Given the growing literature on World Christianity, a trend sometimes referred to as the “world-Christian turn,” World Christianity: Methodological Considerations, edited by Martha Frederiks and Dorottya Nagy, is a welcome volume. The editors, academic leaders in the study of Christianity, unite this rich collection of essays under two purposes that are occasionally at odds. First, they propose a particular, multidisciplinary approach to studying Christianity, in contrast to the treatment of World Christianity as an academic discipline or a field of study. Second, they bring together a diverse, world-class group of scholars who do not necessarily share this collective understanding of what “World Christianity” entails. While these voices remain in tension throughout the volume, Frederik and Nagy still manage to weave them within a common rubric.
This project is complicated by a strong Eurocentric tendency in Western scholarship or what has been called the WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democracies) focus. World Christianity, of course, requires a global perspective, one that does not privilege a cultural form of faith over others. As Frederiks and Nagy point out, there has been much progress: despite this tendency, there has been a resistance by way of revealing unexamined assumptions. And this is where the value of this volume lies. The book is a deliberate attempt to peel back the layers and to uncover such assumptions, offering rich insights on methodology and suppositions. The editors’ appeal for a multidisciplinary approach centered on both local and global perspectives is a promising start and the readers of this compendium will be richly rewarded.
The editors have gathered a formidable team of collaborators from various disciplines to focus on questions of methodology in the study of World Christianity. Emma Wild-Wood's chapter arguing for close reading of missionary sources and Joseph Lee and Christine Chow's examination of historical research on Christians in China are two chapters that model this well. While featuring a diverse cast of authors, Frederiks and Nagy also do a fine job of setting up a framework for understanding the World Christianity approach that is well articulated in their introduction and in each of their individually authored contributions.
In the first chapter, Frederiks introduces the “World Christianity approach” in which she carefully acknowledges the multiple centers in Christianity and the integrative forces that Christians have in common. She also seeks to “critically interrogate past and present trajectories of knowledge production as well as genealogies of key analytic concepts and theories.” This is where recognizing the lingering impact of Eurocentrism is vital not just in the power dynamics in the present but in the periodization and interpretation of the past. Her proposed approach is perhaps most useful in trying to broaden the scholarly voices from around the world; in so doing, she reveals blind spots or biases in the past and present scholarship in Christianity. Included in this is the much-needed project of “provincializing” the European histories of Christianity, countering their canonical, normative stature. The contributors to this volume strengthen her case, especially by showing the importance of the interreligious context in which many Christians find themselves. In this regard, Kari Storstein Haug's chapter on Thai comparative theologizing in a majority Buddhist society is particularly helpful.
In the second chapter, Nagy supports the proposal to define World Christianity as part of a global conversation between scholars. While “world studies” of various kinds are useful in this project, it seems that any interdisciplinary study should also draw on “global studies.” What's the difference? While one of the core values of global studies is the fact that the world is far too complex for traditional approaches, Nagy points out that many uses of a “world” focus on the non-Western world inadvertently privileges the European position as outside of the classification or, worse, as normative. She emphasizes interconnectivity, unity, diversity, and locality in World Christianity as an approach, a theme echoed by several contributors, especially by Stanley John in his examination of Kerala's New Generation churches. Nagy finds the most commonality with Sebastian Conrad in his book on global history, which methodologically has several parallels to World Christianity, not the least of which is the emphasis of the local and global, connectively, and power differentials. All of this is underscored most succinctly by Raimundo Barretto: “The Christian story can be more fully appreciated if told from multiple perspectives.”
But what makes this book especially helpful is the concluding chapter, which ties each of the contributions to the whole. The editors speak here of operationalizing the World Christianity approach and this they do with great skill, structuring the last chapter around five methodological clusters: (1) context; (2) typologies, terminologies, and conceptual categories; (3) working with sources; (4) methods; and (5) units of analysis. In the end, they achieve what they set out to do, namely, to introduce “a dynamic multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary approach of studying and narrating Christianity/ies’ (hi)stories from multiple perspectives.” I highly recommend this innovative book to undergraduates and graduates studying Christianity or religion as a global phenomenon.
