How Christianity Became a Global Religion: Andrew Walls and the Translation Principle

The Crisis That Became Christianity's Defining Strength

Every time Christianity has appeared to be dying—declining in one region, losing cultural influence, being expelled or suppressed—it has moved. And in moving, it has taken root somewhere new, becoming genuinely indigenous rather than remaining a foreign import. This pattern, which Scottish missiologist Andrew Walls (1928–2021) named the "translation principle," may be the most distinctive feature of Christian faith as a world religion.

Walls spent decades at the University of Edinburgh and then at Liverpool Hope University studying the global spread of Christianity across cultures and centuries. His landmark collection The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Orbis Books, 1996) built the case that Christianity uniquely translates itself—fully, not superficially—into each new host culture without losing its essential theological core. This is not a strategic choice missionaries make. It is, Walls argued, the outworking of the Incarnation itself.

What Makes Christianity Different

The comparison with other world religions is illuminating. Islam holds that the Quran, properly speaking, cannot be translated—the Arabic original is the sacred text, and all renderings in other languages are considered interpretive approximations. Arabic retains a sacred status in Muslim worship regardless of the worshipper's native tongue. Classical Buddhism likewise traces its authoritative scriptures to Pali (Theravada) or Sanskrit (Mahayana), and its conceptual architecture carries deep Indian philosophical presuppositions.

Christianity, by contrast, began in Aramaic (the language Jesus spoke), was written down in Greek (a language Jesus likely did not primarily use), and within a century was being translated into Syriac, Latin, Coptic, and Ethiopian Ge'ez. There is no sacred original language. The New Testament itself is already a translation of what Jesus said.

Walls argued this was not accidental but irreversibly theological. The Incarnation—"the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14)—is the supreme act of divine translation. God entered a particular culture, ate particular food, spoke a particular language, was shaped by particular family structures and political realities. This established the pattern for how the gospel would travel: not as a foreign system to be imported but as a seed that germinates in local soil and takes the shape of that soil.

Jerusalem to Antioch: The First Great Translation

The movement from Jerusalem to Antioch marks Christianity's first consequential cultural crossing. In Jerusalem, the faith was unambiguously Jewish: Torah observance, temple worship, Hebrew Scripture, Jewish social structures. In Antioch, it became Hellenistic—Greek-speaking Gentile converts brought new philosophical questions, new aesthetic sensibilities, new understandings of community. It was in Antioch that followers of Jesus were first called "Christians" (Acts 11:26), suggesting that outsiders recognized a new and distinct identity had emerged.

The Jerusalem Council of Acts 15 was the formal negotiation of this translation. The question was precise: what must carry across every cultural crossing (the gospel of Jesus, the authority of Israel's Scripture, the moral character shaped by the Spirit), and what was culturally particular to Jewish expression (circumcision, dietary laws)? The council's answer established the hermeneutical principle Walls would later systematize.

The pattern repeated: North Africa produced Tertullian and Augustine, who translated the faith into the idiom of Roman law and Platonic philosophy. Celtic Christianity took a distinctive shape in the monasteries of Ireland and Scotland. The Germanic conversion produced medieval Christendom. Each translation looked different. Each retained the core.

The Global South and the Future of the Church

Writing in Christianity Today (christianitytoday.com/ct/2002/marchweb-only/53.0.html), scholars examining Walls's work noted his prescient observation that the center of global Christianity had already shifted south and east—long before most Western Christians noticed. Today, the majority of the world's 2.6 billion Christians live in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The fastest-growing Christian communities are in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Brazil, China, and Indonesia.

Walls saw this not as a crisis but as confirmation. Christianity will always look different tomorrow than it does today. The faith moves, translates, and takes root in new soil. And the places it previously flourished sometimes drift—as North Africa, once the intellectual heartland of Christian theology, drifted after the Islamic expansion of the seventh century. The translation principle is not a guarantee of permanence anywhere. It is a guarantee of movement everywhere.

Helper

1. Andrew Walls argues the Incarnation establishes the template for translation—God entering fully into a particular culture. How does thinking of the Incarnation as divine translation change how you understand Jesus?
2. Your local congregation expresses Christianity in a particular cultural idiom. Which aspects of your church's worship are genuinely theological, and which are culturally specific habits that could look different elsewhere?
3. The majority of Christians now live in the Global South. How does this reality reshape your sense of who "we" are as the global church?
4. Is there a cultural assumption you carry into your faith that might not be universally Christian—something you have confused with the gospel itself? How would you begin to identify the difference?
5. How should churches in declining Western contexts respond to the global shift Walls describes—with grief, with hope, or with both?