[Subjects: Christianity, Western Civilization, Roman influence, Rome’s collapse, post western, Congo, Christian growth, church growth, future of Christian faith]

DO WE LIVE IN A POST-CHRISTIAN WORLD?

BY

Ralph D. Winter

Professor of the Historical Development

Of the Christian Movement

Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California 91101

Lection given at Fuller Forum

1970-1971

DO WE LIVE IN A POST-CHRISTIAN WORLD?

By

Ralph D. Winter

Professor of the Historical Development

Of the Christian Movement

Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California 91101

The topic given to me does not readily lend itself to 20 minutes! Even so, I feel there is a previous question that we must in any case deal with seriously. I will spend the first half of my time on that previous question, on the grounds that the topic itself will then be more approachable. That previous question is, “Do we live in a post-Western world?” This is what I feel many people actually mean when they mention the concept of a post-Christian world. This is because in their minds they do not distinguish between western civilization and Christianity. Now, in order to illuminate this distinction, let me draw some brief parallels between the western world of today in its decline and the period of the fall of the Roman Empire. This will clarify the fact, and the import of the fact, that in some striking ways our Western world really is in decline.

Those Romans for a long time were a pretty marvelous bunch of people. They produced fabulous roads and aqueducts, their military discipline was legendary, and all things considered, even in the refreshing little glimpse of the Roman Empire we see in the New Testament, they had a pretty evenhanded government. Despite Nero and Caligula you can’t find fault with the Romans on too many points. Theirs was a pretty solid civilization. But, very gradually over many decades their welfare rolls extended, strikes occurred, slave population increased, their own birth rate declined. The German tribal peoples outside their boundaries to the north out bred them. And all of a sudden after a thousand years of undisputed sway in their area they began to realize that they were in the minority. The balance had shifted.

There was also an increase in homosexuality and divorce. There were people who weren’t so eager to go out on the front lines and fight. There were “make love, not war” attitudes in the populace. There was an increased use of mercenaries as a result. They began to hire Germans to fight Germans. As a result it turned out that they began – not on purpose of course – to train their very enemies in the arts of war. There came a time when the Germans, reaching around the empire down into Egypt got a better steel for their swords than the Roman Legions carried. There were other little things toward the end of the period. Heavy taxation in the area now called France increasingly encouraged the people there to side with the less-civilized tribes on the other side of the Roman frontier.

It was an age of affluence for some. Fantastic luxury crept in. There was a breakdown of traditions and extensive religious confusion. There came the day when the very roads their technology had built so carefully became avenues invading armies could use against them. Curiously, a scientist recently has proposed that one of the reasons for the breakdown was the fact their their drinking water was dispersed through a system of leaden troughs in the city of Rome and this gradually poisoned the upper classes. Lead poisoning has very definite symptoms and autopsies on Romans buried in those days confirm the existence of this problem. Think of the tons of effluent from leaded gasoline spewed into our city atmospheres each day!

Thus, the Roman Empire did gradually collapse. However, note that a certain influence of the Roman Empire continued. Our vocabulary today is more Roman than Germanic. The Roman calendar is still with us. We must look at our watch-calendars to find out how many days there are going to be in the next month. (It is not a very good calendar that they bequeathed us. The Mayan Indians have a far superior calendar that we might better have borrowed.) In any case, our laws, language, literature, government, attitudes and styles, even little things like the custom of carrying a bride across a threshold, are mainly Roman customs that are still with us. The Coliseum here in Los Angeles is named after their sports center. In a thousand ways, we are far more the product of the Roman civilization than any other human civilization. In other words, even though their empire, their political system collapsed, their civilization by no means blew away. Is that small consolation to us today?

Let’s look more closely at the events of Rome’s collapse and parallels today. The first thing that happened was that Roman legions withdrew from occupied territories, just as in the last 25 years Europeans have pulled back from their colonies around the world. The white man in 1945 still had 99% of the non-Western peoples of the world under his thumb. Twenty-five years later, it was exactly the opposite. By the end of 1969 99% of those people were no longer under the thumb of the white man. This astonishing reversal in modern times has shaken the foundations of the Western world, shaken the perspective of Christians, and induced a pessimism, which has eaten into all areas and sectors of society. This is the first half of the story I have tried to sketch in my little book, The Twenty-Five Unbelievable Years 1945-1969.

Remember, however, it didn’t all happen in a day. In the case of the Romans it really started when the relatively friendly Visigoths were pushed across the border and given sanctuary within the empire, due to the advance of the Huns from the East. Then the Visigoths weren’t treated quite right, they were a minority that didn’t get its full rights. And in a scuffle with these Visigoths (a pretty tough bunch of people) Valens, the Roman emperor, was killed at the battle of Adrianople in 378 A.D. That was spectacular evidence that a Roman emperor could not only be scratched but defeated. Once the Visigoths got started they couldn’t be stopped. I think a comparable event occurred in 1907, which Westerners didn’t take much note of. That was when the Japanese defeated the Russians: the first time a Western power had been defeated by a non-Western power. It was the handwriting on the wall, and we should have begun to wonder. A little bit later in 1914 we had fantastic internal strife within the West, which we called (in our pompous provinciality) a “world” war; we might also have wondered then. Some did. Oswald Spengler came out with his book The Decline of the West in 1918. He predicted that our civilization was on the decline. Then in 1941 came Pearl Harbor – another cloud on the horizon, as the advancing non-Western world became more powerful, using the weapons of the West against the West itself. The Japanese were using airplanes, military logistics, and battleships (that were not only copies but improvements) as they steamed East to Pearl Harbor. Thus today we face a situation which is quite parallel to the withdrawal of the Roman legions. The first thing the Romans did was withdraw their legions from Britain, then later from France, then Spain. Eventually, of course, non-Romans were pounding at the gates of Rome. In 410 A.D. the Christians from within the city went outside the gate and persuaded the Christians in these advancing armies that they out to be kind to the Romans. Miraculously those semi-Christian tribal peoples agreed not to take human life or molest the churches, if they could take anything else. Roman leaders were astonished that they kept their word. In this somewhat savage sense they were at least honorable savages because they were already Christians of a sort. Now, it is a curious fact today that many of the non-Western nations are led by Christians. Sukarno could quote the bible by the yard. Leaders that rail against us in the U.N. have all come from Christian schools. Kenyatta, that “known Communist” who came to power in Kenya, didn’t throw the missionaries out, as everyone expected. It turns out that he is kind of a Christian. So are 75% of the men in his government. He even invited missions to bring in teachers to man the public schools in Kenya. It’s a very curious situation all over the world: our political power is waning, but our Christianity doesn’t seem to be waning.

At this point, then, I would like to rephrase the question. The real question is not, “Are we living in a post-Western world?” That question seems inevitably to be answered in the positive. Just think, there doesn’t seem to be any power that is any longer exclusively our own. There is no weapon at our disposal that is not also in the hands of non-Western nations. Our birth rate is declining in sheer numbers. We have little real power. You say, well, we are still a powerful nation. We are more powerful than any other nation in history. Great. How powerful are we in Viet Nam? All the King’s horses and all the King’s men apparently cannot put even one little nation back together again. You say we have international industrial complexes in our hands. But our ownership of those properties is merely written on paper and the rest of our wealth at home is mainly invested in roads, building, and equipment, which is not exactly portable. You can’t cash them in, send them overseas to pay debts or buy off enemies. Our gold is gone. What would we do if the entire non-Western world simply, all of a sudden, said “Go Home, Stay Home, or Move Over?” I am not sure that we could forestall that event. Like the Romans we are increasingly unable, and perhaps even unwilling, to stand up to the non-Western world. A captive ambassador may release 40 terrorists. Sixteen hundred prisoners may decide a war. Lots of Westerners have said “Better Red than dead.” We may end up letting non-Western nations walk over us so long as they promise to spare us pain.

So, the real question is therefore not, “Do we live in a post-Western world?” But rather, “Do we live in a post-Christian world?” This is now much easier to answer, and it will be possible briefly to point out that Christianity has by no means collapsed or pulled back from the non-Western world, yet this is what was in the minds of some people when 2,000 missionaries were flown out of Congo in 1961. They assumed Christianity would collapse behind them. One person I heard at a missionary meeting said that a radio station in Liberia, about 2,000 miles to the west of Congo, was now the only Christian influence reaching into the Congo. That dear missionary woman, a good friend of mine, perhaps didn’t reflect on the fact that there were still 12,000 Christian churches left behind. And as it was pointed out later, hardly a single church missed a Sunday morning service, despite the absence of 2,000 missionaries.

The Congo tells us something else about the durability of Christianity. Early in this century, Simon Kimbangu preached the Gospel and for a short time before the Belgian authorities put him in jail, many flocked to hear him. He spent 38 years in jail where he finally died in 1951. Surely by 1961, when independence came his movement was dead? No, within a year the Kimbanguist Church had a million members and now some say it is 3,000,000. Note also that it is the new national leaders who are more tolerant of the various forms of Christianity than were the colonial powers.

Christianity is evidently different from Western civilization, and certainly different from Western political power. Our political power is exceedingly fragile and is now almost totally absent in the non-Western world. Our military power is very nearly useless, but somehow Christianity is there to stay. Our newspapers may not always tell the whole story. Remember how horrified we were when the Biafrans were finally defeated and we wondered what the Nigerians would do to those Biafrans? It turned out there were a whole lot of Christians on both sides, not the least of which was the head of the Nigerian central government, the son of a Nigerian Methodist preacher. General Gowan and his men probably did a better job in rehabilitation, in true Christian generosity and kindness in the treatment of Biafrans, than any victor in any civil war in history. Christianity is not drying up and blowing away.

Remember what happened in India. Many people assumed that when the missionaries left that the Christian church would not survive, but of course, that did not turn out to be true. In Latin American the church is growing five times as fast as the population. In the city of Seoul, Korea there are 1,000 Christian churches. In Africa as a whole 3% of the population was Christian in 1900. Today it is 30% and at the present rates of growth, without allowing for the apparent increase in growth rates, 46% of the population will be Christian in another 27 years. Nevertheless, in a 1960 UNESCO report 400 pages thick, describing the educational world of Africa, there was no reference to the fact that 85% of the schools in Africa at that date were run by Christian missions or churches. Thus the impact of the Gospel of Christ has been permanent, just as permanent as it was outside the empire prior to the fall of Rome. There is apparently nothing impermanent about it.

I am not predicting that Christianity is going to conquer the earth. I am merely saying that there is no hard evidence that it will not. I am not the one who is predicting! I am saying to those who predictions are negative that their facts are not straight, and that if you are going to have to predict, then on the basis of present data you have to be optimistic. Even in Russia Christianity is the despair of the Communists. There are three kinds of Christians in Russia today – Russian Orthodox, registered “sects” (like Baptists) and the underground church. All three groups are larger and far more dedicated than when the Communists took over fifth years ago. This doesn’t at all mean that the Communists have been “soft on Christians.” They have been diabolically cruel. Yet the facts are stubborn: there are more Pentecostals in Russia than there are members of the Communist party in the U.S., and there are less than one-third as many Communist party members, even in Russia, than there are people officially known to be Christians, in Russia.

But this is not time for Western Christians to coast. Let’s be glad that no other religion has even half as many adherents. Let’s take heart that Christianity is the one – the one – world religion that does not require people to learn another language or make outward changes in their ethnic inheritance in order to be acceptable to God. Let’s be glad that in practically every nation of the world Christians have a faster rate of growth than the general population. But there are still two thousand million human beings who go to bed at night without any confidence in the Living God as He is known in the person of Jesus Christ.

One final comment would be this: since many people think that we are living in a Post-Christian world, the one thing that we who are Westerners have got to ask ourselves is whether we ourselves as a matter of fact are living in a post-Christian world. Can it be that Christianity would girdle the globe while the world of our own lives, and our own families is effectively post-Christian? Have we somehow given up? Has the edge of our faith been taken off by the corrosive acids of disbelief and rancor and misguided pessimism in our society today? It is our faith, not our citizenship that makes us members of the largest human community in the world today. Let us fix our eyes on this world Christian fellowship rather than merely upon the uncertain political fortunes of the West. Only then will be able to avoid confusing the two questions, and be able to see that while our world may be increasingly post-Western, and to a great extent non-yet-Christian, it is certainly not post-Christian.