“Many scholars of Christianity right now are interested in viewing their subject in terms of both world history and lived experience on the ground. They want to think outside Western frameworks as much as possible (while not necessarily rejecting those frameworks). They want to understand the rich diversity of Christian life present in different times and places, not simply the history of church councils or leaders, as in traditional ‘church history.’” —Joseph T. Stuart
Editor’s note: We recently conducted an interview with Dr. Joseph T. Stuart, editor of the newly published Milestone Documents of Christianity. Joseph is Professor of History and Fellow in Catholic Studies at the University of Mary in Bismarck, ND, where he lives with his wife, Barbara, and their four children. He is the author of Christopher Dawson: A Cultural Mind in the Age of the Great War, The Church and the Age of Reformations, and Rethinking the Enlightenment: Faith in the Age of Reason.
Milestone Documents of Christianity is available in print and ebook form directly from Schlager Group or via your favorite wholesaler. It is also included in the Schlager Digital Library, our comprehensive primary source collection designed for Academic libraries.
1) With the new Milestone Documents of Christianity, what were your overall goals in developing the list of documents to be covered? What kind of balance/approach were you trying to achieve that might be unique to this publication?
[JS]I am really excited about this project! It is a unique publication because it is aimed at a wide audience, and not necessarily a Christian one. Each document is accompanied by expert and scholarly commentary but is accessible to the general, educated public—including upper-level high school and college students. The arrangement of documents is chronological, but the Introduction brings out themes—like law or martyrdom—that one can follow in the sources. Grounded in their many years of experience in primary source education, Schlager Group did a remarkable job with illustrations and fact boxes and glossaries that make these documents accessible and come alive.
I had two goals in mind when selecting the primary sources for this publication. One was to present as many documents as possible illustrative of world Christianity. The other was to include documents demonstrating the formation of Christian culture through diverse interaction of Christianity with native cultural materials. I faced a certain tension in these goals because the first emphasized a universal process normally associated with missionary work and the other focused on particular inculturations of faith in time and place. In reality, however, I found that these two goals often overlapped because the concept of “world Christianity” as developed by historian Lamin Sanneh views the spread of Christianity around the world primarily as a grassroots movement in which local inculturation is continually happening. Still, there is a certain tension here that makes for a unique publication.
2) What topics/issues on the list are particularly hot or burgeoning in terms of current interest among scholars right now?
I would say many scholars of Christianity right now are interested in viewing their subject in terms of both world history and lived experience on the ground. They want to think outside Western frameworks as much as possible (while not necessarily rejecting those frameworks). They want to understand the rich diversity of Christian life present in different times and places, not simply the history of church councils or leaders, as in traditional “church history.” This collection is consciously organized according to these current interests in the world and cultural history of Christianity.
3) Were there any documents that you included that were new to you and particularly surprising or noteworthy?
Did you know that the Italian missionary Matteo Ricci dressed in the robes of a Confucian scholar when he lived and worked in China? Or that the first woman in the world to receive a doctoral degree at a university, Elena Piscopia, was a Benedictine oblate? Or that when a visiting preacher froze during a service in 1819, unable to speak further, Jarena Lee spoke up from the congregation to deliver the sermon instead? Lee became the first woman preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the first American Black woman to publish an autobiography. There are fascinating documents in this collection related to these surprising facts. These are found alongside selections from widely known documents in the history of Christianity, like the Gospel of John, Augustine’s City of God, and the documents of Vatican II. The combination of obscure documents revealing intimate details of diverse Christian lives across the centuries with “classical” documents shaping the life and thought of the Christian tradition make this a really fun collection.
4) Why do you feel it’s important to present a multitude of perspectives through these primary sources?
One of the amazing things about the great world religions like Christianity or Islam is that they are like giant rivers flowing through time joining the many streams of different cultures into a certain unity. They sometimes flood their banks and at other times restrict due to drought, but they never cease drawing very different peoples—who retain many of their differences—into a common worldview and shared way of life. This is an astonishing fact about the religious history of the world because it contradicts so many of our modern, materialist assumptions.
Immersing ourselves in the different perspectives found in these primary sources only highlights the amazing power of Christianity, in particular, to form a common basis for innumerable human lives. This process is never perfect; the wars of religion in Europe during the Age of Reformations come to mind. But even during those wars, Christian Europeans remained (grumpy) brothers and sisters in their faith. Beneath their messy disagreements, they shared common assumptions about God, human beings, and the world—assumptions which eventually were articulated by the twentieth-century ecumenical movement. Seeing a certain unity behind a multitude of perspectives can, I think, give us hope in a highly diverse and pluralistic world today that sometimes seems ready to tear itself apart.
5) How does this publication present a modern approach?
This publication is not only organized according to contemporary concerns for world history of Christianity and daily lived experience (culture) of Christians, but it also includes Christian historiography from Eusebius and Augustine to Bede and Dawson and Sanneh. How do Christians think about themselves in time? How do they theorize about historical change and the meaning of history as a whole? This self-awareness is characteristic of a modern approach to history—or, I should say, a postmodern approach, concerned with “extending the gaze of the historian so that nothing escapes it, not even themselves” (Robert Parkes, “No Outside History: Reconsidering Postmodernism”).
6) What do you hope students and scholars will gain from Milestone Documents of Christianity and a study of the history of Christianity as a whole?
I want them to be surprised. My eyes widen even when just flipping through the pages of these volumes—wondering, “Wait…what?!? Jesus said that? Christians believe what? …That Jesus is both God and man…? Christians point to divine love toward all people, but they did that to each other? Christians lived so heroically and thought so clearly and built so beautifully, and yet they attacked each other, exploited other peoples, and used the name of their founder to justify their own selfishness…. What is this? What is going on here?”
I hope all readers gain something from the stories here that cause one to ponder the depths of the human spirit and to shrink back in horror at human depravity. (How do we even recognize said depravity? Does even that judgment have something to do with Christian teaching that so often condemns Christian behavior?) The study of the history of Christianity as a whole is certainly an immersion in what it means to be human. I hope readers gain much from that. I hope readers challenge themselves to contemplate the deep human questions of which great world religions like Christianity remind us.