Copyright holder: Tyndale University, 3377 Bayview Ave., Toronto, Ontario, Canada M2M 3S4 Att.: Library Director, J. William Horsey Library Copyright: This Work has been made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws of Canada without the written authority from the copyright owner. Copyright license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License Citation: Faught, C. Brad. Review of A History of Christianity in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, 1450-1990: A Documentary Sourcebook, edited by Klaus Koschorke, Frieder Ludwig and Mariano Delgado. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2007. Anglican and Episcopal History 77, no. 3 (2008): 328-329. ***** Begin Content ****** TYNDALE UNIVERSITY 3377 Bayview Avenue Toronto, ON M2M 3S4 TEL: 416.226.6620 www.tyndale.ca Note: This Work has been made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws of Canada without the written authority from the copyright owner. Faught, C. Brad. Review of A History of Christianity in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, 1450-1990: A Documentary Sourcebook, edited by Klaus Koschorke, Frieder Ludwig and Mariano Delgado. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2007. Anglican and Episcopal History 77, no. 3 (2008): 328-329. Book Reviews A History of Christianity in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, 1450-1990: A Documentary Sourcebook. Edited by Klaus Koschorke, Frieder Ludwig, and Mariano Delgado. (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 2007, Pp. xxxiii, 426. $35.00.) Mission history and global Christianity are areas of study that have captured an increasing number of scholars in recent years. Linked—as they inevitably are—to European expansion and the constituent “age of empire,” such studies have done much to show the myriad ways in which Christianity both imposed itself on the imperial periphery and was taken up by local populations. Most of these studies are either biographies or histories of individual missionary societies. In the volume under review here, however, a different tack is taken. Koschorke and his fellow editors have endeavoured to strip down to the written word the entire mod- ern Christian missionary enterprise; that is, they take over half-a- millennium’s worth of missionary documents and writings and place them one after another in an edited compendium. The editors begin with the Iberian expansion—the Portuguese move into India in the mid-fifteenth century—and their initial contact with the already resident Nestorian Christians. They then proceed to offer a documentary history of Christianity in Asia followed by the same in Africa and Latin America terminating in 1990. One of the shortcomings of documentary studies is that almost in- variably they tend to lack narrative coherence. This book is no excep- tion, although its editors go a good distance in lessening this problem by providing brief descriptors for each group of documents. In this way the problem of context is partially addressed, although it goes without say- ing that a reasonable knowledge of each geographical region and his- torical era under examination makes the entries that much more un- derstandable. The inclusiveness and range of documents found in the volume is impressive, and one of the sheer delights of the book is opening it to any page and being pulled immediately into the historical present tense. Whether it be Roberto de Nobili reporting to Pope Paul V on the founding of the first Jesuit mission in South India in 1606 (36), William 328 329 BOOK REVIEWS Wilberforce declaiming in Parliament on the manifest iniquities of the slave trade in 1789 (180), or a report on the beginnings of the Brazilian Pentecostal movement in 1911 (371), this book places before its readers the lineaments of world Christianity in a clear and immediate fashion. As in any large (edited) book occasional errors of fact are virtually inescapable. So, for example, Wilberforce’s date of death is given as 1813, twenty years before he actually died (180). But such an instance is a mere quibble. A substantive criticism might be one which asks for the inclusion of explanatory essays on each region, thus putting into sharp relief the prevailing European imperial history really only hinted at in the short pieces used to set up each section. These points aside, how- ever, this collection is an excellent sourcebook of documents that gives scholars, students, and interested laypeople alike five hundred years of Christian history at their fingertips. There is no other comparative col- lection of historical documents like it. C. Brad Faught Tyndale University College ***** This is the end of the e-text. This e-text was brought to you by Tyndale University, J. William Horsey Library - Tyndale Digital Collections *****