The Changing Shape of Church History

Justo L. González

• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780827205741
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

New, different readings of church history are finally reflecting Christianity's deep roots in every culture worldwide. González listens to voices from centers other than the North Atlantic to help us see a different perspective of church history—a global story that includes those previously marginalized—as he offers us a hopeful outlook for the future of world Christianity.

PART I
	The
	Changing
	Geography
	of Church
	History

1

The Changing Cartography

History and Geography

As a central image for describing and discussing the changes that are taking place in church history, I have decided to use the metaphor of geography. However, in a way this is more than a metaphor, for there is indeed a connection between history and geography. If history is a drama, then geography is the stage on which the action flows. No matter how much one focuses on the plot, it is impossible to understand or to follow the action without its setting on the stage. Indeed, much of the plot has to do with the placing of the various actors on the stage, with their entering and exiting, with the various props that establish the setting, with the movement of the actors up- or downstage. Likewise, I learned many years ago that it is impossible to follow history without an understanding of the stage on which it takes place.

I must confess that in my own academic career, in my early years of study, the subject that I most disliked was history. Then I realized that one of the reasons I disliked it was because I was trying to understand events only in their chronological sequence, as if the geography or the stage on which they took place were unimportant. Thus, what ought to have been the fascinating study of people’s lives became a series of names and dates hanging in mid-air, of disembodied ghosts parading through my textbooks in rapid and confusing succession. It was only when I began seeing them as actual people with their feet on the ground, and when I began understanding the movements of peoples and nations not only across time and chronology but also across space and geography, that history became fascinating to me.

As a professor, I have become convinced that one of the main obstacles in the teaching and the learning of church history is that the geography in which that history takes place is alien and unknown to most students. I may be fascinated with the theological and hermeneutical contrasts between Alexandria and Antioch, and spend an hour explaining those contrasts and their consequences for christology or for soteriology, only to find at the end of the hour that many of my students do not have the faintest idea where to place Alexandria or Antioch on a map of the Roman Empire.

My wife also teaches church history. Some years ago she began to suspect that one of the reasons why some students had enormous difficulties understanding the history of the ancient and medieval church was that they lacked even a basic understanding of geography. One year, at the very first class, before saying even the first word about history, she handed out blank maps of Europe and the Roman Empire and asked the students to locate on those maps a list of cities and places. Almost all knew enough geography to place Rome somewhere in the boot of Italy. Most knew that Jerusalem was somewhere toward the eastern edge of the Mediterranean. But there their knowledge ended. One student put Ireland in the Ukraine. Another moved Spain to Germany, and Egypt to Spain. Alexandria drifted all the way from Egypt to Great Britain, and the unfortunate Libyans were freezing north of Moscow. Only one student out of a class of about fifty college graduates knew enough European geography to be able to place correctly the list of twenty names they were given—and that student was a Korean!

Needless to say, since then one of the required textbooks for that introductory course on church history is a good historical atlas.

Having had our laugh at beginning students of theology, it is time that we historians and professors of theology look at the beams in our own eyes. True, we know more or less where to place Alexandria on the map, and we would never place Spain east of the Rhine, but are we sufficiently aware of the manner in which the map of the church has changed during our own lifetimes, and the manner in which that is beginning to affect the reading and the writing of church history?

The changes in the map of Christianity should be evident to anyone who is aware of the manner in which Christianity has evolved during the last few decades. At the beginning of the twentieth century, half of all Christians in the world lived in Europe. Now that figure is less than a quarter. At the beginning of that century, approximately four out of five Christians were white. At the end of the century, less than two out of five. At the beginning of the century, the great missionary centers of Christianity were New York and London. Today more missionaries are sent from Korea than from London, and Puerto Rico is sending missionaries to New York by the dozen. A hundred years ago, there were less than 10 million Christians in Africa, less than 22 million in Asia, and some 5 million in Oceania; now those numbers have risen to 360 million, 312 million, and 22 million respectively. Meanwhile, growth in the North Atlantic has been much less spectacular (from 460 to 821 million), and in most cases has not kept up with population growth.¹

The Old Map

What this means is that the map of Christianity on which we operated a few decades ago is no longer operational. That was a map in which the center was the North Atlantic—Europe and North America. Apart from a few churches whose interest was mostly as relics of an ancient past, there was little outside the North Atlantic to attract the attention of historians. And these historians themselves were either persons from the North Atlantic, or persons who, as myself, had been trained into the North Atlantic reading of history.

A few examples should suffice to make this point.

First, a look at the basic textbook on church history on which most of my generation was formed. That was Williston Walker’s A History of the Christian Church. Although by the time I went to seminary this book had gone through a number of revisions, its basic outline was the same as that of the original edition. Most of my comments are based on the 1959 edition, revised by Cyril C. Richardson, Wilhelm Pauck, and Robert T. Handy, which was published just as I was preparing for my doctoral exams at Yale.²

It appears that the main criterion of the selection process in Walker’s History is the importance of various events and developments for North American Protestant self-understanding. Indeed, the table of contents is such that many a North American Protestant will be able to read most of the book and say, “this is my story.” The narrative is almost exclusively limited to the Roman Empire in the early centuries, then to Western Europe, and after the Reformation to the North Atlantic. The conversion of Armenia is mentioned almost parenthetically in a sentence dealing with the spread of Monophysism. The church in Ethiopia ranks a bit more space—about half a paragraph, again in a section dealing with the Monophysite revolt resulting from Justinian’s policies. The spread of Islam also merits half a paragraph—a paragraph that also deals with the Lombards, the Avars, the Croats, the Serbs, and several others. Another paragraph takes care of the Spanish Reconquista. The significance of Arabic civilization for the theological renaissance of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and in particular for the development of Thomism, is barely mentioned. The crucial role of Sicily and Spain in that encounter between civilizations is not mentioned at all.

Then comes the Reformation of the sixteenth century. The period is covered in 121 pages, of which slightly less than seven are devoted to Roman Catholicism. In that brief section on Catholicism, attention is paid to monastic and mystical movements, to anti-Protestant polemics, and to the Council of Trent. But not a word is said about the very active theological work that was taking place in the Roman Catholic Church quite apart from any anti-Protestant concern. Those seven pages also include a passing reference to Ricci in China and De Nobili in India. Francis Suárez, foundational theologian for the Jesuit order, is conspicuously absent. The story of Roman Catholicism is picked up in another nine pages toward the end of the book, dealing with “Modern Roman Catholicism,” which covers the entire development from Jansenism to the time the book was written.

After the Iconoclastic controversy, the Eastern churches receive two pages for the rest of their medieval development, and then a final chapter of seven pages to bring their story up to date.

This may sound quite critical, and indeed it is. Yet it must be pointed out that as a seminary student the only place in the theological curriculum, apart from a belated course on ecumenism, where I had even an inkling of the existence of Christians and churches in Ethiopia or in Armenia was through this book and others like it.

A New Consciousness Requires a New Map

Still, when I review the manner in which I first studied church history, and the cartography that lay behind that history as an unspoken presupposition, I am surprised and dismayed at the degree to which I allowed that telling of the narrative to become part of my story, even though in many ways it marginalized me and my community.

Walker’s book, as well as all the others that were used as textbooks at the time, tended to reduce the significance of the sixteenth century to the Protestant Reformation and its Roman Catholic counterpart. That was understandable. These were mostly Protestant books, written at a time when there was still great alienation between Protestants and Catholics, and they were also books from the North Atlantic, written from a perspective in which the North Atlantic was the new mare nostrum of the new imperial civilization. Significantly, even though I had studied the history of the conquest and colonization of the Western Hemisphere ever since I was in the second grade, as I read those books in seminary it did not occur to me that there was a great omission. Today, I cannot speak of the history of the church in the sixteenth century without taking into account that on May 26, 1521, the same day that the Imperial Diet of Worms issued its edict against Luther, Hernán Cortés was laying siege to the imperial city of Tenochtitlán. And today, after the Second Vatican Council and a number of developments in Latin America, many would agree that the jury is still out as to which of those two events will eventually prove to be more important for the history of the church at large—a point to which I shall return in chapter 3.

Today I must work with a different set of maps. Indeed, today I must work with a map that no longer places the North Atlantic at the center, but is, rather, a polycentric map. This is perhaps the most radical change that has taken place in the cartography of church history. In the past, we could speak of a center, or at most of two centers, and tell the story from those centers outward. Today that is no longer possible. Today there are many centers, both in the actual life of the church and in the way the past history of the church is being written.

A Polycentric Map

It may be helpful to stop and think about the polycentric nature of today’s Christianity. To a degree without parallel in the history of the church, today the centers of vitality are not the same as the centers of economic resources. And those centers are more than one. In times past, there have been many changes in the geography of Christianity. Already in the New Testament, we see the center shifting from Jerusalem to Antioch and even toward Asia Minor. Yet it is also clear that at that time, as the importance of the church in Jerusalem wanes in comparison with the rest of Christianity, so also do its economic resources wane, so that a significant part of Paul’s mission is to collect funds for the saints in Jerusalem.

When the Empire becomes Christian, the center of Christianity once again shifts, this time to the centers of political power. At first, this is Constantinople, and therefore one should not be surprised that all the early ecumenical councils of the Christian church take place in Constantinople or nearby—Nicea, Ephesus, Chalcedon.

Later, when the Islamic invasions and the Carolingian renaissance shift the center to Western Europe, it is clear that there is a new center, not only in vitality, but also in political power and even in the relatively meager economic resources of the time. Henri Pirenne has stated this quite starkly:

The West was blockaded and forced to live upon its own resources. For the first time in history the axis of life was shifted northwards from the Mediterranean. The decadence into which the Merovingian monarchy lapsed as a result of this change gave birth to a new dynasty, the Carolingian, whose original home was in the Germanic North.

With this new dynasty the Pope allied himself, breaking with the Emperor [in Constantinople]…And so the Church allied itself with the new order of things. In Rome, and in the Empire which it founded, it had no rival.³

Thus, if until that time the center of Christianity was along an East-West axis along the Mediterranean basin, after that time the center was along a North-South axis that would eventually run from the British Isles, through France, and on to Rome—with a smaller, independent center in Constantinople.

The “discoveries” and colonial expansion of Western Europe, which had their beginnings in the late fifteenth century but reached their high point in the colonial and missionary enterprises of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, once again shifted the center of Christianity, which now was the North Atlantic. The theological, missionary, and economic center was in Western Europe—particularly Northwestern Europe—and North America. Out of that center, Western European colonial, economic, and religious power expanded to the rest of the world. Kenneth Scott Latourette has stated the new situation quite bluntly:

By A.D. 1914 all the land surface of the world was politically subject to European peoples except a few spots in Africa, some of the Asiatic states, Japan, a little corner of Southeastern Europe, and the jungles in the interior of some of the largest of the islands of the Pacific. Even the lands which had not submitted politically had been touched by the commerce of Europeans and most of them had been modified by European culture.⁴

He then relates that colonial, economic, and technological expansion to the advance of Christianity:

The fact that the emerging world culture had its origins in the Occident was of advantage to Christianity. Because of the Western source of that culture and because Christianity was traditionally the religion of the West, the way was opened for the Christian impulse to become a constituent part of that culture and to help shape it.⁵

These past shifts of the centers of Christianity—from Jerusalem, to Antioch, to Constantinople, to Western Europe, to the North Atlantic—should lead us to expect similar shifts, so that the changes that have taken place in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries should not surprise us. Already by the time Latourette completed his monumental seven-volume History of the Expansion of Christianity he was well aware of the demise of colonialism and of the potentially negative consequences of the situation he had described earlier. He was also aware that the center of Christianity was beginning to shift, as the traditionally Christian West became more secular, and churches elsewhere gained in vitality.

However, the change that was taking place was different from the previous changes in the centers of Christianity. In the previous cases—from Jerusalem to Antioch, to Constantinople, and so forth— a shift in the center of power had also implied a shift in the center of numbers, finances, vitality, creativity, and so on.

Today the situation is quite different. There is no doubt that the vast majority of the financial resources of the church are still in the North Atlantic. Indeed, the budget of some of our major seminaries in the United States is larger than the total budget of many a denomination overseas. And some congregations in the United States own buildings that are worth more than all the holdings of entire denominations elsewhere. The same is true of the number of magazines and books published, resources invested in the media, and so on. And yet, proportionately speaking, the number of Christians in the North Atlantic continues to dwindle, while there is an explosion in church membership in traditionally poorer countries.

That is the first dimension of what I mean by affirming that the emerging geography of Christianity is polycentric. From the point of view of resources, the centers are still in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. From the point of view of vitality, missionary and evangelistic zeal, and even theological creativity, the centers have been shifting south for some time.

The second dimension of the new polycentric reality is that even in the South there is no new center. Exciting new theological insights are coming from Peru as well as from S...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: The Changing Geography of Church History
• Part II: The Changing History of Church History
• Notes