There are so many negative events happening in our world today - and it seems that many are fearful for the Church, as it concerns persecution and the potential for life as we know it to cease if the Church gets wiped out somehow.
I was talking with one of my mentors (older brother and priest) and he brought the issue to my attention with the books he was collecting over the years - in light of the ways that it seemed books were being targeted more and more for editing out key information for the sake of controlling traffic of thought/how others saw themselves. For knowledge of the Bible is being lost - as well as knowledge of Church tradition when it comes to seeing how the Bible was composed and interpreted. For secular society openly rejects the Bible as being the Word of God, but Christians are becoming so caught up in other functions of the church that they are losing that hunger for scripture that used to drive them to study and absorb God’s Word.
And as my mentor has noted, many have been of the same mindset that there's massive attacks happening on churches worldwide and it'd not take much for things to go crazy
If all the history books in the world were burned up - and all documentation of the Church councils or the stories of the saints were wiped out, some have felt that the church itself would not be strong since scripture alone without understanding how it was interpreted and what the Church did is a big problem.
In example - in our times, if you had a small parish that had a bishop with a little bit of scripture was teaching....how would those people in that one tiny parish, following that ONE faithful bishop, know that their bishop was the faithful one and all the others weren't if they were isolated in their knowledge? Obviously, they would look at Scripture and at the liturgical texts. They also would read the Fathers and the councils and compare all that to what was being taught by their bishop, and all the other bishops. Of course, belief in apostolic succession (and probably a much wider swath of material to sift through before deciding who is right) would make a significant difference in how they interpreted things - say in an Orthodox or Catholic parish - than a Baptist or Methodist one. But what's consistent is that they would have many resources to use and turn to.
However, if you take these well-meaning people, whose circumstances are beyond their control, and place them within an area where there are no faithful bishops or where nobody sounds like he's in accord with the early fathers and Scripture, it would seem as if they had hit the end of the line with regard to faithful bishops and translation of information.
And with each feeling they are a remnant due to know knowing what was up, you'd end up with an issue that asks "How would you go about deciding which bishop was faithful and which wasn't?"
I wrestled over that for sometime - wondering how to go about addressing the issue - and on the subject, this is what I came up with in my estimation.
Even without a history of the Bishops of the Church or Church tradition present (as has occurred in places where Christianity was eradicated), who's to say that the Lord couldn't speak to others in the same way he did with the Prophets and the Apostles so that they'd have insight in the same way that those with the traditions of the Church had?
God isn't limited by what men lose....as He's able to translate ideas to others and it's more than possible (and has occurred ) that people may not have a memory of a tradition valued in the Church and yet they may still - by the leading of the Lord - live out the very thing that the early Church valued anyhow. And their actions, if there is a gap in memory of what happened before, would simply be taken as the beginning of a new cycle and memories that future generations of the Church would look back to.
Middle Eastern/Near-Eastern culture is where the Israelites developed in - and of course, one could argue that it seems others today are not distinct in being recognized as other cultures connected with Middle-Eastern culture (as with Muslims) - but that even Muslim culture developed in architechture after stealing it from the Arabic Christians/Eastern Christians, reverse-engineering what they saw and then having all other preceeding generations assume that it was a "Muslim" innovation to have the buildings they turned into mosques be as they are. The architecture of the earliest minarets, which are square rather than round, unmistakably derive from the church towers of Byzantine Syria (and several other things that Muslims have a part of their culture already came from Eastern Christians/Jewish believers -
as noted before.
Professor Philip Jenkiins Philip Jenkins noted it in-depth in his work entitled "
The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia — and How It Died". It was very brilliant in discussing the many experiences of believers who literally spread around the world with the Gospel of Messiah---and yet experienced many pains/difficulties despite the victories they had.
As
one review said best:
But just as he restores this lost history of expansion, he also gives due consideration to the near extinction of Christianity in these lands by about 1300. This requires a nuanced discussion of the "ferocious organized violence" (pp. 101, 141) of Islam that conquered many of these Christian lands, and Jenkins takes care not to say too much or too little. Between the years 1200 and 1400 most all of these churches had vanished except for significant remnants like Coptic Christians in Egypt. By around the year 1900, writes Jenkins, "the whole Middle East accounted for just 0.9 percent of the world's Christians" (155) — a stunning reversal of fortunes for a once powerful presence. In his final pages Jenkins moves beyond the confines of secular history to a "theology of extinction" (249).
He inquires what existential meaning for faith we might derive from this story of our Christian forbears. Even if some churches die, the Church lives on, and the possibility for resurrection rests in the recovery of historical memory.
- especially in the Church of the East, which was a far reaching web reaching as far as Tibet and China. Along with the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Asian and African members of now almost forgotten churches dominated the Middle East in the centuries before the Muslim conquest and then provided most of the architectural, administrative, and scholarly backbone for the Arabic Empire....but when the sect of Islam began to rise in geographical locations, they took over and claimed the buildings made for themselves.
And yet, what they stood for found ways to arise again in different contexts even after many in Islam did everything possible to wipe them out - in some areas succeeding completely (just as it is happening unfortunately in Syria and as occurred in Iraq).
There seems to be the dynamic of seasons clearly involved----where the church at times had great persecution (Acts 8) and at others there were long times/periods of peace (Acts 9), where God prospered his people to do well for the purpose of helping others. And then there are times when the Lord may allow it for the Church to be wiped out in certain places only for it to develop elsewhere in another area/take on a differing development. Often one will read books on Church Growth, but not many have ever read a book on the death or extinction of a church even when in history, church death is a very common phenomenon. Christianity has within it a very migratory dynamic where it WILL survive and Christ will never shut down-----no matter what form of government exists--since Christianity moves from one area to another.
Though it may dies in areas where it has been strong, that is not something to be discouraged about....
For reference:
Yes, unfortunately, the history of those saints from the original Early Church would be lost if things started over again without the lessons from the past.....and it'd stink to not be able to remember them. Nonetheless, they are present within the Church Eternal and the Heavens with Christ - so the wisdom of God could continue on anew. Others would wrestle over issues just as the Early Church did all over again - and although new trajectories may occur (just as
they did the first time and s
till are doing today), the same wisdom God gave the FIRST time would continue onward.
And it'd be like a tree being chopped down - but still having seeds planted by the one who made it originally - and those seeds coming up all over again..
On the issue, it may not be the best example - but I was challenged when remembering this scene from one of my favorite movies - called
"Book of Eli" (
with Denzel Washington) -
where the future had it where all the Bibles/ties to the Church were destroyed after nuclear war nearly killed all of humanity and religion was blamed ...and where one man who was blind had enough vision to hide God's Word within Him so that it'd never be lost wherever you go. All the Bibles in the world were destroyed and memory of the Church lost - yet one man found a brail Bible to read that he was guided to....and even after losing that, he STILL was able to translate it.
The Book of Eli - Eli Cites Genesis 1 - YouTube
"There is no wisdom, no insight, no plan that can succeed against the LORD" (Proverbs 21:30) - and so true that you can pulp a story but you cannot destroy an idea, for that's ancient knowledge and glad that even if every page of every Bible everywhere was destroyed, God will make sure it will find a way to reprint itself again.
And even if men try to wage war against God with his own gifts (as every good thing we have is on loan from Him), God will find a way to take what men present and make it a present/gift to glorify Himself because that's who He is.
Eli End - YouTube
Does anyone else feel similar to what I've been noting? Do you feel that the Church could ever be rebooted so to speak or in danger of being wiped out - only for God to start over fresh with it? Or is that something that shouldn't even be a concern?
And if the Bibles and Church history was erased/destroyed but somehow managed to survive, do you feel that what would emerge afterward would look radically different than what we see now with all the different camps that have arisen (i.e. Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, etc.) or would groups formulate again that'd be exactly the same to what happened before?