457 - World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Study of Churches and Religions in the Modern World, A.D. 1900-2000

World Christian Encyclopedia:
A Comparative Study of Churches and Religions
in the Modern World, A.D. 1900-2000
By David B. Barrett
Nairobi and New York, Oxford University Press, 1982. 1,026 pp. $95.00.

[Editorial Note: For many years, the reviewer of this monumental work, John M. Mulder, served as Assistant Editor of THEOLOGY TODAY. Now the President of Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and Professor of Historical Theology, we welcome Dr. Mulder back to our pages with this extended review, so appropriate for our Fortieth Anniversary issue.]

"In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled." Thus begins the familiar narrative of the birth of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, and from then until today we are still intrigued with knowing the size and character of the oikoumene--the whole inhabited world. Within the Christian tradition, the first systematic attempt to chart the number of believers, and their distribution, was carried out by the Nestorian theologian and geographer, Cosmas Indicopleustes, who traveled widely and compiled the Topographia Christiana between 535 and 547 A.D. During the medieval and Reformation periods, few attempts were made to conduct similar studies, but with the birth of modern Roman Catholic and Protestant missions, especially during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the age-old quest of Caesar Augustus began anew.

But poor Caesar Augustus, Cosmas Indicopleustes, and their more modern followers, unlike David B. Barrett, did not have a computer. Barrett, a former aviation designer who quit his position in 1951 in protest over the development of atomic weaponry, became an Anglican priest and eventually assumed a post in Nairobi, Kenya. For fourteen years he labored with a group of twenty-one editors and consultants and five hundred experts around the globe to compile a census of Christians in the twentieth century, and to plot the future course of Christian demography by the end of the second Christian millennium.

The result is this volume, and few superlatives are adequate to describe such a monumental achievement. Running to 1,026 pages, it includes more than 1,500 illustrations of maps, photographs, graphs, etc. It contains essays on Christianity and other religions in 223 countries (212 of which were visited by Barrett himself personally); a historical essay and chronology of the expansion of Christianity from the first

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century to the twentieth; an atlas; a dictionary of the thousands of words which people use to describe God; a directory of Christian organizations; a "Who's Who" in the Christian world; and statistics--page upon page of numbers of people, churches, organizations, and more.

For those fascinated with the mechanics of printing and book publishing, the story behind the actual production of this volume is itself a legend. Barrett was chronically short of funds for his project, and for more than five years he worked with only one copy of his 1,000-plus manuscript, carrying it with him throughout the world to check and double-check statistics and findings. At the conclusion of an eight-nation tour of countries hostile to Christianity, he was detained for several hours while a security guard poured over his manuscript looking for secret inks, watermarks, or microdots, all the while ignoring the text that described the persecution of the Christian church in his own country. Every doctoral student has heard the horror stories of dissertations lost by fire, water, or the postal service, but Barrett's manuscript survived. (But he learned his lesson and made a duplicate copy.)

The statistics alone were compiled and computerized in a 100 - megabyte data base, and the entire text of the book was set in hot type in Nairobi, where editor and proofreader Barrett had his headquarters. The typesetting began in 1978, and two years and another typesetter later, the project was completed. Full-color maps were printed in England, and the rest of the printing and binding were done in the United States by Oxford University Press.

It would be too much to expect individuals to put down $95.00, plus tax, for this volume, and prospective buyers should be forewarned about trying to carry this heavy tome any great distance. And yet, church libraries--not to speak of public and school libraries--will find this book to be an invaluable reference aid. Any minister would be rewarded several times over for an investment in this book, an investment that will return itself in insight and wisdom about the complex character of Christianity and its continuing mission in the latter part of the twentieth century.

It would also be presumptuous to spell out the implications of Barrett's findings, for he has charted a virtual revolution that continues today and will grow in force and magnitude. What this revolution will mean for the Christian church and for human culture cannot be predicted, but it is certain to have a profound and lasting impact on the nature of the church and its witness during the next century and beyond. After studying Barrett's work, the following points stand out with dramatic clarity.

(1) The missionary movements in Protestantism and Roman Catholicism have produced a world Christianity in the twentieth century. Spawned in part by the polemics and bitter competition for supremacy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and spurred by nationalism

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and imperialism, the modern missionary movement of Christianity has "succeeded" in a sense beyond its wildest dreams.

The rallying cry of the Student Volunteer Movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was "the evangelization of the world in this generation," a motto often derided as another example of late Victorian romantic idealism. But the astonishing fact is that there are very few areas of the world today that have not been touched by Christian influence or where the Gospel has not been proclaimed.

Here is where Barrett's methodology will be challenged by some, for be has adopted the European theology of evangelization which places the presentation of the Christian faith at the heart of evangelism. In contrast, the American school of evangelization stresses conversions as the key. By that standard, the task is still unfinished, and even by Barrett's calculation, the church continues to have a challenging and continuing evangelistic mission.

The conclusion, however, should not be overlooked. For the first time in history, Christianity has extended to the oikoumene--the whole inhabited world. In its theology, its worship, and its mission, the Christian church must now grapple with this new global reality of the body of Christ.

(2) The numerical strength of Christianity is rapidly moving away from its base in western Europe and North America to the South and the East. Here are a few statistics from Barrett for illustrative and shock purposes: Western churches are losing adherents at the rate of 7,600 members per day. African churches are gaining members at the rate of 16,400 per day, roughly 12,000 through the birth rate and the rest through conversions. That amounts to 6 million new African Christians each year. South Asian churches add 447,000 each year; East Asian churches count 360,000 new members each year. Even after the Chinese Revolution and the official suppression of Christianity during the Cultural Revolution, the latest figures from the People's Republic of China indicate 1,100 congregations and 10,000 home churches with as many as 25 to 50 million members.

The change can also be described in comparative percentages. In 1900, 83 percent of the world's Christians were Western-50 percent in Europe, 19 percent in Russia, and 14 percent in North America. By 1985, less than half of the world's Christians--approximately 48 percent

will be Westerners. Europe's share will fall to 27 percent; Russia's to 6 percent; and North America's percentage will rise slightly to 15 percent. By the year 2000, Latin America will be the most populous Christian continent with 28 percent of the world's Christians, followed by Europe with 21 percent, Africa with 19 percent, and North America with 13 percent.

The following table gives the percentages in more exact form for the eight major geographical areas defined by Barrett:

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For roughly fifteen hundred years, Christianity has been dominated by the West--theologically, politically, economically, culturally. Within a very few years, that dominance--at least numerically--will disappear.

(3) The implications of the transformation of Christianity from its Western base to the South and East are profound and far-reaching. Western philosophical concepts, on which so much of Christian theology is based, have been and will be increasingly challenged by theologians who are indebted to oral rather than literary cultures and who do not share the Western ideas of space, time, matter, or being. In the process, core doctrines of the Christian faith, such as creation, redemption, love, and grace, will inevitably be reinterpreted.

At the same time, the relationship between Christianity and other world religions will become a still more important and pressing issue for the Christian church and Christian theology. This question, which emerged in modern times through the missionary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has been the casual preoccupation of Western theologians and scholars but has had virtually no currency throughout the Western churches as a whole. For this generation and beyond, the question will surely move out of academe and into the pew, where it is now located for most of the world's Christians in any case.

The central question for the Christian church will thus become: "What is Christian about Christianity?" It will be asked in two forums. The first will be the internal dialogue within Christianity itself, as Western and non-Western Christians seek to define the nature of the faith itself. The second will be Christianity's engagement with the pluralism of world religions. Of the two, I suspect that the internal discussion will be the more wrenching and more controversial, as all intramural, intrafamilial debates tend to be. The second arena will further define the integrity of Christian witness.

(4) Despite its global character and its dramatic expansion, Christianity is barely holding its own, and Christian churches will find themselves in the minority throughout the world. In 1900, Christians comprised 34.4 percent of the world's population; by the year 2000 their

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number will fall to 32.3 percent of the globe's inhabitants. "Nonreligious" people, as defined by Barrett, were only 0.2 percent of the world's population in 1900; they will increase to 17.1 percent by 2000. Only Islam will increase its share of the world's religious adherents in the twentieth century, growing from 12.4 percent in 1900 to 19.2 percent in 2000.

Equally striking are Barrett's categories for the political situation in which the Christian churches carry out their mission today. In 1980, he estimates that 866 million Christians or 60.6 percent of the Christian population live in countries without full political freedom or full civil rights. Forty-two percent of the world's Christians live under some form of political restriction on religious liberty; 18 percent are governed by explicitly atheistic regimes.

In short, the experience of the vast majority of Christians today is one of restriction of their civil and religious freedom and for many, outright hostility to the Christian faith. Christianity, long accustomed in the West to cultural and political dominance, is now a minority church in the oikoumene, and its theology and missiology will be shaped by confrontation with principalities and powers hostile to its existence, its growth, and its message. In this sense, the pattern of American Christianity will be an anomaly within world Christianity, and the capacity of American Christians to understand and appreciate the situation of other Christian churches will be sorely tried.

(5) Paradoxically, the American Christian experience will not be an anomaly at all but one laboratory for the pattern of Christianity in the future. According to Barrett, the United States wins hands down as the most disparate and pluralistic religious nation in the world. Within U.S. Christianity alone, says Barrett, there are 2,050 denominations for 197 million Christians. The United States has more Jews than any other nation in the world -7.2 million. Fifteen million Americans are nonreligious, and a few million adhere to other religions. In 1900, Barrett estimates that 65 percent of the American population belonged to traditional Protestant denominations, but by 2000 the percentage will fall to 34 percent. The largest increase will come in the percentage of non-religious people, jumping from a mere 1.3 percent of the American population in 1900 to 8.4 percent in 2000.

Thus the shape of Christian witness in the oikoumene is not necessarily a struggle between the Western and non-Western churches but is a debate within the entire church, including those and perhaps especially those in the United States. Few imagined and even fewer appreciate the magnitude of the Revolution that took place during the early American revolutionary generation when this nation was launched on a path of disestablishment for the church and when it made explicit provision for religious liberty. Only now are we beginning to appreciate the implications of this step, and the outlines of what this means for the church in the U.S. and for the culture are still unclear.

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These are only some of the questions and issues that are raised by Barrett's work, and it will serve as the basis for a continuing discussion within the church for the rest of this century. Statisticians rarely receive their due, and statistics are notoriously slippery, particularly compiled on this grand scale. But the nature of the oikoumene today and of the future are at least defined in their broad patterns within this magnificent book, and Barrett's achievement is one for which we can give thanks. One comes away from this book with a deep sense of humility and awe at the mystery of the Holy Spirit, given in grace at Pentecost and still guiding the people of God--in all their diversity--today.

John M. Mulder
Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary
Louisville, Kentucky