The Cambridge University Press journal Horizons: The Journal of the College Theology Society has its roots in the progressive re-visioning of Roman Catholic theology after Vatican II, frequently understood as aggiornamento, and is committed to scholarship that is grounded in the Catholic incarnational/sacramental tradition. Horizons also fosters diverse scholarship across the fields of religious studies and theology, and is dedicated to a broad ecumenical perspective, a wide range of theological methods, and an intensive engagement of faith with culture.
In a postliberal era, theologians are suspicious of metanarratives. In a postcolonial era, Christians have grown more cognizant of the ways in which appeals to universalism have supported various social hierarchies, global imperialism, and attacks on the dignity of human persons. Jesus’ final words to his disciples at the conclusion of the Gospel of Matthew instructed his followers to “make disciples of all nations.” The Jesus-movement began as a sect within Judaism and within a century the influx of Gentile converts transformed Christians’ self-understanding into that of a religion separate from Judaism. From its origins in Asia, Christianity expanded throughout the Mediterranean world, but after the collapse of the Western Roman empire and the rise of Islam, the vast majority of Christians were Europeans. Medieval Christendom marked the apex of a social construction in which Christianity and European culture were fused into a common marker of identity. Christendom’s hold on the continent’s religious imagination proved so successful that, even in the secularized Europe of the twenty-first century, representatives from several countries lobbied (ultimately unsuccessfully) for explicit mention of Christianity’s importance in Europe’s cultural heritage in the preamble of a proposed European constitution.[1] Christopher Columbus and his successors brought colonialism and Christianity to the Western Hemisphere, Africa, and Asia, but a legacy of this European colonialism is that the majority of Christians living in the world today are residents not of Europe but of the Global South.[2]
The Second Vatican Council was the first ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church in which significant numbers of bishops from outside of Europe and the Near East participated. In the years after the Council, at conferences in Medellín and Puebla the bishops of Latin America challenged abstract conceptions of the Church by giving voice to the particularities of the lived realities of Latin American Christians.[3] By naming and opposing the political structures that frustrated human liberation, and with which the Catholic Church had often allied itself during the colonialist period, the Latin American Episcopal Council inaugurated a new era. In 1976, the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT) met for its inaugural meeting in Dar es Salaam. Many of the theological debates over the shape of ecclesial reform in the immediate aftermath of Vatican II were often conducted by those whose intellectual horizons were focused upon concerns responding to the forms of modernity facing Catholics in democratic and capitalist societies of Europe and North America. Liberation theologies challenged many of the presumptions of theologians who assumed they were in the vanguard of change at the Council, while new waves of Christian immigration from Latin America, Africa, and the Philippines to the United States and to Europe made clear that in a postcolonial age geographic boundaries would bring new inculturations of Christianity to societies undergoing rapid secularization. Change has come at the top of the Church’s hierarchy as well. Prior to the Council, Pius XII had appointed a number of non-European cardinals that significantly increased the representation of cardinals outside Europe, a trend that continued under Pius’s papal successors and that resulted in the election of Pope Francis in 2013 and Pope Leo XIV this year.
In 2012, Peter Phan’s Horizons essay, “World Christianity: Its Implications for History, Religious Studies, and Theology,” sought to reconstruct Christian historiography by clarifying what precisely “World Christianity” means in our contemporary era. Surveying the work of earlier writers, Phan demonstrated that World Christianity was distinct from the earlier field of missiology. Missionaries in the era of colonialism presumed that the gospel message would flow in a unilateral direction, from professed Christians to those who were not Christian. Phan’s contrasting understanding of World Christianity was polycentric and more egalitarian:
In “World Christianity” no one form of inculturated Christianity is privileged and normative for another, be it that of Rome (the “First Rome”) or Constantinople (the “Second Rome”) or Moscow (the “Third Rome”) or Canterbury or Geneva or Beijing. Each of the local incarnations of Christianity embodies, in its own unique way, Christianity wholly but not perfectly, and all of them make up World Christianity.[4]
There is here no whiggish a priori claim that Christians in some parts of the world will catch up to a theological and spiritual plane to which other more advanced Christians have supposedly already attained. This sociologically-informed presentation calls for a new “topography” that challenges ecclesiologies centered upon popes and missionaries.
Building upon this redefinition of Christian history, Phan proposed that a non-catechetical presentation of such a “World Christianity” could be integrated into departments of religious studies that were distinct from theological faculties. He called for greater attention to lived Christianity—embodied in devotional practices and personal piety often marginalized in older studies centered on the history of biblical interpretation, the development of doctrine, and changes in church organization. Additionally, Phan argued that Pentecostal and charismatic movements and their overt appeals to immediate supernatural experience be given their due share of scholarly attention. “Doing theology in World Christianity,” Phan wrote, “requires a hermeneutical circle in which the Christian Bible and Tradition are read in the light of the local context and the local context is read in the light of the Christian Bible and Tradition in such a way that there result a mutual illumination and enrichment, and when necessary, a reciprocal correction.”[5] Corrections envisioned by Phan included reformulations of trinitarian theology, Christology, and soteriology. In keeping with his 2004 book Being Religious Interreligiously,he called for a greater emphasis in Christian theology on the role of the Holy Spirit.[6]
Continuing Horizons’songoing retrospective in the wake of its fifty years of publication, this virtual issue features two responses to Phan’s essay. Leo Lefebure, a colleague of Phan’s at Georgetown University, notes how Phan’s early life and travels provided him with a multicultural and pluralistic experience of Christianity. The polyglot milieu in which Phan was raised was not static, however, as France’s imperial rule over Phan’s Vietnam was coming to an end. After moving to Hong Kong, Phan learned English and Latin but, as was also the case in his schooling in Vietnam, Asian intellectual achievements were absent from the curriculum. When Phan moved to Europe as an adult, he experienced the same colonialist hegemony in his education; to speak about “global Christianity” at that time was to talk about how Europeans had spread their religion throughout the world. He learned about theology from the underside after fleeing Vietnam at the fall of Saigon, and wound up as a garbage collector in the United States making minimum wage. Lefebure writes, “Phan eloquently praises migration as a lens for viewing God, linking reflection on religious pluralism both to the biblical witness regarding migration and also to the contemporary experiences of migration.”
In her essay “An Undulating and Polycentric Web of Faithfulness,” Kristine Suna-Koro calls attention to what has changed in the years since Phan’s Horizons essay appeared. “The trajectory that Phan draws,” she writes, “of the nexus of inculturation/contextualization and the (emerging?) polycentric normativity seems to have landed on a considerably more ambiguous terrain in the middle of the third decade of the twenty-first century.” Suna-Koro cautions readers not to overlook the ongoing tensions and power imbalances in World Christianity, including those within the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches that feature centralized episcopal structures. The demographic shifts in World Christianity have been concomitant with fervent debates among Christians, often with the theological fault lines drawn between the Global North and the Global South, over the ordination of women and the liturgical status of same-gender relationships. Is it not time, Sura-Koro asks, to move from inculturation and its colonial overtones to interculturation in a world hopefully marked by less hegemony? Where Phan has spent his theological career promoting interreligious dialogue, Suna-Koro directs readers to focus on interreligious learning in which there is more emphasis on listening to others rather than speaking. Such religious learning should result in communications that neither repeat the unequal imperialist exchanges of the past nor simply reverse the theological polarity so that churches of the Global South are romanticized and posited as a new postcolonial center of authority vis-à-vis other local churches. This emerging interculturation, Suna-Koro contends, should be oriented not merely to theological clarification but to participation in social movements for justice and peace.
Peter Phan’s scholarship is a crystallization of his unique life story that mirrors the polyglot world of many of the earliest Christians. Educated under colonial auspices, Phan has been a tireless advocate for Christians whose lived witness to the gospel was marginalized by more powerful groups for centuries. He has travelled far from his homeland and has ministered to many different groups both as a teacher and as a priest. Like many before him, he has faced opposition from select religious authorities who have questioned the orthodoxy of his thought. Like Peter and Paul in the Acts of the Apostles, Phan has responded by invoking the Holy Spirit. In his 2017 book The Joy of Religious Pluralism, he described an “interfaith Christology” as follows: “An interfaith Christology is essentially a Spirit or pneumatological Christology consisting in an elaboration on the work of Jesus as the Christ by virtue of the Spirit in bringing about humanity’s union with God and/or human self-realization.”[7] For a contemporary world in which globalization has been defined by colonial powers and neoliberal economics, Phan’s appeal to the Spirit in an age of World Christianity provides an alternative and even subversive platform from which Christians can work towards a more authentic globalization marked by the unity of humanity among a diversity of cultures and communities.