The Shape of Christian History

Continuity and Diversity in the Global Church

Scott W. Sunquist

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781514002223
• eBook ISBN: 9781514002230
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

While understanding history has always been an essential task for God's people, rapid changes within the past two generations of Christianity have challenged many of our assumptions and methods for studying the past. How should thoughtful Christians—and especially historians and missiologists—make sense of global Christianity as an unfolding historical movement?

Scott Sunquist invites readers to join him for a capstone course in historical thinking from a master teacher. Highlighting both the continuity and the diversity within the Christian movement over the centuries, he identifies three key concepts for framing church history: time, cross, and glory. These themes shed light to help us discern how the Jesus movement developed from the first century to the present, through an explosion of contextual expressions. Tracing these concepts through the centuries, we learn from the stories of Christians reflecting the glories of God's kingdom—and from their failures.

Filled with historical case studies and stories from Sunquist's teaching around the world, The Shape of Christian History offers a framework for how to read and write church history. Even more, it demonstrates how the study of history illuminates God's mission in the world and sharpens our understanding of how to participate in that mission faithfully.

He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.

ECCLESIASTES 3:11

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. . . . And the Word became flesh and lived among us.

JOHN 1:1-4, 14

We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us—we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.

1 JOHN 1:1-3

CHRISTIANITY IS ROOTED IN TIME: historic events in a particular place that have universal claim. Past events have present realities and a future life. People who come from Hellenistic, Hindu, Buddhist, or various animistic religious backgrounds are shocked by the challenge this is to their reigning assumptions. Here the mundane is sacralized, the cyclical is given direction (and meaning), and all people are given equal status. A value and sacredness is assigned to all of creation in a world where most religions devalue the created world. Those who believed in a life of endless rebirths—a cycle they sought to be released from—now have their life focused on this life and the fullness of this life (in time) for all of eternity. Was all of this done in a simple passage like, “And the Word became flesh”? Yes. The incarnation, the translation of God into human flesh, brought about the conversion of humanity and human cultures.

In this chapter, we will lift up something that has been lost or nearly forgotten concerning Christianity and Christian history. To put it simply, we have forgotten that the dual fact of God’s creation (beginning time) and God’s incarnation (entering time) has been the central strand in what makes Christianity what it is: a religion of transformation in this world. These dual facts also claim to be the interpretive key for all of life.

In answering the compound question mentioned in the introduction —the question about the meaning of the Christian movement and the meaning of God’s redemptive work in history—I will first set the context. Princeton Theological Seminary’s Students’ Lectures on Missions given over the past 120 years provide a convenient context. I will use the history of these lectures as my canvas, and some of the early speakers, especially James Dennis, for my paint. After looking at how Christianity was understood in its historical and cultural context of the early twentieth century, we will turn to look at history from two angles of view. First, we will look at the study of history in the recent past. What is the historian actually doing, or what does the historian think she or he is doing? This will be a much-too-brief look at the development of history writing in the past century, but it will help to set the context for the rest of the book.

Our second angle of view will be covered in the next chapter. In chapter two we will look at the overall concept of history and time and its relationship to redemption. Christianity is very much about time! Christianity did not invent time, but it certainly did make it what it is today. The results of this view of the cosmos will be shown through examples of church history . . . through time. But now, a brief history of history.

HISTORY AND THE LECTURES

James Dennis’s three-volume Christian Missions and Social Progress1 is an excellent case study in contextualization and historical understanding. Dennis, a Presbyterian missionary to Syria and historian of missions, gave the first Students’ Lecture on Missions, later published as Foreign Missions After a Century. In fact, he also gave the fourth lectures, which were later expanded into the massive three-volume work, Christian Missions and Social Progress. I will use his understanding of mission and the Christian movement as a starting point. He was not an eccentric or marginal figure by any stretch of the imagination. His views may seem so strange and optimistic to us today, so imperialistic and arrogant, and yet his idea of progress was as natural and common in his time as our commonly held ideas that technology holds the answers for the future, or that pluralism is a virtue. Dennis was a nineteenth-century progressive evangelical rooted in the American Protestant tradition, the confidence of the Student Volunteer Movement, and the sense of duty that was at times expressed as the “white man’s burden.”2 The phrase “progressive evangelical” makes perfect sense when talking about American Christianity a century ago.

In the introduction to his first volume of Social Progress he notes the following:

That there is a striking apologetic import to the aspect of missions herein presented is evident. It is not merely a vindication of the social value of mission work, but it becomes, in proportion to the reality and significance of the facts put in evidence, a present-day supplement to the cumulative argument of history in defense of Christianity as a supreme force in the social regeneration and elevation of the human race.3

His view is illustrated in the wealth of facts, stories, and pictures that fill the volume. For Dennis the missionary message is for “worldwide reformation . . . or . . . regeneration.” Listen to his evaluation of history and reform:

We have had local reformations in religious history; we had them in Hebrew history, before the coming of Christ. The result of early Christian labors was the conversion of the Roman Empire, and in the 16th century came the great historic Reformation of Europe. Now, for the first time in the history of our earth, this great movement in the direction of regeneration or reformation is beginning to shape itself into a world-wide enterprise.

The sixteenth-century Reformation was only in Europe; thus he says, “May we not expect that a reformation so extended as that contemplated in modern missions will produce world-wide fruit, especially since it has all the advantages afforded by modern inventions, and facilities and methods of communication, and international relations and the almost magical expedients for disseminating knowledge?”4 He and his age had great trust in technology and human inventions. This is what gives him confidence in Christian mission. I don’t believe we are that different today, although we will express it differently (stopping climate change, etc.). His views, however, were not yet chastened by the world wars and genocides of the twentieth century. In the preface to volume three he notes, referring to his previous lectures,

It has been asserted, for example, that missions are a forceful dynamic power in social progress, a molding influence upon national life, and a factor of importance in commercial expansion, as well as a stimulus to the religious reformation not only of individual lives, but of society as a whole, through many and varied channels of influence.5

What may cause us to pause is his seemingly imperialistic view of Christianity (“national life, commercial expansion”) that sounds like a domination of the world by Christian cultures and nations. He is expressing here a very liberal view of the missionary enterprise, a view that included much more than making converts and planting churches. This was a broad social mission that embraced the core of the gospel and its many products. Dropping the paternalism, it would still seem that the evangelization of cultures or penetration of Christian values of justice and peace is something we should affirm. Jesus’ life and death were not just a privatized act for our own self-improvement. They were identification with the lost, lonely, and oppressed in order to usher in new relationships and life called a kingdom. The problem with Dennis from our perspective is not how expansive his vision of mission was but how it was woven with national aspirations and reliance on human efforts (including technology and empire). His interpretation wove nationalism and modern science into his interpretation of God’s kingdom coming to earth as it is in heaven.

Dennis was not unique or strange in this view. I cannot emphasize enough that this was the common understanding of Western nations and Western theologians, even, or especially, the more progressive of the time. When we say “all Western nations,” this would include France. In 1899, Dennis was working on his magnum opus as the Ottoman Empire was collapsing and France, England, and Russia were moving into the Middle East. With the expanding influence of the French Empire, the opportunity came for the Benedictines to rebuild a crusader church in Palestine. In a September 11, 1899, letter from D. Drouhin, OAB (Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil), to French Consul Ernest Auzépy, we read the following:

In this surprising concourse of circumstances, there is for us, Mr. Consul, a very precious encouragement: we would gladly say, with our generous Crusaders of the 11th and 12th century: God wants it. God wants it! Especially as our consciences and our hearts give their testimony that, like them, we are only looking for the greatness of our dear France and the extension of God’s reign, which for individuals and for peoples is the real, the unique source of civilization and happiness.6

Our Presbyterian James Dennis is much less imperialistic and nationalistic than the good French Benedictine brother, but that should give us little solace. Empires were Christian empires, and they were all bestowing their “blessings” on the ignorant and “pagan” countries of the world. Rebuilding a crusaders’ church was understood as part of the process of bringing “civilization and happiness” to the Middle East.

TIME: ADVANCES AND RECESSIONS

Dennis and Drouhin, and for that matter other great Christian leaders of the early twentieth century such as John R. Mott, Robert E. Speer, and Samuel Zwemer, viewed Christianity through their cultural lenses, and they saw progress—social progress, in fact. Christianity was advancing and bringing with it a better life for all, a life for the West African or Chinese that would be like the best of Western civilization. This basic view was a scholarly or academic view—the view of the academy—but it was also the Fundamentalist and the Pentecostal view of Christianity. The great historian Kenneth Scott Latourette reflected a similar view a half a century later, although he was more chastened by the long historical record he traced. Still, he saw each advance of Christianity as progressing a little further and each recession receding a little less. In his remarkable preface to volume one of A History of Christianity, Latourette clearly outlines eight periods of church history, and he does so looking at the advance and recession of the religion and its overall influence on the world’s cultures. His last period was not yet complete (1914–1953), but he gives characteristics. He said that even with the “colossal setbacks and striking losses,” Christianity was “becoming really worldwide . . . and it is more potent than in any earlier era.” He was either an eternal optimist, or he was very prophetic, for the great Christian movement into Africa and Asia was only beginning when he penned those words. He knew of dying Christendom (“what was once termed Christendom”) in Europe in the shadow of the two world wars and the rise of atheistic communism, and yet he pronounced the body healthy.7 He never predicted, nor did any other historian, the rapid decline of Western Christianity that was a reverse image of the non-Western world. Optimism, progressivism, and human ability were themes in the historical writing of Christianity of the period. It was easy for them to see the kingdom of God revealed in modern technology, Christian empires, the missionary movement, new schools, and modern-looking hospitals in poor countries.

All of these historians were telling a story of Christianity as it was unfolding around them in ways that made sense to them and to their cultures. This should make us very cautious, careful, and circumspect in our task here. The cultural norms and values can enhance one’s historic vision, but they can also obscure both how the story is told and how we understand Christianity. Those telling the story that I have looked at above, and those who spoke in lectureships at Princeton or who taught at Yale, were top scholars, and they were very well informed about Christian history and Christian “progress.” The best and the brightest were caught up in contemporary visions of reality that obscured their Christian view of time.

We now live in a new century, and it is necessary to re-center or re-view Christianity today as we understand it in historical perspective. In light of the presence of Christianity today as mostly a non-Western religion (roughly two-thirds), and in light of the errors of the past in equating human technology, social progress, and empire with Christian mission, meaning must now come out of three sources, or must heed three voices. To stick with the analogy of a thread, history must be told by weaving together three strands: the biblical story, the experience of the global church, and its founder. It would be good to reread that last sentence before you go on: biblical story, global church, and Jesus. These three voices or threads will help prevent us from repeating the imperialistic and ethnocentric histories of the past.

None of our great standards for guiding us in our understanding Christian history in the past will work today. We cannot rely on Wesley’s quadrilateral (Scripture, tradition, experience, and reason), the Reformation cry of sola Scriptura, the Book of Concord, or the Westminster Confession of Faith. These lenses for understanding Christianity came out of Western Christendom, when Christianity was woven into the fabric of Western societies. This was Andrew Walls’s point in his lecture in Denmark mentioned in the introduction. Needed for the twenty-first century are concepts and convictions that come out of studying Chr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. A Brief History of History
• 2. Time: Creation and Incarnation
• 3. Cross: The Cruciform and Apostolic Nature of Christianity
• 4. Glory: The Humility and Hope of Heaven
• 5. Faithful Reading of Christian History
• Notes
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Scripture Index
• Praise for The Shape of Christian History
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright