The failure of the early church and the rise of Islam

The importance of Evangelism, missions, bible translation, contextualization, acculturation, church planting.

1. The failure of the early church to reach out in Evangelism, missions, translating the Bible into Arabic; hence, there was no Biblical contextualized witness. (The right kind of contextualization; that keeps the balance of the Biblical truth in the language and culture of the people; not the radical forms of it espoused by many modern missiologists [ie, the church growth movement and Fuller Seminary; "The Insider's Movement"; C-5 level Contextualization; "the Common Ground" seminar teachings; "Jesus in the Qur'an" Seminars; and "The Camel Method"] and the underlying world view of the “seeker sensitive movement” and the “Emerging/emergent church conversation”.)

“As L. E. Browne has remarked, if Christians had seized the opportunity in that age when Arabia was barely becoming literate and had “made the first Arabic book the Bible, instead of the Qur’an, the whole course of the religious history of the east might have been different.” (Samuel Moffett. A History of Christianity in Asia, volume 1. San Francisco: Harper, 1992, p. 329-330. Moffat cites Lawrence E. Browne, The Eclipse of Christianity in Asia from the time of Muhammad till the Fourteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, 1933, p. 14.”

Two Centuries after the Islamic conquest of the land of Christianity, the first project to translate the gospels into Arabic was started!

“This manuscript, presently at St. Catherine Monastery in the Sinai, “is the oldest dated manuscript of the Gospel in Arabic known to modern scholars.” (Robert Wilken. The Land Called Holy. Yale University Press, 1992, p. 251.)

“Of course the language of the Christians native to the area was Syriac [a dialect of ancient Aramaic, which only survives today in the modern Assyrian language.], a Semitic tongue, and this made the transition into Arabic easier for them than for the Christians who spoke Greek or Coptic, like those in Egypt. By the end of the 8^th Century, the scholarly activity of the monks at the monasteries of Mar Sabas and Mar Chariton was beginning to be conducted in Arabic.” (Wilken, ibid, p. 251)

The Church in North Africa:

“. . . the failure to give the Scriptures to the people in their own language. They were available in Latin, but not translations were ever made into the language of the Punic people or the Berbers.” (J. Herbert Kane. A Global View of Christian Missions. Baker Books, 1971, p. 52.)

The Church in North Africa was once a thriving church, with famous church leaders such as Tertullian in the second century, Cyprian in the 3^rd Century, and Augustine of Hippo, the great theologian since the apostle Paul. Kane asks the question, “How shall we account for the demise of such a church?” (ibid, p. 52)

We will continue with this in a future post.