Is there some kind of inherent fragility in Christianity that causes it to decline in places where it once prospered, move away from established central locations, and grow in places that are considered to be the cultural margins? The late 20th century missiologist Andrew Walls, in The Cross Cultural Process in Christian History (2002), seemed to think so. I ran across this argument last year right around the time of his death and I have not been able to stop thinking about it. If we consider the supposed weakness and foolishness of the Cross of Christ from an earthly view (1 Corinthians 1), it makes sense.
Walls says,
The history and expansion of the two great missionary faiths, Christianity and Islam, suggests a contrast. While each has spread across vast areas of the world and each claims the allegiance of very diverse peoples, Islam seems ... thus far to have been markedly more successful in retaining that allegiance. With relatively few (although admittedly important) exceptions, the areas and peoples that accepted Islam have remained Islamic ever since. Arabia, for example, seems now so immutably Islamic that it is hard to remember that it once had Jewish tribes and Christian towns, as well as the shrines of gods and goddesses to which the bulk of its population gave homage. Contrast the position with that of Jerusalem, the first major center of Christianity; or of Egypt and Syria, once almost as axiomatically Christian as Arabia is now Islamic; or of the cities once stirred by the preaching of John Knox or John Wesley, now full of unwanted churches doing duty as furniture stores or night clubs. It is as though there is some inherent fragility, some built in vulnerability, in Christianity, considered as a popular profession, that is not to the same extent as Islam. This vulnerability is engraved into the Christian founding documents themselves, with their recurrent theme of the impending rejection of apostate Israel, and their warnings to earthly Christian churches of the possible removal of their candlestick. Neither of these eventualities are seen as jeopardizing the saving activity of God for humanity. I have argued elsewhere that this vulnerability is also linked with the essentially vernacular nature of Christian faith, which rests on a massive act of translation, the Word made flesh, God translated into a specific segment of social reality as Christ is received there. Christian faith must go on being translated, must continuously enter into vernacular culture and interact with it, or it withers and fades. Islamic absolutes are fixed in a particular language, and in the conditions of a particular period of human history. The divine Word is the Qur'an, fixed in heaven forever in Arabic, the language of original revelation. For Christians, however, the divine word is translatable, infinitely translatable. The very words of Christ himself were transmitted in translated form in the earliest documents we have, a fact surely inseparable from the conviction that in Christ, God's own self was translated into human form. Much misunderstanding between Christians and Muslims has arisen from the assumption that the Qur'an is for Muslims what the Bible is for Christians. It would be truer to say that the Qur'an is for Muslims what Christ is for Christians (Walls 2002, 29-30).
In speaking of the expansion of Islam, Walls says that it has been progressive and triumphalist. Mecca was the original center of Islam and it retains that central importance. But, Christianity is different. Walls goes on:
The rhetoric of Christian expansion has often been similarly progressive; images of the triumphant host streaming out from Christendom to Bring the whole world into it come to mind readily enough. But, the actual experience of Christian expansion has been different. As its most comprehensive historian, K.S. Latourette (1945), noted long ago, recession is a feature of Christian history as well as advance. He might have gone on to note that the recessions typically take place in the Christian heartlands, in the areas of greatest Christian strength and influence - its Arabias, as one might say - while the advances typically take place at or beyond its periphery.
This feature means that Christian faith is repeatedly coming into creative interaction with new cultures, with different systems of thought and different patterns of tradition; that (again in contrast to Islam, whose Arabic absolutes provide cultural norms applying throughout the Islamic world) its profoundest expressions are often local and vernacular. It also means that the demographic and geographical center of gravity of Christianity is subject to periodic shifts. Christians have no abiding city, no permanent sacred sits, no earthly Mecca; their new Jerusalem comes down out of heaven at the last day. Meanwhile, Christian history has been one of successive penetration of diverse culture. Islam expansion is progressive; Christian expansion is serial (Walls 2002, 30).
This idea of the serial expansion of Christianity is elaborated further by Walls in an interview in 2000 for The Christian Century. He explains the serial expansion of Christianity through missionary efforts at the margins while decline sets in at what was once the understood center:
If you consider the expansion of Islam or Buddhism, the pattern is one of steady expansion. And in general, the lands that have been Islamic have stayed Islamic, and the lands that have been Buddhist have stayed Buddhist. Christian history is quite different. The original center, Jerusalem, is no longer a center of Christianity -- not the kind of center that Mecca is, for example. And if you consider other places that at different times have been centers of Christianity -- such as North Africa, Egypt, Serbia, Asia Minor, Great Britain -- it’s evident that these are no longer centers of the faith. My own country, Scotland, is full of churches that have been turned into garages or nightclubs.
What happened in each case was decay in the heartland that appeared to be at the center of the faith. At the same time, through the missionary effort, Christianity moved to or beyond the periphery, and established a new center. When the Jerusalem church was scattered to the winds, Hellenistic Christianity arose as a result of the mission to the gentiles. And when Hellenistic society collapsed, the faith was seized by the barbarians of northern and western Europe. By the time Christianity was receding in Europe, the churches of Africa, Asia and Latin America were coming into their own. The movement of Christianity is one of serial, not progressive, expansion.
Walls is asked about what this means theologically, or rather, if this serial decline and expansion has a theological impulse. He believes that it does, and it is wrapped up in the missionary journey of Jesus, the Word made flesh who dwelt among us, and in the inherent fragility and vulnerability of the Cross. As it turns out, the movement of Christianity across the centuries as the body of Christ is formed and reformed amongst the peoples of the earth, looks like and takes the shape of Jesus and His Cross:
Well, this pattern does make one ask why Christianity does not seem to maintain its hold on people the way Islam has. One must conclude, I think, that there is a certain vulnerability, a fragility, at the heart of Christianity. You might say that this is the vulnerability of the cross. Perhaps the chief theological point is that nobody owns the Christian faith. That is, there is no "Christian civilization" or "Christian culture" in the way that there is an "Islamic culture," which you can recognize from Pakistan to Tunisia to Morocco.
The interviewer then asks Walls: "It seems that Christianity is able to localize itself or indigenize itself in a variety of cultures. Do you see this as in some way consistent with the Christian belief in the incarnation?"
Yes. Christians’ central affirmation is that God became human. He didn’t become a generalized humanity -- he became human under particular conditions of time and space. Furthermore, we affirm that Christ is formed in people. Paul says in his Letter to the Galatians that he is in travail "until Christ be formed in you." If all that is the case, then when people come to Christ, Christ is in some sense taking shape in new social forms.
I think cultural diversity was built into the Christian faith with that first great decision by the Council in Jerusalem, recorded in Acts 15, which declared that the new gentile Christians didn’t have to enter Jewish religious culture. They didn’t have to receive circumcision and keep the law. I’m not sure we’ve grasped all the implications of that decision. After all, up to that moment there was only one Christian lifestyle and everybody knew what it was. The Lord himself had led the life of an observant Jew, and he had said that not a jot or tittle of the law should pass away. The apostles continued that tradition. The obvious thing, surely, for the new church to do was to insist that the gentile converts do what gentile converts had always done -- take on the mark of the covenant.
The early church made the extraordinary decision not to continue the tribal model of the faith. Once it decided that there was no requirement of circumcision and no requirement to keep every part of the law, then things were wide open. People no longer knew what a Christian lifestyle looked like. The converts had to work out, under the guidance of the Holy Spilt, a Hellenistic way of being Christian.
Think how much of the material in the Epistles needn’t have been written if the church had made the opposite decision. Paul wouldn’t have needed to discuss with the Corinthians what to do if a pagan friend invites you to dinner and you’re not sure whether the meat had been offered in sacrifice the day before. That was not a problem for any of the apostles or any of the Christians in Jerusalem. They were not going to be eating with pagans in the first place, since observant Jews don’t sit down at the table with pagans. But in Hellenistic Christianity this was an issue. These Christians were faced with the task of changing the Hellenistic lifestyle from the inside.
Walls goes on to conclude that the supposed decline of Christianity in places where it was once strong (Europe and North America) does not mean that Christianity itself is weakening. Rather, as it declines at the center, it grows in what was once considered the margins until those margins become the new center. He says,
There is a significant feature of each of these demographic and cultural shifts of the Christian center of gravity. In each case a threatened eclipse of Christianity was averted by its cross-cultural diffusion. Cross cultural boundaries has been the life blood of historic Christianity. It is also noteworthy that most of the energy for the frontier crossing has come from the periphery rather than from the center. The book of Acts suggests that is was not the apostles who were responsible for the breakthrough of Antioch, whereby Greek-speaking pagans heard of the Jewish messiah as the Lord Jesus, but quite unknown Jewish believers from Cyprus and Greece (Acts 11:19-20) (Walls 2002, 32).
What this means, and what we are seeing now in the world, is that to see the growth of Christianity, we should look to the margins. That Christianity is growing rapidly in the Global South and East should not be a surprise to us. It is the way that Christianity has grown historically. What should hearten us is that through Global Migration where millions of people are on the move from the South to the North and from East to West, the majority of whom are Christians, we see the possibility of renewal of the old Christian centers with the witness and energy of Christian sojourners from the places where missionaries once went bringing the gospel. Those once evangelized now travel back to the sending countries with good news and blessing of their own, if we will have the ears to hear them and faith to receive what God wants to gift us through them.
Kristeen Kim of Fuller Seminary writes in "Migration in World Christianity: Hospitality, Pilgrimage, and Church on the Move" that the church is renewed as it both embraces Jesus as host and migrant, the One giving life and the one receiving ministry through the presence of the vulnerable sojourner. This reality should shape how the church sees itself both as host to stranger and also as the sojourning migrant dependent upon God and both sent into the world and receiving those who come to it with good news. The idea that Christianity is strengthened and renewed as the church engages in racial, holistic hospitality toward the sojourner that is sent to it gives shaped to Walls's view on the serial expansion and decline of the church. More on this later ...
