Christian and Western

Philip Jenkin’s earlier books turn the world upside down – south is up, north is down.  His recent The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died does the same for eastern ad western Christianity.  As the subtitle indicates, the book is about the rise and suppression of Christianity in the lands east of Byzantium, in Syria, modern day Iraq and Iran, China and India, and south into Africa.  Jenkins shows that these Christian communities were stronger, more vital, and lasted much longer than popularly thought.

These churches were denounced as Nestorian and Monophysite, but when one of their patriarchs showed up in the West (as an emissary of the Mongol ruler seeking a Mongol-Christian alliance against Islam!), the Western Christian found him thoroughly orthodox.

The book is full of import, but here just one note: Jenkins refers to Benedict XVI’s Regensburg speech in which the Pope created a furor by quoting a Byzantine opinion concerning Islam.  Jenkins focuses on another claim in the speech, the idea that Christianity is forever tied to thought forms and forms of expression shaped by Greco-Roman civilization.

Jenkins finds that claim implausible.   Even the weaker claim that “as a matter of fact” Christianity emerged from an encounter with Greco-Roman civilization doesn’t work.  He recounts a thousand year history of non-Greco-Roman, strongly Semitic Christianity that had a claim to be descended from the original apostolic church at least as strong as the West.  Jenkins’s book makes it abundantly clear that the faith is not Europe, and raises the question of whether we are really doing justice to the faith if we make Greco-Roman culture the necessary matrix of Christian orthodoxy.  This question is hugely important today, and will only become more so, as non-Western Christianity has a larger and larger impact on Christianity in general.

As a side note: Jenkins’s book makes it obvious how Euro-centric the papal theology of Roman Catholicism is.  When Catholic missionaries made it to India in the early modern period, they discovered Christians who had been in India for a millennium and had never heard of a pope.  Catholics who encountered Copts complained that the Copts thought they were the only true believers; by their lights, they had no need of a pope to justify their sense of superiority.  Is it plausible that the centuries of Coptic Christianity are basically impoverished because they do not acknowledge the pope as Peter’s successor?  In the light of Jenkins’s story, even to ask the question makes the claims of the papacy seem profoundly parochial: What could induce Christians for whom Rome was never, in any sense, the center of the world, acknowledge the bishop of Rome as head of the church?