Global Evangelicalism by Donald M. Lewis

Author:Donald M. Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2014-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

The Death of Colonial Christendom

At the time of the conquest of America the general assumption in the Iberian Peninsula was that the destinies of Spain and Portugal were inseparable from that of the Roman Catholic Church. Seen from the perspective of the medieval concept of Christendom as defined by Pablo Richard, it was “a specific historical model of insertion of the institutional church into social reality, a model that basically uses the political power (political society) and the hegemonic power (civil society) of the dominant classes.”3 These nations were regarded as God’s chosen instruments to accomplish his purpose for the whole world. Accordingly, the conquest of the so-called New World was a “crusade” opening the way for the conversion of the heathen to Christ, a necessary step to fulfill the ideal of establishing a Christian kingdom under the auspices of the Roman Catholic sovereigns and the power of the pope. Consequently, the conquerors engaged in this religious-political project with a spirit that many critics saw as much more in harmony with Islam than Christianity.

The missionary strategy adopted by Catholics during the conquest was consistent with the ideological premises of Christendom, according to which both military conquest and evangelization worked together toward the formation of a Christian society under the tutelage of the church. As John A. Crow put it,

While other countries were content to establish themselves under Protestant or mixed Catholic and Protestant regimes which would grow toward religious liberalism, the Iberian countries created the Church-State type of authoritarian absolutism in which government and religious doctrine became inseparable. Other countries made of religion a national expression, but Spain and Portugal maintained unbroken belief in the holy internationalism of the Catholic Church.4

This “authoritarian absolutism” was the most decisive factor in the history of Latin America, not only in regard to religion, but also to culture, politics, society and economics.

The form of Christianity established in Latin America at the end of the fifteenth century was deeply shaped by the “evangelization” carried out by the conquerors in association with the military. The church was conceived as essentially a top-down, hierarchical and sacramental institution, rather than a community of followers of Jesus Christ from below. Thus, it was crucial to subject all the social structures to the authority of the church, that is, the “Christianizing” of every human institution. Christianity functioned as a political religion used to legitimize the colonial establishment. As a result, what took place was in some ways less evangelization in the sense of spreading the gospel and more a transplanting of church structures closely associated with the sociopolitical structures. The result was that the main weakness of the colonial ecclesiastical model was its dependence on the secular order and the insufficient attention given to people at the grassroots. Rather than being a liberating community for the common people, the church was linked with the dominant system and often served as an agent of oppression. The assessment of Chilean Catholic theologian Pablo Richard is apt: “The church shaped by colonial Christendom

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