The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History<\/em><\/a>, Andrew Walls observes that \u201cWith relatively few (though admittedly important) exceptions, the areas and peoples that accepted Islam have remained Islamic ever since: Arabia seems now so immutably Islamic that it is hard to remember that it once had Jewish tribes and Christian towns, as well as the shrines of gods and goddesses to which the bulk of its population gave homage.\u201d<\/p>\nIt is not so with Christianity: \u201cIt is as though there is some inherent fragility, some builtin vulnerability, in Christianity, considered as a popular profession, which is not to the same extent a feature of Islam.\u201d The rhetoric of Christian missions sometimes covers over this fragility, but the reality doesn\u2019t match: \u201cThe rhetoric of Christian expansion has often been similarly progressive; images of the triumphant host streaming out from Christendom to bring the whole world into it come to mind readily enough. But the actual experience of Christian expansion has been different. As its most comprehensive historian, \u039a S Latourette, noted long ago, recession is a feature of Christian history as well as advance.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Walls doesn\u2019t think this a design flaw. It is the incarnational power of Christianity: \u201cthis vulnerability is also linked with the essentially vernacular nature of Christian faith, which rests on a massive act of translation, the Word made flesh, God translated into a specific segment of social reality as Christ is received there. \u00a0. . . the divine Word is translatable, infinitely translatable\u201d\u2014unlike Islam, which maintains an Arabic holy book and tends to replicate the same social and political forms wherever it goes. The gospel takes flesh\u2014whatever flesh it finds\u2014and lives there<\/em>.<\/p>\nT<\/span>he church started out this way, crossing frontiers and settling into and giving life to alien cultures: \u201cWithin a remarkably short time, Christianity ceased to be a demographically Jewish phenomenon, centred in Jewish Palestine and expressed in terms of the fulfilment of God\u2019s promises to Israel. It moved towards a new expression as a demographically and culturally Hellenistic one, dispersed across the Eastern Mediterranean, and then beyond it. The Gentile mission, which had begun as a mere by-product of the Messianic movement centred in Jerusalem, sparked off, the Acts of the Apostles tells us, by the forced removal from the city of many of the leading activists, (Acts 8:1) turned out to be the means of the movement\u2019s very survival. The crux was the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, and the accompanying destruction of the Jewish state. With that state, the original Jewish model of Christianity typified by James the Just, the righteous, deeply observant Jew who was the very brother of the Lord, was swept away for ever.\u201d<\/p>\nChristian history been marked by recessions, and there is a pattern to the recessions, and the accessions: \u201cthe recessions typically take place in the Christian heartlands, in the areas of greatest Christian strength and influence, its Arabias, as one might say; while the advances typically take place at or beyond its periphery.\u201d In sum, \u201cIslamic expansion is progressive; Christian expansion is serial.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In an essay on \u201cChristianity in the Non-Western World\u201d found in\u00a0The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History, Andrew Walls observes that \u201cWith relatively few (though admittedly important) exceptions, the areas and peoples that accepted Islam have remained Islamic ever since: Arabia seems now so immutably Islamic that it is hard to remember that it once had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1199,116,360],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-church-history","category-islam","category-mission"],"yoast_head":"\n
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