Whose religion is Christianity?

Overview of Christian Theology: Assignment 10

Lamin Sanneh draws a useful distinction between global Christianity, a hegemonic offspring of Western European expansionism and colonialism, and world Christianity, characterized by the adoption, absorption, and proclamation of the gospel in less-developed nations and by indigenous peoples in a way unrelated and generally counter to nationalistic goals or political powers-that-be. He ascribes the growth and strength of the latter movement primarily to the burgeoning of Bible translations into mother tongues, and even more specifically to the use of the primary language’s original words for God in the new texts.

He rightly points out that all gospel texts are, on a fundamental level, translations. None of them are Aramaic, the presumed native tongue of Jesus of Nazareth. Each of them had already been filtered through the sieve of street Greek before they came into the canon. He identifies this as, in fact, a strength of Christianity: that the story and message of the gospel are both simple and powerful enough to be conveyed by the plain language of everyday folk, that God can speak to us directly in our own language. The church itself was essentially brought into being at Pentecost, when the Spirit gave voice to the good news in all the languages of the world known to Luke.

He claims that, for example, African Christianity has an advantage, despite its colonial origins, in that it has never been a bitterly contested religion. As he puts it: “there have been no ecclesiastical courts condemning unbelievers, heretics and witches to death; no bloody battles of doctrine and piety; no territorial aggrandizement by churches; no jihads against infidels; no fatwas against women; no amputations, lynchings, ostracism, penalties, or public condemnations of doctrinal difference or dissent.” (p. 39) To which I am tempted quite cynically to add: “Yet.” Western Christianity managed to get a century or so in before it started becoming enough of an institution to start abusing power instead of being persecuted. Sanneh draws parallels between early Christian communities and world Christianity, but doesn’t explain persuasively why a similar evolution shouldn’t eventually take place.

I must admit that I find the socratic dialog format of this book quite frustrating, as I generally do. For me, the chief difficulty is that the flow of the question and answer rarely goes in a way that corresponds to the way I would want to investigate the topic. I always feel that the wrong question is being asked at the wrong time, or that a straw man is being erected just to have the stuffing kicked out of him. Follow up questions are not the ones that I would have asked, although of course they do serve the agenda of the author! And when a question I have is asked, it is generally not answered in as thorough or satisfactory way as I would prefer. I also note that there’s a danger of the same themes and material returning over and over; I found that this slim book contained a great deal of repetition.

In particular, I was disappointed in the dismissive way that Sanneh treats the Western experience of the Enlightenment and modern science and their interaction with the texts and doctrines of the Christian tradition. He seems to imply that this experience is, on some substantive level, basically irrelevant for the way the gospel is lived and transmitted in other cultures, and that it will continue to be so in the future. This seems inherently improbable to me.

I do, however, delight in the recurring sentiment that “Christianity is a multicolored fabric where each new thread, chosen and refined at the Designer’s hand, adds luster and strength to the whole.” I rather wish Sanneh would give us more specific examples of the new or different kind of theology that emerges from world Christianity's claim upon the Bible. I sympathize deeply with his call both to other voices and other interpretations, and to rejoice whenever the gospel finds and speaks to people where they are, in the language and cultural form accessible to them.

Reading: Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West by Lamin Sanneh. 2003. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company: Grand Rapids, MI.