Medieval Missions

Lecture 20, age number three, medieval missions, and in this lecture, we will focus on one of the aspects of the topic of the last lecture, which was a brief overview of different areas of the second 500 years of Christianity, one of those important topics is missions. So today we will look at missions and next time at missions as well. Gregory the Great was one of the important missionary popes of the medieval period, and we'll begin with a prayer now from Gregory the Great. Let us pray. No Christ, our King, Creator, Lord, Savior of all who trust thy word, to them who seek thee every year, now to our praises, then thy year. Thou didst create the stars of night, yet Thou hast veiled in flesh thy light, hast designed a mortal form to wear, a mortal's painful lot to bear. When thou didst hang upon the tree, the quaking earth acknowledged thee. When thou didst there yield up thy breath, the world grew dark as shades of death. Now in thy father's glory high, great conqueror, never more to die, us by thy mighty power to thin and rain through ages without in a man. Dr. Kenneth Scott Latterrat has referred to the 19th century as the Great Century of missions. This is the title that he uses for three of his books in his famous seven volume history of the expansion of Christianity, and that is certainly true. The 19th century is the Great Century of missions, but the Medieval Church was involved in missions as well, and this lecture and next lecture we're going to look at the activity of the Medieval Church in missions and study people like Alpholus and Patrick and St. Augustine of Canterbury and Boniface and a host of others. Some known to us, many unknown to us, who faithfully took the gospel into the world during these periods of the Middle Ages. We've been sometimes, since we've talked about missions as such, and as we think of the spread of the gospel beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire, to the limits of the Roman Empire and beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire, we really don't know the missionaries. Most of the missionaries of that earlier period are unnamed, unknown, at least unknown to us, certainly not to God, men and women who went with the gospel and as they went for various purposes, business or in the military or something else, they faithfully took the gospel with them so that the gospel goes to the limit. Most of the Roman Empire and even beyond John of Damascus and the quotation in the syllabus talks about these unarmed, poor, unlettered, persecuted, tormented, dungedeth, men and women who were the missionaries, and as they went forth, God blessed their efforts and by the power of His Spirit brought others into the Christian faith. Because of the work of these people, when the barbarians began to come into the Roman Empire, those barbarians had already heard of Christ because the missionaries had gone beyond the limits of the Roman Empire and the barbarians when they attacked Rome, if they were not already Christians, they in many cases had already been evangelized. But in the later period, fourth century and on through the middle ages, on through the second, 500 years of Christianity, we know many of the names of the great missionaries. For instance, we know the name of Opholus. He was a fourth century missionary that was instrumental in the conversion of the Goths, one of these barbarian groups, north of the Danube. Opholus has a Gothic name, it means liberal wolf, but his ancestry was not Gothic, it was actually Greek. Opholus's grandparents had lived in Cappadocia, in Asia, the land of the great church fathers, the great Cappadocians, and those grandparents had been captured by the Goths in a raid that the Goths made down into that territory. They took some slaves, took them back to the north. These grandparents were Christian people, and their grandson Opholus, as he was called by the Goths, was in 341 appointed Bishop of all the Goths north of the Danube. One of the great things he did was to translate the Bible into the Gothic language. It's the oldest literary work in any German language. There's an interesting story about that because Opholus translated all the books of the Bible into Gothic except first and second kings. The Goths don't need first and second kings, they know how to fight already, and if they get first and second kings it will encourage them more in their warlike nature. The original Gothic Bible omitted first and second kings because he felt that they needed rather than a spurred to their military endeavours the kind of constraint or restraint placed upon them so that they would avoid acts of war. Opholus was a great missionary, unfortunately Opholus was an Aryan. He had learned Aryanism and many people in the 4th century were Aryans before Orthodoxy, the Nicene Orthodoxy of 325 of the Council of Nicela prevailed in the Roman Empire. But as Opholus went back up to his homeland north of the Danube he took with him and preached there the Aryan creed. There's only one God and that God has a son, maker of all creation, there's no one else like him. But he's not Homousius with the father. That message appealed to the Goths for one thing is very simple, they could understand here's God and God has a son and that son is next to God in importance and then the Holy Spirit is next to those two in importance that was a very simple message that they could understand. But I think the Goths also liked the idea of Christ the Son is a kind of hero, kind of a super man, maybe a military leader. So Aryan, Chinatarian thought or Aryan Christology was the basic form of Christianity that was preached then to the Goths. That then spread from the Goths throughout their Germanic tribes and then down into the Roman world, which meant that 200 years after the Council of Nicela the Old Roman Empire is divided into Catholic territory with the slanted lines here to the east and to the west and the north. But in between, including Italy and down into North Africa, this has become Aryan 200 years after the Council of Nicela, Aryanism is still very prominent in the Roman world and the reason for that is that it went up into the north. The Goths and others were converted to Aryanism and then when they invaded the Roman world, they brought an Aryan form of Christianity back into the Old Roman Empire. The fact that Aryanism did not finally prevail everywhere, this new enlarge measure to the conversion of another barbarian group called the Franks. The Franks were converted directly to Orthodox Christianity, the story of the conversion of the Franks, which took place around the year 500, has to do with a queen whose name is Clotilda and a king or husband Clovis. Clotilda was a Christian, Orthodox Christian and she married the king of the Franks, Clovis and went to work right away trying to convert him to Christianity. It wasn't easy but finally she prevailed and Clovis became a Christian in the year 496. When Clovis became a Christian, all the Franks became Christians because in those days when the king made a choice as to a religious allegiance or persuasion, then the people were forced to join him whether they wanted to or not. There wasn't the idea of individual conversion so much as a group conversion. So the king, Clovis, was converted in 496 and the people were converted. There's a story about the baptism of these Franks. This was a war like tried to, all these tried to war like. That's what they were good at. And at the baptism of the Franks, mass baptism of the Franks, the Frankish army and Frankish people, as the soldiers were being baptized, they held up their right hands, not in salute to the Lord but so that their right hands and arms would not be baptized as the water fell upon them. Because they wanted to continue to fight and they were baptized but not totally baptized because the right hand could still do what it did best and fight. Well, I suppose in the province of God that worked out too. God has a way of using all kinds of things because the Franks then helped to convert these Aryan tribes to orthodoxy, somewhat by persuasion but mainly by the sword. So the Aryans gradually disappeared and then Western Europe became entirely orthodox in its theology. So we think about the missionary movement, from this point on, there are really four centers of missionary activity, four areas from which missionaries are going and I've illustrated it with this map. One center, of course, was Rome. Rome was sending missionaries up to the north primarily and the most important of those missions is the one that we will study next time. The mission sent by Gregory the Great to England and the missionary was St. Augustine of Canterbury. By the time St. Augustine gets to England, even before this, there is already an important missionary sending area, a very surprising one because it's a land we haven't talked about yet, right on the fringe of the world, the European world, and that's the land of our land. And we'll see how Patrick went from England to Ireland and the missionaries like St. Columba and Columbanus went from Ireland to Scotland to England and down to the continent of Europe. So Rome is a center, Ireland and England become a center. Persia in the east becomes a center as Persian missionaries, monk missionaries travel the Old Silk Road all the way to China and establish the Nestorian Church in China in the 7th century. And the 4th great center of missionary activity in the medieval period is Constantinople, where missionaries going north to the Slavs and north and east to Ukraine and to Russia. Well, we'll talk about all of that, but just notice those four significant centers of Christianity in the medieval period, sending places where there is a missionary impetus going out from not just one place like Rome but four distinct centers and many relatively minor centers, but these are the four significant centers. Of missionary activity. Next time we're going to look at the story of the Christianization of Great Britain. We'll take a whole lecture on that because it is interesting and important. So we will pass on from that point D to look at the Nestorian Persian mission to China in the 7th century. I did mention that last time, but I would like to focus on it again because it's something we should not ignore. Missionary expansion was not only to the north, it was also to the far east, to the nomads of Central Asia and then all the way to China. This is a map that shows some of the routes that those missionaries took, about line here in the map, the old silk road, it was called, from China all the way back to the Roman world. This was the route that the merchants took or the several routes that they took in order to travel to China to get silk to bring back to the west and people were constantly on the move on that old silk road, including missionaries. The road provided a route for the missionaries to China, just like the old Roman road, roads had provided a route for Paul and the early missionaries to travel throughout the Roman Empire. The Persian missionary Alopin reached Chang'an, capital of China in 635. Chang'an was the largest city in the world at that time. One of the most prosperous and advanced cultures. So as these missionaries go to China, they're not going to a backward place, they're going to a very cosmopolitan world capital. Much more advanced in arts and sciences than the European capitals of this time. Alopin got to Chang'an in 635. It was the time of the Tang dynasty which you had probably heard of, one of the famous dynasties of Chinese history. And as I have said, one of the wealthiest and most civilized empires in the world, the first Christian church was built then in Chang'an in 638, just three years after the missionary arrived as a Christian church in the largest city in the world, the capital of China. Despite persecution from Buddhist Christianity grew and it looked as though China would become a great center for Christianity as Constantinople and Rome were in the west, the China in the east, as well as Persia would be great centers for Christianity. But the Nestorian church almost totally disappeared in the 9th century. Why did that happen such a promising beginning? So hopeful that Christianity would now have a strong eastern base as it had a strong western base. And as we know a strong southern base in Ethiopia in Africa, why did the church in China disappear? Scholars have puzzled about that. Some have talked about persecution and certainly there was persecution, particularly after Buddhism was declared the state religion in 698. Others have thought it was theological compromise and you can certainly find some synchretism in the Nestorian church, but basically the church seems to have maintained its orthodoxy. I think in the interest of contextualizing Christianity to Chinese culture, the church may have at times passed over the line from contextualization into synchretism, which is easy to do. But that perhaps was not the fatal cause of its decline. Others speak about a foreign orientation. This was a Persian church or really a Syrian church that had found its base in Persia and now had been transplanted into China. But as people have looked at the records of this Nestorian church in China, the records, the writings of the Nestorians were not in Syriac, the official language of the Persian church as Latin was of the Roman church, but these writings are in Chinese. So it appears that the Nestorian church was not so much to be viewed as a foreign church, as a Chinese church, but I think people have agreed that the real problem was this, that the Christian church in China, the so-called Nestorian church, had a lot itself very closely with the Tang Dynasty. That Chinese noble house, imperial house that ruled China for some time, had become the promoter and protector of Christianity. But there were other houses, other forces that work in China. Eventually, those forces brought about the fall of the Tang Dynasty in the year 907, and it appears that Christianity fell with it. So I think we would say that the major reason the church in China disappeared was that it was viewed as a kind of arm of this imperial house, department of religion of this imperial house, and when the Tang Dynasty fell, the church fell too. It's not the only time that we learn in church history that dependence on a government for the survival of the church is a very dangerous thing and provides an uncertain foundation. About the time that Christianity was disappearing in China, it was beginning to take new life in the other end of Asia, in Russia, Ukraine, and over into Europe among the Slavic peoples. The discouraged Nestorian monk in the year 97, monk living in Baghdad, said this, there's not a single Christian left in China. Well, he may have been right, may have been wrong, but there was not a church left in China. And when missionaries returned to China, centuries later, they don't know anything about the earlier Christian church that existed there. But by this time missionaries are pressing from Constantinople up into the north among the Slavic people. Constantinople is now the center of the eastern part of the church, although as we'll see soon, the church is not officially divided into a western half and an eastern half until the year 1054. One of the important dates of church history as is 1517 that divides the church into Catholic and Protestant, but the differences are there long before 1054. And from Constantinople, we could now begin to think of this as eastern orthodoxy. Missionaries went northward. The missionaries from Constantinople were restricted in their movement to the east and to the south by Islam, which was pressing up against the very borders of Constantinople by this time. And missionaries from the eastern part of the church were restricted in their movement west by Roman Catholicism, so the natural direction for the flow of Christian missionaries from Constantinople was to the north. Two Greek brothers, Cyril and Methodius, were sent by the emperor in 862 to preach in Moravia, modern day Austria. So you have the movement of these two missionaries up to Austria. They produced an alphabet and translated the Bible into Slavonic, also translated liturgies or service books into Slavonic. Quite different from Rome, Rome tends to take the Latin with them, teach the people to read the Latin Bible and conduct the mass in Latin, whereas the eastern missionaries don't use Greek so much as immediately began to try to put the Bible and the liturgy into the language of the people to whom they are ministering. I want to mention one other missionary in the north, his name is Ansgar, not a missionary from Constantinople, but from the Roman side of things. He was a bishop appointed bishop in Hamburg in Germany, but his ordination, his appointment was focused on Denmark, there is Scandinavia way up there, not yet Christian. And the church begins to look for ways to reach Scandinavia. Ansgar planted several churches in Denmark in the ninth century, he died in 865, and when he died those churches disappeared and nothing really came of his work. I wonder why did I put him in the list then? Well, I put him in this list of missionaries because sometimes we don't have great stories to tell, missionaries faithful, does the work and nothing much happens. That was the case of the first mission to Denmark. Stephen Neal puts it very well in his history of Christian missions when he said that Ansgar pushed against a door that was not yet ready to open. Eventually that door would open, but it was not yet ready to open. But I think in the province of God it was important that this missionary bishop push against that door even though it did not open at this time. We don't know what his pushing against that door may have contributed to the eventual evangelization of the Scandinavian nations. Well, if that door into Scandinavia was not yet ready to open, there was a very large door that was opening just when Ansgar was pushing against the door that would not open into Denmark. The large door that opened about this time was Russia, or Ukraine, really both of those present day countries, Ukraine and Russia. And the history of Christianity in Ukraine and Russia is traced back to a decision that Prince Vladimir of Kiev made in 988. Again, you have a prince making a decision and his decision becomes the decision of the people. According to the legend, and we had writings of the history and the legends connected with the millennial celebration of Christianity in Ukraine and Russia. According to the legend, Prince Vladimir wanted to find a new religion for his people. So he sent emissaries to check out Islam and Roman Catholic religion and the Greek religion centered in Constantinople. And they all came back with various reports. He turned down Islam, thought about the Catholic Church, but really liked what he heard about Greek Orthodoxy, partly because the emissaries from Kiev, when they got to Hagia Sophia, the great church of Justinian in Constantinople, they were just overwhelmed with the beauty of it all and with the liturgy. And they came back and said, we went to church there and we did not know if we were still on earth or if we'd gone to heaven. And Vladimir thought, well, that's good religion to have. So according to that legend, he adopted Eastern Orthodoxy. There's much more to the story than that. There were missionaries going out from Constantinople and preaching the Eastern version of the gospel, which was very much like the Western version, but with certain differences that we'll look at later. And the vast area of Russia, Ukraine, converted to the Orthodox faith, one modern Orthodox writer, says that the decision to embrace the Eastern form of Christianity determined the destiny of Russia. The whole Russian mind and heart were shaped by this Eastern Christian mole. The best way to get a feel and picture of all of that is to read the big novels by Dostoevsky. And you'll see what Orthodoxy, Christianity and its Orthodox form has done to shape the Russian mind. So, well, I'd like to, at this point, think of some of the reasons that people were converting to Christianity in the medieval period. Andrew Walls, in the word about history at the beginning of the syllabus, talks about a slow, painful, and far from satisfactory spread of Christian allegiance. You shouldn't get the idea that these people become Christians and are real Christians from the very first day. You can tell, by the way, that I've told some of the stories that it didn't work that way. Some people became Christians because they were forced to become Christians by Frank's forcing Aryans into Orthodoxy, or by a king or a prince making a decision that then was to be followed by all of the people. There's a story I read about the conversion of the people in the Orkney Islands, now part of Scotland, but originally earlier part of Norway. Eventually, those Scandinavian countries did become Christian, even though did not happen through Ansgar's ministry. King Olaf of Norway, who became a Christian, wrote to Earl of Orkney a kind of vassal kingdom to Norway at that time and said, I want you and all your subjects to be baptized. If you refuse, I'll have you killed on the spot, and I'll swear that I'll ravage every island with fire and steel. That was his evangelistic message to the Orkneys, and Earl of Orkney and all the people in Orkney were baptized. They got the point, but you can see that that sort of conversion of entire people group or nation is going to require a lot of work in the future, and it's necessary for those islanders to be converted again in a more serious and real way. Some people were converted because of perceived advantages. Sometimes those advantages were spiritual. The gospel really does meet inner needs of human beings, and people saw that and found relief from sin through conversion. Sometimes they perceive that the advantages were physical advantages, material advantages. When Christianity is supported by the Tang Dynasty in China, then it's important for people to be Christians in order to take advantage of the status of Christianity in that kingdom, and the same thing would have been true in places in Europe. Sometimes people are converted because of what we now call the power encounter. One of the real concerns that people had in this medieval period was who to be allied with in terms of the power of that God? The power of that earthly Lord, he wanted to be in connection with someone who really had some strength, but in spiritual ways the same thing followed. The question was really who is the strongest God, and the missionaries had to realize that that was the question the people were asking, who is really the strongest God? The question was not so much what is true, or what does the Bible say, but tell me about this God of the Bible is he's stronger than the gods that we've been worshiping. He said better to be lined up with him than some of these other gods. The gospel was sometimes presented in the context of this power encounter. We'll see that St. Patrick does that in Ireland, the land of the Druids, and Patrick is always talking about the strong name of the Trinity. That's because this is a strong name, and the Territory in Christian God has a name that is stronger than the pagan gods of Ireland. St. Boniface, who went from England to Germany, had a hard time planning a Christian church in Germany until he cut down this big oak tree that was a tree dedicated to the worship of the German God Thor. And it was believed that if anybody damaged that tree, it would be an terrible thing to do, and all sorts of things would happen to that person. Well, Boniface, not making much progress, got the idea that he would just take an axe and cut tree down. That produced a sensational event, everybody watched, expecting him to be struck dead immediately, but he kept on cutting, nothing happened to him. The tree fell over, nothing happened to him, and all the people became Christians, because now they have found the God who was stronger than the God Thor. I've seen that same power encounter, context in my travels and work in Haiti, where people there are concerned about the voodoo gods, whether the Christian God is superior in power and might, to the gods of voodoo or not. Well, with all of these reasons for conversions to Christianity, there, of course, are people who really are genuinely converted. Real faith, the Bible is the message of the gospel, is the power of God into salvation, and the message was getting forth. Sometimes obscured, sometimes not presented in the best way possible, but still that message that God saves sinners through Christ as we receive the gift of salvation by faith. Somehow that gets forth, and people hear it, and are converted. In all of this, we have God's Providence, think of the Roman Empire, what a wonderful instrument that was in God's Providence in the early church, so that you had a vast area of relative peace and ease of travel, which meant that the gospel could move quickly and easily from one end of the Empire to another. Think of even things like the barbarian raids, which you would not believe would have been used by God as missionary instruments, but the grandparents of Alpholus being captured and taken up into the land of the gospel, that this little boy grows up speaking the language of those people and knowing their culture. Or think of St. Patrick that we will look at next time, captured by Irish raiders and taken back to Ireland as a slave, and how God used that to bring the gospel to Ireland. Think about the old silk road, people thought that the road was there so that silk could go to the west, but God was using it to take the gospel to the east. And I think as Calvinist, we would say that in all of this, God has His people, and He is using His acts of Providence and the faithfulness of His missionaries to take His message to those people. The venerable bead, the monk who became the church historian of the English church, ascribes the conversion of King Edwin of North Umbria to predestination. Now some interesting stories related to the conversion of North Umbria will look at some of that next time. But certainly the venerable bead is making an important point when he says that in all of this, God has His people. Let's come to the results and let me explain briefly what I mean by age number three. Age number one in the history of Christianity is the period of Jewish Christianity, centered in Jerusalem, Christians were Jewish people, struggling to know how and whether they should take the gospel to the Gentiles of night, and you know that history from the New Testament. And then finally they do just in the nick of time you might say because the Jewish nation collapses if Christianity had been part of that and part of that only, it would have collapsed like it collapsed in China with the fall of the Tang Dynasty. But by the time the Jewish nation collapses and is destroyed by the Romans, Christianity has moved across a cultural frontier and has been transmitted now into the Greek Roman world, becomes that home you might say in the Roman Empire. And we've been studying that for a good part of this course but the Roman Empire finally collapses. But Christianity doesn't collapse with it because by the time that happens again to speak humanly just in the nick of time Christianity has moved beyond the borders of that cultural political entity, the Greek Roman world, into northern Europe. And Europe temporarily into China is already in Persia and Christianity has found new centuries of influence this time to speak of Europe in the formerly pagan countries of northern Europe. And it happened a number of other times to in the flow of Christian history and is still happening today. So we see the transmission of the gospel from its more recent centers of influence in Europe and in North America into the southern hemisphere, into Africa and into Latin America and into Asia. It looks as though these will become the next centers for the Christian faith as the old centers either fall or Christianity is lost or weakened in those old centers. So we're now in age number three and that's where we will stay in terms of this outline of the transmission of Christianity for the rest of this course. Since we are surrounded with such a great cloud of witnesses, let us run with perseverance the race that is set out for us. I would think so. Yes, I'm not sure I know enough about that to comment in any detail but I'm almost certain that has to be true. Wherever Christianity goes it changes that culture and the culture is not only the secular culture or the ordinary style of people's lives but the religious culture. The other thing that happens is it works the other way to the culture will influence Christianity. The other question would be does Buddhism Hinduism and these religions influence Christianity? Perhaps in some cases, yes, I think the one example where we see this probably the most clearly is in China where Confucianism did seem to mingle somewhat with the Christian faith. And you have a certain amount of syncretism that takes place there. Okay, thank you.