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Whether Confucianism is, or has ever been, a religion is a consideration that has been hotly debated for centuries, with evidence for and against its religious nature presented by those who answer either “Yes” or “No.” Anna Sun states that this is indeed a question “the West has never been able to answer, and China never able to ask.” She continues, however, that Confucianism is a civil religion. In this section, we shall present the findings of two outstanding American writers, Kenneth Scott Latourette and Charles E. Farhadian, both of whom identify Confucianism as a world religion.

“In the twentieth century, for the first time, there was in the world a universal religion – the Christian religion. . . . In country after country . . . it took root, not as a foreign import, but as the Church of the countries in which it dwells,” this author powerfully proclaims. Though the term is not used, this was the period when “World Christianity” fully came into being as the major development in Christian history and, perhaps, of all human history.

In these chapters, we note the pattern of progression, “conquest,” and then retrogression, as formerly “Christian” nations and peoples were conquered from without or fatally compromised from within.

This one-volume history of Christian missions is, in one sense, comprehensive. Neill’s grandparents and parents had served as missionaries in India, bequeathing to him an insider’s knowledge of missionary life and work, which he augmented by serving in India with the Church Missionary Society for twenty years. His narrative reads like a story rather than a mere chronicle.

This is an outstanding book, of great usefulness to anyone wanting to understand the immense changes that took place in the twentieth century. It is also a marvel of conciseness: Sunquist packs an enormous amount of information and analysis into less than 200 pages.

We’re revisiting this book review more than 25 years after the beginning of the new century to see what we can learn in hindsight. Noted historian on the subject of World Christianity, Scott Sunquist has given us another outstanding volume. He possesses both a wide knowledge of the Christian movement’s history as a whole and a comprehensive grasp of Christian missions in all its dimensions.