The recent globalisation debate had an impact on theology and religious studies. However, developments outside Europe have been reflected in the writings of church historians and theologians at least since the European discoveries of the 15th and 16th centuries. In his "Ecclesiastes", Erasmus of Rotterdam pointed out that every day new unknown territories were discovered. He also described the vast regions of Asia and Africa and concluded that Europe was the smallest part of the world - "Orbis minima pars est Europa". Erasmus contrasted his own time with the apostolic periodand drew a pessimistic conclusion: While in the old days the gospel had flourished everywhere, now there was decay and decline. Protestant authors,e.g. Johann Gerhard, followed this interpretation and attributed the problems to the establishment of the Roman Catholic church. In this view, the emergence of Islam was perceived as God´s punishment for the apostasy of the Roman Church. At the same time, there was a growing interest in non-Roman forms of Christianity. David Chytraeus and Gottfried Arnold reported about Ethiopia, and Arnold used the most recent research reports of his time. The philosophical discussions of the early 18th century were preoccupied with the Far East, and this is also reflected in church history: Johann Lorenz von Mosheim wrote a Chinese Church History, and Johann Salomo Semler discussed Hindu-Christian encounters in India. To somedegree, both of them favoured the development of a plurality of different cultural forms of Christianity, but at the same time European Protestantismwith its individualism was the measure of their evaluation. This, however, changed during the 19th century awakening; the most profiled historian of the movement, August Neander, even indicated that the future of Christianity could be outside Europe. Many writings of Neander are devoted to the history of missions. Although he was criticized for the openness of his approach (which implicitly led to the renunciation of an overall theory) by

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Personen: Ludwig, Frieder

Schlagwörter: Kirchengeschichte Wahrnehmung Mission Europa Geschichtsschreibung Aufklärung