International Bulletin of Missionary Research

Issue 31:3, July 2007
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FULL ISSUE (56 pp., 3.5 MB PDF)

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Europe: Christendom Graveyard or Christian Laboratory?

Shortly before his election as Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger published a pithy little volume in Italian, Europa: I suoi fondamenti oggi e domani (Edizioni San Paolo, 2004). Recently translated into English under the title Europe Today and Tomorrow (Ignatius Press, 2007), the book wistfully recalls the continent’s Christendom heritage and argues that, without a return to its spiritual foundations, Europe’s moral and political disintegration is inevitable.

In his lead article Philip Jenkins argues that while the collapse of mainstream European religion may well mark the death of Christendom, closer scrutiny suggests that instead we may be witnessing a prolonged and growingly uncomfortable gestation, a necessary prelude, that could birth spiritual regeneration, though perhaps not in a wholly familiar form. Is Christendom being born again, so to speak, to a faith that combines Christian beliefs with Christian behavior? This hopeful idea is echoed by Lamin Sanneh in his essay “Can Europe Be Saved?”—an extended review of Jenkins’s just-published God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis (Oxford Univ. Press, 2007).

Christendom from its earliest days found it impractical to follow the ways of Jesus—to actually reflect the mind of Christ—as demonstrated by its violent politics, aggressive and self-centered economics, and fierce militarism. As Alan Kreider points out in his essay on violence and mission in the fourth and fifth centuries, Christendom—the conjunction of self-serving state and ostensibly self-giving church—almost at once succumbed to the use of both social and military compulsions in the cause of its mission efforts. Christendom constructed an ethic that permitted, applauded, and at times compelled killing in Jesus’ name. Today, the armies of powerful but anxious neo-Christendom likewise launch rockets, scatter bombs, and demolish cities in piously rationalized causes.

What, then, does Europe—or, for that matter, its giant neo-Christendom offspring—need to be saved from? As Ratzinger rightly argues, it needs to be saved from cultural and spiritual amnesia, from the self-inflicted partial lobotomy that has removed the memory of its Christendom past. Europe has lost its way. As any traveler knows, to be “lost” makes arrival at the desired destination a matter of implausible chance. Is it reasonable to think that Europe might traverse the present and arrive at a hopeful future if it rejects its memory of where it has recently been?

But further troubling questions arise. If it be granted that a people is defined primarily by shared memory, does it follow that mere recollection of its Christendom past will be sufficient for the salvation of Europe? What if Europe has never been “saved” in any Gospel sense of that word? (Nonconformists can make a case for this conclusion.) What if the real clash of civilizations, from a strictly Gospel point of view, is not and has never been between Islam and the West but between self-serving states and followers of the self-giving Christ within their borders?

Perhaps, even with the accelerating metamorphosis of the continent’s conspicuously proud monuments to human power, architectural ingenuity, and bygone devotion into mosques, museums, markets, and upscale apartments, Europe might embrace some kind of unembarrassed belief in Christ, the Savior of the world. After all, the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures teach us that we humans need to be saved, above all, from ourselves. The Bible offers no scheme for rescue from outside enemies, but it has much to say about the enemy within. Such a rescue could not come too soon for both Christendom and its Islamic nemesis.

Old Christendom was violent, and powerful neo-Christendom still prefers violence as an effective means of insisting that its will be done on earth. While old Christendom, since World War II, has enjoyed a relative moratorium on war, time and circumstance will doubtless change that situation, perhaps in the not-too-distant future. As for neo-Christendom, it is disheartening to observe how utterly reliant on violence and its terrible instruments this great society and its institutions have become. Commanding 43 percent of the global trafficking in weapons, operating out of more than 700 military bases scattered across the globe, and with virtually every state somehow benefiting from the weapons trade, there appears to be no way out. Neo-Christendom is no mere victim, but the primary beneficiary, of violence around the world.

Twenty years ago in this journal, one of the wisest Christian leaders of his generation posed this question: “Suppose instead of trying to understand the Gospel from the point of view of our culture, we tried to understand our culture from the point of view of the Gospel?” (Lesslie Newbigin, “Can the West Be Converted?” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 11, no. 1 [January 1987]: 5). The way we choose to answer this question may contain the key to one of the most important concerns of our time: Can Europe be saved?

—Jonathan J. Bonk
bonk@omsc.org

 

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Issue 31:3, July 2007
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FULL ISSUE (56 pp., 3.5 MB PDF)