Lost Christianities

Yes, I’m been blog MIA.  I blame it on Aaron (my 1 yr old).  Last Nov I picked up Philip Jenkin’s latest work, The Lost History of Christianity at SBL.  Jenkins is doing some of the best writing today in regard to global Christianity.  His previous works on the spread of the Global Church and the Bible in Africa are seminal works – reflecting not only great research but highly readable.  The thesis of this latest work is intriguing.  If one considers the Eastern Nestorian church, then the church for her first 1000 years was tricontinental – African, European, and Asian.  According to Jenkins as late as the 11th century Asia was home to at least a third of the world’s Christians and a tenth lived in Africa.

Around 780 the bishop Timothy becomes patriarch or catholicos of the church of the East based in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Seleucia.  He lives into his nineties dying in 823 and is arguably the most most significant Christian spiritual leader of his day eclipsing the importance of the pope in Rome and the patriarch in Constantinople.  To illustrate the widespread influence of Timothy and the scale of the Nestorian church Jenkins compares the number of metropolitans he oversees to those in England.  Metropolitans are senior clergy who give oversight over bishops assigned to various regions.  Timothy presided over  nineteen metropolitans and 85 bishops.  Compare that to England which at the time had 2 metropolitans.  The map above demonstrates the widepread influence of the church in the East  This isn’t the best copy but if you look closely you will see that a large number of Christians lived in Mesopotamia and stretched east as far as Beijing.  Christians in Beijing in 800 C.E.?

Jenkins raises some provocative issues in response to this history:

1. The recent explosion of Christians in Asia and Africa is not a unprecedented event in the history of the church but rather a return to Christianity’s roots.
2. What constitutes the church?  Who is a Christian?  When I teach I appeal to what my friend refers to as the “survival of the theologically fittest” to explain the formation of the canon and Christian doctrine.  I.e., truth triumphed.  It’s easy to speak like this when the majority constituted the Western and Eastern church and embraced orthodoxy.  Sure there were heretical movements but they were the minority.  We lack information but as far as we can tell these Asian Christians who at one point constitute 1/3 of the world’s Christians were Nestorian.  Nestorianism asserted that there were two persons to Christ, a human and divine, rather than the orthodox position of two natures (human and divine) in the one person of Jesus.  This view was denounced at the Council of Ephesus in 431.
3. What ought to be the relationship between the church and state?  Many believe Christianity started on a downhill path ever since Constantine legitimized Christianity in the 4th century.  Since then Christianity has been prone to confusing the kingdom of God with the kingdom of humans (e.g., Crusades).  Yes, Christianity oftentimes thrives amidst persecution but Jenkins chronicles how in the case of the Asian Nestorian church persecution triumphed.  Today Christianity is but a faint memory in many parts of Asia.  In regard to the success of Christianity in Europe Jenkins writes, “Christianity became predominantly European not because this continent had any obvious affinity for that faith, but by default:  Europe was the continent where it was not destroyed” (3).  Should Christians attribute much of their success to the power of sword?