Prospects of World-wide Christianity Today

Christianity, emanating from the West, has today become part of the problem with which all faiths are grappling. The divide between spiritual and material confronts all cultures now.

It originated in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment era in western Europe, as the product of a Christendom which had already lost sight of the potential integration of human society latent in its own faith. It was, arguably, the distinctive relationship between heaven and earth, divine and human, implicit in the message of the Incarnation, which gave Western culture its particular grasp on reality. It may be claimed that while this led to its capacity to develop natural science and technology, new forms of commerce and democracy, Western society’s original realisation of its own faith proved in this context to be both socially and conceptually inadequate. Christianity expanded beyond its European confines at precisely the period when its own inner spiritual, intellectual and social resources were proving inadequate to the multiple challenge posed within the European setting itself.

The relative decline of all faiths in this era of global crisis, in which religious revivals often appear as symptom rather than cure, can be clearly charted. All cultures and societies are fundamentally disintegrating. They desperately require a new mediation between a sceptical, urbanised materialism, individualist or collectivist, and a romantic nostalgia or Utopian yearning; between public institutions, centres of economic or political power, and private quests for both personal fulfilment and true community; between a just social order and universal liberty; between public control and personal freedom; between the rational and the intuitive. The expansion of Christianity has been one crucial aspect of this universal breakdown. In its fragmented Westernised form it has appeared in many cultural settings to be more part of the problem than of the solution, especially in its complacent and aggressive forms.

However, the possibility is emerging that there could yet be within Christianity the means of a fresh realisation of its meaning and potential. There is the hint of a kind of Church transcending west and east, north and south, coming into being across the globe. Where this happens, there is a sense in which the Christian way discloses once again the seed of a healing, a bridging of the great divide.

Pilgrims

Some of those who have discerned this possibility most clearly are people on the fringes of Christian faith. They may even be living across the frontiers between faiths. But so many of those in the West who cross over into Islam, into the circle surrounding some newly fashionable guru or yogi, into a Buddhist monastery, into a new religion or a new version of an old, seem to have fallen away into an alternative half-world under the pressures of contemporary secular experience. They do not represent an attempt to break new ground in enabling Christianity to find fresh expression within a world-wide context.

To cite a specific example: one striking ‘Pilgrim of the Absolute’ who lives on the edge of an Asian city has suggested that the only expression of the Christian mystery that is anywhere near faithful to its original integration of earth and heaven is to be found in Russian Christianity. He did not want to study Western theology for fear of its anaemic abstraction. Asian thought had not yet truly come to terms with the ‘demythologised humanism’ of the West. So it was Dostoevsky who spoke to him more effectively than any other of Christ in modern dress. It would be those capable of living between two worlds who would find an authentic form for the Christian message, itself a marriage of East and West, in our time. This insistence recalls the way in which Khomiakov, a contemporary of Dostoevsky’s, visiting the West, found its churches, Catholic and Protestant alike, cold, grey, individualised and suffering from a profound inner dichotomy. For this Asian pilgrim, Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov spoke most truly of the indissoluble marriage of earth and heaven in Christ.

The Persecuted

Russian Christianity also afford striking examples of a second aspect of vitality and creativity in Christian life today. Persecution has come to be part of its existence. The usefulness of the Church to Stalin during the Second World War saved it from the near extinction it had reached in two decades after the Revolution, but Khrushchev resumed harsh persecution and restriction. The situation has since eased a little but the limited freedom of the Church is always precarious. On the one hand, church leaders like the Patriarch Nikodim and his successor Pimen remained cautiously conforming in relation to the system, in order to enable the liturgy to be maintained and the Church to survive. On the other hand, famous dissidents like Father Glev Yakunin, Lev Regelson or Father Dimitri Dudko have been arrested, brain-washed and crushed. The Baptists have grown significantly and have attracted the young. Solzhenitsyn’s Baptist in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a representative figure in our time. In the life and testimony of such Russian Christians there is the integrity and vitality which Solzhenitsyn describes as the ‘radiant ethical atmosphere in which our morals have been grounded’. It contrasts with the stale, spiritually bankrupt atmosphere of much of Soviet Communist society, and indeed of much of the capitalist world of the West.

Among other Eastern European Christians, a similar rediscovery of the true integrity of the Christian gospel is being made. Here, too, significant examples of creativity are to be found, striking notes that are in one sense traditional but in another sense novel, so that they are ‘pointers’ within present-day Christianity, viewed as a world religion, transcending their local context.

The faith of the Polish Church, still inspired and epitomised by the experience of the priest Maximilian Kolbe in the concentration camp of Auschwitz, who offered himself up to death in place of another prisoner, is going beyond its roots in popular religion.

The Church may indeed be the guardian of the nation’s language, history and culture, but in its alliance with the Solidarity political reform movement, its Masses in shipyards and factories, its martyr priest Jerzy Popieluszko, it has identified itself with the suffering and survival of the people. That is where the real integration lies.

Other parts of Eastern Europe afford comparable examples, where new Christian ground is being broken. These are the Christian heirs of Dubcek in Czechoslovakia, members of the Protestant Church of the Czech Brethren or the Catholic ‘Oasis’ movement in Slovakia, living in faithfulness to the vision of a ‘socialism with a human face’, all persisting despite pressure from the regime. There are the two to four thousand ‘basic Christian communities’ in Hungary where Church and State are coming to terms with each other, the struggling martyrs of Albania where the Church has been systematically crushed, the continuing witness against atheism of the steadily surviving Church in Bulgaria, with its brutally assaulted Pentecostals, and the strong and flourishing Church and monastic life of Rumania. In East Germany, as in Yugoslavia, a Western type of secularism and materialism is a more serious cause of decline now than political pressure. There has of late been a degree of relaxation by the government and some acknowledgement of the place and role of the Church. In all these countries a profound witness is being worked out which Western Christians need to understand more deeply, and in which the social and political failures of the Church of the past can often be faced and acknowledged. In such settings, the Church begins to discover a new identity, a new sense of belonging to the people, a way which goes far beyond its previous associations with the powerful and the oppressive.

Perhaps nowhere have persecuted Christians so much atoned for and lived down this distorted past as in China. There, where Christian missionaries were once linked in the popular mind with the shameful ravages of Western intruders with Opium Wars and gunboats, and with China’s era of frustration and division, they had indeed much to live down.

The ‘Three Self’ Christian movement originally arose in a reaction against this embarrassment. It was a controversial effort by some liberal Chinese Christians for self-government, self-support and self-propagation—old ideals, enforced by the Communists through a semi-official body in the 1950s. It could not save Christianity in the traumatic era of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Then, Evangelical indigenous churches, like the Little Flock or the Jesus Family, and institutional mission-led churches, Catholic and Protestant, reactionary and modernist, all went under together. It seemed the end of YangJiao, a foreign teaching, ‘a religion of love spread by force’, as one Chinese Christian critic called it. In the ‘dark night’ of the Chinese Church, the period of stripping of the altars, when buildings were lost, Bibles trampled upon and leaders led away in shame, often to die in prison and disgrace, there was some kind of real purgation of its alienness.

Two years ago, on the steps of Lambeth Palace in London, Bishop Ting, the leader ofthe revived‘Church of China’, the Three Self movement reconstituted, declared, ‘We have been through a death and a resurrection.’ There had emerged across the country a widely scattered series of Christian communities with an integrity, an attractive power and a moral force proved in persecution which were infectious. Now the renewed churches are far more numerous than before and the buildings which are being returned to their aged leaders cannot house them all. Seminaries are coming into being. The main Christian bodies include a ‘post-denomination’ Protestant Church and a divided Catholic Church, part linked to Rome, part separated. Meanwhile, more and more descriptions of how little Christian groups came into being, grew secretly and spread rapidly are emerging. Some could only pray together ‘in the parks... with our eyes open and mouths smiling, as if we were talking and sharing a joke’.

In the moral and spiritual vacuum of post-Maoist China, where a whole generation ‘lost out’, the disillusioned young are searching for more meaningful patterns of life, and the Church can have a special attraction.

In the setting of Chinese society it is distinctive, offering different features from the revivals of Taoism and Islam which China is also seeing. For the Church appeals as something modern, something which has embraced and contained technological, scientific and social change, something open to today’s more pluralist, relativist world.

The Poor

Throughout the world, those who are embracing a revitalised Christian vision most effectively of all are those for whom the original gospel of Christ crucified and risen always was supremely good news: the poor. And a movement has begun in the area where the Church has had its crudest identification with power and oppression, where Christianity has often been seen not as crucified but crucifying—Latin America. The movement is that of the ‘basic Christian communities’.

After the failure of the great struggle of Friar Bartolome de Las Casas (1474—1566) and thejesuit missions to defend the Indians from the tyranny of their conquerors, the Church in both Portuguese and Spanish America became identified with the wealthy and the powerful. As the Peruvian song has it:

They say God cares for the poor

Well, this may be true or not,

But it’s the mine-owner he dines with.

The Church, the rich and the army formed a mutually supportive triumvirate. Individuals will, of course, here and there have played a more compassionate role. But the bishops and the whole organisation of the Church were part and parcel of an extremely unequal and unjust society. It is all the more remarkable therefore that over the whole of Latin America, and especially in Mexico and Brazil, a movement of‘grass-roots’ Christian communities has spread through the Catholic Church. They may be in little units of seven to twelve, like the house groups popular in the West, and they may often also be finked into larger combinations of several such groups. They meet for prayer and Bible study, for mutual support and exchange of experience, and to encourage each other to social and political action. This they see as the outworking of Christian love. The famous, or notorious, ‘liberation theology’ has developed out of reflection on the experience of such ‘base communities’, and at the same time given them an articulation and a rationale.

At first sight the movement may appear to be once again a romantic or Utopian alternative to the necessary structures of Church and society. Sometimes the language of its apologetics strays into a Marxist jargon with an unreal ring of propaganda about it. And it is true to say that some of the organisers and so-called ‘conscientisers’, in attempting to make poor people aware of the ‘social’ cause of their plight, have become increasingly politically ideological; and their disciples have learnt to echo them.

But there is far too much vigour and independence of spirit in the members of the base communities themselves for them to fall for such a typically Western style. Although in the days of its origins liberation theology had overtones of a Marxist dogmatism, a fanatical optimism and a naive belief in the inevitable processes of history (the imminent emergence of the ‘New Man’ and the like), this was soon modified by sometimes bitter experience.

In 1968 the famous Second Assembly of the Latin American Episcopate of the Catholic Church took place at Medellin, Colombia. In the Statement resulting from the Assembly the bishops drew on personal experience and on the experience of hundreds of priests and lay members of base communities from all over the region. There was a firm realism about the personal as well as the social nature of sin, and about its cosmic and demonic character. There was thus a recognition of the need for grace, faith, the Bible, prayer and the sacraments in the struggle for the transformation of people and society. The Church, while not expecting instant change, nor indeed identifying the will of God with any one political party or philosophy, must seek to be made into a sign of self-giving, materially worked-out love to the whole of humanity.

The biblical accounts of the liberating Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and their subsequent long Captivity in Babylon both came to assume for these Latin American Christians a profound significance. To endure patiently a long political struggle, they began to feel the need for all the resources of the Spirit. They were to build up a new middle way between institution and community, the spiritual and the material. They were to fuse worship and prayer with practical action. The meditations of Archbishop Helder Camara, the story and witness of Archbishop Romero or the American missionary sisters murdered soon after him in San Salvador, reveal a fresh integration of faith and love. The mood is epitomised in the book of the Peruvian theologian, Gustavo Gutierrez, priest-adviser to groups of students and workers, We Drink from our own Wells (London, 1983). Moving beyond his earlier ‘Theology of Liberation’, he has come to stress the distinctively Christian and spiritual dimension, the dimension of grace. For him, theology arises from the experience of prayer, worship, Bible study and the active struggle for justice, described as ‘praxis’. Theology should be written and taught out of action, prayer and then reflection. Similarly, for Mortimer Arias, a Uruguayan Methodist bishop, writing after a time in prison, ‘Jesus Christ came in the Spirit, and he came to liberate, so here together you have the charismatic and liberating dimension of the Gospel. In Jesus Christ, it is one, but we have put asunder what God has joined together. We have a polarisation of the two. But I believe we have to open both windows’ (D. Winter, Hope in Captivity (London, 1977), p. 48).

This is very much the quality of the Asian theology of liberation of a remarkable mystic and radical, the Jesuit Aloysius Pieris in Sri Lanka, who has been critical of the earlier Latin American liberation theology as being too materialistic and obsessed with ‘freedom from poverty’, the goal of Western technocracy. Pieris wants less of a Marxist, more of a monastic flavour. He wants not just the ‘praxis’ of Marxism and Latin American liberation theology but a ‘theopraxis’, God-centred not man- centred, involving an askesis, a spiritual discipline, and a darsana, a vision. The ‘Minjung’ folk-theologians of Korea and the writing and witness of the Christian Korean poet, Kim Chi Ha, stress a Christian and spiritual third way, an alternative to Western socialism and capitalism, rooted in a costly discipleship and a contemplative struggle for justice. A similar spirit has infused ‘base communities’ in the Philippines and the whole mood underlying what was so largely a Christian uprising there during the Marcos-Aquino struggle of 1985-6. The quality of a number of Christian communities in Tondo, the slums of Manila, and other parts of the country, with their radical faith, prayer and courageous obedience, has been a major source of the humane character of the Filipino revolution.

It remains to be seen whether Christianity can exercise a similar role in other parts of the world where issues concerning the transfer of power remain to be decided. Foremost among them is South Africa. Within the black townships as much as in the white suburbs of Johannesburg or Cape Town, there is everywhere a Christian leadership that is committed to justice. It is brave, patient and far-sighted. The black Christian leaders have so far been able to carry with them their more violent young followers, and to reach out to include the more repentant and sympathetic whites. Whether the Church can retain its spiritual lead much longer without Western intervention (as happened in the Philippines) is doubtful.

In all these manifestations, the stress is on the value of the person, the quality of relationships, the role of women as well as men, and the importance of the poorest, the least confident and the uneducated. The group is usually actively involved in social and political concerns but not essentially politicised. Rather, it has its own identity and approach, inspired by faith, worship, word and sacrament. It has about it something of the joy and freshness of the gospel message. ‘This joy’, says Clodovis Boff of Brazil, ‘differentiates members of a basic community from the political militants of the left and from bourgeois Christians. The deepest and most intimate core of the Gospel is felt in basic communities.’

This is the quality of many groups springing up all over the world. Within such an ambience there is often a great openness to other faiths and an intermingling with adherents of those faiths, a respect for them, a readiness for mutual exchange. The secret of this openness is that there is a conviction shared by Christian pilgrims, persecuted and poor, as they explore new expressions and forms of their faith and transcend old barriers, that they are caught up in a movement of the Spirit, spanning the globe. The old religious systems and institutions are seen to be shifting and disintegrating. A new common humanity is emerging from the divided worlds of earlier days. We are entering a spiritual and cultural melting-pot. And yet in the midst of this confusion there is a healing, and what is believed to be the integrating disclosure of God alongside us, in the form of Christ, broken, stripped and excluded from an outworn system, who offers the possibility of holiness. Here there can be seen the hope of a humane faith, a life transfigured by the Spirit and available to all, that will be true to the heart of all Christianity’s inherited fragments of faith, true to Semitic, Hellenistic and localised folk cultures, true also to East and West. Perhaps that is why a Muslim Sufist, Hassan Askari, has written, ‘The Cross is a sign of the relationship between God and man for people of all faiths.’ This can be the only real meaning of Christianity today, as it was at the time of its beginning.

Prospects of World-wide Christianity Today

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