“Comparing African and Egyptian circumstances also points to other reasons why churches survived in some regions and failed in others. From earliest times, Christianity had developed in the particular social and economic world of the Mediterranean and the Near East,… — Philip Jenkins Copy Share Image
“Looking at the sweep of Christian history, we are often reminded of this message of the transience of human affairs, and, based on that, of the foolishness of associating faith with any particular state or social order. Even the Roman… — Philip Jenkins Copy Share Image
“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,… — Philip Jenkins Copy Share Image
“Any acquaintance with recent history made nonsense of any claim that God was on the side of Christian states. As one scholar suggests, what… — Philip Jenkins Copy Share Image
