The World's Christians

Who They Are, Where They Are, and How They Got There

Douglas Jacobsen

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119626121
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Christianisme

This accessible textbook describes Christianity, the world's largest religion, in all of its historical and contemporary diversity. No other publication includes so much information or presents it so clearly and winsomely. This volume employs a "religious studies" approach that is neutral in tone yet accommodates the lived experiences of Christians in different traditions and from all regions of the globe. The World's Christians is a perfect textbook for either public university classrooms or liberal arts campuses.

Divided into three parts, the text first describes the world's four largest Christian traditions (Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Pentecostal) which together account for roughly 98 percent of all Christians worldwide. A second section focuses on Christian history, explaining the movement's developing ideas and practices and examining Christianity's engagement with people and cultures around the world. The third and longest portion of the text details the distinctive experiences, contemporary challenges, and demographics of Christians in nine geographic regions, including the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Eastern and Western Europe, South Asia, North America, East Asia, and Oceania.

The second edition of this popular text has been thoroughly rewritten to take recent developments into account, and each chapter now includes two primary source readings, highlighting the diversity of voices that exist within the world Christian movement. Like the first edition, the revised text is enhanced with easily understandable maps, charts, tables and illustrative photographs. In summary, this new and improved second edition of The World's Christians is:

• written in a clear style that readers will find engaging
• enriched by the addition of thought-provoking primary source readings
• thoroughly revised to bring the story of Christianity up to the 2020s
• more geographically comprehensive than any competing text
• more theologically/ecclesiastically comprehensive than any competing text
• amply illustrated with maps, charts, tables, and photographs
• perfect for use in the classroom or for general readers who want to understand the full diversity of Christianity as it currently exists around the world

PART I
Who They Are: Four Christian Mega‐Traditions

Introduction

To be a Christian is to be a follower of Jesus Christ, but not all Christians follow Christ in the same way. Those differences become apparent with a quick survey of the social structure of contemporary Christianity. Christians are institutionally divided into more than 35,000 separate and distinct organizations, ranging in size from the enormous Roman Catholic Church, which has more than a billion members worldwide, to the grandly named Universal Church of Christ, which has only a few hundred members, almost all of them in the Caribbean. Every week, Christians gather at more than five million local churches and parishes to worship God. And that’s just the formal structure. Informally, there are millions of additional Christian groups that meet in homes, schools, and places of work for Bible study, prayer, and mutual support.

The diversity that now exists within Christianity is so broad and multifaceted that some scholars have begun to use the term “Christianities” (instead of “Christianity” in the singular) to describe the movement. There is a logic to this plural terminology. World Christianity has become so divergent that it can sometimes be very hard to see what binds together all these groups and individuals. But, despite an enormous variety of beliefs and practices, some important commonalities still define the movement, and these distinctive ideas, practices, and understandings of human life are shared by all or almost all Christians.

What Christians Hold in Common

The broad contours of participation in the Christian movement are relatively obvious. The vast majority of Christians worldwide share the practice of gathering for worship on Sunday; most Christians, if they can afford it, meet for worship in a building called a church; and almost all Christians view the Bible as uniquely the “word of God” that Christians are called to follow. Additionally, almost all Christians worldwide share a common understanding of Jesus as Christ, of God as a Trinity, of salvation as a gift from God, and of sacraments as church rituals that help Christians in their walk with God.

Jesus as Christ: The most obvious point of connection among Christians is their faith in Jesus. The historical Jesus was an unlikely religious leader. He lived the first thirty years of his life in relative obscurity as the son of Mary and her husband Joseph, who was a carpenter in the small town of Nazareth. Then, for just a few years, Jesus took on the role of a wandering Jewish prophet and teacher, first in the rural region of Galilee and later in Jerusalem.

Jesus’s message was simple but profound. As a faithful Jew, he affirmed much of the Judaism of his day, including the Golden Rule (“do unto others what you would have them do unto you”), but Jesus frequently added his own twist to those teachings. Some of these additions – the folksy way he referred to God as “abba” (best translated as “daddy”), his willingness to bend the law to accommodate human frailty, his claim that he was able to forgive sins – were troubling to some of his Jewish contemporaries.

His message was also troubling to Rome. Jesus spoke of a coming “kingdom of God” and described his own actions as the dawning of that kingdom. He instructed his followers to give appropriate respect to Caesar, the Roman Emperor, but he also told them to give their entire lives to God, a qualification that clearly limited any loyalty owed to Caesar. And, while he did not seek political power for himself, he refused to cower when he was arrested and questioned by Rome’s political appointees in Palestine. All of it seemed potentially subversive to an empire that demanded absolute obedience, and Rome responded vigorously, as Rome always did. Using the gruesome spectacle of execution on a cross, the Empire eliminated Jesus and sent a public message to his followers that the show was over.

Most local residents thought that was the end of the matter; they assumed that another pesky prophet had come and gone and that life would now return to normal. But killing Jesus did not stop the movement. His closest followers – all of whom were, like Jesus, Jews themselves – soon became convinced that Jesus had survived his crucifixion or, as they put it, he had risen from the grave and conquered death. They reported that they had seen him alive, in a glorious resurrected body, and that he had commanded them to continue the work he had begun. Rather than using his given name Jesus, which numerous other individuals shared, they called him “the Christ” (or just “Christ”), which means “the anointed one,” God’s special representative on earth.

Very quickly, many of the earliest followers of Christ came to think of Jesus Christ not merely as God’s representative, but somehow as divine himself. Yes, they said, Jesus was a human being, but Jesus was also God incarnate, God appearing in human form. Christians around the world today continue to make this claim. Thus, in addition to being committed to following the teachings of Christ, most Christians also worship Christ as God. This has been the main driving force powering the growth of Christianity through the centuries and around the world: that, in Jesus, God came to earth in order to heal the woes of humankind. This belief makes Christianity more than just the religion of Jesus, the religion taught and practiced by Jesus himself. If that was all that was claimed, then Christianity would be a new variety of Judaism. But Christianity quite quickly became a very different religion than Judaism, and the key difference is what Christians believe about Jesus.

God as Trinity: New ideas about God did not stop with Christianity’s affirmation of the deity of Christ; Christians also believe that God is a Trinity. Jesus had spoken of a paraclete (meaning “comforter” or “advocate”) who would come to help his followers after he had departed the earth. With that promise in mind, Jesus’s closest followers gathered together in Jerusalem after his death to wait for this to happen. On the day of Pentecost, a Jewish holy day that took place fifty days after the celebration of Passover, those followers reported that the Holy Spirit had descended from heaven and filled them, both individually and as a group, with God’s presence and power. Ever since, Christians have conceptualized their relationship with God as involving not only the God of creation and the person of Jesus Christ, but also their ongoing experience of God as life‐giving Spirit.

After many years of reflecting on this threefold understanding of God – as Creator, as Christ, and as Holy Spirit (or “Holy Ghost”) – Christians settled on the word “Trinity” to describe their complex understanding of God. Many different theologians over the centuries have tried to explain the three‐ness of God. No single explanation of the Trinity has ever been adopted as the one model that all Christians accept, but almost all Christians continue to ascribe some kind of three‐ness to God. Most Christians describe God as “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” – three divine “persons” bound indissolubly together in one divine being. The notion of God as Trinity sets Christianity apart from the other two Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam. In fact, many Jews and Muslims think that Christians have somehow abandoned monotheism for an alternative belief in three separate Gods. Christians themselves maintain that they are indeed monotheists, but they believe that God’s inner being is more complex than can be communicated by simple singularity.

Salvation: Christians assume that the world as it currently exists, and especially the way people currently live, falls short of what God intended for them. In the terminology of the New Testament, this is called “sin” (harmartia), a word that literally means “to fall short” or “to miss the mark.” The word “salvation” refers to the act or process by which God overcomes sin, redeeming human beings and giving them the opportunity to become the people they were meant to be.

According to Christian scripture, the most important goal for any person – the goal of the life for which they were created – is to love God “with all your heart and with all your mind and with all your soul.” Salvation accordingly involves the establishment of a proper loving relationship with God. Christians also believe that they are supposed to love others as much as they love themselves, so salvation includes a mandate to establish just and loving relationships among human beings as well. (Obviously Christians do not always live up to this ideal, but most would agree that it is the goal.)

Christians believe that salvation is impossible apart from God’s grace. Grace is God taking the initiative for remaking people into who and what they ought to be. In the language used by many churches, grace is defined as God’s unmerited favor directed toward humanity despite humanity’s sin. Christians believe that God’s grace has been delivered to humanity in many different ways: by way of the Ten Commandments, through the words of the many different prophets who spoke to the ancient Israelite people, and, most crucially, through the birth, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Grace is also evident in every personal encounter with God that nudges people little by little toward greater love for God and others.

Different communities of Christians have different opinions about some aspects of salvation, including whether human effort is required (or whether God does everything) and how quickly salvation happens (all at once or slowly over time). Despite ...