Crossing Cultural Frontiers: Studies in the History of World Christianity

Andrew Walls, the renowned interpreter of the history of world Christianity, calls this collection of essays—his third such—a “ragbag” of writings. Pity the poor publisher; that is no way to convince browsers to buy and read this book. So if you have read his first, The Missionary Movement in Christian History (1996), and its sequel, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History (2002), why delve in once again?

Quite simply, you should read them all because each of these volumes serves a different purpose. Missionary Movement was a shooting star, one of the first extended arguments for the rising importance of Christianity worldwide, not as a European export but as a predominantly non-Western religion. Cross-Cultural Process was a study in historical surprises and ironies, all about missionary intentions and actions that led to dramatically different outcomes. This new book pushes very hard on what it calls the normative nature of world Christianity, and on what it means to be a Christian scholar in an age of world Christianity. It features a number of clear and powerful expositions of familiar concepts, such as migration, worldview, conversion, evangelicalism, the missionary movement’s marginality, and the costly nature of mission-driven scholarship.

The book’s main point, says Walls, is that Christianity is by its nature and intention a global and culturally diverse faith, and it has been so since its beginning. World Christianity is normative Christianity. Too often, Walls observes, world Christianity has been assumed to mean “Christianity somewhere else,” like the “world foods” section of the supermarket. Not so, he says; world Christianity means that the faith is present on every continent and “has always been addressed to the oikumene, the whole inhabited world” (ix). Twenty years since his first book appeared and forty years since Walls started writing about world Christianity, he is still prodding Western scholars of Christian theology and history to stop assuming the centrality and normativity of the West and to reflect this new, polycentric reality in their work. As Walls’s most accomplished student, Kwame Bediako, once quipped, we will know that this problem has been fixed when we start seeing courses in “Western theology.”

This book has been artfully organized and edited by Mark Gornik, Walls’s protégé and founder of the City Seminary of New York. It contains essays on some of the most commonly addressed themes in contemporary mission history: worldview, conversion, migration, and globalization. If I were teaching an introductory course on the history of missions, these would be required reading. So too for a graduate seminar on missions historiography. Without wading into the complex and often convoluted conceptual arguments attending each of these ideas, Walls addresses them with remarkable clarity.

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Worldviews, he says, are “the mental maps of the universe that contain what we know, or think we know, about the universe and how it operates, and about our own place in it. We use these maps to navigate our way through daily life” (35). These maps deal with our understanding of how nature works, what kinds of beings inhabit the world, what is right and wrong, to whom we belong, and what we owe each other. They map out how we handle contingencies, where dangers lie, and what has priority and importance. Worldviews vary widely by place, time, and people group. Obviously, then, Walls insists, there is no such thing as the Christian worldview.

Indeed, says Walls, we need to keep worldviews in mind when we try to understand what conversion means for people. It does not mean that people exchange one worldview for another. It probably will mean that some aspects gain priority and others diminish in importance. Many if not most African peoples, for example, have a concept of a supreme creator God as part of their worldview, but they may not assign a high priority to relating to God. For Christians this priority changes, but many other features of their mental maps remain. Some propensities and directions reorient over time, toward the God of the Bible and toward Jesus Christ, God the Son. That is what conversion means, Walls reminds us: not an eradication of much of what is already there in our lives and worldviews, but a turning of these toward Christ.

Westerners work with post-Enlightenment worldviews, Walls reminds us. They draw sharp lines between the realms of matter and of spirit, enlarging the first and constraining the second. Many if not most of the conflicts, puzzles, and ironies of mission history, he suggests, come from this huge disparity of mental maps between Europeans and people living to the south and east of them. These disparities continue, he argues, especially in theology, where the West has major deficiencies in dealing with the spiritual problems of the rest of the world. Of all the theological needs of our day, the most urgent, he says, is the need for “an ecumenical theology of evil” (47).

Contemporary megatrends such as globalization and migration increasingly draw attention from scholars in mission studies. Walls reminds us that Christianity has always been a portable faith that engages people on the move. Indeed, the history of Christianity shows that if Christianity had not been mobile and crossed cultural frontiers, it may well have died out. In recent centuries, Western Christianity accompanied the massive migrations out of Europe and followed the patterns of European empire and settlement around the globe. Today the lines of migration have reversed, and all the world’s varieties of Christianity are moving to Europe and North America. We should be rediscovering, then, the theological idea that ranges across the New Testament: the people of God have no permanent home in this age.

Studying Christianity in Africa has preoccupied much of Walls’s personal career, and the second section of this book addresses the main themes that Walls sees in African Christian thought and history. Africans found Christianity to be costly, and Walls reminds us of the many sacrifices that Africans—both leaders and ordinary folk—have paid for being Christians. He ranges from St. Anthony’s spiritual warfare in the desert to the Ugandan boys at court who were martyred for their stand. Ever since he went to Sierra Leone to teach as a young man, Walls has been fascinated by the story of that West African nation, which has seen such extremes of achievement and disaster.

A former colleague of Walls at Aberdeen, Lamin Sanneh, famously argued for translation as the operative heart of cross-cultural mission, but Walls reminds us that this factor has never been a simple or straightforward matter in Africa. Even so, Walls insists, the rising interest in African spirituality and religious practice pioneered by missionary ethnographers has brought to light a primal religious consciousness. It appears in remarkably parallel forms among tribal people around the world, and it may well provide the spiritual undercarriage for Christianity.

African Christians’ quest for identity during colonial and postcolonial times has involved a great struggle. Walls’s chapter on Kwame Bediako features the Ghanaian theologian’s likening of Africans’ quest to be both Christian and African to the earliest cross-cultural struggle of that kind, in the Hellenic world. This cross-cultural quest for Christian identity should change the study of African theology, Walls hopes, from “an exotic minority specialization” into an essential part of “global Christian discourse” (154).

The last section of the book shifts the focus back to the West. Walls covers familiar territory here in unfamiliar ways, showing how marginal missions were to mainstream Western consciousness and priorities. He traces the treatment of missions—or the lack thereof—in English novels. He also shows how marginal cross-cultural missions were to the vision of two of the most eminent evangelical thinkers of the day: Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley. Both inspired thousands to missionary devotion, but both cared mainly about seeking real Christianity in the midst of a nominally Christian society. Even Edwards’s classic study of David Brainerd, which became prime missionary hagiography for generations, was more about the young minister’s challenge to status-quo Christianity than about his call to mission outside of Christendom.

Indeed, evangelicalism’s role as a major missions force drives home the point of the marginality of missions. Taking up a missionary call was a marginal thing to do in Western society. Most missionaries were religious radicals, products of the evangelical revival. Evangelicalism, Walls says, “challenged a Christian civil society that was not Christian enough, positing ‘real Christianity’ over against the formal or nominal” (176), and the main force of the missionary movement came from these radical Christians. Neither Luther nor Calvin nor the pre-Wesleyan Church of England, Walls observes, evinced a strong concern for mission outside of Europe. Not one well-settled and salaried Anglican clergyman answered the call, he claims. So the modern missionary movement was “a product largely of peripheral forces” (187). To Walls, the supreme irony is that the modern missions movement, which was the igniter of the dramatic growth of Christianity around the world, was very often just a sideline of conventional Western Christianity. God was choosing the humble folk and the fanatics to ignite the most explosive church growth in history.

These are fun facts for armchair ironists, but Walls will not let those who study the church’s mission sit back and smile. The evangelical revival induced a yearning for knowledge among laborers and artisans, and the missionary scholars it created were a driven lot. Robert Morrison, a self-taught Scot, went to China in 1807 with a charge to translate the Bible—at a time when virtually no one in England or the English trading ports in China knew Chinese. Over the course of a quarter-century of pioneering labor in extremely trying circumstances, he produced a Chinese New Testament and a three-volume, 2,700-page dictionary.

James Legge, another Scotsman who labored unrelentingly in Malacca and China for more than three decades, produced painstakingly translated and edited versions of the Chinese classics, from Confucius and before him, and thereby uncovered a theistic tradition in the heart of the ancient civilization. Harold Turner, Walls’s colleague in African universities and at Aberdeen, also labored relentlessly and sacrificially. He delved deep into African religious circles and sources to document the rise of new religious movements, then spent most of the rest of his life doing the same kinds of work around the world and developing the idea of a primal religious sensibility that, Turner argued, undergirds us all.

The lesson here, Walls insists, is that God calls mission scholars to “sustained vision and sustained toil” (256), in and for a field that offers very little prestige but instead the opportunity to “wash up” after other scholars, teasing out the missiological dynamics and perspectives that they should have addressed. Missions scholars should be “academic subversives,” addressing issues and data and questions neglected by established disciplines. They are cross-cultural intellectual brokers as well, “enabling exchange across cultural or national or regional boundaries” (259). There is little by way of personal glory to be found in this work, but if it succeeds, it may help the church regain “the plural cultural Christian consciousness of the New Testament” (260).

For Walls, that consciousness is a pearl of great price, and this book gives evidence of how far, how long, and into how many corners he has gone, sweeping and searching with sharp eyes and an uncanny ability to see what others have overlooked. He finds new depth and generative knowledge even in old mission stories. Yes, this is Andrew Walls’s third volume of essays, but it offers much that is fresh and provocative. Get it and read it!