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By Philip Jenkins
Oxford University Press, 2006. 252 pp., $26 |
The commission with which Jesus charged his Apostles is decidedly unambiguous. "Go forth," he commanded, "and make disciples of all nations." In obedience to this mandate, an upstart sect in a backwater province managed to become the world's largest religion.
Christianity's rise and flourishing have nevertheless proceeded by fits and starts, with moments of explosive growth followed by years of quiet consolidation. We live, incidentally, in a moment of explosive growth. The steady march of Christianity through Africa and Asia is comparable in scale with the conversion of the Germanic tribes in the fourth century or the baptism of the New World. Indeed, based on current trends, there will be three billion Christians by 2050--only one in five of whom will come from the U.S. or Europe.
Few scholars have devoted as much attention to this epochal phenomenon as Philip Jenkins. Four years ago he published "The Next Christendom," a detailed examination of the emerging global Christianity--a major geopolitical fact otherwise little noted or commented upon. In "The New Faces of Christianity," he turns his talents from international affairs to theology. How, he asks, will these hundreds of millions of new converts change Christianity itself?
It is obviously difficult to speculate about future beliefs, and Mr. Jenkins is duly cautious. Just a few decades ago, it was widely assumed that the Third World would inspire a theology of liberation, a revolutionary marriage of postcolonial Christianity and Marxism. Today the conventional wisdom runs in the opposite direction, holding that Nigerian bishops and Korean evangelicals represent the cause of a superstitious and reactionary fundamentalism. Neither commonplace has proved accurate. Conventional categories like radical and conservative are of little use in describing the coming Christendom. Instead, argues Mr. Jenkins, this rising faith can best be characterized as biblical.
The Bible informs much of Western civilization, to be sure, and is deeply ingrained in its philosophy, art and ethics. For precisely that reason, however, in the West the Scriptures have lost much of their capacity to astonish. Not so in Uganda or India or China, where eager catechumens read the Bible with fresh eyes. Their enthusiasm for the Scriptures is palpable, and they hold the book's authority in high regard. The faithful throughout the global south are thus less apt to ascribe a challenging passage to historical circumstance or to give it an abstract metaphorical meaning. They tend instead to adopt a rather more literalistic approach.
This heightened literalism is not simply a matter of the convert's zeal. Scriptural imagery speaks directly to the world's southern Christians; after all, much in their lives is closer to the Bible's world than the modern one. Many of these neophytes still know the smell of the barnyard and the weight of the plow. They inhabit a universe populated with angels and demons, where the possibility of miraculous intervention remains open. They do not attempt to explain away miracles or visions, nor do they doubt the power of prophecy and exorcism.
The great themes of Scripture are likewise powerfully relevant for many southern Christians. Unlike their brethren in more peaceful and prosperous lands, these believers have witnessed war, famine, pestilence and death; they do not need to imagine what it is like to suffer from grinding poverty or rank injustice. Biblical injunctions to care for the sick resonate in countries devastated by AIDS, and the promises of heavenly feasting resound in the ears of those who have known starvation. Christian Scripture speaks directly to the lived reality of much of the Southern Hemisphere.
Northern churches are already feeling the influence of southern Christianity. Schism looms over the Church of England, where the decision of American Episcopalians to ordain an openly homosexual bishop has scandalized the much larger and more traditional Anglican communion in Africa. In other denominations, similar fault lines run between northern and southern approaches to moral theology. For the foreseeable future, northern expectations of utility and tolerance will jar against southern fidelity to biblical foundations.
Such friction is not necessarily undesirable. Spirit and letter alike belong to Christian orthodoxy. So long as both sides endeavor to understand each other, a healthy tension can exist between them. By introducing the world of southern Christianity to a northern audience, Mr. Jenkins has thus done a good deed for people on both sides of the equator. With its wise and sympathetic vision, "The New Faces of Christianity" calls to mind the words of the Psalmist, who long ago sang in gratitude to the Lord: "The heavens are thine, the earth also is thine: as for the world and the fullness thereof, thou hast founded them. The North and the South thou hast created them."
Christopher Levenick is the W. H. Brady Doctoral Fellow in Social and Political Studies at AEI.
