“In trying to understand the death of churches, several possible explanations come to mind, some much less convincing to modern ears than others. Throughout Christian history, observers seeking to understand catastrophe have turned to the Bible. They have looked in… — Philip Jenkins Copy Share
“Yet even when such languages did not face direct official sanction, speakers of older tongues knew that they had little chance of getting on in an Arabic world. By the eleventh century, Coptic and Syriac were declining as major languages, and the compiler of the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria translated the work into Arabic because “today Arabic is… — Philip Jenkins Copy Share
“Christianity offers similar stories, and the global Christianity that perished in the late Middle Ages has revived in the past century. China offers an… — Philip Jenkins Copy Share Image
“Where the African church failed was in not carrying Christianity beyond the Romanized inhabitants of the cities and the great estates, and not sinking… — Philip Jenkins Copy Share Image
“Christians believe that God speaks through history; and only by knowing that history can we hope to interpret momentous events like the Japanese persecutions and the fall of the Asian churches. Yet Christians have systematically forgotten or ignored so very much of their history that it is scarcely surprising that they encounter only a deafening silence. Losing the ancient churches… — Philip Jenkins Copy Share
“Perhaps theological attempts to explain the destruction of churches or of “Christian nations” are asking the wrong question, if they judge success and failure by the standards of the secular world. When, for instance, a Christian community loses political or cultural hegemony, historians might conventionally think of it as having failed, as if the faith must of necessity be allied… — Philip Jenkins Copy Share
“Another difficulty with the reservation scheme was that it reinforced the popular association of Christianity with foreign imperialism, and thus with enmity to the… — Philip Jenkins Copy Share Image
“Far from anti-Christian purges ceasing with the official end of war in 1918, they actually intensified during the ensuing war between Greece and Turkey. In its origins, this war stemmed from aggressive Greek claims to territory in Asia Minor, which at their most extreme amounted to a return to something like the Byzantine Empire. As matters turned out, the Turks… — Philip Jenkins Copy Share
“Middle Eastern Christians, in short, tried every possible tactic to survive and flourish, and their efforts have largely failed. Partly, this is a matter… — Philip Jenkins Copy Share Image
“Besides the missionary theology cultivated by many churches, we also need a theology of extinction.” — Philip Jenkins Copy Share Image
“Our accepted chronology of the ancient church is wrong: ancient Semitic Christianity dies out not in the fourth century, but in the fourteenth.8” — Philip Jenkins Copy Share Image
“Christianity in this region remained as much a colonists’ religion as it would be once again during the French Empire of the twentieth century, and, just as in that later period, when the colonists left, so did the religion. Long wars during the sixth and seventh centuries forced many Romanized Africans to flee to other parts of the Mediterranean, and… — Philip Jenkins Copy Share
“Any acquaintance with recent history made nonsense of any claim that God was on the side of Christian states. As one scholar suggests, what turned Christians to Islam was “the common acceptance by Muslim and Christian alike of the error that the favor of God is shown by worldly success.”22 Self-evidently, Islam represented growth, expansion, and success, in contrast to… — Philip Jenkins Copy Share
