Constantino de la Fuente (San Clemente, 1502–Seville, 1560). From acclaimed cathedral preacher to condemned ‘Lutheran’ heretic. By Frances Luttikhuizen. (Refo500 Academic Studies, 88.) Pp. 292. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2022. €120. 978 3 525 56502 5

Abstract

standing of Christianity; ‘dual religious participation’ in which people retain commitments to separated Christian and indigenous religious spheres; and ‘selective acculturation’ which embraces elements of Christianity specifically because they are foreign. Lindenfeld reserves special attention for an eighth mode, ‘concentration of spirituality’, which he places at the centrepoint of his schema and which comes closest to a master theme for the book. World histories have tended to conform to a narrative of an evolution from diffuse local cultural forms to ever more homogeneity, from worlds of ‘enchantment’, in Weberian terms, to a singular world of rationality and conformity. The study of local responses to Christianity suggest a much more complex and pluralistic reality. All religious traditions, Lindenfeld argues, exhibit a tension between concentrated expressions in the forms of religious offices, collective rituals, core mythologies and so forth and the diffuse more personal and private experiences of individuals. Engagement with mission Christianity brought not only new foci for concentrated spirituality but also shifts in the more diffused ways people experienced and expressed spirituality. In more of a coda than a conclusion, Lindenfeld contests the idea that the Western world is becoming ever more secular. Instead, taking an expansive view of religion, he argues instead that the trend has been towards an ever more diffused personal spirituality. The inherent tension that he suggests is at the heart of every religious tradition now plays out on a scale, as Churches continue to expand in the global South even as they decline in the West. The short conclusion provides one of the rare instances where Lindenfeld attempts to generalise beyond regional levels. Suggesting that his schema of ‘strategies’ should be deployed as a ‘vocabulary’ rather than a typology, for the most part he draws on it lightly, more as commentary than analysis. Each chapter presents an informative synthesis of regional scholarship enlivened by the author’s often acute insights on the myriad ways local peoples responded to the challenges and potentialities in their encounters with Western Christianity. The general picture Lindenfeld presents, however, is for the most part fragmentary and diffuse. World Christianity and indigenous experience does not so much serve as a model for a comprehensive approach to World Christianity that acknowledges the contributions of the non-Westerners who today make up the majority of its adherents but rather as evidence of how challenging that goal remains.