In the first chapter of this book, Lamin Sanneh gives us a broad, diachronic survey of Christianity from the point of origin of Western imperial undertakings. Prior to this point in history, Christianity saw persecution and was placed under "penal surveillance." (17) At this time Christianity during its inception, while maintaining critical distinction, took on much of its contiguous cultural elements: namely, Hellenism. The major point of this chapter, is that Christianity had been a force of minority that came to its inception not through some legal forces, but rather instead of legal obstacles.The second chapter examines Christianity from an Islamic perspective. While both adhere to a strictly ascetic mode of life, namely the call to maintain a certain purity in a perishing generation, in its proliferation Christianity encountered a historical stalemate against the Islamic faith. Notwithstanding the continuously, mutually conflictive stances there had been minor exceptions to this mutual barricade: "Al- Kindí spoke uncompromisingly about how anyone who sought truth that there is nothing of higher value than truth itself. That sentiment had parallels in Christian thought, and it was not surprising that, to the shock of fellow Muslims, al-Kandí wrote Apology for Christianity." (72-73)
The third chapter illuminates the colonial aspects of the expansion of Christianity, and the often, related enterprise of the transatlantic slave trade, exploitative structures such as fazendas, and other critical inconsistencies such as: "unholy greed for worldly wealth and the sins of the flesh..." (91) made vocal by Peruvian descendant of an Inca chief. Scores of inconsistencies are recorded within the pretext of Christendom, practices that far contradict the gospel message its proponents wielded, throughout South America during the 1500s and, West Africa during the 1800s.
The fourth chapter delves into the unfortunate cooperation marked throughout the history of Africa for one, between colonialist interests and mission. Furthermore, the Western imperialist cultural dominance was prevalent with its marks still lingering today: "In a relatively short space of time, missionaries completely subdued Creek Town and the adjoining country. Missionary ladies took the local girls and fitted them in Victorian clothes, thus imposing through its women the constraints and conceits their Western culture deemed appropriate to the gospel." (133) More recently, Albert Schweitzer who is celebrated in the West as an icon of humility and a "post-Enlightenment wonder," has a sharply contrasting evaluation from the African evaluation of "towering aloofness" (140) while, David Livingstone is noted as a distinguished for his efforts of cultural reciprocity: "...Livingstone adopted the cause of the Xhosa as his own. He said that, while England sympathized with the struggles for freedom that she so well enjoyed, she had inconsistently been trying to crush the Xhosa whose struggle for freedom was every bit as important as that of the Magyars of Hungary." (141-142)
The fifth chapter begins with the eighteenth-century Pietist movement in Europe, "taking a confessional stance against worldliness in the church, demanding repossession of the religion's moral autonomy against the compromisers (colonial and other interests that run contrary to the "purity" of faith, and the church). The revival triggered a movement of translation into the vernacular languages by which a sustainable ecclesiology was made evident without foreign mission control. This promised the possibility, of a non-Western interference in the development of Christianity in their indigenous setting: "...Westermann advanced reasons why vernacular translation was essential to the whole psychology of recasting Christianity in the idiom and psyche of an indigenous culture, translation was empowerment." (178) Sanneh concludes with a note on how we are on the "Post-Western Fault Line," as indicated as emergent churches in their current form in Africa, and also in China.
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