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April 10 - April 15, 2023
To adapt the phrase once applied to the increasingly conservative U.S. electorate of the 1970s, the stereotype holds that Christians are un-black, un-poor, and un-young.
If we want to visualize a “typical” contemporary Christian, we should think of a woman living in a village in Nigeria, or in a Brazilian favela.
This global perspective should make us think carefully before asserting “what Christians believe” or “how the church is changing.”
The era of Western Christianity has passed within our lifetimes, and the day of the Southern churches is dawning.
“It is utterly scandalous for so many Christian scholars in [the] old Christendom to know so much about heretical movements in the second and third centuries, when so few of them know anything about Christian movements in areas of the younger churches.”
If we look at the nations with the fastest demographic growth and the youngest populations, they are evenly distributed between Christian- and Muslim-dominated societies.
To take one potent example, modern Western interpretations of the Atonement (both Catholic and Protestant) can be traced to the writings of Saint Anselm around 1100.
The biblical Lord became a feudal lord.
we can say that many global South Christians are more conservative in terms of both beliefs and moral teaching than are the mainstream churches of the global North; this is especially true of African churches.
There is no single Southern Christianity, any more than there is such a thing as European or North American Christianity: each of these terms involves numerous components, some strongly at odds with the others.
Making all allowances for generalization, then, global South Christians retain a strong supernatural orientation and are by and large far more interested in personal salvation than in radical politics.
In addition, rapid growth is occurring in nontraditional denominations that adapt Christian belief to local tradition,
For better or worse, the dominant churches of the future could have much in common with those of medieval or early modern European times.
Since there were only a handful of charismatics and Pentecostals in 1900, and several hundred million today, is it not reasonable to identify this as perhaps the most successful social movement of the past century?
As Southern Christianities continue to expand and mature, they will assuredly develop a wider theological spectrum than at present, and stronger liberal or secularizing tendencies may well emerge.
For the foreseeable future, though, the dominant theological tone of emerging world Christianity is traditionalist, orthodox, and supernatural.
While some American churches have declined, it is the most liberal and accommodating that have suffered the sharpest contractions. It would not be easy to convince a congregation in Seoul or Nairobi that Christianity or “traditional faith” is dying, when their main concern is building a worship facility big enough for the ten or twenty thousand members they have gained over the last few years.
I use the word “Christendom” in a more neutral sense.
In its origins, then, “Christendom” has supranational and even antinational implications quite different from the term’s use in common parlance.
a true overarching unity and a focus of loyalty transcending mere kingdoms or empires.
Ultimately, Christendom collapsed in the face of the overwhelming power of secular nationalism.
No less than Christians, the Muslim world will be transformed
Based on recent experiences around the world—in Nigeria and Indonesia, the Sudan and the Philippines—we face the likelihood that population growth will be accompanied by intensified rivalry, by struggles for converts, by competing attempts to enforce moral codes by means of secular law.
Such a clash is anything but inevitable. Around the world, Christians and Muslims often have lived contentedly side by side, learning to respect each other’s sensitivities.
Both expectations, liberal and conservative, are wrong, or at least, fail to see the whole picture. Each in its different way expects the Southern churches to reproduce Western obsessions and approaches, rather than evolving their own distinctive solutions to their own particular problems.
However partisan the interpretations of the new Christianity, however paternalistic, there can be no doubt that the emerging Christian world will be anchored in the Southern continents.
what we are now witnessing is “the renewal of a non-Western religion.”
at no point did the West have a monopoly on the Christian faith. Even at the height of the missionary endeavor, non-Western converts very soon absorbed and adapted the religion according to their own cultural needs.
To imagine the early history of Christianity, we would do much better to use the standard map of the world that was regularly offered in medieval times. In these older pictures, the then-known continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia all appeared as more or less equal lobes conjoined at a central location, which was Palestine, with Jerusalem at its center.
By the time the Roman Empire granted the Christians toleration in the early fourth century, there was no question that the religion was predominantly associated with the eastern half of the empire, and indeed with territories beyond the eastern border.
Of the five ancient patriarchates of the church, only one, Rome, clearly stood in the West: the others were at Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria.
When we refer to Christianity forming a relationship with the secular state, Western historians think of Constantine, who granted toleration within the Roman Empire in 313. Far less celebrated are the other early states that established Christianity as their own official religion in the fourth century, namely Ethiopia and Armenia.
Almost certainly, Armenia was the first state anywhere to establish Christianity as an official faith, which it did around the year 300.
By the time the first Anglo-Saxons were converted, Ethiopian Christianity was already in its tenth generation.
Under Muslim rule, the patriarchates of Alexandria, Constantinople, and Antioch continued to be vital centers of ecclesiastical authority, still commanding the allegiance of millions of followers.
The other great Christian center was the Persian university of Jundaisapur, which became the foundation of Muslim learning in Baghdad itself.
At so many points, the living Christianity of Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Ethiopia, and Armenia takes us back to the earliest centuries of the faith, a time when the followers of Jesus were developing cells of believers within a still vibrant Roman empire.
Modern images of medieval Christianity draw heavily on images of France and Western Europe, which are portrayed as priest-ridden, theocratic states, with little tolerance for Jews or heretics. Yet through much of the Middle Ages, a large proportion of the world’s Christians themselves lived as despised minorities, under the political power of a hostile faith.
Medieval England and France were Christian states, while the regimes of Egypt and Syria were solidly Muslim, but there may have been more Christians all told in the Eastern nations than the Western, and the Easterners possessed at least as active a cultural and spiritual life.
On balance, I would argue that at the time of Magna Carta or the Crusades if we imagine a typical Christian, we should still be thinking not of a French artisan but of a Syrian peasant or Mesopotamian town-dweller, an Asian not a European.
If we want to picture the lights of Christianity fading on an imaginary map of the world, with the Christian faith largely confined to Europe, then this is the era in which we should do so, a full thousand years after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West.
From about 1500, we can first glimpse the pattern of Christian expansion familiar from popular stereotypes, namely a religion borne by European warships and muskets to vulnerable natives in Africa or South America.
In religious terms, the greatest long-term Catholic successes would be in Central and South America, where the conquered peoples accepted forms of Catholicism, heavily mixed with local beliefs.
at least in the initial decades, the depth of these conversions was questionable. For the first century or two after the conquest, the church made little effort to educate or evangelize, once native peoples had given formal assent to the faith.
Issues of accommodating local customs and practices surfaced repeatedly.
acknowledging caste meant refusing to treat the poorest on terms of equality, violating the teachings of Jesus—an issue that is still desperately contentious for Indian Christians today. Still, this represented a successful missionary strategy, and perhaps the only one that could have worked in the setting of the time.
Up to the end of the eighteenth century, large-scale missionary efforts were strictly the preserve of the Catholic powers, a point of superiority proudly stressed by Catholic controversialists.
In fact, Protestant missionary endeavors were making significant advances from about 1700.
In 1698, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge was founded in England, while the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts followed in 1701.
The great age of Protestant missions effectively began in the 1790s, partly as a consequence of the evangelical revival, and partly due to the unprecedented power and reach of the British Empire.
