Christian Mission E-Book

Dana L. Robert

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Blackwell Brief Histories of Religion
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 401

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

CHRISTIAN MISSION

“Dana Robert distils a quarter of a century of her research into an erudite and accessible single-volume account of how Christianity became the largest religious tradition in the world. There is no better place for any reader to start becoming informed about this important subject.”
David Hempton, Harvard University

“Remarkable for the range and depth of the material Robert is able to pack into so short a book. Reliable and readable, it is especially valuable for its treatment of the relation between western and non-western missionary activity.”
David A. Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley

“Dana Robert’s richly textured book shows us that the history of Christian missions is far from being merely a European colonial story, and will be immensely valuable to students and general readers who are concerned to uncover the historical roots of Christianity’s current status as a truly global faith.”
Brian Stanley, University of Edinburgh

The Gospels record that Christ commanded his disciples to “go forth and teach all nations.” Thus began the history of Christian mission, a phenomenon which brought about massive shifts in the nature and practice of Christianity, and one that many say reflects the single most important movement of intercultural encounter over a sustained period of human history.

To understand Christianity as a global movement, therefore, it is essential to study the role of mission – defined as the transmission of the Gospel across cultures. Erudite and enlightening, this brief book explores the 2,000 years of mission history, covering topics such as the meaning of the missionary through history, gender and missions, and missions in culture and politics. Given that in the twenty-first century, Christianity is now largely practiced outside the West, Christian Mission is an inspirational and invaluable resource to broaden our understanding of the nature of Christianity as a truly multi-cultural world religion.

Leseprobe

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: The Making of a World Religion: Christian Mission through the Ages

Chapter 1: From Christ to Christendom

From Jerusalem into “All the World”

The Creation of Catholic Europe, 400–1400

Chapter 2: Vernaculars and Volunteers, 1450–

Bible Translation and the Roots of Modern Missions

The Revitalization of Catholic Missions

The Beginnings of Protestant Missions

Voluntarism and Mission

Protestant Missionary Activities in the Nineteenth Century

Chapter 3: Global Networking for the Nations, 1910–

The Growth of Global Networks

International Awakenings

Awakening Internationalism

Postcolonial Rejection of Christian Mission

Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans in Mission

Part II: Themes in Mission History

Chapter 4: The Politics of Missions: Empire, Human Rights, and Land

Critiques of Missions

Missionaries and Human Rights

Missionaries and the Land

Chapter 5: Women in World Mission: Purity, Motherhood, and Women’s Well-Being

Women as Missionaries

Purity and Gender Neutrality

The Mission of Motherhood

Women’s Well-Being and Social Change

Chapter 6: Conversion and Christian Community: The Missionary from St. Patrick to Bernard Mizeki

Who Was St. Patrick?

Bernard Mizeki, “Apostle to the Shona”

Missionaries and the Formation of Communal Christian Identities

Chapter 7: Postscript: Multicultural Missions in Global Context

Bibliography

Index

BLACKWELL BRIEF HISTORIES OF RELIGION SERIES

This series offers brief, accessible and lively accounts of key topics within theology and religion. Each volume presents both academic and general readers with a selected history of topics which have had a profound effect on religious and cultural life. The word ‘history’ is, therefore, understood in its broadest cultural and social sense. The volumes are based on serious scholarship but they are written engagingly and in terms readily understood by general readers.

PublishedHeavenAlister E. McGrathHeresyG. R. EvansIslamTamara SonnDeathDouglas J. DaviesSaintsLawrence S. CunninghamChristianityCarter LindbergDantePeter S. HawkinsSpiritualityPhilip SheldrakeCults and New ReligionsDouglas E. Cowan and David G. BromleyLoveCarter LindbergChristian MissionDana L. RobertForthcomingJudaismSteven Leonard JacobsEthicsMichael BannerReformationKenneth AppoldMonasticismDennis D. MartinApocalypseMartha HimmelfarbShintoJohn Breen and Mark TeeuwenSufismShahzad Green

This edition first published 2009© 2009 Dana L. Robert

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Robert, Dana Lee.Christian mission : how Christianity became a world religion / Dana L. Robert.p. cm. – (Blackwell brief histories of religion series)Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.ISBN 978-0-631-23619-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-631-23620-7(pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Missions–History. I. Title.BV2100.R554 2009266.009–dc222008047762

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

1 2009

For Marthinus Louis Daneel

List of Illustrations

Maps

1 Christians by region in 400

2 Christians by region in 1600

3 Christians by region in 2010

Figures

2.1 Matteo Ricci and leading Chinese Christian Xu Guangqi

2.2 Tamil Bible translated by Ziegenbalg

2.3 William Carey and Mrityunjaya, his Indian assistant

3.1 World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910

3.2 V. S. Azariah, first Anglican bishop from India

4.1 David Livingstone memorial statue, Victoria Falls

5.1 Annalena Tonelli in Somalia

6.1 Icon of St. Patrick

6.2 Icon of Bernard Mizeki

6.3 Bernard Mizeki’s baptismal portrait

7.1 Apostolic evangelist preaching in Zimbabwe

Acknowledgments

There is an old joke about a man who wrote a very long letter to his son, ending with the postscript, “I’m sorry I wrote such a long letter. I didn’t have enough time to write you a short one.” After twenty-five years of teaching mission history and finding it endlessly fascinating, I have taken an eternity to write a “brief” history of my major field of research. Part of the struggle lies in deciding what must be included, and what can be left out.

But another challenge is that the historiography of Christian mission has been changing rapidly. Before the mid twentieth century, a narrative of European expansion dominated the field. By the mid 1960s, the subject of Christian mission – if noticed at all – was treated as a form of western hegemonic discourse wedded to economic and cultural imperialism, or European colonialism. Studies by nonwestern historians often focused on the limitations and advantages of mission in relation to nation-building or the creation of communal identities. By the late twentieth century, mission historians emphasized the complexity of intercultural and interreligious encounters, including the need to put indigenous leaders at the center of the picture. Women’s studies have entered the field, with gender finally recognized as an important dynamic in the mission process. Postcolonial perspectives vary widely, but in general both the missionary and the convert are treated as agents of hybridity, as cultural brokers in the border-crossing production of worldviews. For theologians, the study of mission history has continued to emphasize missions’ role in the transmission and creation of theologies. For ordinary believers, the missionary remains an exemplar of piety and embodiment of Christian identity.

I am indebted to many scholars who have shaped the above-mentioned perspectives. I find much merit in multiple approaches, and a discerning reader will find traces of them in my text. But in this study, which is meant to introduce missions as the object of historical rather than theological analysis, I argue that mission history can be explained as a series of boundary crossings, driven by a universalist logic. Thus the meaning of Christian mission is integral to Christianity as a world religion that exists across time, space, and cultures. Teachers and colleagues whose insights over the years have substantially helped me to reach these conclusions include Charles Forman, George Lindbeck, Andrew Walls, Lamin Sanneh, Gerald Anderson, and Robert Hefner. I thank them all, though of course I take full blame for weaknesses in my arguments.

For financial support in the writing of this book I wish to thank the ATS Lilly Faculty Sabbatical Grant program, which helped me with a semester’s leave in 2006. My friends Kip Knight and Peggy Day, and the DeFreitas Family Foundation, have also provided research funds without which I could not have written this book. Thanks go to Dean Ray Hart of the Boston University School of Theology for his unflinching support in the midst of many changes.

For help with the manuscript I thank Doug Tzan, who as a diligent research assistant kept me from making mistakes. Doug also formatted the bibliography. I am grateful to Todd Johnson for providing me with three original maps. David Hempton and Angelyn Dries were valuable sounding boards for some of my early ideas about this project. Martha Smalley of Yale Divinity School invited me to present some of the research in the George Edward and Olivia Hotchkiss Day Associate Lecture. I wish to thank Ellie Beatty, Ann Braude, Shawn Daggett, Samuel Massie, Charles Robert, and Diana Wylie for reading all or part of the manuscript and providing valuable critiques. Thanks especially go to editor Rebecca Harkin, who asked me to write this book and provided encouragement and feedback along the way.

I dedicate this book to my husband Inus, who is a constant source of inspiration and encouragement.

Dana L. RobertSomerville, Massachusetts

Introduction

Today roughly one-third of the people on earth are Christians. Not only is Christianity the largest religion in the world but it embraces a huge variety of forms, ranging from Catholics in Brazil, to Apostles in Zimbabwe, to Copts in Egypt, to Pentecostals in Ghana, to Lutherans in Germany, to House Church believers in China. The geographic range, cultural diversity, and organizational variety of Christianity surpass those of the other great world religions.

How did Christianity get to be so diverse and widespread? The movement of Christianity from one culture to another can be explained by the concept “mission.” The word “mission” comes from the biblical Greek words for “sending.” Christianity, like Islam, is a “sending” religion. Within its philosophical structure is the idea of universality – that the message it proclaims about Jesus Christ should be shared with all peoples. Its sacred text, the Bible, contains missionary documents that command Jesus’ followers to “go into all the world.” Within its 2,000-year history are myriad examples of Christians deliberately being sent or else informally crossing geographic or cultural barriers, and founding new groups of believers wherever they go. New groups in turn launch missions of their own. The history of Christian mission – and of churches’ particular missions – provides a useful framework for grasping the meaning of Christianity as a multicultural, global presence in the world today.

The stereotyped popular view of missions is at odds with their rich variety and fascinating realities. The word “mission” is often quickly reduced to western colonialism, rather than analyzed as a complex, multi-cultural historical process stretching across two millennia. The term “missionary” is caricatured as representing a white Anglo-Saxon man in a pith helmet, preaching to unwilling “natives” in a steamy jungle. Yet over the 2,000 years of Christianity, the “missionary” is likely to have been a Korean couple working among university students in China, or an Indian medical doctor tending to refugees, or a Tongan family living peaceably in a Fijian village, or a Nestorian trader making his living along the Silk Road.

This book is a brief thematic history of an endlessly complex and detailed process in the history of Christianity. It does not and cannot seek to be exhaustive. It begins with a chronological overview of how Christianity spread around the world. This way of narrating the history of Christianity differs from traditional approaches by focusing on shifts in methods of communication and changes in sociopolitical contexts that opened the way for the transmission of Christian faith across cultural boundaries. The details of the beliefs and practices of Christians in each culture, and the history of the various churches, are largely omitted. In this chronological overview, Christianity becomes interesting as a catalyst for new identity-formation rather than as a fixed institution. The second part of the book examines selected major themes in mission history, namely the complex relationship between missions and western colonialism; the role of women in mission; and the role of the missionary in conversion and in the creation of communal identities. The two halves of the book represent different approaches to the same subject, and thus overlap slightly.

The words “mission” and “missions” will be used somewhat interchangeably, though with an emphasis on “mission” as the overview term, as in “the mission of the church”; and an emphasis on “missions” to refer to specific manifestations of mission, as in “Anglican missions,” or “faith missions.” The discerning reader will also notice that a disproportionate number of examples in the book are drawn from Africa. Since the book is a selective rather than exhaustive treatment of the subject, I have naturally leaned more heavily upon my own areas of expertise.

A few caveats are in order. Although this book is not a history of theology, for Christians the practices of mission are driven by theological beliefs. Thus even if the subject of mission is historicized as a set of human actions within history, or as the movement of religious ideas from one culture to another, theology cannot be avoided entirely. Indeed, one of the goals of this book is to explain why Christians have continued to engage in missionary activity over the centuries. What will not happen in this book is an analysis of debates among mission theologians. The purpose of Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion is to understand how cross-cultural mission is a central historical process in the formation of Christianity as a world religion.1

It should be noted that the book’s analytical framework is situated largely within the western traditions of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. The chief reason for this is the need to focus on the last few hundred years of mission history, during which missionaries were largely westerners functioning in the contexts of western colonialism. Nevertheless, the assumption that Christianity is a multi-cultural religion guides the text from beginning to end. In global terms, mission is not primarily a rationale for western expansion, but the multi-directional movement of Christians who have crossed boundaries to share their faith.

1 Because this book is intended to be a brief history, footnotes have been kept to a minimum and are used primarily to document direct quotations or major sources. For details of sources on particular persons or ideas mentioned in each chapter, see the Bibliography.

Part I

The Making of a World Religion: Christian Mission through the Ages

1

From Christ to Christendom

In 1970 the British rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar hit the shelves of record stores. The deceased Judas, who betrayed Jesus to the authorities who crucified him, appears in the afterlife and sings the title song, “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, who are you, what have you sacrificed? Jesus Christ, Superstar, do you think you’re what they say you are?” Referring to Jesus’ humble origins in Palestine, an obscure province conquered by the Roman Pompey in 63 BC, Judas asks him, “Why’d you choose such a backward time and such a strange land? If you’d come today you would have reached a whole nation. Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication.”

The conservative Christian establishment found the portrayal of an earthy “rock and roll” Jesus with his long hair and hippie commune of male and female disciples to be disrespectful, if not sacrilegious. But for many American baby boomers in the 1970s, Jesus Christ Superstar blew like a fresh breeze across their predictable and boring suburban churches. Suddenly Jesus seemed like one of them. He defied authority, was filled with self-doubt, and “hung out” with a pack of friends. Even before the rock opera opened on Broadway and in London, American high school students bought the record and staged their own productions.

At the same time, behind the Iron Curtain in Estonia, Soviet communism persecuted religions and denied education to active Christians. In the early 1970s, teenagers huddled in secret, listening to illegal recordings of Jesus Christ Superstar smuggled from the United States. The combination of the outlawed religion with forbidden western rock music was a potent mixture. Years later, a leading Estonian Christian reminisced that his first real understanding of the faith had come from the humanity of the rock-and-roll Jesus he secretly encountered in Jesus Christ Superstar. In the decades since it opened, the rock opera has been performed in Central America, eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and around the world.

Map 1 Christians by region in 400Source: Center for the Study of Global Christianity, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

While on one level Jesus Christ Superstar is a money-making musical, on another level its transcendence of Cold War geopolitical divisions – and the appeal of its rock-and-roll Jesus to youth everywhere – exemplifies the remarkable cultural fluidity of the Christian religion across the centuries. Whether told through music, art, sermons, or books of theology, the story of Jesus is repeatedly translated anew. Because of its embodiment in human cultures – an idea that theologians refer to as “incarnation” – the Christian message has outlasted clans and tribes, nations and empires, monarchies, democracies, and military dictatorships. When a handful of Jesus’ Jewish followers reached out to non-Jews in the Roman empire, they unknowingly set their faith on the path toward becoming a world religion. It appears that Israel in 4 BC was not such a “backward” place after all.

By the third century AD, Christians could be found from Britannia in the north to North Africa in the south, from Spain in the west to the borders of Persia in the east. The eastward spread of Christianity was so extensive that the fourth-century Persian empire contained as high a percentage of Christians as the Roman, with a geographic spread from modern-day Iran to India. By the seventh century, Christians were living as far east as China and as far south as Nubia in Africa.

The rise of Islam in Arabia during the seventh century halted Christianity’s eastward and southward expansions. Although Arab armies conquered the country of Jesus’ birth, by the end of the first millennium after his death the Christian religion had pushed northward across Russia, Scandinavia, and Iceland. The first Christian arrived in North America in AD 986 when a short-lived colony settled in Greenland. By the late sixteenth century, substantial groups of indigenous Christians were thriving in Angola, Japan, the Philippines, Brazil, and Central America. By the early seventeenth century, South Africa, Vietnam, and First Nations Canada all had significant Christian populations. During the nineteenth century Christianity spread across North America, North Asia, the South Pacific, and into different regions of Africa. The most rapid expansion of Christianity took place in the twentieth century, as pockets of Christians throughout Africa and Asia grew into widespread movements.

But the story of Christianity around the world is not that of a simple, linear progression. To become a world religion, Christianity first had to succeed on the local level. Specific groups of people had to understand and shape its meaning for themselves. What in totality is called a “world” religion is, on closer observation, a mosaic of local beliefs and practices in creative tension with a universal framework shaped by belief in the God of the Bible, as handed down through Jesus and his followers. As a world religion, Christianity thrives at the intersection between the global or universal, and the local or personal.

A complicating factor in charting the spread of Christianity is that its expansion has not been a matter of continuous progress. Rather, growth takes place at the edges or borderlands of Christian areas, even as Christian heartlands experience decline. Christianity has wilted under assault from hostile governments, ranging from the Zoroastrian Persians in the fourth century to the communist takeover of Russia that killed millions of believers in the twentieth century. When circumstances change, loss of meaning can hollow out the faith from within. In the wake of two devastating world wars, secularism swept over Europe in the late twentieth century, and the percentage of practicing Christians dropped. The pattern that historian Andrew Walls calls “serial progression,” including expansion and contraction over time, means that the history of Christianity cannot be treated as a monolithic enterprise, with its universal spread a foregone conclusion.1 By the mid twenty-first century, the most populous Christian areas of the world are projected to be in the southern hemisphere, in Africa and South America.

The following chronology defines the history of Christianity as a movement rather than a set of doctrines or institutions, notwithstanding that doctrines and institutions are important markers of group identity. As a historical process, Christian mission involves the crossing of cultural and linguistic boundaries by those who consider themselves followers of Jesus Christ, with the intention of sharing their faith. The ongoing boundary crossings raise the question of how the meaning of “Christian” continues to include culturally disparate groups of people: how does Christian identity change as it crosses cultures? The reverse question is also important, namely, how does Christianity shape the culture or worldviews of those who encounter it?

From Jerusalem into “All the World”

The creation and expansion of Christianity began with Jesus, a devout Jewish man who lived 2,000 years ago, never left Palestine, had a public ministry of only three years, and was executed by Roman authorities at age 33 by being nailed to a cross of wood in the manner of common criminals. Government officials hunted down and executed his most important followers. Yet within three centuries of his death, an estimated 10 percent of people in the Roman empire ordered their lives around communal memories of his life and teachings, faith in the defeat of death itself, and the affirmation that he was the “Christ” or “Lord,” the unique embodiment of the one true God.

The writings generated by Jesus’ disciples are the starting point for understanding the cross-cultural process of Christian adaptation. The New Testament was itself a collection of missionary writings written to help a scattered community remember its origins, and to provide a framework that described and justified the expansion of the faith beyond the first Hebrew believers. Documents were written in the commercial lingua franca of the Roman empire, common Greek, and then compiled into a portable book form, or codex. Greek was the language of philosophy, and so was well suited to the expression of theological ideas. By the second century after Jesus’ death, the Greek texts had been translated into Latin and Syriac, other major languages of the Mediterranean and western Asia.

The infrastructures of the Roman empire provided unprecedented opportunities for the spread of information from one region to another. With the Pax Romana, or peace enforced by Rome, followers of “the Way” – as early followers of Jesus called themselves – moved along the good Roman roads into the major cities of the empire, carrying letters of introduction from believers in other cities that convinced strangers to open their doors and host the traveling teachers.

Diaspora Jews scattered throughout the empire, in a wide variety of occupations, were interested in stories of one who had wandered as a teacher and healer in the mode of the biblical prophets, and who claimed to represent a fulfillment of Jewish destiny. And non-Jews, or “Gentiles” in Jewish parlance, sometimes admired the Jewish people for their ethical uprightness and belief in one God, and so were drawn to new interpretations of the Hebrew Scriptures that welcomed non-Jewish members.

The idea of “mission” is carried through the New Testament by 206 references to the term “sending.” The main Greek verb for “to send” is apostellein.2 Thus apostles were literally those sent to spread the “Good News” of Jesus’ life and message. Notable passages in the New Testament contain explicit commands to go into the world to announce the coming of God’s reign, such as when Jesus sent seventy followers to preach to the Jews (Luke 10:1–12). After his resurrection from death and appearance to Mary Magdalene and other women who had gone to his tomb, Jesus told the women to “go tell” his male followers that they had seen him alive.

The most famous biblical passage used by Christians to encourage each other to spread the word about Jesus’ life, work, and defeat of death occurred when after his resurrection Jesus ordered the gathered disciples to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19–20). The book of John phrased Jesus’ post-resurrection counsel to the disciples with the words, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (John 20:21).

Despite intermittent opposition from the Roman authorities, from Jewish religious leaders, and from adherents of Greek and Roman gods, early followers of “the Way” organized themselves into gathered communities called ekklesia, or churches. Dozens of different biblical expressions were used to describe the public witness or missionary existence of the ekklesia, such as “light to the world,” “salt of the earth,” and “city on a hill.” Churches, therefore, were both the products of mission and the organizational network behind further spread of the message.

A century ago, theologian Martin Kähler remarked that mission is “the mother of theology.”3 Although the New Testament is not a systematic handbook of theology, its missionary character reveals that the early followers of Jesus believed they had a divine mandate to bear witness to what they had seen of his ministry, of his message, and especially of his stunning reappearances after the crucifixion. Early Christians believed that Jesus was fulfilling the Jewish prophecies that someday a Savior or Messiah would come to save Israel and inaugurate God’s reign on earth. The significance for the history of Christian mission does not lie in the numerous modern debates over the historical accuracy of the events around Jesus’ death and miraculous resurrection, but rather in what the New Testament shows about the missionary consciousness of the early Christians. The transformation of a cowed and defeated handful of Jewish followers into a death-defying, multi-cultural missionary community was an amazing beginning to what is now the largest religion in the world.

The Apostle Paul as missionary

While the core followers of Jesus when he was alive were known as “disciples,” Paul is remembered as the “apostle” to the Gentiles, or in modern terms a “missionary” – “one who is sent.” Scores of books have been written about Paul as the archetype of the cross-cultural missionary, on Paul’s mission strategy, or “Pauline” methods in missions. Yet Paul was only one of dozens of believers who traveled around the Roman empire, spreading the “Good News” about Jesus as Messiah, the chosen one of God. Paul has been remembered as the model missionary by Christians down through the centuries not just because he traveled an estimated 10,000 miles for his mission, but because the letters to the churches he founded are the oldest documents gathered into the New Testament and are foundational to Christian theology. The narrative of Paul’s ministry is contained in the Acts of the Apostles, the fifth book in the New Testament.

Paul’s personal story makes gripping reading: a follower of a Jewish religious sect called the Pharisees, a law-abiding and duly circumcised member of the tribe of Benjamin, and a Greek-speaking Roman citizen, Paul began his relationship with Christians by persecuting them. The followers of Jesus were standing up in synagogues and proclaiming that Jesus represented the fulfillment of Jewish Scriptures about the coming Messiah. When one of the early church officers named Stephen was stoned to death for blasphemy, Paul held the coats of the mob.

Yet one day, on his way to arrest some Christians in Damascus, Paul was blinded by a flash of light and heard the voice of Jesus asking him why he was persecuting him. After three days of blindness, Paul was visited by a church leader who restored his eyesight and told him how Jesus had been resurrected from death (Acts 9:1–19). This transformative experience was interpreted by Paul as God calling him to preach to Greek-speaking Jews and Gentiles on behalf of “the Way” of Jesus Christ.

Propelled by his vision, Paul traveled to provincial centers where he sought out the Jewish quarters and began proclaiming the message of Jesus as Messiah. Because the diaspora Jews scattered throughout the empire spoke Greek, and worked and traded in the wider Greek-speaking world, many had forgotten their native Hebrew. In the third century BC Jewish Scriptures had been translated into a Greek version called the Septuagint. As Paul interpreted the salvific role of Jesus according to the Hebrew Scriptures, he could be understood both by ethnic Jews and by non-Jews. The common Greek language – as well as Paul’s theological interpretations – were bridges across which the meaning of Jesus’ defeat of death traveled from an oral, Aramaic-speaking local Hebrew culture into the cosmopolitan Greek world. The Greek word for Messiah, or Lord, is “Christ.”

In Antioch, where Paul spent a year, a decisive breakthrough among Greek-speaking Gentiles occurred, and the followers of the Way of Jesus began to be called “Christians.” Paul’s basic message was one of inclusion: through Jesus Christ, Gentiles were grafted on to God’s promises for Israel: “For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. For, ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved’ ” (Romans 10:12–13). The biculturality of the diaspora Jewish population, as exemplified by Paul himself – a Greek-speaking Jew – was essential for the expanded meaning of salvation that included both Jews and Greeks. After Paul had gathered a community of believers in a particular city he moved on, but sent other workers to help the fledgling churches he had visited. A network of Christians – linked together by correspondence and itinerant teachers like Paul – began emerging in the cities across the Roman empire.

As more non-Jews were attracted to the Christian community, tensions grew between the Jewish believers, who continued to worship in synagogues and to follow Jewish law, and the new believers from other ethnic backgrounds for whom the Jewish law was unimportant. Many of Paul’s letters dealt with the struggles of the infant churches to negotiate their internal cultural and economic differences. After fourteen years of successful ministry among the growing Gentile churches, Paul was summoned to Jerusalem to meet with the Hebrew Christians, directed by Jesus’ brother James. The Christians in Jerusalem were skeptical that the non-Jewish Christians could be fully accepted by God without obeying Jewish law. In a crucial discussion, described in Acts 15, Jesus’ chief disciple Peter, Paul, and his friend Barnabas convinced James and the Hebrew church elders that God was clearly speaking to the Gentiles. Evidence of God’s love for non Jews was to be found in the miraculous healings and changed lives, the “signs and wonders,” being performed among them. The Jerusalem Christians sent off Paul and Barnabas with some minimal instructions and a generous blessing for the non-Jewish Christians. This approval by the “Jerusalem Council” of Jewish leaders who had been close to Jesus himself ratified Christianity’s already vigorous expansion into Syria, Cilicia, Antioch, and points eastward.

That so many non-Jewish believers were responding to the work of Paul and the other evangelists created a crisis for the original believers in Jerusalem, who sensed themselves losing control over the boundaries of the faith. This same dilemma has been repeated every time the gospel message makes itself at home among a new group of people. The cross-cultural spread of the message, including translating it into terms that made sense to a Gentile audience, set a pattern that not only separated Christianity from its Jewish background, but created a religion able to transcend cultural differences. The crucial decision to allow Greeks to become Christians and remain within their own cultural framework was the key that opened the future of Christianity to its global potential as a “world” religion, rather than remaining as a sect within Judaism.

The extent to which Christianity remains connected to its Jewish roots has been a source of disagreement throughout its history. Since Jesus was himself Jewish, as were his original disciples, Christianity was built upon Jewish foundations, upon continuity with Hebrew Scriptures, commonly called by Christians the “Old Testament.” Yet the fact of cross-cultural transmission immediately opened the question of what changes and what is retained each time Christianity crosses into new cultures. Some early Greek Christians, notably Marcion, a wealthy shipowner from Sinope in Pontus, tried to strip the sacred writings of their Jewish elements and rejected the Septuagint, believing that they were a barrier to understanding Jesus in light of Greek philosophy. The rejection of Marcion and others like him by the majority of churches resulted in the biblical books, or “canon”, being closed to further changes by the late fourth century. But the issue of authority, and how to define Christian tradition, even as Christian worldviews accommodate new cultural and generational understandings, is a perpetual balancing act in the Christian movement. The “first missionary,” Paul, set the balance between innovation and tradition when he welcomed the customs of both Jewish and Greek Christians, but insisted that the core message of belief in “Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2) could not be compromised.

Expansion across the Roman empire and beyond

The book of Acts in the New Testament voiced the early self-perception of Christians as a multi-cultural people on the move. First came “Pentecost,” the so-called birthday of the church, when a group of diaspora Jews in Jerusalem miraculously heard the good news of Jesus’ resurrection in their own languages, “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs – in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power” (Acts 2:9–11). The participants in Pentecost experienced a profound sense of the presence of the living God, the Holy Spirit, which they heard as a divine rush of wind (ruah). The empowered, multi-lingual messengers of the divine moved out from Jerusalem – and burst the seams of Jewish law and tradition.

By Acts 5, the Good News had reached the Samaritan people, a nontraditional and unpopular community north of Israel. In Acts 8, an Ethiopian eunuch, an African admirer of Judaism, became convinced by the apostle Philip that Jesus fulfilled the Hebrew Scriptures and was baptized. In Acts 10, the Holy Spirit fell upon the household of Cornelius, a righteous Roman centurion. They were baptized and admitted into fellowship with the believers. Samaritans, African eunuchs, and Roman oppressors – all were the kind of marginal participants in Judaism who were attracted to the early Christian message that they, too, were welcome among the believers in the one God as mediated by his son and messenger, Jesus Christ, and empowered by the Holy Spirit. According to Christian tradition, Jesus’ disciples took the message from Jerusalem into new regions in which they were eventually martyred – Mark to Egypt, Thomas to India, Philip to Africa, and Peter to Rome. Ancient churches today, including the Malankara Syrian Orthodox Church of South India and the Christian Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt, consider these early apostles to be their founders. The very existence of a growing, multi-cultural network of churches was seen by Paul and others as theological proof that the kingdom of God, the peaceful reign of the one God of Jews and Gentiles alike, was at hand.

The story of Christianity during its first three centuries was that of a steadily expanding urban network, often along extended family lines, under the leadership of strong local leaders known as “bishops,” or overseers.4 Bishops ran social services, collected money for the poor, solved theological disputes, and were the first to be tortured and executed during waves of persecution. Gatherings of Christians met in house churches sponsored by wealthier members. Women played a prominent role as patrons of the movement that gained a reputation for female leadership and strict personal ethical codes.

Because of their loyalty to the one God, Christians refused to make sacrifices to the gods and emperor of the Roman empire. Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna, the last church leader believed to have known Jesus’ disciples personally, was burned alive in AD 156 at age 86 because he refused to burn incense to Caesar. Christians were suspected of treason and suffered intermittent persecution, including being arrested, burned as torches by the Emperor Nero, and thrown into gladiatorial arenas to be torn apart by wild beasts. And yet the movement grew, as increasing numbers of people admired the Christians’ strong community life and compassionate care for the poor. As the early church “father of Latin theology” Tertullian (d. 235) noted, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”

During its first few centuries, Christianity spread through three main linguistic groups. North Africa became the stronghold of Latin-speaking Christians, with their headquarters in Rome. Greek speakers dominated the church in Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean. Syriac, the language most closely related to the Aramaic spoken by Jesus himself, became the sacred language of the eastern churches that spread beyond the Roman empire. Each linguistic grouping developed its own traditions of theology and worship. Strong ascetic practices marked believers’ desire to identify with Jesus and his sufferings. Healings and miracles characterized the popular appropriation of the faith, with Christians particularly noted for their care of the sick during epidemics. Critics continued to accuse Christianity of being a superstitious cult that attracted marginal people – children, the poor, and women. Yet leading philosophers and intellectuals also joined the movement. By the end of the third century, Christianity had spread strongly into areas of Persian control, present-day Iran. Christian slaves, captured from Roman territory, began carrying their faith throughout Persia and along the Silk Road across central Asia.

Fourth- and fifth-century Christianities

In the fourth century, the scattered seeds of Christianity burst into bloom everywhere at once. Christianity became too widespread for political rulers to ignore. With persecution-tested bishops, a network of believers across cultural and political boundaries, schools for theological training, and sacred texts in the major literary languages, it seemed that Christianity’s time had come.5

The most important major development of the fourth century was the legalization of Christianity in the Roman empire. Given that the traditional Roman pantheon and imperial rituals were strongest among the landed gentry of the Mediterranean area, it is not surprising that the pressure to legalize Christianity came not from the old Roman aristocracy but sweeping down from the distant provinces. Just as Christianity had grown at the margins of society, so did its political establishment come from outside the core of the empire, in the person of a soldier Constantine (d. 337), who had gone to the northernmost Roman province of Britannia to help his father, the tetrarch Constantius I, exert military control over a rebellion. When Constantius I died in 306, the Roman troops in Britain declared his son emperor. No doubt young Constantine’s military prowess and shrewd social policies made him popular in Roman Britannia. By separating the civil from the military realms, Constantine granted de facto religious toleration to the Christians there. Although it is unclear what percentage of the British were Christians at the time, rough estimates for the number of Christians in the empire at the time of Constantine were up to 10 percent – a large enough percentage to make a difference to contenders for the throne. His army hardened by frontier service in Britannia, Constantine fought his way into Rome in AD 312.

According to Christian tradition, Constantine had a vision from God that he should place the chi-rho, a symbol representing the first two Greek letters of the word “Christ,” on the shields of his men, and God would grant them the key victory over his rival for the throne. After marching as victor into the city, Constantine broke with expected practice and did not sacrifice to the Roman gods. Instead, he soon issued his famous edict of religious toleration for Christianity. Under Constantine the Great, Christianity went from being persecuted, to being tolerated, to being the favored religion of the Roman empire. This sea-change in socio-political context had broad implications for Christian identity. Instead of being destroyed, churches were now built with government funds. A new Christian capital, Constantinople, signified the start of the new era. Army officers and young nobles patronized the favored religion, and masses of people began needing baptism and religious instruction.

With the regime change, formerly persecuted and isolated theologians and bishops came into the open. Perhaps predictably, they fought among themselves over the theological meaning of Jesus’ identity, the nature of his relationship to God the Creator, and themes of church order. The multi-lingual and multi-cultural variety of religious practices prevalent when Christianity was underground needed to be reconciled with its new public face. Constantine himself, though not yet baptized into formal church membership, called a major church council in 325 in Nicaea (now Iznik, Turkey) to lay the foundations of a common theological understanding of the nature of Jesus Christ as both fully human and fully divine. The formal theology patronized by the emperor became the law, and other versions of Christianity became illegal.

Once sacrifices to the Roman gods were eliminated as a requirement for public service, Christians took leading roles in the government and military. In 391, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire, and pagan religions were outlawed. Various emperors’ determination that theologies were either “official” or “heretical” had profound implications for mission, as theologians judged to be heretics by major church councils fled beyond the areas of Roman control and spread their versions of Christianity there. In retrospect, some of the bitter theological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries can be explained by cultural and linguistic differences among Christians.

Government recognition of Christianity was a two-edged sword, depending not only upon one’s theology, but also upon the empire in which one lived. What was good for Christian fortunes in the Roman empire was bad for them in Persia, Rome’s chief rival. Sponsorship by Rome meant that Christians in Persia appeared to be enemies of the state. As self-proclaimed patron of the Christians, Constantine sent a letter to Shapur II (d. 379), the “shah of shahs,” asking him to treat Christians better. Shapur II, with the assistance of Zoroastrian priests, launched a major persecution of Christians in 339. Christians were double-taxed, and their churches destroyed. They were ordered to worship the sun, the center of Zoroastrian ritual. When they refused, tens of thousands were tortured and executed, especially those native Persians who had converted to Christianity. In the capital city of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, every bishop selected in subsequent decades was immediately executed. The rage of the Zoroastrians was especially directed against the many ascetic Christians who had taken vows of celibacy and thus appeared to “drop out” from social responsibilities. Thousands of celibate women, many of them deaconesses and nuns who held high positions in the Syrian church, were martyred. Educated individual Christians retained value for their service to the Persian state, but their safety was tenuous and subject to arbitrary swings between persecution and patronage.

Even as it functioned within Roman and Persian imperial frameworks, fourth-century Christianity helped to reshape particular ethnic identities. As different linguistic groupings interacted with the Christian message in their own languages, they solidified into ethnicities or nations with a shared history and tradition. The range of potential theologies increased in tandem with ethnic and linguistic differences. Thus the emerging fourth-century variations of Christianity should be seen as plural “Christianities,” with each form developing according to its own cultural and political dynamics.

While Edessa, now anliurfa in modern-day Turkey, was the first city to register a Christian majority, the conversion of Armenia was noteworthy because it was the first independent ethnic nation to become Christian. According to tradition, Gregory the Illuminator (d. circa 337) was born of Parthian parents who lived in Armenia. He became a Christian in Cappadocia and returned to Armenia around 300. Like Paul, he was a bicultural bridge from a parochial ethnic culture into a more universal Christian worldview. He refused to sacrifice to the Armenian goddess and was imprisoned in a pit for thirteen years. But when the king fell ill, Gregory was brought out to pray for his healing. Upon his recovery, King Tiridates II was baptized.

In 314, around the time of Constantine’s conversion, Gregory became a bishop and established the church in Armenia. An Armenian script was developed for the purpose of translating the Scriptures. In the early years of the fifth century, the patriarch (head bishop) developed an alphabet and assembled a team of scholars to translate the Bible and liturgical and theological materials that became foundational for a national church. With a national identity molded by the acquisition of their own written language, a written history, and Scriptures, the Armenians were able to maintain their ethnic solidarity over many centuries despite the loss of their political independence. The unity of the Armenians helped them to withstand attacks from the Zoroastrian Persians in the fifth century, and similar pressure by the surrounding Turkish and then Soviet empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During World War I, an estimated 1.5 million Armenians were killed by the Ottoman Turks. The “Armenian massacres” became the modern prototype for ethno-religious genocide.

The fourth-century spread of Christianity into Africa also created an ethnic national Christianity that, despite pressure from Islam and then militant Marxism, has retained its identity to the present day. Axum was capital of a kingdom known as Abyssinia, now Ethiopia. In the early fourth century pirates on the Red Sea killed a Christian philosopher from Tyre. In the resulting shipwreck, his wards Frumentius (d. circa 380) and Aedesius were found by the Axumites sitting under a tree and studying. The king welcomed them and gave them high positions, as they were persons of knowledge. When the king died and left an infant son, the future King Ezana (d. circa 350), Frumentius became regent. Eventually Frumentius was consecrated by the bishop of Alexandria to organize the church in Axum. He converted the royal family, planted churches, ordained priests, and opened a school. Under King Ezana, the warrior kingdom of Axum shifted from worshiping various south Arabian pagan gods, to Christianity. A rich tradition of monasticism characterized Ethiopian Christianity, and Syriac-speaking missionaries translated the Bible into Ge’ez, the language of Axum. In the fourth century the kingdom of Axum conquered Meroe, the combined kingdom giving birth to Nubia, another ancient African Christian nation.

Bicultural persons were the human bridges across which the “Good News” of Jesus traveled from one culture to another. In the 250 s, Goths on the northwestern shore of the Black Sea took to ships and raided the shores of Asia Minor. They seized many Christians, who witnessed to their faith among their captors. The bicultural son of a Goth and a Christian slave, Ulfila (d. 383) studied Greek, Latin, and Gothic. At age 30 Ulfila was sent to Constantinople as a diplomat, and was there consecrated as a bishop for the Gothic Christians. Known as the Apostle to the Goths, he returned to the Gothic lands and became leader of the church. This role included creating a Gothic alphabet and translating the Scriptures into Gothic – the first central European language to have the Bible. Around 347, Ulfila took a group of Gothic Christian refugees onto Roman soil for protection. He led the negotiations to allow other Goths to cross into the Roman empire in 376, as they fled from other hostile tribes on the move in central Europe.

To the cultured Mediterranean heirs of ancient Greek and Roman civilization, the Germanic Goths were primitive, forest-dwelling, northern “barbarians.” Their theology was also seen as defective and inferior to the theological formulations of the Roman bishops. Known as Arianism, the Gothic theological system viewed Jesus as similar to a tribal chief’s counselor, or go-between, who carried people’s petitions to the ruler and who carried out the chief’s orders. In various forms of Arianism, Jesus was seen as subordinate to the Father God and less than divine.

The Arian Christology differed from the Orthodox, or Catholic version, settled at the Council of Nicaea in 325. To followers of Constantine and the official Orthodox Christianity of the empire, Jesus was homoousios