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This department has been created to showcase stimulating opinions, interviews, and other writings from some of our sister publications at CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Inc. In coming issues you can expect readings on trends affecting the church from LEADERSHIP journal, instructive tales of the past from CHRISTIAN HISTORY, and incisive commentary from BOOKS & CULTURE.

We inaugurate the series with an excerpt from the November/December issue of B&C. In his review essay, historian Mark Noll summarizes the thought experiment that opens missiologist Andrew Walls's new book The Missionary Movement in Christian History (Orbis). For Noll, this passage wonderfully captures the significance of Walls's larger thesis that "the whole history of Christianity is a series of successive adaptations of the faith to local situations."

Imagine an alien savant who wants to study Christianity and who is able to visit planet Earth at widely spaced intervals. His first visit occurs in A.D. 37 at a gathering of believers in Jerusalem where the ways in which this church differs from a Jewish sect are hard to discern. The Christians honor the seventh day, meet in the temple, read from the Hebrew Scriptures, and circumcise their sons. Only by unusual interpretations of parts of those Hebrew Scriptures, specifically by relating Jewish accounts of the Messiah, the Suffering Servant, and the Son of Man to Jesus of Nazareth, do these Jews show that they are, in fact, Christians.

Next, the extraterrestrial returns in the year 325 to the little town of Nicea in what is now modern Turkey where a great gathering of Christian leaders is taking place. Jews and the marks of Judaism are nowhere to be seen. Rather, the believers come from throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond. And they are preoccupied with minute, but also obviously momentous, discussions about how to understand Jesus in the thought forms of Hellenistic culture.

The visitor is back in about three centuries, this time to the coast of Ireland. Here he encounters a crowd of monks undergoing several kinds of privations, some self-inflicted, some arising from efforts to spread the message of Jesus to unappreciative listeners. Some have forsaken all fellowship with other humans and sit quietly in caves by the sea. The religious issue that consumes them is how to determine the exact date on which to celebrate Easter.

Now leap forward more than a millennium to 1840 and a great meeting of prosperous Londoners in Exeter Hall. They are convened to discuss how best to advance Christianity, along with commerce and civilization, in the continent of Africa. Their prosperity could not be in starker contrast to the poverty of the Irish monks, their lack of concern for anything Jewish as clear as at Nicea, their centrality in their society's power structure (which is at the pinnacle of all such powers in the world) as evident as was the marginality of the Christians of A.D. 37 in relationship to the might of Rome.

Finally, come with our alien to Lagos, Nigeria, in 1980. Walls describes what the visitor sees:

A white-robed group is dancing and chanting through the streets on their way to their church. They are informing the world at large that they are Cherubim and Seraphim; they are inviting people to come and experience the power of God in their services. They claim that God has messages for particular individuals and that his power can be demonstrated in healing.

What such an extraterrestrial visitor would note immediately is that Christianity does not possess a single, sharply defined cultural essence. Rather, it appears in different forms in different centuries in different places. If the visitor had come to Nicea in 1840, there would have been virtually nothing Christian to see at all. If he had returned to London in 1980, there would have been much Christian architecture, but rituals of Christian practice far less expansive than on view in Nigeria.

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March 3 1997, Vol. 41, No. 3