Too Western?

It is a rather risky matter to assess the “non-Western Jesus” from a Western perspective. After all, what is to be the basis for such an assessment – the author's Western framework? In connection with this question, Philip Jenkins makes use of the following illustration. Suppose that in the seventh or eighth century – the time of Willibrord's mission to Western Europe – a traveller from distant Western Europe gave a report on the rise of a new Christianity there to the theologians living in the centre of Christianity at the time (Syria and Mesopotamia). They would probably have been very enthusiastic about the growth of faith in these areas that were considered to be stubbornly barbarian (= unbelieving). Undoubtedly, they would also have been very curious about the nature of the new Christianity: Were they Antiochenes or Alexandrians, Dyophysites or Monophysites, Nestorians or Eutychians? How would they have looked upon the iconoclasm that had broken out in the East in the meantime? They would probably have been disappointed to hear that not all their central questions were central for those new Christians in distant Western Europe. Consequently, they would have wondered if it was truly a matter of a new form of Christianity or a remarkable synthesis of Christian and Celtic, German and Saxon ideas. Undoubtedly, many would have used the word syncretism immediately in a negative sense.

A Western theologian could react in a similar way now to the many forms of non-Western theology. Western theology continues to be stamped by the concepts that became current during the sixteenth-century controversy between Rome and the Reformation.