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I mean no disrespect to Marty's work when I say that little of the material presented, few of the examples, will come as any great surprise to readers with any background in Christian history. Its value lies instead in its overall construction, and the relative importance allotted to different times and regions, and he has clearly exercised enormous restraint in limiting coverage of Western-centered topics that he knows and loves—the Reformation, the 18th century Awakenings—in order to give due credit to non-Euro-American issues. Many will find the results startling, and that is very much to the good. To take an example, his North American chapter uses a sparse 28 pages to span the whole experience of Christianity in that region since 1492. In comparison, modern Africa receives 19 pages, modern Asia 18, both quite rational allocations in terms of the numbers of believers in those regions today and of their likely importance in the development of the faith in coming years. The Christian World is a bold attempt to make people rethink their basic assumptions of the where and when of a history they may assume they know all too well. To use a rather ugly word, it is a classic exercise in defamiliarization. Marty incidentally, as is well known, never employs ugly words or jargon, and writes throughout in admirably clear, intelligent prose.
Reading a book like Marty's raises many questions, especially about the amount of attention we devote to cherished topics. In a fair and balanced survey of Christian history, for instance, would the great revivals of the 18th-century Atlantic world deserve more attention than the very comparable movements of 20th-century Africa? Or is that a question that can only be answered by historians yet unborn?
In rethinking these diverse Christian worlds, furthermore, we need to reconstruct our sense of geography no less than of history, of space as well as time. Though maps rarely lie, in the sense of cartographers presenting data they know to be false, the way we choose to visualize information can give a radically distorted impression of reality. As an example, suppose we think of the first half of the Christian experience, the first millennium or so. Where would we properly look for the heart of Christian experience? When we think about the spread of Christianity, we commonly use maps focused on Europe and the Mediterranean, as we know intuitively that this was the scene of the most intense and important activity. If the Christian world has always been a largely European reality, then it makes sense to use Europe-centered maps, with the Levant off to the distant right-hand fringe. The message offered is that beyond the colored margins, Christianity never existed, or at least never mattered. Our maps don't include South America, because it is irrelevant to the story before 1492; by the same token, why should we include Asia or Africa?
As a useful alternative image, we can turn to the symbolic world maps that Christians commonly used through the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, which depicted the three continents as fairly equal lobes joined together in Jerusalem. Depicting the world in such simple geometric forms did not mean that early cartographers were ignorant or incompetent, as they were quite capable of drawing up highly accurate charts for practical navigation, but these maps rather carried a higher truth: Jerusalem was the center of the world, the natural site for Christ's act of self-sacrifice and redemption. These images also reflected a world in which Christianity had a strong presence across Asia and much of northern Africa. Criticizing traditional visual concepts of Christian history, Andrew Walls has suggested that, instead of placing a vital early Syrian Christian center like Edessa on the distant eastern fringes of Europe, it makes at least as much sense to locate it at the far west of an Asian map, in the lower left hand corner. He was not of course suggesting that such an Asian-focused interpretation would be complete or comprehensive, but it would no less accurate than the Eurocentric vision. Leaving Europe out of the story makes as much, or as little, sense as omitting Asia.
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