Читать книгу The World's Christians - Douglas Jacobsen - Страница 16

The goal of this book is signaled in the volume’s subtitle: to explain who the world’s Christians are, where they currently reside, and how they got there. The “who” section describes the main theological and organizational divisions that exist among the world’s Christians, the “where” section identifies the particular experiences of Christians living in various regions of the world, and the section on “how they got there” provides a brief history of Christianity’s global growth and development.

“Who are the world’s Christians?” is answered in Part I by describing the four largest Christian sub‐traditions, which are called “mega‐traditions” in this book: Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Pentecostalism. Taken together these four groups account for roughly 97 or 98 percent of all Christians worldwide. The chapters in this section of the book describe the spirituality (the lived character and general religious ethos) of each of these traditions, how each group understands the Christian idea of salvation, the institutional structure of each group, and the story of each group’s origins and subsequent development.

Part II of The World’s Christians describes how Christianity came to assume its current global shape. It includes four chapters, each covering 500 years of Christian history. These chapters explain both the internal (spiritual and theological) developments of the Christian movement and Christianity’s external engagement with the world’s different cultures. This section of the book underscores the dynamic character of Christianity, how it grew from being a tiny religious movement in the Middle East into the incredibly complex faith it is today. While Christianity has been a world religion for a very long time, its global shape has changed dramatically over the course of the last two thousand years, and it is still changing today.

Part III – the largest part of the book – is organized geographically and describes where Christians are living in the present. Nine regions are identified as representing distinctly different zones of Christian life and experience. These regions are: (1) the Middle East and North Africa, where Christianity is barely surviving; (2) Eastern Europe, where Orthodox Christianity is dominant; (3) Central and South Asia, where Christians represent only a very small minority of the population, but have ancient roots; (4) Western Europe, which was the undisputed center of world Christianity for almost five hundred years; (5) Sub‐Saharan Africa, where Christianity is currently growing faster than anywhere else; (6) East Asia, where Christianity is more unevenly distributed than anywhere else on earth; (7) Latin America, where close to half of the world’s Catholics now live; (8) North America, which is the most Protestant region of the globe; and (9) Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific islands), where Christianity was only recently introduced.

The increasing diversity of contemporary Christianity is made obvious in these nine chapters. In contrast to past centuries, world Christianity no longer has any identifiable spiritual or geographic center that controls the movement as a whole. Instead, Christians now inhabit a “flat” world, a world where the Christian population is spread out more or less evenly around the globe and where new and varied experiments are being lived out regarding what it means to be a follower of Jesus today.