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"The Underground Railroad" by Colson Whitehead is a magnificent novel chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. See more
Product Details
Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press; Annotated edition (September 1, 2006)
Philip Jenkins, Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University, is a prolific author and a clear, engaging writer who has addressed a host of different topics in his many books. Recently, however, he has captured the attention of many evangelicals because of two of his recent works. In 2001 he published Hidden Gospels, a blistering attack on revisionist interpretations of Jesus. He convincingly argues that headline-making scholars of the Jesus Seminar sort traded far more heavily on novelty and sensationalism than on critical and judicious scholarship. In 2002 he made even more waves with the publication of The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, which brought acclaim from many sources, evangelical and otherwise. The thesis of that book--that Christianity is exploding in unprecedented and often heterodox ways outside of Europe and North America (that is, in "the global south")--is further elaborated in this fascinating and important book on how these new expressions of Christianity are appropriating the Bible for themselves, often apart from Western influences. Jenkins is a Roman Catholic whose own theological perspective is fairly muted throughout the book. He writes more as a chronicler than as a theologian or philosopher, although his own take on the global south's engagement with Scripture does come to surface in several places, as I will note below.
Jenkins begins by noting that African Anglicans are far more conservative than the bulk of their American counterparts. While American Anglicans (Episcopalians) may tolerate or endorse homosexual behavior, abortion, and other liberal shibboleths, African Anglicans take the Bible in a more straightforward way.Read more ›
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In this sequel to his earlier volume, The Next Christendom; The Coming of Global Christianity (2002), Penn State professor Philip Jenkins shows how the majority of Christians in the world read the Bible with an authenticity, immediacy, and primitiveness that readers in the mainly white, rich, North American context would find strange and even naive. Most readers, Jenkins reminds us, "see things not as they are but as we are." That is, our reading and hearing of Scripture originates from our social context. Ordinary, poor Christians in Latin America, Asia and Africa know all too well about corrupt states, famine, unending wars, ethnic strife, brutal repression, crushing debt, and grinding poverty, and so they hear these themes of Scripture as directly relevant to their daily lives. Healing, liberation, dreams, visions, miracles, and prophecies are lived realities rather than deconstructed myths for these Christians.
After two introductory chapters, Jenkins shows how the Old Testament in particular resonates with these believers because of its themes of nomadic existence, tribalisms, animal sacrifice, paganism, agrarian economies, and polygamy. He then devotes individual chapters to the themes of rich and poor, good and evil, persecution and vindication, and then women and men. A final chapter compares and contrasts how Christians in the global south and in the wealthy north read Scripture. What constitutes a truly "authentic" reading of the Bible, and what might one dismiss as "cultural baggage" in both text and interpreter? Jenkins is not uncritical of the way global southerners read the Bible, but in both tone and content his "reading" of the global south exudes admiration and even gratitude.Read more ›
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Europeans are sure Christianity is about to disappear. At least it has in Europe. Witness the Anglican church, its churches empty, its coffers empty, chasing vainly after every new leftist fad.
Jenkins wants us to turn our eyes now to the other Anglicans: the ones in Africa, staunch in their faith, their denominations growing, raging against the liberal skeleton of a church left in England. This, Jenkins insists, is the new face of Christianity. When "Sweden's liberal Lutheran church tried to enforce its views on traditionalist diehards, conservatives placed themselves under the authority of Kenyan bishop Walter Obare Omwanza, who denounced the official church...ordination of women as a 'Gnostic novelty'" )p 4).
Jenkins points to these facts: "Between 1900 and 2000, the number of Christians in Africa grew from 10 million to over 360 million, from 10 percent of the population to 46 percent. If that is not, quantitatively, the largest religious change in human history in such a short period, I am at a loss to think of a rival" (p 9). This explosive growth has also happened in Asia. Things are changing.
Jenkins posits many intriguing questions about why Christianity is so appealing. Here's one: "Because of their modern historical experiencem, many Southern Christians easily identify with the profoundly antistate and separatist texts in the New Testament" (p 128).
Another important chapter is spent on persecutions. Various Asian and Muslim countries are currently persecuting Christians. "Between 2000 and 2005, violence between Muslims and Christians in just one Nigerian province killed or expelled over fifty thousand people, mainly Christian (p 129). Not something our newspapers cover in depth.
You will find this an eyeopening book.
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This item: The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South
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