Go East Young Man

No one has been sent to us Orientals by the Pope.  The holy apostles aforesaid taught us and we still hold today what they handed  down to us.

-          Rabban Bar Sauma, c. 1290 (from the Nestorian Church of the East in China)

The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died, by Philip Jenkins

Merv, today a dead city but at one time a major city in what is now Turkmenistan and a center of trade along the Silk Road, was, in the twelfth century, one of the largest cities in the world.  By the 420s, it had a bishop, and in the first half of the sixth century it became a metropolitan see of the Eastern (Nestorian) Church.

Around the year 500, it was already translating major works from Greek and Syriac sources into the languages of central and eastern Asia.  This rich intellectual life continued until the thirteenth century – and could compete with intellectual life anywhere in the Christian world until the establishment of universities in western Europe in the twelfth century.

This under Muslim rule, with Christians a minority, yet it survived and even thrived – a Christian world completely outside of any European context.  At a time when Rome was an outlier (even taking many of its earliest popes from Syria) – the only one of the five great patriarchates in Europe, with the others all in Asia – Merv was already established as an important center.

I found the following fascinating, and by citing the author I do not intend to mean that I agree or have otherwise researched the claim.  But, here goes:

Repeatedly, we find that what we think of as the customs or practices of the Western churches were rooted in Syria or Mesopotamia.  Eastern churches, for instance, had a special devotion to the Virgin Mary, derived partly from popular apocryphal Gospels.

This devotion gave rise to new feasts: the Purification, the Annunciation, as well as commemorations of her birth and passing.  By the end of the seventh century, these were all popularized by Pope Sergius – whose family was from Antioch.

Now…this brings me to a side note, one that I must make for clarification because the lines are blurred – perhaps out of historical reality – by Jenkins.  It has always been easy for me to understand Rome / Latin as compared to Constantinople / Eastern Orthodox / Greek.  I have also distinguished what we today call Oriental Orthodox, such as the Armenian, Coptic, and Ethiopian Churches – those that split off after Chalcedon.

Through this book, the examination is of another – call it a third – Eastern Church, sometimes referred to by Jenkins as Nestorian, Syriac…or even “Eastern.”  Jenkins sometimes blends these various Eastern churches, but perhaps there is little choice.  Where does one draw the lines when belief is not limited to or clearly defined by a political or geographic border?

Sure, the Christianity in China was different than the Christianity in Constantinople.  But what of the areas in between, where both could be found, or where beliefs were not so clearly distinguishable?

Where I am comfortable, I will attempt to clarify the lines.  However, I am coming to accept that there will be fluidity – and perhaps necessarily so.  For example, as much as any other reason, Christianity spread far to the east due to the fluidity of trade – the Silk Roads, running from the Mediterranean to the heart of China. 

In any case, Jerusalem is closer to central Asia than it is to France:

If early Christians could reach Ireland, there was no logical reason why they should not find their way to Sri Lanka.

Christianity spread along protected trade routes (far more developed in Asia than in the Europe outside of the Mediterranean world), with Christian traders using language familiar to the elites.  The borders, fluid and changing, mattered little to trade – hence to the progress of Christianity.

In Africa, Nubia survived as a Christian kingdom from the sixth century to the fifteenth.  Its churches and cathedrals were decorated in the best Byzantine style.  Its main cathedral, at Faras, was adorned with hundreds of paintings – kings, bishops, and saints.  It lay forgotten under the sand until the 1960s.

Meanwhile, the church in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) continues until today.  Aksum is the reputed home of the Ark of the Covenant; the medieval ruling dynasty claimed descent from Solomon and the queen of Sheba.  Ethiopia – the true Israel?

Loss…and a Remnant

Religions die. …For a thousand years, India was mainly Buddhist, a faith that now enjoys only marginal status in that land.  Once Persia was Zoroastrian; Spain, Muslim.

The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died, by Philip Jenkins

This story is about none of these.  It is the story of a Christianity that has almost completely disappeared, a Christianity in the east – east of Byzantium, outside of Eastern Orthodoxy.  Many of us are reasonably familiar with the Christianity that was lost to Islam in North Africa and the Middle East – and, for a time, Spain.

These weren’t wholly voluntary conversions – these were the result of wars and slavery.  Yes, some also converted to save their lives.  This wasn’t the case for Europe, the history we know best – at least the history I know best (relatively).

Europe was the continent where [Christianity] was not destroyed.

Which leads, once again, to the real dilemma: Christians and violence.  Love you enemy…but what if this comes in conflict with loving your neighbor?

Christianity wasn’t destroyed in Europe because the Christians in Europe fought to save it – and, at times, in very non-Christian ways (and pacifist Christians would say, at all times in non-Christian ways).  See, for example, Charles Martel in 732, Otto I in 955, and John III Sobieski in 1683.  What would Christianity look like today without such men?  (Hint: we are seeing what it will look like because today we do not have such men.)

Much of what is today the Islamic world was once Christian.  Christianity spread as far east as Western China, and also throughout North Africa.  As late as the eleventh century, about one-third of the world’s Christians lived in Asia; about ten percent in Africa (a figure only again achieved in the 1960s). 

There was the Christian world centered on Rome; another centered on Constantinople.  But there was a third, stretching deep into Asia.  And it is this third center that is the subject of Jenkins’ book.

About 780, the bishop Timothy became patriarch, or catholicos, of the Church of the East, which was then based at the ancient Mesopotamian city of Seleucia.

This Church, as a distinct Church, has its roots in a split after the Council of Ephesus in 431.  It had to do with the condemning of Nestorius and the Christological controversies of the time (of which I have written here). 

Timothy was arguably the most significant Christian spiritual leader of his day, much more influential than the Western pope, in Rome, and on a par with the Orthodox patriarch in Constantinople.  Perhaps a quarter of the world’s Christians looked to Timothy as both spiritual and political head.

And he could claim apostolic succession with the best of them – tradition has it from the apostle Thomas.  Yes, Catholic and Eastern Orthodox consider these churches heretical, but locally they were considered Christian – and as apostolic as the rest.  In terms of scholarship, they achieved by around 800 what Latin Europe would not achieve until five centuries later.

The East still thought and spoke in Syriac, an Aramaic dialect.  For centuries they referred to themselves as Nasraye – Nazarenes – a form preserving the Aramaic term used by the apostles.  Jesus was Yeshua. 

And then there is this claim by Jenkins:

If we are ever tempted to speculate on what the early church might have looked like if it had developed independently, avoiding the mixed blessing of its alliance with Roman state power, we have but to look east.

Keeping in mind that Roman state power included both Rome and Constantinople – the New Rome.

Overcoming Clown World

America became the model liberal nation, and, after England, the exemplar of liberalism to the world.

-          Ralph Raico, describing America after the Revolutionary War

It didn’t last long, but it was true for a time.

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

-          John Adams

No, this isn’t a  post about the excellence of the US Constitution, as I side much more with Lysander Spooner on this:

But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist.

In fact, a moral and religious people require little of what the US Constitution, or any constitution, has to offer.  A moral and religious people would live in accord with the natural law – and, for those Christians who don’t like those words, the Ten Commandments.  In those commandments, one finds enough governance to keep the peace, enjoy property, and respect life.

So, what is this post about? It's a look at the post-liberal West.  World War One certainly was the suicide of the West, as described by Jacques Barzun. Whatever classical liberalism that existed prior to the war was murdered in the war.  For the balance of the twentieth century, the West has been living on the fumes of that previous order.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes why, in his 1983 Templeton Address:

…if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire 20th century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: “Men have forgotten God.” The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century.

Somewhere between the reaction to September 11 and the reaction to covid, the last remaining fumes of classical liberalism all disappeared.  We now speak openly of a post-liberal time.  At the same time, we speak openly of a meaning crisis.  The roots of both are the same; the solution to both is the same.

Jonathan Leeman has written A New Christian Authoritarianism?  In this, he challenges the notions of those like Doug Wilson and others – those he labels as ““general-equity theonomist,” “Christian nationalist” “magisterial Protestant,” “Roman Catholic integralist,” or, in legal circles, “common good constitutionalist….””

Such as these point to the failure of liberalism – something many people are now speaking to, in what is certainly a post-liberal time.  Leeman summarizes this view as follows:

The middle ground of classical liberalism’s restrained approach to governmental power has proven inadequate for maintaining a moral, religious, and just society. The liberal DNA of the American Experiment, following secular Jeffersonian and Madisonian trajectories, has betrayed us.

And in this summary – setting aside if it is an accurate portrayal of those about whom Leeman is writing – one can see the flaw in the entire issue, the flaw for any who view that the failure (or solution) is primarily to be found in classical liberalism. 

Certainly, classical liberalism offered a door through which such a failure could walk; it has no means by which to defend this door.  Classical liberalism wasn’t designed to guard this door – and it was the guards of this door that allowed for the failure of the promise of classical liberalism.

The Institutions Have All Failed Us

The Insider Outsider: The meaning of Tucker Carlson for the present and future of US politics, by Rod Dreher

A couple of days before Tucker Carlson was out of a job, he gave a talk at the Heritage Foundation.  Dreher summarizes as follows:

Tucker Carlson, an affable sinner, went to the citadel of Washington conservatism, delivered a talk in which he took a shot at the Republican Party, indicating his disdain for them, and told his audience that the crisis engulfing our country and our civilization can only be explained in terms of spiritual warfare. He urged them to pray.

We wrestle not against flesh and blood and all that.  The tide is growing on understanding the nature of this battle, when even so many barely-Christians or not-even-Christians can see it.  Dreher notes it in the way the Nashville shooting has been described and handled – not a lament for the victims, but in support of the alphabet.

Dreher’s own journey brought him here: “My point is simply that I lost faith in the institutions.”  The Catholic Church (and, I suggest, many non-Catholic Churches), journalism, universities.  Citing a piece from Ross Douthat:

The young Reaganite or the George W. Bush admirer certainly believed the media was liberal and that the Ivy League could not be trusted. But he or she believed in the CIA and NATO, in General Motors and Wall Street, in Coca-Cola and the American Medical Association and the United States Marine Corps.

Not so for the conservatives who have come of age since the Iraq War, the financial crisis and the Great Awokening.

It isn’t just conservatives.  We are witnessing a great realignment, with many of the wealthiest Americans now voting left, and the working class voting right; with many that would have identified as liberal ten years ago (Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, Matt Taibbi, Glen Greenwald, etc.) now siding with conservatives and many who would have identified as conservative ten years ago (name any neocon and many republican politicians) now siding with liberals.

Continuing with the Douthat cite, again referring to conservatives (and, I say, others) who have come of age in the last two decades:

Alienated from many more American institutions than their predecessors, staring at a record of elite failure and a social landscape where it seems like there’s little to conserve, they increasingly start out where Carlson ended up — in a posture of reflexive distrust, where if an important American institution takes a position, the place to be is probably on the other side.

After trust in God, trust in always taking as a starting point believing the opposite of what one hears from those in today’s institutions of government, universities, and media (“the Cathedral”) is the best and most sure bet one can make.

Conclusion

By Dreher:

Whether you are a person of the Left or of the Right, if you trust the Cathedral at this point, I don’t know what to say to you, except to hope that the scales fall from your eyes some way.

I hope so as well.  However, consider the intervention necessary to make this so:

Acts 9: 17 And Ananias went his way, and entered into the house; and putting his hands on him said, Brother Saul, the Lord, even Jesus, that appeared unto thee in the way as thou camest, hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost.

18 And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized.

The Stomping Boot

Paul VanderKlay (PVK) did a video reviewing, among other things, Tucker Carlson’s recent Heritage Foundation talk – the one that some point to as one more reason for his ousting.  Following are some of my reactions to this.

PVK asks, what is the answer to the divide seemingly caused by these various cultural and political issues?  In my view, the only peaceful answer is secession and decentralization.  Secession means gathering with others who share similar cultural, political, and religious views – and excluding those who hold contrary views.  Decentralization means governance at ever-lower institutional levels – at the lowest reasonable level (e.g., family). 

And this happening, but not in the traditional way.  The traditional way would result in The State of Jefferson.  But we know that the US government has a history of not allowing peaceful transitions.  Not in the United States, not in Korea, not in the former Soviet Union – even Ukraine today.  Not anywhere.

But back to how it is happening today.  People are migrating – seceding in the way they can.  California and New York are losing people, Idaho and Tennessee are gaining people.  Unfortunately, this isn’t an answer for everyone, or even many.  It can only happen on the margins.  But it is happening.

There is no law of God that says three hundred million people have to live under the same rules or in the same culture.  When God created the earth, He didn’t draw the political boundaries on His creation.  These aren’t carved in stone, so to speak. 

We have a culture that freely ignores what God carved in stone, and violently defends that which God did not carve in stone.  Abraham Lincoln ignored what was carved in stone by God, and violently defended that which was not carved in stone by God.  And he is considered by many as our greatest president – especially so by many Christians…sadly showing how long the road is that must be traveled.

Carlson, when speaking of the culture-destroying actions we see all around us, said something like: The weight of the government is behind it.  PVK: “I agree with this, but they aren’t thinking through it either.”  I think this is a naïve statement by VanderKlay.  He attributes good intentions where such attribution isn’t deserved – or, he doesn’t attribute malevolent intentions when such attribution is richly deserved.

PVK, commenting on one of the many theological points made by Carlson: “He’s not at a theological podium; he’s at a political podium.”  VanderKlay would often comment: “Politics is downstream from religion.”  He is right.  In other words, it’s all theological.  It’s just a question of which theology.

PVK: Don’t back your enemies into a corner unless you are planning to do something final.  From this, two points: liberal democracy does not have the tools necessary to defend itself; its enemies don’t play by the rules of liberal democracy, and nothing in liberal democracy is available to counteract this.  Second, one side in this discussion is happy to just be left alone – in other words, they will tolerate, but don’t demand that they affirm.  The other side demands more than toleration; it demands even more than affirmation.  It demands subservience.

Then PVK asks: “Was Donald Trump just more pantomime?” 

The Road Ahead…

…and what is to be done.

 

Through a link from a post by Chuck Baldwin: I Hope America’s Evangelicals Are Sleeping Well, I found the following: ‘Death to Christians’: Violence steps up under new Israeli gov’t

Jerusalem – Nothing about the attack or what happened since surprised Miran Krikorian. The Armenian owner of Taboon and Wine Bar in the Old City of Jerusalem was not surprised to receive a call the night of January 26 that a mob of Israeli settlers was attacking his bar in the Christian Quarter and shouting “Death to Arabs … Death to Christians.”

Attacks against Christians in Jerusalem have been on the rise.

A couple of days later, Armenians leaving a memorial service in the Armenian Quarter say they were attacked by Israeli settlers carrying sticks.

It isn’t only Armenian Christians:

Hostility by fundamentalist Jews towards Jerusalem’s Christian community is not new, and it is not just Armenian Christians who suffer from it. Priests of all denominations describe being spat at for years.

At the beginning of the year, 30 Christian graves at the Protestant Mount Zion Cemetery were desecrated. In the Armenian Quarter, vandals spray-painted “Death to Arabs, Christians and Armenians,” on the walls.

And keep this in mind the next time you hear something from Christians United for Israel:

At the Church of the Flagellation, someone attacked a statue of Jesus with a hammer.

About a century ago, the Christians made up a quarter of the population of Jerusalem; today, they represent less than one percent.  Consider that under Ottoman Muslim rule, the Christians were better protected than under the rule of Israeli Jews.

There are thirteen churches in Jerusalem; a small population divided so many ways.  It has come to the point where the fragmented Christian population is starting to understand that they must come together if they are to survive.

Christians in Jerusalem are starting to increase engagement within and between communities.

“The new generation is growing up with the idea that Christians must cooperate with each other in the city to keep the Christian presence,” said Dzernian. “If we keep saying that we will work alone, we will lose in the end.”

“Occupation makes people very cold, very separate. ‘I am [Syriac], I am Catholic, I am Orthodox, I am Evangelist’,” remarked Hani the restaurant owner. “But with the threats, the violence, the vandalism, now the people are coming together. The churches are waking up. We were blind for 50 years, but no more.”

I find this entire story very applicable to Christians in the West – really, the United States – today.  So much arguing, hostility, etc., between denominations and traditions.  Fighting about trees and losing sight of the forest.  We will continue to have less influence until we come to the point of Jerusalem’s Christians, it seems.

But by this, I don’t mean to include all who label themselves as Christians.  Those who cheer on the war machine, those who bow down at the call of masks and close churches at the whim of some politician, those who see the state of Israel – even with this persecution of Christians – as a state worthy of Christian devotion, those who cannot understand that God made them male and female; I exclude them all.  None of these will be useful in this fight.

Which brings me, once again, to Doug Wilson: A Ham Sandwich With 34 Slices of Felonious Cheese.  The first part of this is just hilarious; he is speaking of the charges against Trump:

Those Other Christians

Throughout this book, I refer to the Eastern Christian churches that are commonly known as Jacobite and Nestorian.  Both names raise problems…. …a reader would not go far wrong by understanding both terms as meaning simply “ancient Christian denominations mainly active outside Europe.”

The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died, by Philip Jenkins

There was once a substantial Christian Church, in lands east of the Greek Church, stretching to today’s Afghanistan and beyond.  I have covered this history once before, briefly, via on chapter in The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, by Peter Frankopan.  But that was merely one chapter in Frankopan’s book.  Jenkins devotes an entire book to the topic, and I will work through it.

In that earlier post, I wrote:

The story of the spread of Christianity from Palestine to the west is well known; the spread of Christianity to the east was far more remarkable and extensive.  Christianity was brought in through the trade routes, as well as through the deportations of Christians from Syria.

Evangelists reached north into Georgia, reaching a large community of Jews who converted.  There were dozens of Christian communities along the Persian Gulf and as far to the east as today’s Afghanistan.

Jenkins introduces the churches of this region – Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia – as churches where the early Christians wrote and thought in Syriac, a language closely related to Jesus’s Aramaic.   Passionate debates with the Greek and Roman Churches ensued, resulting in divisions even as early as the Council of Nicea in 325.

Yes, Christ was in some sense both human and divine, but what was the exact relationship between the two elements?  How could someone say that Jesus was both man and God?

A disagreement that would continue until Chalcedon in 451 and even beyond, as examined by V.C. Samuel.  Not to revisit this theological controversy (please keep in mind, I write of these matters to understand the history, not to debate theology), but Patriarch Nestorius – who accepted the two natures – did not accept the mystical sense in which these were united.  Hence, no Theotokos.

Jenkins makes what is an unfortunate error when writing that many in Egypt and the East accepted only one nature – hence “Monophysites.”  As Samuel demonstrated in the aforementioned work, those in these regions did not write in such a “Monophysite” manner.  The two natures were there, the only issue being, precisely how?

The Jacobites held sway in Greater Syria; the Nestorians in what we now know as Iraq and Iran.  However, Jenkins does not intend that by using these labels these groups were anything less than Christian.  I keep in mind, the differences were still being worked out, and, truth be told, it isn’t like there was a solid Scriptural basis for one teaching or another (as long as human and divine were both in there…somehow, as if we are really capable of understanding this or putting this into words).

Many today from the Roman Church or the Greek Church would claim “tradition” as the way by which to settle these differences – differences not made clear in Scripture.  But, as I have often argued, which tradition?  These churches in the furthest reaches of the east had just as much claim to the tradition of the first three or four centuries as the other churches.