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Cross-Cultural Process: Studies In Transmission and Reception Of Faith
This study of the cross-cultural transmission of the Christian faith looks at how Christianity became a world faith, the role of Africa in Christian history and the missionary movements of the West. It reaches back to Eusebius of Edessa in the 4th century and down to the contemporary world, from Old Athens and New Jerusalem to the vast continents of South America, Asia and Africa. On the way it offers fresh understandings of Pentecostalism, African traditional religion, and the ironic ways in which the western missionary movement often accomplished things - both for good and for ill - that its agents never dreamed of.
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First published December 1, 2001
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About the author
Andrew F. Walls
17 books11 followersA former missionary to Sierra Leone and Nigeria, Andrew Walls taught for many years at the University of Aberdeen before founding the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World at the University of Edinburgh. The Andrew F. Walls Centre for The Study of African and Asian Christianity has recently been founded in his honour at Liverpool Hope University. In 2007 he received the Distinguished Career Award of the American Society of Church History.
Honorary Professor in the University of Edinburgh and Professor of the History of Mission at Liverpool Hope University, and Professor in the Akrofi-Christaller Institute for Theology, Mission and Culture, Akropong, Ghana.
Honorary Professor in the University of Edinburgh and Professor of the History of Mission at Liverpool Hope University, and Professor in the Akrofi-Christaller Institute for Theology, Mission and Culture, Akropong, Ghana.
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December 7, 2016
Walls, Andrew F. 2002. The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission and Appropriation of Faith. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis.
The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History is a collection of essays, originally published independently, which Andrew F. Walls has organized into three parts. Part One consists of four studies of “recurrent themes of Christian history, and of Christian historiography, viewed intercontinentally.” Parts Two and Three consist of eleven studies of “the transmission and appropriation of the Christian faith” in “Africa” and “the modern missionary movement from the West,” respectively (p. ix). Because of the wide-ranging nature of the book’s interests, it is difficult to review it as a whole. So, instead, this review will focus on the themes in three chapters.
Chapter 1, “A History of the Expansion of Christianity Reconsidered,” reviews the contribution of Kenneth Scott Latourette’s magisterial, seven-volume history of missions of that title. Latourette famously described the history of Christianity’s expansion in “the spread of the influence of Jesus.” He went on to propose what Walls calls “a threefold means for measuring the influence of Christ” (p. 9).
Walls devotes the bulk of chapter 1 to outlining and giving theological depth to Latourette’s “threefold means.” He names them “The Church Test” (p. 10), “The Kingdom Test” (p. 13), and “The Gospel Test” (p. 18). “The first sign of the expansion of the influence of Christ is the presence of a community of people who willingly bear his name, an ‘Israel’ that maintains his worship. The other tests themselves presuppose this one…” (p. 10). The second test regards “the numbers and strength of new movements owing their origin to Jesus Christ,” which was Latourette’s means of testing “the depth of Christian expansion at any one time in any given area” (p. 14, emphasis in original). “Kingdom movements,” writes Walls, “call the church to repentance and to alertness to the presence of Christ within,” and are thus inclusive of “many movements of reformation, renewal, and revival” (p. 15). The third test pertains to “the effect of Christ on people and on cultures,” an effect that varies in different times and places because the “scope of the principalities and powers and their corrupting rule is immense” (pp. 18, 19). An obvious example of this is the difference between the guilt-innocence cultures and honor-shame cultures hear the gospel.
Chapter 3, “From Christendom to World Christianity,” highlights the serial nature of Christian expansion. In two paragraphs that repay careful attention, Walls writes:
To the extent that the book’s fifteen independent chapters have a unifying theme, this is it. Christianity expands on a serial basis through cross-cultural processes. One can never assume its triumph in history; one must always be incarnating the faith once delivered to new contexts.
Chapter 13, “The Multiple Conversions of Timothy Richard,” examines the missiological shifts made by Richard, a Welsh Baptist missionary to China, over the course of his tenure there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Walls makes two points: First, these shifts took place in response to changing conditions in China. Walls writes:
Richard,’ experience, in other words, was “paradigmatic…of the instincts of the missionary movement at work.” These instincts were additive rather than subtractive, however, “never abandoning its original position [of evangelism] but clearing space around it in response to developing perspectives” (p. 258). In other words, a mission that began with the goal of saving souls had to, in response to changing circumstances, take cognizance of the physical, social, and ideological elements impinged on would-be converts’ lived experience. Only in this way could the fullness of Christ’s kingdom be experienced.
The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History is a rich, suggestive work that needs to be read several times to fully digest its significance. This review has highlighted three chapters only because they identify themes that recur throughout the work: the measurement of Christian influence, the serial nature of Christian expansion, and the increasing scope of missionary concern.
_____
P.S. If you found my review helpful, please vote “Yes” on my Amazon.com review page.
The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History is a collection of essays, originally published independently, which Andrew F. Walls has organized into three parts. Part One consists of four studies of “recurrent themes of Christian history, and of Christian historiography, viewed intercontinentally.” Parts Two and Three consist of eleven studies of “the transmission and appropriation of the Christian faith” in “Africa” and “the modern missionary movement from the West,” respectively (p. ix). Because of the wide-ranging nature of the book’s interests, it is difficult to review it as a whole. So, instead, this review will focus on the themes in three chapters.
Chapter 1, “A History of the Expansion of Christianity Reconsidered,” reviews the contribution of Kenneth Scott Latourette’s magisterial, seven-volume history of missions of that title. Latourette famously described the history of Christianity’s expansion in “the spread of the influence of Jesus.” He went on to propose what Walls calls “a threefold means for measuring the influence of Christ” (p. 9).
Walls devotes the bulk of chapter 1 to outlining and giving theological depth to Latourette’s “threefold means.” He names them “The Church Test” (p. 10), “The Kingdom Test” (p. 13), and “The Gospel Test” (p. 18). “The first sign of the expansion of the influence of Christ is the presence of a community of people who willingly bear his name, an ‘Israel’ that maintains his worship. The other tests themselves presuppose this one…” (p. 10). The second test regards “the numbers and strength of new movements owing their origin to Jesus Christ,” which was Latourette’s means of testing “the depth of Christian expansion at any one time in any given area” (p. 14, emphasis in original). “Kingdom movements,” writes Walls, “call the church to repentance and to alertness to the presence of Christ within,” and are thus inclusive of “many movements of reformation, renewal, and revival” (p. 15). The third test pertains to “the effect of Christ on people and on cultures,” an effect that varies in different times and places because the “scope of the principalities and powers and their corrupting rule is immense” (pp. 18, 19). An obvious example of this is the difference between the guilt-innocence cultures and honor-shame cultures hear the gospel.
Chapter 3, “From Christendom to World Christianity,” highlights the serial nature of Christian expansion. In two paragraphs that repay careful attention, Walls writes:
…The Christian story is serial: its center moves from place to place. No one church or place or culture owns it. At different times, different peoples and places have become its heartlands, its chief representatives. Then the baton passes on to others. Christian progress is never final, never a set of gains to be plotted on the map. The rhetoric of some of our hymns, and many of our sermons, about the triumphant host streaming out to conquer the world is more Islamic than Christian [!]. Christian history reveals the faith often withering in its heartlands, in its centers of seeming strength and importance, to establish itself on or beyond its margins. It has vulnerability, a certain fragility, at its heart—the vulnerability of the cross, the fragility of the earthen vessel
In other words, cross-cultural diffusion has been necessary to Christianity. It has been its life’s blood, and without it the faith could not have survived. It does not, like so many of the religions of India, belong to a particular soil; nor does it, like Islam, produce a distinctive and immediately recognisable [sic] form of civilization. The missionary movement from the West, therefore, seen in the total history of Christianity, is one of a series of major cross-cultural diffusions…” (pp. 66–67).
To the extent that the book’s fifteen independent chapters have a unifying theme, this is it. Christianity expands on a serial basis through cross-cultural processes. One can never assume its triumph in history; one must always be incarnating the faith once delivered to new contexts.
Chapter 13, “The Multiple Conversions of Timothy Richard,” examines the missiological shifts made by Richard, a Welsh Baptist missionary to China, over the course of his tenure there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Walls makes two points: First, these shifts took place in response to changing conditions in China. Walls writes:
[Richard’s] multiple conversions—from conventional [British] evangelism to methods that took China seriously, to famine relief work, to prophet of structural reform, to theologian or religions, to worker for peace and champion of the submerged tenth—mark stages that marked the wider movement in different parts of the world and at different periods (p. 258).
Richard,’ experience, in other words, was “paradigmatic…of the instincts of the missionary movement at work.” These instincts were additive rather than subtractive, however, “never abandoning its original position [of evangelism] but clearing space around it in response to developing perspectives” (p. 258). In other words, a mission that began with the goal of saving souls had to, in response to changing circumstances, take cognizance of the physical, social, and ideological elements impinged on would-be converts’ lived experience. Only in this way could the fullness of Christ’s kingdom be experienced.
The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History is a rich, suggestive work that needs to be read several times to fully digest its significance. This review has highlighted three chapters only because they identify themes that recur throughout the work: the measurement of Christian influence, the serial nature of Christian expansion, and the increasing scope of missionary concern.
_____
P.S. If you found my review helpful, please vote “Yes” on my Amazon.com review page.
November 19, 2015
This book, like others I have read during this independent study, complements Latourette’s seven volumes, The Expansion of World Christianity. Andrew Walls, director of the Center for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World in Edinburgh, Scotland, freely admits that “Nothing like Latourette’s Expansion had appeared before, and so far it has no obvious successor.” The scope of that work is extraordinary, describing and documenting the story of the Christian faith in every century and in every part of the world. What Walls has done with this volume is to build on Latourette’s work.
What was Walls most impressed about Latourette’s work is his ecumenical vision?
“Latourette seeks to describe Christian expansion in such a way as to include all those who have borne Christ’s name; and he did this long before mutual recognition between Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox was at all widespread.” Latourette was not writing Church history; he was writing Christian history, and therefore, he wrote with an “evenhandedness between the confessions.”
What is the significance of Latourette’s Expansion and what three tests of Christian profession does Walls point out from Latourette’s examination of Christian expansion?
Walls identifies Latourette’s Expansion as a work of “generalization and synthesis about the Christian faith.” Latourette proposed a three-fold means for measuring the influence of Christ-that influence which is the source of Christian expansion. The first is the spread of Christian profession into particular areas. The second is the number and strength of new movements owing their origin to Christ. The third is what Latourette calls, “the effect of Christianity on [humankind] as a whole.” (9) Reinhold Niebuhr apparently accused Latourette of “an underlying secular liberal view of progress and a tendency to appropriate to the influence of Christ what were really the products of secular influences.”
Walls expands on the three tests as: (1) the Church test – the presence of a community, which is faithful to the revealed Christ; (2) the Kingdom test – the depth of influence of Christianity on society; and (3) the Gospel test – the theological. My breadth of appreciation of missions and my paradigm for missions has been broadened through my reading of both Latourette and Walls. My focus has for many years been to expand the “kingdom test” of mission, so that the influence of Christ may go deeper in society, especially through vocational witnesses, people who know their calling in every sphere and work out their lives in faithfulness to the king. I have been week in my appreciation of the gospel test, for fear of wrangling over some theological obscurity. The Church test, another of my areas of weakness, has been largely ignored because I saw so much emphasis on Church and so little on the witness of the kingdom.
How has Walls expanded on Latourette’s work?
Walls has expanded on Latourette’s work in a time when access to materials and understanding of the indigenous nature of the church has proliferated. During Latourette’s time, everyone assumed that Christianity existed in three distinct modes: Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox. However today, Christianity is defined by those major expressions and many more, including multitudinous indigenous churches, extra-church and non-church movements, and an explosion of evangelical charismatic and Pentecostal communities everywhere. Walls indicates that the major three expressions, Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox, no longer have meaning to the majority of Christians.
What key features of this book are instructive to my learning project?
1. Andrew Walls former missionary to Sierra Leone and Nigeria, now teaching at the University of Edinburgh, explains that evangelism in the United States was “the most important occurrence in the modern era.”
2. The Church, including the early models of missionary teams, was born multi-lingual and multi-cultural. Soon this central purpose of the Church was affirmed at the Council of Jerusalem. “Cultural diversity was built into the Christian faith with that first great decision...recorded in Acts 15, which declared that the new Gentile Christians did not have to enter Jewish religious culture.”
SUMMARY:
My observation and supposition, on reflection of Latourette’s Expansion, is that the work of a historian, profoundly shapes the way we look at the past and the way we relate to our world today. Thus, the work of describing and documenting the past, and the way in which the story is told, is significant to the way we understand our future.
What was Walls most impressed about Latourette’s work is his ecumenical vision?
“Latourette seeks to describe Christian expansion in such a way as to include all those who have borne Christ’s name; and he did this long before mutual recognition between Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox was at all widespread.” Latourette was not writing Church history; he was writing Christian history, and therefore, he wrote with an “evenhandedness between the confessions.”
What is the significance of Latourette’s Expansion and what three tests of Christian profession does Walls point out from Latourette’s examination of Christian expansion?
Walls identifies Latourette’s Expansion as a work of “generalization and synthesis about the Christian faith.” Latourette proposed a three-fold means for measuring the influence of Christ-that influence which is the source of Christian expansion. The first is the spread of Christian profession into particular areas. The second is the number and strength of new movements owing their origin to Christ. The third is what Latourette calls, “the effect of Christianity on [humankind] as a whole.” (9) Reinhold Niebuhr apparently accused Latourette of “an underlying secular liberal view of progress and a tendency to appropriate to the influence of Christ what were really the products of secular influences.”
Walls expands on the three tests as: (1) the Church test – the presence of a community, which is faithful to the revealed Christ; (2) the Kingdom test – the depth of influence of Christianity on society; and (3) the Gospel test – the theological. My breadth of appreciation of missions and my paradigm for missions has been broadened through my reading of both Latourette and Walls. My focus has for many years been to expand the “kingdom test” of mission, so that the influence of Christ may go deeper in society, especially through vocational witnesses, people who know their calling in every sphere and work out their lives in faithfulness to the king. I have been week in my appreciation of the gospel test, for fear of wrangling over some theological obscurity. The Church test, another of my areas of weakness, has been largely ignored because I saw so much emphasis on Church and so little on the witness of the kingdom.
How has Walls expanded on Latourette’s work?
Walls has expanded on Latourette’s work in a time when access to materials and understanding of the indigenous nature of the church has proliferated. During Latourette’s time, everyone assumed that Christianity existed in three distinct modes: Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox. However today, Christianity is defined by those major expressions and many more, including multitudinous indigenous churches, extra-church and non-church movements, and an explosion of evangelical charismatic and Pentecostal communities everywhere. Walls indicates that the major three expressions, Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox, no longer have meaning to the majority of Christians.
What key features of this book are instructive to my learning project?
1. Andrew Walls former missionary to Sierra Leone and Nigeria, now teaching at the University of Edinburgh, explains that evangelism in the United States was “the most important occurrence in the modern era.”
2. The Church, including the early models of missionary teams, was born multi-lingual and multi-cultural. Soon this central purpose of the Church was affirmed at the Council of Jerusalem. “Cultural diversity was built into the Christian faith with that first great decision...recorded in Acts 15, which declared that the new Gentile Christians did not have to enter Jewish religious culture.”
SUMMARY:
My observation and supposition, on reflection of Latourette’s Expansion, is that the work of a historian, profoundly shapes the way we look at the past and the way we relate to our world today. Thus, the work of describing and documenting the past, and the way in which the story is told, is significant to the way we understand our future.
December 28, 2007
This book concentrates mostly on Africa (the author's specialty), but that does not diminish its value as a globally applicable set of methodologies.
Walls presents Christianity as a religion that must cross cultural boundaries in order to survive. This thesis all at once represents his own theological perspective, view of history and hopes for the future.
So far, I haven't encountered anything like this book in my other readings on the subject (except maybe his other book on missionary movements). This uniqueness is due to the very few multidisciplinary studies of missionary history and also the relative dearth of non-western histories of Christianity written in the English language.
Walls presents Christianity as a religion that must cross cultural boundaries in order to survive. This thesis all at once represents his own theological perspective, view of history and hopes for the future.
So far, I haven't encountered anything like this book in my other readings on the subject (except maybe his other book on missionary movements). This uniqueness is due to the very few multidisciplinary studies of missionary history and also the relative dearth of non-western histories of Christianity written in the English language.
May 27, 2009
So good
April 29, 2013
Very good book about missions. See the following review for details.
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Cro...
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Cro...
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews