Bediako says that Christianity has always had more success evangelizing primal religious areas than “advanced” religions like Buddhism or Hinduism or Islam. Or modern Western secularism.
Perhaps the West needs to be re-primitivized in order to be re-evangelized.
Or perhaps the West needs to learn that it was never so advanced as it thought, that it was always more primitive than it claimed to be.
And this more or less exactly what cultural anthropology had been doing. And it’s part of what postmodernism is all about.
Re-evangelization perhaps depends on learning Bruno Latour’s lesson, “We Have Never Been Modern.”
Peter Leithart
Peter J. Leithart is President of Theopolis Institute. He is the author of numerous books on theology, literature, and culture, including Theopolitan, Defending Constantine, and Baptized Body.
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