoming a global faith.

Then as now, Christians had their differences. The three most important leaders of the early Christian movement—Peter, Paul, and James—never did see fully eye to eye on everything. Rather than choosing among the views of these apostles, however, the early Christian community had the wisdom to embrace them all. Thus, the letters of Peter, Paul, and James were all preserved alongside one another in the New Testament, even though the views expressed (for example, in the books of James and Galatians) sometimes seem almost diametrically opposed. This same multiplicity of vision is evident in the four Gospels, each of which presents its own slightly different portrait of Jesus and his message. Leaders of the early church thought all four books were inspired and needed to be preserved, and they explicitly rejected the idea that the four Gospels should be harmonized together into one merged text. Jesus himself spoke of the need to accept diversity within the movement. When the disciples told Jesus they had ordered a man they did not know to desist from casting out demons in Jesus’s name, Jesus replied, “Do not stop him, . . . for whoever is not against you is for you” (Luke 9:49–50).

The most challenging expression of diversity in the early Christian movement concerned the distinction between Gentiles and Jews. The core issue was obedience to Jewish law. Did Gentile followers of Jesus need to obey the law in the same way that Jews did? This question was addressed at the first Christian council that met in Jerusalem around the year 50, less than a generation after Jesus’s crucifixion. Gentiles, it was decided, were not required to follow all the regulations of the Jewish Torah, but they were requested to adhere to a handful of Jewish protocols that would make it easier for Jews and Gentiles to work and eat together, most notably to abstain from consuming blood or meat sacrificed to idols. It should be noted that this decision involved compromise. The debate was not framed as a choice between two totally different and mutually exclusive solutions. It was framed in terms of etiquette and mutual respect, and it was assumed that some differences between Jewish and Gentile practices would persist. The account in the book of Acts also says this agreement was reached because “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15:28). This pairing of the guidance of the Holy Spirit with human reasoning reinforces the commonsensical character of the decision, and for the next two centuries piety and practicality were often blended together as Christianity struggled to accommodate cultural diversity.

The First Globalization of Christianity, Beginnings to 1000

Christianity in the Roman Empire

Christianity spread more quickly in the Roman Empire than anywhere else, due in large part to the ease of travel within the Roman domain. The Roman Empire circled the Mediterranean Sea, and water transportation was much easier than overland travel to Persia or Central Asia. Christian missionaries such as Paul traveled sea routes from city to city, and Christianity was soon present almost everywhere in the empire. Despite this rapid expansion of the movement, the total number of Christians remained relatively small, and, until the early 300s, Christianity remained a persecuted minority religion in the Roman Empire.

The situation changed dramatically when the Roman Empire stopped persecuting Christians and embraced Christianity as its own state religion in the fourth century. Constantine, whose rule began in 306 and lasted until 337, was the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. Constantine believed the Christian God had intervened in history to place him on the throne, and he wanted to express his gratitude by supporting the Christian movement. However, there was a problem. Christianity in the Roman Empire was not a single, unified movement. It had fractured into several sub-movements that sometimes viciously disagreed. Constantine believed only one form of Christianity could be correct, and in the year 325, he convened a council of Christian bishops at the city of Nicaea to identify that one true form of Christian faith. When this council decided that the followers of a preacher named Arius were mistaken, Constantine no longer bestowed any favors on that particular Christian group.

Subsequent Roman emperors followed the same policy, showering support on those whose Christianity was deemed to be true and suppressing all others. The definition of “true Christianity” varied from emperor to emperor. Constantine’s son Constantius, for example, favored Arian Christianity rather than Christianity as it was formulated at the Council of Nicaea. Almost all the emperors were consistent, however, in upholding the principle that true Christianity must be expressed uniformly—and most bishops agreed. In contrast to the practices of the early Christian community, the official Christianity of the Roman Empire jettisoned the notion of Christian diversity. One was either an orthodox (right thinking and right acting) Christian or one was a heretic. There were no other legal options. With church and state increasingly fused, Roman Christianity’s ability to accommodate diversity became a thing of the past.

Early Christianity in Asia

The Christian movement outside the Roman Empire followed a different path of development. This alternative trajectory is illustrated by the history of Christianity in Persia. Christianity was introduced to Persia (centered in contemporary Iraq and Iran) in the late first or early second century, and a substantial Christian community came into existence. The Zoroastrian rulers of the empire were offended by some Christian teachings, and persecution was not uncommon. In the 300s and 400s, thousands of Persian Christians were killed for their faith, far greater than the number who died because of persecution within the Roman Empire. Eventually a truce was negotiated, and Christians were allowed some degree of freedom to practice their faith, but Christianity always remained a minority religion in Persian lands.

Most Persian Christians were members of the Church of the East (sometimes called the Nestorian Church), but there were many Syrian Orthodox Christians (also known as Jacobites) and Armenian Christians in the region as well. There was never a time when any particular church had a monopoly on Christianity in Persia. Unlike the imperially imposed uniformity of faith that prevailed in the Christian Roman Empire, Christianity in Persia (and in the rest of Asia) was always pluralistic.

The diversity of teachings and practices within Asian Christianity expanded as Persian missionaries moved eastward, preaching the gospel along the Silk Road, an ancient trade route that ran from the Middle East through Central Asia all the way to China. Communities along the Silk Road were religiously pluralistic, as are many modern cities, and people of different faiths crossed paths every day. In this cosmopolitan setting, Asian Christians enlarged their accommodation of diversity as they learned how to share the gospel winsomely in a pluralistic setting. One of the most widely traveled missionaries of the time was a monk named Alopen, who made it all the way to China in the year 635. Using a communication style borrowed from Buddhist monks he met along the Silk Road, Alopen composed sutras (didactic poems) explaining how the Cool Wind (the Holy Spirit) came upon Mo Yan (Mary), who gave birth to Ye Su (Jesus), who taught humanity how to live. It is not surprising that in China Christianity became known as “the religion of light,” a faith that every good-hearted person could embrace.

Early Christianity in Africa

Christianity was introduced to Africans on the day of Pentecost, and by the second century, Christians could be found all across the northern coast of the continent. This territory was part of the Roman Empire, but soon Christianity began to spread southward, and Africans who had nothing to do with the Roman Empire embraced the gospel. Christianity was introduced to Axum (northern Ethiopia) in the mid-300s, and it soon became the official religion of the state. Ethiopian Christianity was strengthened in the 500s by the arrival of the “Nine Saints,” monks from Syria who erected church buildings and encouraged the creation of a network of monasteries that would later become the backbone of the Ethiopian church.

Nearby Nubia (modern Sudan) was Christianized during the mid-500s, but the dynamics there were more complex than in Ethiopia. Nubia comprised three cooperating kingdoms, and two competing groups of missionaries entered the region about the same time, one of them Chalcedonian (Eastern Orthodox) and the other Miaphysite (Coptic Orthodox). As a result, Nubians developed a more flexible and tolerant disposition toward Christian diversity than was typical in Ethiopia, and Nubia later granted freedom of worship to Muslims as well.

Early Christianity in Europe

European Christianity is as old as Christianity in Africa. The apostle Paul preached the gospel in Greece within two decades of Christ’s death, and a Christian congregation was founded in Rome just a few years later. Up until the fifth century, however, European Christianity had no distinctive sense of identity. It was merely part of Christianity in the Roman Empire. The break point came in the 400s when the western half of the Roman Empire collapsed because Germanic tribes were flooding into the region. The European Christianity of today descends from the faith that was eventually embraced by those barbarian tribes.

From the time Saint Patrick (d. 460) first attempted to convert the Irish until the end of the first Christian millennium, the evangelization of Europe followed basically the same pattern. A charismatic monk or nun would come into a region preaching the gospel and performing miraculous acts that challenged pagan deities and demonstrated the power of the Christian God. The turning point usually came when the local king or queen embraced the gospel and forthwith required everyone else in his or her realm to do the same. The conversion process involved some degree of personal choice, but conversion was generally a group phenomenon, not individual. Bit by bit, tribe by tribe, the European continent slowly became Christian, with the gospel generally spreading from south to north. Scandinavia was the last region in Western Europe to convert, around the year 1000. Similar changes took place in Eastern Europe. Southern Russia was Christianized in the late 900s and the northern Baltic region followed shortly thereafter.

The years between 500 and 1000 were a time of widespread social unrest in Europe, and this context shaped European Christianity as it was being formed. Because there was no overarching government in the region, local decisions mattered. Christianity became a localized faith. The practices of European Christianity were very diverse during the initial era when evangelism was under way, but the old Roman ideal of uniformity soon reasserted itself. As Christianity became more fully established in the region, and as the continent became more politically stable, the pressures of uniformity increased. This was especially evident during periods such as the rule of Charlemagne (774–828) when the central government was strong and when church and state were closely aligned.

By the year 1000, Christianity had become the most geographically widespread religion on earth. It had millions of followers spread across Asia, Europe, and northern Africa. No one in this region knew that the Americas existed, so from their perspective Christianity had been introduced to almost all the known world. During most of this era, the center of gravity of the Christian movement was located in the East. Until 900, there were more Christians living in Asia than in Europe, and most of the movement’s spiritual and intellectual centers were similarly located in Asia. Four major church traditions (Eastern Orthodox, Miaphysite, Church of the East, and Catholic) vied for followers, trying to prove that their own understandings of God, the gospel, and humankind were better than others. Vast cultural and theological differences shaped how Christians lived their faith around the world: different ways of envisioning Jesus, different understandings of salvation, different styles of worship, different rules about family and marriage, different uses of music and the arts, different attitudes about those who had died, and different practices of personal piety. Between the years 700 and 1000, Christianity was almost as diverse as it is today. But that was about to change.

The Great Contraction and a New European Focus: 1000–1900

The geographic and theological diversity that characterized Christianity in the year 1000 narrowed dramatically over the next five centuries as Christianity contracted in Asia and blossomed in Europe. One of the major causes of Christianity’s contraction in the East was the rise of Islam, which exploded into existence during the early seventh century and then spread rapidly across the Middle East and North Africa. Much like the Roman Empire, Islam merged religion and the state. Accordingly, Islamic military conquests in North Africa and the Middle East had religious ramifications. At first, Christians residing in conquered territory were allowed to follow their religious faith without restrictions. Later, more limitations were placed on Christians and pressures to convert to Islam were increased.

A tipping point occurred when Western Christian armies, in a series of military ventures called “crusades,” attempted to reconquer the Middle East in the years lasting roughly from 1100 to 1250. One major consequence was that many Muslims came to view Christians as religious enemies rather than seeing them as part of a shared religious tradition going back to Abraham. Persecution intensified in general, spiking under a ruler named Timur Leng who controlled most of Central Asia and the Middle East during the years 1370–1405. Christians suffered tremendously, and the Christian population plummeted. Churches, and even entire Christian towns, were destroyed. By 1405, it was hard to find a viable Christian community anywhere in the region. The Christian movement has never suffered a more devastating blow than the one delivered by Timur Leng. For all practical purposes, Asia was rendered a Christian wasteland.

Christians fared slightly better in Africa. Christianity had faded into oblivion in much of Islamic North Africa before the Crusades began, but it remained strong in Egypt, even in the face of sometimes serious persecution. Christianity also remained the dominant faith in Ethiopia, unlike neighboring Nubia, where Christianity had declined sharply and eventually disappeared around the year 1400. The fact that Christianity survived in Egypt and Ethiopia did not mean that Christianity was flourishing in these places. Churches in Egypt struggled just to retain their current members, so there was little enthusiasm for spreading the gospel elsewhere. Christianity was not eradicated in Africa as it was in Asia, but it became far less robust.

While Christianity in Asia and Africa was experiencing decline, the opposite was happening in Europe. European Christianity, and especially western European Christianity, was booming. The political order, whic...