Douglas Jacobsen - The World's Christians

The last five hundred years (1500 to the present) have been a time of Christian re‐globalization. This era began with the European conquest, colonization, and Christianization of the Americas, a process that seemed at times to be motivated by genuinely spiritual concerns but that always involved economic gain for the colonizing countries. In subsequent centuries, this same awkward mix of faith and greed shaped Christianity’s expansion into Asia and Africa. Christianity was becoming a global religion, but that globalism was decidedly Eurocentric and European‐controlled. Then social dynamics began to change. At first slowly and then more rapidly, people all around the world began to make Christianity their own. They pushed aside Europe‐imposed ideas about Christianity and began to explore their own new understandings of what it might mean to be a follower of Jesus in the contemporary world. Today, no single region of the world controls Christianity’s development. Contemporary Christianity is diverse, dispersed, and de‐centered.

The goal of Part II is to explain “how Christians got there,” with the word “there” referring to both theology/spirituality and geography/culture. The four chapters in this section of The World’s Christians are all structured similarly to highlight these two concerns. After a very brief overview of the time period, the first half of each chapter concentrates on the core convictions of the Christian communities that flourished during that era. The focus here is on how Christians got to where they are in terms of theology and church practices. The second half of each chapter then discusses how Christianity changed and developed as a result of its encounters with other cultures. These two different dimensions of global Christian history are obviously interconnected, but they are discussed separately here to make the storylines easier to follow.

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