Abstract
In the preface to his wide-ranging work, Brian Stanley highlights the need for a global exploration of developments in Christianity during the twentieth century. As director of the Centre for the Study of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh, Stanley is well placed to deliver on this task, and this book presents fruits not only of his own research, but also of that undertaken by the Centre’s many postgraduate students. Stanley’s approach is neither regional nor chronological; rather, it is structured around 15 key themes, each addressed through two case studies.
Stanley’s first theme is the responses of the British and American churches to the First World War. He then turns to the complex relationship between faith and national identity, considered through Korean Protestantism and Polish Catholicism. Pointing out that the twentieth century was the ‘great century’ of Christian conversions, he explores ‘pathways of conversion’ in West Africa and in Melanesia. Taking the state’s secularizing tendencies in France and the Soviet Union to represent ‘the Church under siege’, Stanley concludes that churches ‘ultimately have more to fear from cultural than political varieties of the secular’ (p. 101). Scandinavia and the USA provide two further perspectives on secularization theory, offering quite different patterns of ‘belonging and believing’.
Stanley next discusses the ecumenical movement, drawing on the experiences of uniting churches in India and China (voluntary and involuntary respectively) to show the limitations of the conception of the twentieth century as ‘the ecumenical century’. The racial policies of Nazi Germany, which led to the Shoah, and the Hutu massacre of Tutsi people in Rwanda lead Stanley to ponder the role of the churches: ‘not that they directly inspired the actions of those who instigated genocide’, but that they made ‘commands to take immoral and violent action “comprehensible and tolerable”’ (p. 170). The varying situations of Christians living in majority Muslim countries are illustrated through the examples of Egypt and Indonesia.
Changing strategies of mission emerged both within Catholicism, especially after the Second Vatican Council, and in Protestantism, where the approach of the World Council of Churches, for instance at the Uppsala Assembly (1968), differed from that of Billy Graham and the International Congress on Evangelization (1974). Liberation theology arose in the Roman Catholic Latin American context (although Stanley identifies Protestant influences on the emerging theology of Gustavo Gutiérrez), but also – and with a rather different emphasis – among Christians in Palestine. Related emphases on human rights and justice shaped the responses of churches (or at least church leaders) to apartheid in South Africa, as well as the complex history of Canada’s residential schools for the children of indigenous peoples. The twentieth century saw many (mostly Protestant) churches embrace new approaches to the role of women in church leadership (although not in every province in the Australian Anglican Church) and to gay rights.
Stanley’s final three chapters trace the growth of Pentecostal churches, focusing on Ghana and Brazil; consider the Eastern Orthodox Church, particularly in Greece and Turkey, and the establishment of African Orthodox Churches; and assess the impact of migration, both black migration from the South and Jamaica, and Chinese migration.
Taken together, these 15 chapters present insights into the extraordinary range of manifestations taken by Christianity during the twentieth century as well as the challenges Christians have faced. There are inevitably points where the treatment seems superficial. Stanley’s (thrice-repeated) insistence that the ecumenical movement and the World Council of Churches arose from the Edinburgh Missionary Conference in 1910 makes no mention of the key 1937 conferences of Life and Work and of Faith and Order that took place in Oxford and Edinburgh. Strangely, he omits any mention of the Church of England’s debates around the ordination of women in the early 1970s. Ignaz von Döllinger is mentioned as the founder of a movement of ‘Reform Catholicism’ rather than of the Old Catholic movement, so Döllinger appears to be Roman Catholic. However, these are minor details.
Stanley’s intention throughout is to highlight the benefits of offering a ‘transnational perspective’. In this he is entirely successful. The decision to draw case studies from different periods of the twentieth century also highlights how similar questions may emerge in quite different chronological contexts, although at times it does make it hard to develop a chronological sense. What emerges from this book is a deep sense of the vibrant presence of different forms of Christianity across many parts of the world, and of the continuing ability of Christians and churches to adapt to new and very various contexts.