Notes

First Paragraph:
Nigerian pastor Daniel Ajayi-Adeniran is a missionary to the U.S. with his mission field in the Bronx.
Church he reps, The Redeemed Church of God, began in Nigeria in 1952.
Church has acquired millions of members in Nigeria and boasts a missionary network with a presence in 100 countries.
According to its leader, the church was “made in heaven, assembled in Nigeria, exported to the world.”
Church is not alone.
Secularism and materialism born of the Scientific Revolution and modern life have eroded religious faith in the West, many believers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America have felt called to reinvigorate a declining Christianity in Europe and North America.
In a remarkable reversal of an earlier pattern, they now seek to “reevangelize” the West, from which they originally received the faith.
After all, more than 60% of the world’s professing Christians now live outside Europe and North America, and, within the U.S., 1 in 6 catholic diocesan priests and 1 in 3 seminary students are foreign-born.
For example, 100s’ of Filipino priests, nuns, and lay workers now serve churches in the West.
Tokunboh Adeyemo
Another Nigerian church leader seeking to minister to an “increasingly godless West.”
Declared “We couldn’t just throw up pour hands and see these churches turned into nightclubs or mosques.”
Early Modern Era of World History
Gave birth to 2 intersecting cultural trends that continue to play out in the 21st century.
1st was the spread of Christianity to Asians, Africans, and Native Americans, some of whom now seem to be returning the favor.
2nd lay in the emergence of a modern scientific outlook, which sharply challenged Western Christianity even as it too acquired a global presence.
So alongside new empires and new patterns of commerce, the early moderns centuries also witnessed novel cultural transformations that likewise connected distant peoples.
Riding the currents of European empire building and commercial expansion, Christianity was established solidly in the Americas and Philippines; far more modestly in Siberia, China, Japan, and India; and hardly at all within the vast and still growing domains of Islam.
A cultural tradition largely limited to Europe in 1500 now became a genuine world religion, spawning a multitude of cultural encounters.
While this ancient faith was spreading, a new understanding of the universe and a new approach to knowledge were taking shape among European thinkers of the Scientific Revolution, giving rise to another kind of cultural encounter – that between science and religion.
Science was a new and competing worldview, and for some it became almost a new religion. In time, it grew into a defining feature of global modernity, achieving a worldwide acceptance that exceeded that of Christianity or any other religious tradition.
Although Europeans were central players in the globalization of Christianity and the emergence of modern science, they did not act alone in the cultural transformations of he early modern era.
Asian, African, and Native American peoples largely determined how Christianity would be accepted, rejected, or transformed as it entered new cultural environments.
Science emerged within and international and not simply a European context, and it met varying receptions in different parts of the world.
Islam continued a long pattern of religious expansion and renewal, even as Christianity began to compete with it as a world religion.
Buddhism maintained its hold in much of East Asia, as did Hinduism in South Asia and numerous smaller-scale religious traditions in Africa.
Europeans themselves were certainly affected by the many “new worlds” that they encountered.
The cultural interactions of the early modern ere, in short, did not take place on a one-way street.
The Globalization of Christianity
Despite its Middle Eastern origins and its earlier presence in many parts of the Afro-Asian world
Christianity largely limited to Europe at beginning of early modern era.
In 1500, the world of Christendom stretched from Spain and England in the west to Russia in the east
With small and beleaguered communities of various kinds in
Egypt
Ethiopia
Southern India
Central Asia
Internally, Christianity was seriously divided between the Roman Catholics of Western and Central Europe and the Eastern Orthodox of Eastern Europe and Russia.
Externally, it was very much on the defensive against an expansive Islam.
Muslims had ousted Christian Crusaders from their toeholds in the Holy Land by 1300, and with the Ottoman seizure of Constantinople in 1453, they had captured the prestigious capital of Eastern Orthodoxy.
The Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1529 marked a Muslim advance into the heart of Central Europe.
Except in Spain and Sicily, which had recently been reclaimed for Christendom after centuries of Muslim rule, the future, it must have seemed, lay with Islam rather than Christianity.
A Map of time:
1453: Ottoman Conquest of Constantinople
1469-1539: Life of Guru Nanak; beginning of Sikh tradition
1472-1529: Life of Wang Yangmin in China
1498-1547: Life of Mirabai, bhakti poet of India
1517: Luther’s 95 These; beginning of Protestant Reformation
1543: Publication of Copernicus’s master work about a sun-centered universe
1545-1563: Council of Trent
1560’s: Take Onqoy movement in Peru
1582-1610: Matteo Ricci in China
1593: Edict of Nantes proclaiming religious toleration in France
Early 1600’s: European Missionaries expelled from Japan
1618-1648: Thirty Years’ War in Europe
1642-1727: Life of Isaac Newton; culmination of European Scientific Revolution
1700’s: European Enlightment
1721: Christian missionary preaching banned in China
1740-1818: Wahhabi movement of Islamic reform in Arabia
Western Christendom Fragmented: The Protestant Reformation
As if these troubles were not enough, in the early 16th century the Protestant Reformation shattered the unit of Roman Catholic Christianity, which for the previous 1,000 years had provided the cultural and organizational foundation of Western European Civilization.
Reformation began in 1517 when a German priest, Martin Luther (1483-1546), publicly invited debate about various abuses within the Roman Catholic Church by issuing a document, known as the Ninety-Five These, allegedly nailing it to the door of a church in Wittenberg.
In itself this was nothing new, for many people were critical of the luxurious life of the popes, the corruption and immorality of some clergy, the Church’s selling of indulgences (said to remove the penalties for sin), and other aspects of church life and practice.
What made Luther’s protest potentially revolutionary, however, was its theological basis.
A troubled and brooding man anxious about his relationship with God, Luther recently had come to a new understanding of salvation, which held that it came through faith alone.
Neither the good works of the sinner nor the sacraments of the Church had any bearing on the eternal destiny of the soul, for faith was a free gift of God, graciously granted to his needy and undeserving people.
To Luther, the source of these beliefs, and of religious authority in general, was not the teaching of the Church, but the Bible alone, interpreted according to the individual’s conscience.
All of this challenged the authority of the Church and called into question the special position of the clerical hierarchy and of the pope in particular.
In sixteenth-century Europe, this was the stuff of revolution.
Contrary to Luther’s original intentions, his ideas provoked a massive schism within the world of Catholic Christendom, for they came to express a variety of political, economic, and social tensions as well as religious differences.
Some kings and princes, many of whom had long disputed the political authority of the pope, found in these ideas a justification for their own independence and an opportunity to gain the lands and taxes previously held by the Church.
In the Protestant idea that all vocations were of equal merit, middle-class urban dwellers found a new religious legitimacy for their growing role in society, since the Roman Catholic Church was associated in their eyes with the rural and feudal world of aristocratic privilege.
For common people, who were offended by the corruption and luxurious living of some bishops, abbots, and popes, the new religious ideas served to express their opposition to the entire social order, particularly in a series of German peasant revolts in the 1520s.
Although large numbers of women were attracted to Protestantism, Reformation teachings and practices did not offer them a substantially greater role in the church or society.
In Protestant-dominated areas, the veneration of Mary and female saints ended, leaving the male Christ figure as the sole object of worship.
Protestant opposition to celibacy and monastic life closed the convents, which had offered some women an alternative to marriage.
Nor were Protestants (except the Quakers) any more willing than Catholics to offer women an official role within their churches.
The importance that Protestants gave to reading the Bible for oneself stimulated education and literacy for women, but given the emphasis on women as wives and mothers subject to male supervision, they had little opportunity to use that education outside of the family.
Reformation thinking spread quickly both within and beyond Germany, thanks in large measure to the recent invention of the printing press.
Luther’s many pamphlets and his translation of the New Testament into German were soon widely available. “God has appointed the Printing Press to preach, whose voice the pope is never able to stop,” declared one Reformation leader.
As the movement spread to France, Switzerland, England, and elsewhere, it also splintered, amoeba-like, into a variety of competing Protestant churches—
Lutheran, Calvinist, Anglican, Quaker, Anabaptist— many of which subsequently subdivided, producing a bewildering array of Protestant denominations.
Each was distinctive, but none gave allegiance to Rome or the pope.
Thus to the divided societies and the fractured political system of Europe was now added the potent brew of religious difference, operating both within and between states.
For more than thirty years (1562–1598), French society was torn by violence between Catholics and the Protestant minority known as Huguenots.
On a single day, August 24, 1572, Catholic mobs in Paris massacred some 3,000 Huguenots, and thousands more perished in provincial towns in the weeks that followed.
Finally, a war-weary monarch, Henry IV, issued the Edict of Nantes (1598), which granted a substantial measure of religious toleration to French Protestants, though with the intention that they would soon return to the Catholic Church. The culmination of European religious conflict took shape in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), a Catholic–Protestant struggle that began in the Holy Roman Empire but eventually engulfed most of Europe. It was a horrendously destructive war, during which, scholars estimate, between 15 and 30 percent of the German population perished from violence, famine, or disease. Finally, the Peace of Westphalia (1648) brought the conflict to an end, with some reshuffling of boundaries and an agreement that each state was sovereign, authorized to control religious affairs within its own territory. Whatever religious unity Catholic Europe had once enjoyed was now permanently splintered.