Encountering the West

Encountering the West: Christianity and the Global Cultural Process: The African Dimension is Lamin Sanneh's extended argument with a consensus that had hardened by the early 1990s — that Christian mission in Africa was essentially the religious arm of European empire, and that the churches it produced are therefore borrowed goods, colonial residue awaiting decolonization. Sanneh, a Gambian-born scholar of Islam in West Africa who had converted to Christianity and who taught missions and world Christianity at Yale Divinity School, was unusually placed to press the question. He had already argued in Translating the Message that Christianity is a religion without a sacred language, obliged in every generation to surrender itself into new tongues. This book follows that thesis outward into the political and cultural consequences.

The central move is to pull mission and colonialism apart, not by defending missionaries but by attending to what happened after them. Vernacular translation, Sanneh argues, was an act missionaries could begin but not control: to render Scripture in Yoruba or Ewe or Igbo was to declare that language and its cosmology adequate to bear divine revelation, to elevate local idiom against colonial administrative languages, and to hand Africans a standard by which the missionary enterprise itself could be judged and found wanting. The African independent churches, the anticolonial movements led by mission-educated Christians, the literary revival of vernacular tongues — these are treated not as reactions against the missionary project but as its logical issue. Sanneh sets this against Islam's very different relation to Arabic, and against the antislavery settlements of Sierra Leone, where liberated Africans became agents of a Christianity they were reshaping in the act of receiving it. Running underneath is a sharper claim aimed at Sanneh's Western readers: the retreat of Western Christianity into secular self-doubt, and its guilt-driven abandonment of mission, is itself a parochial episode, and the burden of proof now lies with those who assume the West is the natural interpreter of the faith.

The book has mattered because it supplied much of the intellectual architecture for the study of world Christianity as a field, and because its argument has been substantially confirmed by demographic fact. It remains the most rigorous available answer to the charge that African Christianity is an imported religion, and its account of translation as a theological principle has shaped how a generation thinks about culture, gospel, and power.

Who should read this: anyone in missiology, world Christianity, or postcolonial theology who needs the case for translatability made at full strength, and Western Christians whose instinct about mission history is uncomplicated shame. It is dense, argumentative, and assumes some familiarity with African history and Islamic studies. Readers looking for devotional formation or a narrative history of missions should look elsewhere.