He Uses the Weak to Shame the Strong
A Summary and Reflection on Philip Jenkins', The New Faces of Christianity
“Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations…” These last words of Jesus recorded in the Gospel of Matthew have grounded and inspired the Christian Church for the last two millennia. In the decades following the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the world was turned upside down by men and women who sought to make disciples from “Jerusalem, Judea, and even to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:8) For First Century Christians, the wide acceptance of the message that Jesus is Lord posed many challenges to the preconceived notions of any one subgroup about how the faith should be practiced. Twenty centuries later, as the commission still stands and Christ’s Kingdom grows ever more broad, Philip Jenkins in The New Faces of Christianity documents that the challenges presented by this cross-cultured Christianity are just as pressing and as valuable now as they were to the early Christians. According to Dr. Jenkins–the Distinguished Professor of History and the Director of the Program on Historical Studies of Religion at Baylor University–Northern Christians (predominantly European and American Christians) and Southern Christians (Christians spread across Asia, Africa, and South America) differ significantly in the way that they read and believe the Bible. His contention, though, is that it is precisely this challenge which can offer any given subgroup, but especially his audience of Northern Christians, the lenses necessary to read the Bible in a fresh way and find the needed inspiration to march faithfully forward into the future.
The New Faces of Christianity by Chapter
Is the Global South ‘Fundamentalist’?
Jenkins begins his assessment of Southern Christianity with the question, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” In this course-setting chapter, he recalls the question of Harry Fosdick during the early 20th Century American Protestant rift between Liberals and Fundamentalists, presenting the basic dichotomy of his historical assessment: global South Christians have striking similarities to early 20th-Century American Fundamentalists, and global North Christians are more closely identified with the Liberals of that time. While these labels help to set the stage for the basic stance of Southern Christians on important issues like biblical interpretation, gender roles, human sexuality, supernaturalism, and economy, Jenkins offers the helpful qualification that “labels such as fundamentalist and literalist, liberal and conservative can distract from the real issues…Only when we see global South Christianity on its own terms…can we see how the emerging churches are formulating their own responses to social or religious questions…” Throughout the chapter, he makes the historical case that global North Christians cannot simply dismiss the traditional interpretations offered by the newer Southern Christian communities as “fundamentalist.” They have arrived at their interpretive conclusions from different histories and contexts and are thus on equal footing with Northern Christians, able to bring their framework of interpretation into the center of the global conversation about how to read the Bible.
In the next chapter, “Power in the Book,” Jenkins explores the historical, cultural, and spiritual causes of Southern Christians’ conservative approaches to the Bible. He posits several reasons for the phenomenon: churches who are conservative in their theology historically have sent more foreign missionaries, the explosion of Bible translation and literacy since the Reformation has loosened biblical interpretation from only an elite class to all people, the communal and oral nature of many Southern cultures place an exalted status on texts that seem eminently authoritative. Jenkins considers these factors with evident seriousness and charitable respect. A weakness that appears in a few instances throughout the work appears here when, as he is drawing a distinction between Northern and Southern Christians, he makes the claim, “Except for the hardest of hardcore fundamentalists, American Christians rarely believe that each and every verse of scripture carries the same degree of inspiration, and hence the same value.” This statement equates a large number of American Christians (who would affirm that every verse of Scripture is equally inspired) with extreme Fundamentalists, a term that he already admitted was often pejorative and unhelpful. Were the author to understand that even a sizeable amount of those Northern Christians he describes as being confounded by the theology of the South also have similar instincts about the authority and inspiration of the Bible, he may have been able to make a more precise argument about the help that Southern Christianity can give to both liberal and conservative Christians. As it stands, however, he frequently assumes liberal Christianity is Northern Christianity.
When one considers the often literalistic interpretations of Southern Christians as described by Jenkins, she may ask how these believers observe the Old Testament and New Testament texts with specific admonitions such as James’ epistle. It is to this question that Jenkins turns to next. He begins with a sharp critique directed at Western (“global North”) Christianity of what he concludes to be a contemporary Marcionism–Western Christians have practically (and sometimes literally) subjugated the Old Testament because of difficulties with the text largely owing to the great cultural distance between the cultures of the Old Testament and modern American/European societies. In contrast, “It is precisely the ‘primitive’ features of ancient Hebrew religion…that have long endeared it to Africans.” Jenkins repeatedly makes it clear on this point that Western Christians have much to learn from Southern Christians. This is not to say, however, that such closeness to the biblical cultures do not have risks when influencing interpretation. Jenkins notes that, not unlike some Early Church Fathers, this has led some Southern Christians to anti-Semitic sentiment. It has led others to pharisaical legalism. It has, surprisingly, even led some to another version of Marcionism.
Health, Wealth, Demons, and Democracy
The next four chapters of the book zoom in to examine more specific issues and the ways that global South Christians apply the Bible to these categories. Chapter 4, “Poor and Rich,” describes the ways in which the poverty of the majority of Southern Christians actually makes them more ready to trust in the promises of hope in the Bible and often makes them more capable of intuitive interpretation of passages that may seem obscure or simply metaphor to Northern Christians. He also gives a critical but charitable account of the global South’s propensity toward following “prosperity gospels.” In Chapter 5, “Good and Evil,” Jenkins contrasts the ubiquitous belief and interaction with spiritual forces in Southern Christianity with the derision that such thoughts and practices are generally met with in the global north. He documents how the Southern disposition toward the spiritual is actually more in line with the majority of Christian thought in history and that such a disposition is not necessarily as “otherworldly” as many often accuse. Chapter 6, “Persecution and Vindication,” moves the reader from matters of interpretation within the communities of Southern Christians into their relationships with external powers, particularly the state. Here, again, Jenkins levels a great criticism against Northern Christians for putting too much hope in the work of the state. He documents the great trials that many Christians in the global South regularly face due to their minority status and several other factors and holds up their faith and activism in the midst of such hardship as instructive to Northern readers. Jenkins documents how Southern Christians approach gender roles in the final chapter focusing on particular categories of issues in Chapter 7, “Women and Men.” In this chapter, he demonstrates that most Southern Christians come from intensely patriarchal societies. When individuals and groups in those societies begin to believe the Bible there is often liberation for women in many instances and affirmations of existing oppressive structures in many others.
North and South–What Hath London to Do With Lagos?
The book concludes with the chapter, “North and South,” which summarizes Jenkins’ data and the claims made in the previous chapters. The author opens the chapter stating, “The impact of the Bible in the global South must raise questions for European and American Christians, questions that are at once exhilarating and disturbing.” He goes on to pose that one of those questions may be, “Which ‘side’ of Christianity is closer to the early Christian culture and interpretation of the Scriptures?” His answer is clearly Southern Christianity. What, asks Jenkins, does Northern Christianity give up when it rejects the supernatural and trust in the Scriptures as given? Or is all the talk about the explosion of Christianity in the global South merely superficial? These questions and more lead Jenkins to assert the great mutual benefit for both Northern and Southern Christianity in comparative studies on the faith and practice of the other. He concludes that in doing so, we can read the Bible with new lenses and continue to mine the depths of its riches.
He Has Exalted the Humble and Weak
As I read The New Faces of Christianity, I found myself often drifting off into thoughts of the last two years of my service as a missionary in South Asia. Anecdotally, I can affirm the research and numerous claims of Jenkins about the “Southern Church.” For example, I have found Jenkins’ position that the poor around me in South Asia are very often those who are best able to believe the promises of the gospel to be wholly accurate. I see their faith and I struggle, as I type on my laptop inside an air-conditioned room–this good news is obviously for these lowly brothers; I am so privileged, so filled with this world’s wealth, is it possible that I too can partake in these truths as they do? I have heard the screams of a woman possessed by a demon as a pastor (who eventually would himself fall into great sins of greed) drove it away from her, only to see her periodically over the next year in a perfectly joyful disposition and at a healthier weight each time we met to worship Christ. Dr. Jenkins’ extensive research has yielded an accurate snapshot of Southern Christianity, and if more Christians in my sphere of influence in the United States were to read this work, they would be challenged in ways not dissimilar to these last two years of my living in South Asia.
Not only is there a subjective benefit for readers looking to encounter needful challenges from Southern Christianity to the Northern world, but Jenkins also makes a courageous effort to give pertinent criticisms of what he styles as the “Northern Church.” On supernatural healings he states bluntly, “...Northern-world resistance to ideas of a healing mission can readily be criticized as a stubborn refusal to acknowledge the plain lessons of scripture.” On Northern churches giving in to liberalization, particularly in biblical criticism, he says, “The practical consequences are all too clear if we contrast the teeming congregations of Africa and Asia with the empty churches of post-Christian Europe…God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” Criticisms like these and provocative questions to his Northern readership can be found delicately placed like Easter-eggs for a surprising but worthwhile challenge for any Northern Christian.
Northern Christianity–Evangelical or Liberal?
In so frequently employing the category of “Northern Christian” to draw conclusions delineating the difference between the two hemispheres of global Christianity, however, Jenkins makes a serious mistake by often equating “Northern Christian” with what could be called “liberal Christian.” As mentioned above, he claims that only “the hardest of hardcore fundamentalists” believe that Paul wrote Timothy and Titus. Elsewhere he says that, “African readers are far more comfortable drawing connections between the testaments than are their Northern-world counterparts.” My experience of Northern-world Christianity contradicts both of these sweeping claims, and the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, has written into its confession, The Baptist Faith and Message 2000, articles contradicting them. In the discussions about wealth and poverty (Chapter 4) and Christians’ relationships to the state (Chapter 6) he does well to group liberal and evangelical Christians into “Northern Christianity.” When he wades into matters of faith such as belief in the supernatural, gender roles, and the authority of the Bible, more often than not, the typical Baptist in Alabama is much more like the Adi Vasi (tribal) Indian Christian than he is the liberal American Christian. To be fair, he does make some delineations between these two types of Northern Christians, especially near the end of the book, but many of his earlier contrasts are based on the assumption that liberalized Christian beliefs constitute an overwhelming majority of Christian belief in North America and Europe.
Additionally, though Jenkins is on the whole self-aware of his (to employ the book’s nomenclature) Northern Christian tendencies of liberalization, there are many times that it seems that he is unable to shake off the water that he normally swims in. For example, he describes the global South’s affinity for more literalistic interpretations as a “love affair with the scripture” that will eventually mellow into something similar to the Northern world’s biblical understanding. Elsewhere, when describing how many in the global South usually practice some form of patriarchy (though not exactly in step with the pre-Christian patriarchy), Jenkins’ gives in to the tired dichotomous choice of either oppressive patriarchy or feminism. He says, “Such a catalogue of readings makes Christianity seem like a purely repressive force…Yet at every step…patriarchal readings are countered or criticized by African or Asian feminists…” While I do not doubt that what he claims is verifiably true, I think that such framing of the issue is unhelpful. Might there be more nuanced ways to understand how Southern Christians approach gender in light of the biblical text? I think so.
Such disagreements with Jenkins, though, do not in any way disqualify the worth of his impressive scholarship on Southern Christianity and the cutting effect of his questions and criticisms directed at the Northern world. In light of the fact that contemporary American Christians are daily faced with the option of demonizing the global South by cultural and political forces and that there is such an upsurge in a poisonous form American exceptionalism (we could even call it, “American infallibilism”), particularly among Evangelicals, Northern Christians would do very well to read The New Faces of Christianity and learn from our little brothers and sisters of the global South.