Tuesday, 3 November 2015

A Brief Moment

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The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission and Reception of Faith,
Andrew F. Walls, T&T Clark, 2002, page 78

Walls drops back into history and continues his story:

The Ephesian moment - the social coming together of people of two cultures to experience Christ - was quite brief. Circumstances - the destruction of the Jewish state in 70 CE, the scattering of the Jewish churc, the sheer success of the mission to the Gentiles - soon made the church monocultural again; and in the eastern Mediterranean the Christian movement became as overwhelmingly Hellenistic as once it had been overwhelmingly Jewish.

Perhaps Walls forgets or chooses to step over the behaviour of the church in distancing itself from its Jewish roots; the behaviour of the Gentile bishops and churches; the intervention of Constantine and the Council of Nicea.

Nevertheless, the end point Walls describes is essentially correct; the church has became devastatingly monocultural and the Ephesian moment passed.