Pandita Ramabai’s Spiritual Journey23 12.1 Chiara Lubich and Focolare
24 12.2 Dietrich Bonhoeffer and European Secularism
25 13.1 Simon Kimbangu, a Congolese Christian Prophet
26 13.2 Mercy Amba Oduyoye on Women, the Bible, and African Christianity
27 14.1 Marianne Katoppo on Poverty, Women, and the Eucharist
28 14.2 Pastor Wang Yi on the Relationship of Church and State
29 15.1 Eva Peron’s Critique of the Catholic Church
30 15.2 Gustavo Gutiérrez on Liberation Theology
31 16.1 James Cone on Black and White Christianity
32 16.2 Mother Angelica on the Left–Right Divide in American Catholicism
33 17.1 Bernard Narokobi on Christianity and the Melanesian Way
34 17.2 Bobbie Houston on The Sisterhood
Introduction to World Christianity
The Christian movement began with just a handful of people, maybe a few hundred, who had known Jesus while he was alive and who looked to him even after his death as their religious teacher and guide. Jesus was born in a remote part of Palestine at the eastern edge of the Roman Empire, and during his lifetime his following never extended beyond that region. Most of his closest associates were of modest means, and many – perhaps most – were illiterate. All in all, there was little to suggest that this movement would endure for centuries and someday span the globe. Yet today Christianity, the religion of Jesus, is the largest and most widely disseminated religion in the world.
There are many different ways to study religion, and there are many different ways to study the particular religion that is known as Christianity. Some scholars of Christianity spend most of their time and energy trying to understand Jesus himself, some focus on the distinctive beliefs and moral teachings of Jesus’s followers (theology), some concentrate their work on the oldest writings of Christianity (biblical studies), some want to know how Christianity has grown and developed over the centuries (the history of Christianity), and some emphasize the great works of art, architecture, and literature that have been produced by the Christian community. This book takes a multi‐disciplinary approach, combining historical, sociological, and theological resources, seeking to describe the vast diversity that now exists within the movement.
Christianity’s Global Diversity
Christianity appears in so many diverse forms around the world that some scholars have begun talking about Christianity in the plural, as Christianities that at times seem to have little in common. But that may be an overstatement. Yes, contemporary Christianity is amazingly complex, but Christianity has possessed an inner diversity from the very beginning. The willingness to allow a range of different interpretations to coexist side by side is part of Christianity’s religious ethos, and it is one of the reasons that Christianity has spread so widely around the world. Everywhere Christianity has gone it has adapted itself to local ideas, ideals, and practices. By the end of the first century the Christian movement already included Jews and Gentiles and people from all over north Africa, southern Europe, and the Middle East. These early Christians came from many different cultures, they spoke a variety of different languages, and they had distinct ways of thinking about their faith.
Diverse perspectives are evident in the foundational documents of the movement, within the pages of the New Testament itself. For example, the book of Galatians argues that “good works” have nothing at all to do with Christian faith or salvation, while the book of James argues that faith without “works” (proper moral conduct) is dead. The four New Testament gospels (attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) present slightly different portraits of Jesus, but when the second‐century writer Tatian tried to harmonize those four gospels and turn them into one unified rendition of the life of Jesus, Christians rejected his text. They chose instead to maintain the four different versions of Jesus’s life that still appear in the Bible today.
The Christian movement was already diverse in the first and second centuries, and it has been diversifying ever since. As Christianity spread east into Asia, west into Europe, and south into Africa, each new tribe, nation, or linguistic unit that embraced the faith of Jesus added its own ideas and emphases to the movement, and this process of growth and transformation has accelerated in the last two centuries.
Today Christianity is the most culturally and ethnically diverse religion that has ever existed in human history. Christians live in every nation on earth, and they bring insights from all the world’s cultures into their understandings of faith. Roughly 25 percent of the world’s Christians now live in Europe, another 25 percent live in Africa, 25 percent in Latin America, 15 percent in Asia, and 10 percent reside in North America. (These population percentages are obviously rounded estimates. More precise numbers appear in the remainder of this book, and the process for obtaining those numbers is explained in the appendix on “Counting Christians.”) This relatively even distribution of the Christian population around the world represents a far greater global dispersion of faith than is characteristic of the other three major world religions of Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. More than 95 percent of today’s Hindus and Buddhists live in Asia, and Asia is also home to almost three‐quarters of the world’s Muslims.
Despite its wide dispersion across the globe, many people still think of Christianity as a “western” religion. During the four centuries from 1400 to 1800, most Christians in the world were, in fact, European; about 85 percent of all the Christians in the world lived in that single region. Christianity had flourished in parts of Asia and Africa in earlier centuries, but it contracted to Europe during these four centuries when coincidentally Europe was also beginning to spread its influence around the world. These centuries of European domination had a profound and lasting impact on global perceptions of Christianity. People worldwide came to see Christianity and Europeanness as two sides of the same coin. Christianity was reconceived as a purely “western” religion, and actions undertaken by anyone in “the West” were often attributed to Christianity.
The idea that Christianity is a western or European religion is sometimes reinforced by western Christians who are themselves often convinced that their own way of being Christian is the only or best way of being Christian and that all other ways are deficient or mistaken. While some Christians may continue to presume that western Christianity is the norm for all Christians everywhere, that is no longer the demographic reality. Christianity was a global faith for much of its history, and it is a thoroughly global movement today.
World Christianity
