The best part of school for me has always been the books! So many fantastic stories to “hear,” conversations to “listen in on,” and concepts to contemplate. As i go along, i hope to post (at the least) brief responses to some of these texts. Here is the response to The Changing Shape of Church History by Justo Gonzalez:
In the “Preface” of Justo Gonzalez’ The Changing Shape of Church History, the author reports that “the materials that comprise this book were developed as lectures delivered at various academic institutions.” [1] And this is exactly how it reads. Like Paul Revere exclaiming, “The British are coming! The British are coming!” Gonzalez does not hide his passion concerning the crucial nature of the changes occurring in the discipline of church history:
I can no longer read the past out of a single perspective or out of a single context. I must somehow listen to those voices from other centers and from the margins that speak from different perspectives and see a past that is not exactly the same as I have seen. In fact, I can no longer speak of a single past, for out of these many centers and many perspectives come many pasts…the entire discipline of church history might explode into a thousand fragments…[2]
I found Chapter One, in which Gonzalez uses the analogies of cartography and topography to illumine the readers’ understanding of his views concerning the limited scope of past church historians, engaging. I, too, have wondered about the curiously skewed view of “North Atlantic Christianity [as] the goal of church history.”[3] Why has there been this line of demarcation between those movements and people groups that were part of “church history” and those that were “missions?”[4] Indeed, as Gonzalez suggests, “the postmodern polycentric map of Christianity will no longer allow that.”[5]
I must admit that, after such a battle cry, I was anticipating the rest of the book to be less about the way church history used to be written and more about how to write church history now and in the near future. How will we pull off such a polycentric perspective? Can we?
However, as Philip Jenkins recommends, the book is a “succinct introduction to the study of church history”[6] and, though not as exciting as I had hoped, informative none-the-less. For example, in Chapter 5 Gonzalez discusses the distinction between “universal” and “cath’holic.”[7] As a person that spent her Protestant teen years “sneaking” into St. Barbara’s Catholic Church to receive holy communion at the risk of being found out, it was encouraging to be reminded that true “catholicism” is “that in which all have a place.”[8] I also appreciated his stern warning that we not allow “Western interpretation of the gospel” to be confused with “the gospel itself.”[9] In addition, the section on the “Egyptian” or “Common text” as compared to the “Western text” in Chapter 6 was intriguing.[10] Does the inconsistency of my being asked to preach in some churches, but only “give a talk” or “share my testimony” in others, ooze, like an infection, from this “Western revision”[11]?
As any of us that are not white males can attest, we have had to dig deep in the mines of written church history to scrape out a few flakes of wisdom from “our kind” of Christians. Gonzalez is correct in his assertion that “we study history because we believe that it somehow illumines our present and announces our future.”[12]
When the thick, golden veins we encounter contain only the words of the “Conqueror” we can lose hope. Yet, Gonzalez believes that with the current transition of church history from ethnocentric to “polycentric” and even “incarnate marginality,”[13] there may appear a church history replete with accounts of “service from the margin.”[14] Perhaps.
Yet, perhaps because there seemed to be little presentation of exactly how Gonzalez proposes this can and should come about, I was left wondering if, when future Christians look back on the work of 21st century church historians, they will indeed view a gloriously woven tapestry of polycentric church history, rich with multi-colored threads and a variety of patterns or they instead will find a hastily piled collection of mismatched place mats, like the ones found on a table at a yard sale.
I would love to read an expanded version of this book. Or perhaps the sequel, in which a group just like those Gonzalez describes – “Chinese, Russians, Poles, Mexicans, …women, sociologists, psychologists…” are, indeed, working out the ways in which they can be in “constant dialogue” and be open to “mutual correction.”[15] As I continue reading through the pages of the church histories as they have been handed to me, I do not find people with no regard for God or each other. Rather, I find a people saved but sinful…blessed, but blind. It makes me wonder if we really can do any better. And it makes me want to try.
For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. [16]
[1] Justo Gonzalez, The Changing Shape of Church History (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2002), vii.
[2] Ibid, 17.
[3] Ibid, 15.
[4] Ibid, 15.
[5] Ibid, 19.
[6] Ibid, back cover.
[7] Ibid, 71.
[8] Justo Gonzalez, The Changing Shape of Church History (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2002), 71.
[9] Ibid, 74.
[10]Ibid, 95.
[11] Ibid, 95.
[12] Ibid, 148.
[13] Ibid, 153.
[14] Ibid, 154.
[15] Ibid, 151.
[16]The Holy Bible : New Revised Standard Version.(Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989.) 1 Co 13:12-13