Dale T. Irvin

Mark Noll reviews two books on the worldwide history/spread of Christianity in 11-12/13 B&C: History of the World Christian Movement (1454-1800, 2012)-Dale T. Irwin/Scott W. Sunquist and The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century (2011)-David Hempton/I. B. Tauris

Christianity and Islam continue to expand, while the world's nonreligious population continues to shrink; the number of Christians in Africa, Asia, and Latin America is rising from about 2/5 of the world total in 1970 to about 2/3 by 2020; the Pentecostal or Pentecostal-like proportion of the world's Christians is moving in this same short span from about 5 percent to about 30 percent; the number in Africa is climbing to well over 600 million (in 1900 there were barely 500 million identifiable Christians in the whole world); the most rapid expansion of Christianity is taking place in East Asia; waves of immigration continue to disperse Christians (and Muslims) ever more widely in the world; and much more.[1]

Christianity's worldwide expansion was not without its cruelties and cultural impositions, but neither was it devoid of heroism and humanitarianism, sacrifice and service."

The expertise that Hempton displayed in several earlier books on the Methodists is put to unusually good use in describing the evangelical revivals of the 18th century. Following the landmark work of W. R. Ward, he defines the essential thrust of pietistic and evangelical religion as the resistance of personally appropriated faith to the controlling efforts of established churches and hegemonic states. Pietists and evangelicals were partly traditionalists as they stressed the liberating force of Protestantism's historical doctrine of justification by faith, but also very much of the modern 18th century as they practiced a religion keyed to "personal experience" and "personal and communal discipline." Through hymns, sermons addressing ordinary people, "testimonies" (especially recording the death scenes of the godly), and a new confidence in the inner spiritual authority accessible by the most ordinary laypeople, evangelicals and pietists began the transformations of daily life that continue to influence churches and Christian expressions to this day.

Both books also agree that the Jesuits were the era's most farsighted and effective "world Christians." This Counter-Reformation religious order deployed the pioneers who most boldly imagined that Christian faith might take shape differently in Chinese or Caribbean or Canadian cultures than it had in Europe.

The books are also agreed that the great Christian scandal of the early modern era was slavery.

Finally, both books clarify what most centrally defines the Christian faith itself. For Hempton it is the recognition at "the most profound level that Christianity is in its essence a missionary religion." For Irvin and Sunquist, it is the claim that Christian faith can never be adequately grasped except as a "world movement." Both thus flesh out the luminous insight of Andrew Walls that Christianity can be at home everywhere, even as it is fully at home nowhere—that every instantiation of the faith deserves to be appreciated for how it has taken up residence in a particular culture and also critiqued for how it compromises the faith's inner character by that residence. Walls describes this dual character as "the indigenous principle" in constant tension with "the pilgrim principle."3 In these two very different but complementary books we see clearly what pilgrim and indigenous principles have meant in the past; we also may glimpse a path for discerning what that combination might mean in the present and the future.

Mark Noll is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame.… (altro)