Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History
A collection of essays by the Scottish historian and missiologist Andrew Walls, gathered as a companion volume to his earlier *The Missionary Movement in Christian History*. Walls came to these questions in Sierra Leone, where he taught patristics at Fourah Bay College in the late 1950s and realized, as he later put it, that he was lecturing on the second-century church to students who were living in something very like it — a young, expanding, culturally improvisational Christianity surrounded by older religious systems. He spent the rest of his career building the academic study of Christianity outside the West, founding centres for it at Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and these papers are the distillation of that work: written across decades, delivered in lecture halls on several continents, and assembled here around a single preoccupation with how faith crosses cultural frontiers and what happens to it when it does.
Walls's central claim is that Christianity has no permanent geographical or cultural center. It advances by serial transmission — Jewish, Hellenistic-Roman, northern European "barbarian," Western Enlightenment, and now African, Asian, and Latin American — and characteristically recedes in its old heartlands even as it takes root in new ones. What makes this possible is translation, which for Walls is not merely linguistic but the governing logic of the Incarnation itself: the Word was translated into flesh, into one particular Jewish life, and every subsequent crossing repeats that vulnerable act of entering a new cultural medium on its own terms. Two forces hold the resulting diversity together and apart. The indigenizing principle makes converts at home in their own culture; the pilgrim principle unsettles them within it. Neither can be surrendered. From this Walls draws his most quoted formulation, the "Ephesian moment" — the argument from Ephesians that the full stature of Christ requires the convergence of all cultures, that no single cultural expression of Christian faith contains the whole, and that the church of the twenty-first century is being handed the largest such moment since the first century.
The essays have shaped how a generation of scholars talks about world Christianity, and they supplied the historical framework beneath much subsequent work on the demographic shift southward. Walls writes with dry wit, wide reading, and an unusual refusal to treat Western Christianity as the norm from which others deviate.
Who should read this: anyone teaching, studying, or practicing mission and cross-cultural ministry; theological educators reconsidering whose questions their curriculum answers; readers of church history who suspect the standard story stops at the wrong places. Not for those wanting a sustained single-argument monograph — themes recur across essays written for different occasions — nor for readers seeking devotional material or practical technique.