The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (review)

This volume is a historian’s witty, erudite, and provocative reflection on popular (as opposed to academic) biblical interpretation focusing mainly on Africa, although the terminology of “the Global South” is much more ambitious (and, indeed, the book-jacket photograph is taken from a location in Brazil). It relates to a specifically North American discussion: in The New Faces of Christianity Jenkins continues pushing a narrative he had begun in his controversial The Next Christendom (New York, 2002) and concluded in his analysis of the “religious crisis” in Europe, God’s Continent (New York, 2007).The argument of this well-researched trilogy on the global religious situation is not only that Christianity has moved south but also that a massive schism of historical proportions is in the making between the liberal North Atlantic minority and the more fundamentalist (“primitive”) variants of Christianity in the Global South. For the foreseeable future, Jenkins thinks, the big battalions will be with the crusading South and make life pretty uncomfortable for a northern Christianity that has made its peace with liberalism and secularism. Moribund and, at best, part of a creative minority in Europe, liberal Christianity’s role in the future of humankind will be limited, in particular with regard to the conflict between Christianity and Islam—perhaps a clear indication for the United States to search somewhere else for allies: the Christian South.

The main hypothesis of The New Faces means more bad news for liberal Bible reading in the wealthy North: a poverty-stricken and miracle-hunting Christian “Global South” took the blood and redemption talk of the Bible as its guide to daily life and, because of such cultural affinities with the biblical world, is more intimate with and “immediate” to the biblical text (and the “earliest traditions of the church,” [p. 180]). However, Jenkins has learnt from the criticism leveled against The Next Christendom and is quick to match generalizations such as this with an immediate disclaimer or a balanced analysis, notably in the last paragraph (p. 193) where Karl Barth has been lined up to warn against any immediacy between culture and biblical revelation. Yet, there can be little doubt that Jenkins does indeed regard the intimacy of the biblical interpretation of the South as legitimate and authentic, whereas he has considerably less sympathy for its selective and sanitized variants in the North. The problem with the view that context defines the authenticity of biblical interpretation is threefold: one, it may not be the “cultural affinities” but the faithful quest for joining the new people of God that constitute the bridge between text and context; two, Jenkins has privileged a particular context (that of deprivation and primal religiosity); and, three, the very principle of contextuality does not allow such privileging and hence legitimizes also the North Atlantic liberal interpretation. To discern authentic religious content and distinguish it from cultural baggage, we need theological criteria. But Jenkins does perhaps know all this. The New Faces is a most illuminating and inspiring book—a must read, in particular when one is of a different persuasion.