{"id":14152,"date":"2017-10-05T07:49:51","date_gmt":"2017-10-05T14:49:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=14152"},"modified":"2017-10-05T07:49:51","modified_gmt":"2017-10-05T14:49:51","slug":"telling-the-story-of-today-frankopans-the-silk-roads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/telling-the-story-of-today-frankopans-the-silk-roads\/","title":{"rendered":"Telling the Story of Today: Frankopan’s “The Silk Roads”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u201cWho lives, who dies, who tells your story?\u201d<\/em>\u2014Hamilton, the musical<\/p>\n

After Alexander Hamilton\u2019s death by duel with Aaron Burr, his wife, Eliza, spends the next fifty years cementing his legacy. She advocated for the building of the Washington Monument and founded the first private orphanage in New York City, in memory of her orphaned husband. At the close of the contemporary monumental musical, filled with non-white actors playing the founders of our nation, the above question is asked about identifying the gatekeepers of history. \u201cWho tells your story?\u201d We see that question being asked more and more with the world in upheaval and the center of gravity shifting.<\/p>\n

The past five hundred years have been dominated by a world with a European navel. But the earth seems to be groaning in resistance to a linear storyline with Europe and \"\"<\/a>European North America as the protagonist. Like Galileo\u2019s heliocentric shift, how do we begin to adjust to a reality in which we are not the center of the universe? This is not a new question, but perhaps one that we white European\/North Americans are only now beginning to painfully touch. The controversial historian, Howard Zinn, opened floodgates by giving voice and story to women, slaves, laborers, and other marginalized people; he challenged the conventional narrative that white male Americans were foundational to America\u2019s success and moved us to consider the wider contributors into the American story, beyond what we traditionally were taught in classrooms. [1]<\/a> Likewise, Tom Oden argues that early Christian theology was developed in Africa and expanded into Europe and beyond, rather than emerging first from Europe, as we commonly and mistakenly assume.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

Into this paradigm of historical gatekeepers, then, enters Peter Frankopan\u2019s The Silk Roads: A New History of the World<\/em>.[3]<\/a> Frankopan convincingly suggests that we need to rethink the Eurocentric narrative that has dominated our historical perspective and driven our present-day unilateralism and Western jingoism: \u201cWhat has been striking throughout the events of recent decades is the west\u2019s lack of perspective about global history\u2014about the bigger picture, the wider themes and the larger patterns\u201d at play, especially in the Eastern Mediterranean\/Western Asia region.[4]<\/a> Throughout the extensive treatise, he guides us through the history of the region known as \u201cthe Silk Roads,\u201d concluding with his observation that this area of the world is re-emerging as the epicenter of cultural and economic dominance. Indeed, \u201cthese lands have always been of pivotal importance in global history in one way or another, linking east and west, serving as a melting-pot where ideas, customs and languages have jostled with each other from antiquity to today.\u201d[5]<\/a><\/p>\n

By shifting the narrative away from a western-dominated history, Frankopan at once reminds us of our trivialness\u2014like gazing into the Milky Way\u2014and draws us into the bigger reality of multi-directional influence and a new (though ancient) locus of power.<\/p>\n

In juxtaposition to that, however, lies the Church, the people of God. We are wise to listen to theologians like Oden and historians like Frankopan and recognize that the Church is not Eurocentric or American dominant (contra popular American religion). We should learn stories of the early Nestorian Christians in China, Thomas Christians in India, and the ancient Ethiopian church, and need to be reminded that the \u201cGreat Century\u201d of European and North American missions, while important, is also only a piece of the bigger picture of God\u2019s people at work. More importantly, though, unlike Frankopan\u2019s thesis of the navel of the world shifting, Christianity has no geographic center. In his book chronicling the five 2010 world missionary conferences, Allen Yeh writes, \u201cChristianity is the only religion in the world that has no one majority racial or ethnic group, and no geographical center\u2014we have no Mecca or Varanasi or Jerusalem or Salt Lake City because the temple of the Holy Spirit is God\u2019s people.\u201d[6]<\/a> Indeed, the move of the Holy Spirit in the people of God is \u201cpolycentric and polydirectional.\u201d[7]<\/a><\/p>\n

How do we tell our story? How do we understand history? When we consider influence to be unidirectional, we miss the webs connecting us.[8]<\/a> When we limit our history to the era of our own national dominance, we miss the ebb and flow of power. And when we see our faith as only a present reality, we miss the movement of the Holy Spirit from everywhere to everywhere.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Howard Zinn,\u00a0A People’s History of the United States: 1492-2001<\/em> (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Thomas Oden, How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind<\/em> (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity, 2007).<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World<\/em> (New York: Vintage Books, 2017).<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Frankopan, 492.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Ibid., 495.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Allen Yeh, Polycentric Missiology: Twenty-first Century Mission from Everyone to Everywhere<\/em> (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity, 2016) 215.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Ibid., 216.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> \u201cWe do history and the human experience a disservice if we follow a linear, teleological narrative through time, imagining it to be unidirectional or neatly boxed. Across time and space we are all connected; we all rise and fall. Globalisation might be voguish, but it is not new.\u201d http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/books\/what-to-read\/the-silk-roads-by-peter-frankopan-review\/<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWho lives, who dies, who tells your story?\u201d\u2014Hamilton, the musical After Alexander Hamilton\u2019s death by duel with Aaron Burr, his wife, Eliza, spends the next fifty years cementing his legacy. She advocated for the building of the Washington Monument and founded the first private orphanage in New York City, in memory of her orphaned husband. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":85,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[762,1026,953,1028,1027],"class_list":["post-14152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-frankopan","tag-hamilton","tag-oden","tag-yeh","tag-zinn","cohort-lgp7"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/85"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14152"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14153,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14152\/revisions\/14153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}