Historiographically, no better solvent can be found for dissolving the rust of Eurocentricity which corrodes the writing of Christian history than a polycentric approach open to voices from the global South, past and present. Only recently have we faced up to our preoccupation with missionary hagiography; Europeans (or Euro-Americans) were not the only ones doing the heavy lifting while everyone else stood idle. Nowadays, Eurocentrism is a cardinal sin; we grind our teeth at the sound of it. But try putting together a proper syllabus for a course in World Christianity without having access to a library stocked with primary sources in non-European as well as European languages, and the task may seem impossibly hard. Fortunately, the volume under review makes teaching much easier, thanks in no small part to the diligence of three editors, Koschorke for Asia, Ludwig for Africa and Delgado for Latin America. Their labours have produced a sourcebook of sufficient size and scope to sustain a whole course on its own without need of further supplementation.
Architecturally, the material is arranged by region, chronologically. Within one of five historical eras, they are then sorted out thematically under major headings (e.g., ‘Christians in Asia before the Arrival of the Portuguese’) and minor ones (‘St. Thomas Christians in India’, etc.), 317 in all. Additionally, brief but helpful introductions clarify the context of the texts which were selected; at the end, the source for each is cited and a bibliography for further reading recommended.
As I read, I kept a tally of sources and their provenance, indigenous or exogenous (namely European or Euro-American), to confirm or refute the claim of the editors (p. xxix) that their sourcebook ‘documents the voices of indigenous Christians’. Actually, it was about neck and neck, with a slight advantage on the side of individuals from the global North. Naturally, missionaries who were directly involved in Christianity's diffusion are cited most often; others are also included, merchants, military adventurers and travellers who happened to be in the global South and observed the faith communities emerging there.
Many of the items here are simply priceless, the solemn Franciscan–Aztec Dialogues, for instance, translated from Náhuatl in the 1550s when the Conquest was still a raw memory. Across the Atlantic, a letter dating to the same era from the Catholic monarch of the Congo complains that mission houses were being used to keep ‘women of ill repute’, bought as slaves (p. 152). An odd but interesting selection is a 1950s diatribe by Kim Il Sung, lambasting Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount; this exemplifies a demonisation of Christianity prevalent in North Korea even today. No comparable volume recognises the importance of including backtalk from Christianity's global South adversaries, ancient and modern. Historiographically, this has real importance; how a thing is (mis)perceived ought to be considered an aspect of what it is (as Robert Wilken ably demonstrates in Christians as the Romans Saw Them, Yale University Press, 1984).
Eurocentricity, however, is a hard and persistent problem to recognise and eradicate. There is no critical reflection, for instance, on which things might count as ‘documentation’. No doubt readers will wonder why Pentecostals were not allotted more space. But a more basic question might be: who speaks for traditional societies on all three continents where ‘oracy’ prevailed until literacy was imposed by colonisation and Christianisation? To his credit, Delgado includes Chilam Balam, a Mesoamerican specimen (Mayan). Still, why not include material artifacts? An 1890s Yoruba woodcarving of a missionary (Bible or pistol in hand; several exist) seems as good an example of a ‘document’ as anything inscribed or printed on paper.
