The Break-up of Early World Christianity and the Great Ecumenical Failure

Abstract

Christianity has from its beginning been global in principle, and for many centuries was so in practice. In the first six or seven centuries of Christian history, Christian presence spread across the greater part of the then known world – the vast landmass that constitutes Europe, Asia and Africa – and constituted a world Christianity which was multicentric, multilingual and multicultural. But the doctrinal disputes of the fifth century led to the alienation of large numbers of Coptic- and Syriac-speaking Christians from those who thought and spoke in Greek and Latin, and the ecumenical tragedy of the sixth century saw the great multicultural church divided along lines of language and culture. We are now in a new age of world Christianity – an even larger and more diverse reality than that of the first Christian centuries, but like it, multicentric, multilingual, multicultural. The acid test for Christianity in the twenty-first century will be whether the break-up of that first age of world Christianity can now be repaired.