Part 2: Christendom and Biblical Interpretation

A. Introduction

In the first part of this series we examined the emergence of Christendom, identified some of its defining features, considered different assessments of this system, reflected briefly on its gradual demise and argued that we need to examine critically the Christendom mindset that continues to influence the way we think. In this part we will look at the important area of biblical interpretation, asking how the Christendom mindset has influenced the way the Bible was interpreted and applied, what alternatives there were in that area, and how we might interpret the Bible in post-Christendom.

One important proviso that must be noted as we proceed, however, is that the division of church history thus far into the three eras of pre-Christendom, Christendom and post-Christendom is to adopt a Eurocentric perspective. Since this summer school is taking place in Europe and our concern here is primarily with biblical interpretation, mission and church life in Britain, this perspective may not be inappropriate, but we need to recognise:

• The story of European Christendom is only part of the story of the church, and our language needs to reflect this. Thus we might rewrite Alan Roxburgh's comment quoted towards the end of the last part as follows: "The fourth and twentieth centuries form bookends marking transition points in the history of the church in Europe."
  
  
• It has been claimed that in the Middle Ages the Christian community in Asia was more extensive, both numerically and geographically, than European Christendom. It is certainly possible that the experience of these Asian communities as missionary minority groups in a pluralistic, multi-religious context might have significant lessons to teach Christians today in a not dissimilar context today.
  
  
• The pervasive and persistent bias towards a Eurocentric perspective on church history (and many other subjects) must be challenged - both to do justice to the full story and in recognition that the centre of gravity of the global church is no longer in Europe but in the southern hemisphere. Many of the interesting developments in biblical interpretation, mission and ecclesiology are taking place in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

So, as we explore biblical interpretation, mission and ecclesiology, we need not only to reflect on the influence of Christendom but also listen to other voices from beyond Christendom - communities who lived before the Christendom shift, communities from areas of the globe that Christendom did not reach, and communities on the edges of Christendom who rejected the Christendom mindset (often at great cost). If we are now a church on the margins of society, we may find most help from conversations with other marginal communities of today and yesterday. In this section we will refer in passing to these various perspectives, but we will have time only to listen to one set of marginal voices - the dissenting groups on the edges of Christendom.

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