Is Christianity a Western religion?

What the Bible says

Begin with the map. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, grew up in Nazareth, and was crucified and raised in Jerusalem. All of it is Asia, and the whole Old Testament was written in the Middle East. After his resurrection Jesus said:

and in His name repentance and forgiveness of sins will be proclaimed to all nations, beginning in Jerusalem.

Luke 24:47

The gospel starts in Jerusalem and moves outward to every people. When the Spirit came at Pentecost, the crowd included easterners: "Parthians, Medes, and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia" (Acts 2:9), and Africans from "Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene" (Acts 2:10). Each heard "the wonders of God in our own tongues" (Acts 2:11). From the first day the gospel was heard in many languages from many lands.

Acts 8 introduces an African. A court official of the queen of the Ethiopians "had gone to Jerusalem to worship" (Acts 8:27) and on the way home was reading Isaiah. Philip told him about Jesus, and he was baptized. The "Ethiopia" here is generally understood to be the ancient kingdom of Cush on the upper Nile rather than modern Ethiopia. And it was at Antioch, a city in Syria, that the disciples were first called Christians (Acts 11:26).

The gospel did travel west too. Paul went to Macedonia, Greece and Rome, and Europe became an early home of the church. But that does not make the gospel Western. At the council in Jerusalem, James judged that "we should not cause trouble for the Gentiles who are turning to God" (Acts 15:19). Gentiles did not have to put on Jewish culture to follow Christ. That decision set a principle: the gospel is not tied to the clothing of any one culture. Scripture’s final picture says the same.

After this I looked and saw a multitude too large to count, from every nation and tribe and people and tongue, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.

Rev 7:9

Isaiah had already promised this. God says to his servant:

I will also make You a light for the nations, to bring My salvation to the ends of the earth.

Isa 49:6

The church's witness

Church history points the same way. Around AD 112 Pliny the Younger reported to the emperor that Christians were spread through the towns and countryside of northern Asia Minor, today’s Turkey Pliny the Younger, Letters 10.96. Syriac-speaking churches moved east into Persia. Armenia is traditionally held to have embraced Christianity as a nation in the early fourth century, and the kingdom of Aksum, in what is now northern Ethiopia, followed in the fourth century. In south-western India there is an ancient church that traces itself to the apostle Thomas; historians differ on that origin, but the community is very old.

In China, a missionary of the Church of the East reached the Tang capital in 635. A stele set up in 781 records this in Chinese and Syriac Xi’an Stele. That is more than twelve hundred years before Protestant missionaries came to Korea. Africa shaped the theology of the West as well. Athanasius defended the Nicene faith in Christ's full deity in Alexandria, monastic life began in the Egyptian desert, and Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine taught in Carthage and Hippo in North Africa.

Matthew Henry, on Acts 8, writes that "Sometimes God opens a door of opportunity to his ministers in very unlikely places" Matthew Henry. On Revelation 7:9 he speaks of the worship of heaven and urges, "we ought to begin it now" Matthew Henry.

Korea is a striking case. Korean Catholicism began before any priest or missionary arrived: scholars read books in Chinese and embraced the faith on their own, and in 1784 Yi Seung-hun was baptized in Beijing and returned to found a community. It began without a priest, and most of those who died in the persecutions that followed were lay people. Korean Protestantism began when Koreans such as Seo Sang-ryun and Yi Ung-chan, with the Scottish missionary John Ross, translated the Bible into Korean in Manchuria. Luke and John appeared in 1882 and the whole New Testament in 1887. Seo brought these Scriptures into Korea and led a gathering of Korean believers at Sorae in Hwanghae, traditionally dated to about 1883 (the sources vary), before resident missionaries arrived in 1884-85. Of the 33 national representatives who signed the 1919 independence declaration, 16 were Christians, a sign that the faith had become a Korean story.

And today? In the early twentieth century roughly two in three Christians lived in Europe. Now, by common estimates, well over half, perhaps nearer two in three, live in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The centre of gravity has moved south and east.

In the original languages

The "nations" of Matthew 28:19 is the Greek ethnos (ἔθνος), closer to "peoples" than to modern nation-states. Revelation 7:9 uses the same word: "every nation." In God’s promise to Abraham, "all the families of the earth will be blessed through you," the Hebrew is mishpachah (מִשְׁפָּחָה), "family" or "clan" (Gen 12:3). From the start the blessing was never meant to stay with one people.

"Christian" is Christianos (Χριστιανός), first used at Antioch. The ending -ianos is a Latin form meaning roughly "belonging to Christ’s people." The name was born not in Rome or Europe but in a Syrian city.

Common objections

"Western missions came with empire. Isn’t Christianity a tool for spreading Western culture?" There is a painful truth here. In many places missions and colonial rule were tangled together, some missionaries despised local culture, and even the Korean church took over Western denominational structures and customs wholesale. The church should admit this, not deny it. But the gospel mostly spread through local people. In Korea the Bible was translated by Koreans, and in Africa and China the church grew after the missionaries left, sometimes after they were expelled. A mere tool of a foreign power does not explain that.

"The creeds and theology are Greek and Roman. So it is Western." The New Testament was written in Greek, and the creeds use words from Greek philosophy. But Greek was the common language of the eastern Mediterranean, of Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt, not of today’s West. The content of the New Testament comes from the Hebrew Scriptures, and the gospel was translated very early into Syriac, Coptic, Armenian and Ethiopic. Fitting into the language of any culture is part of what the gospel is.

"Doesn’t it ask Koreans to abandon their traditions?" This is a real difficulty. The gospel illuminates every culture, but it also judges every culture. Some things are received with thanks and some must change. Where the line falls is disputed even among Christians, and ancestral rites are the main example (Can Christians take part in ancestral rites (jesa)?).

Going further

To say Christianity is not a Western religion is not to run down the West. It says that the gospel arrives as a stranger in every land and becomes the possession of its people. Western culture stands under the gospel’s judgment just as much as any other. If Christianity has felt foreign to you, you can ask whether the strangeness comes from the gospel itself or from the way and history in which it reached you.

You might ask yourself: Have I divided faith into "ours" and "theirs"? What does it mean to me that Jesus came as a Middle Eastern Jew? What do I keep in my church because it is biblical, and what because it is Western?

To read further, see Why Christianity and not another religion? and How did we get the Bible?