The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History

Definitely an academic book, Walls' collection of essays is brilliant and informative, and makes me want to dive into even more sources to learn about the themes he reveals here about Western missionary history and the trends for global Christianity. His first section focuses on the transmission of Christian faith, in which he considers certain theological tests we can make of Christian expansion (church, kingdom, gospel) and discusses how the serial nature of Christian expansion (advance and regression) is partially due to Christian engagement with vernacular culture (the use of translation as an example). In contrast, Islam's continuous progression can partially be tied to its fixed cultural element. Walls illustrates how the missionary movement led to the separation of Christianity from the political ideals of Christendom, and how cross-cultural diffusion was what enabled the church to survive. He considers how we are at the intersection of an Ephesian moment in which various cultures and lifestyles come together to experience Christ and require creative theology that does not extend to extremes, either of treating one's own tradition as normative or of relativizing all approaches while remaining in isolation.

His second section details perspectives on Christian history in Africa and how the representative Christianity of the 21st century is shaped by events and processes in Africa - both because of the demographic shift that has already taken place and led to a "post-Christian West" and "post-Western Christianity" and because of questions concerning nationhood and the nation-state. He challenges the accepted wisdom that the early Christian history of Africa is disassociated from contemporary history, or that Christianity is a Western import. African religion and Christianity are not mutually opposing self-contained systems; African Christianity is truly in continuity with both its African and Christian heritages, functioning out of a distinctly African worldview including various ways of engaging God, divinities, ancestors, and objects of power. What is important is that those areas are appropriated under a new Christian worldview instead of with tribal connotations. Africa is also a main point of engagement with Islam, though mission history largely failed to engage with it in the 19th century due to views of cultural incompatibility (and the lack of threat to Western society) as well as social evolutionary theories that treated Islam as beneficial for the development of the "other".

The last section is devoted to snapshots of the W. missionary movement - from the British perspective of missions as the white man's burden, to the often unrecognized Pietist-Evangelical beginnings on the European Continent for a mission endeavor that was only later joined and restructured by British involvement, to developments in society that changed missions from ordained activity to lay ministry - including medical missions, the increasing importance of women missionaries, and the involvement of lay subscription societies who supported missions. Walls highlights the importance of education and how missionaries were forced to recognize new dimensions to the missionary task as they adapted to the missionary model of living on another's terms - from taking the indigenous population seriously, to enlarging the work to include a Christian response to human suffering, to identifying the cause of suffering and the means to remove them, to recognition that God had already been at work in the cultures and languages to which they were sent. Even in the midst of all this, as missionaries contributed to various fields of learning, the one unchangeable norm remained theology. Finally, there is the recognition that Western theological categories are often irrelevant to the concerns of the mission field - meant to address historical concerns or categories of thought that are of no moment to their current context.

That was a fly-by snapshot of some very in-depth historical surveys. Really a deep read.