The beginning of Christendom is, strictly, at a point out of time.
—Charles Williams
Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence has as its central character Father Sebastian Rodrigues, the last serving priest of the seventeenth-century mission to Japan. Although Father Sebastian has been trained to expect persecution and martyrdom, the anti-Christian campaign he witnesses appalls him less because of its extreme ferocity than for its apparent lack of meaning. Why, he asks, are Christians willing to die for an endeavor that is so conspicuously failing? And why, amid all the persecution, does God offer no signs of hope? Already, twenty years have passed since the start of the great inquisition:
The black soil of Japan has been filled with the lament of so many Christians; the red blood of priests has flowed profusely; the walls of the churches have fallen down; and in the face of this terrible and merciless sacrifice offered up to him, God has remained silent.1
Knowing that churches are born in blood, he is initially willing to suffer the torment or death that might prove to be the labor pains of a future Japanese Catholicism; but he has no intellectual framework to cope with the death of a church. Encountering only a divine silence, he is driven to ask whether God exists, and if so, whether God takes any interest whatever in human affairs.
Contemplating the extinction of Christian communities, others might also be moved to consider profound issues of meaning, which recall the agonized dilemmas of Jewish thinkers seeking to reconcile the fact of the Holocaust with the existence of a just God. In the presence of such horrors, why did the skies not darken? One might even see the failure of churches as a potent argument against the truth of Christianity. If in fact the religion is true, if God intends his church to carry a message to the utmost ends of the earth, why would he ever allow that church to die? Is God silent, or nonexistent? Christians have always believed that God guides all earthly affairs. An ancient hymn prays to Christ as incarnate Wisdom:
O come, Thou Wisdom from on high,
Who orderest all things mightily.
But did that mighty “ordering” include the annihilation of many of the world’s churches, the persecution or defection of their believers?
So often, too, it is difficult to see in this story the workings of providence, as opposed to blind chance. The survival or eclipse of churches seems to depend on the decisions of particular individuals, on the outcome of battles, or indeed of geographical factors. If not for the defensible land bridge separating Egypt from Western Asia, would the Coptic Church be with us today? Persecuted churches could endure for centuries above the two-thousand-foot contour, but succumbed nearer to sea level. From a secular standpoint, such stories just remind us yet again of the role of political factors, and indeed of chance, in shaping the history of religions. If matters had worked out differently, Manichaean Uygurs or Christian Keraits might have transformed the history of the Middle East, rather than Muslim Turks. In terms of better-known historical events, if Henry VIII’s first queen had borne a son, perhaps England would have remained loyal to the popes and to the Roman Catholic Church, with all that would have implied for the later history of North America and the wider world.
For Christians, or for other believers, the apparent role of chance or randomness raises difficult questions. If the history of Christianity is at its heart a tale of the chance survival of particular forms of faith, how is it possible to speak of any meaning or purpose in that process? Even if we imagine the workings of subtler forms of divine intervention that we cannot immediately understand, the historical process still seems bizarre and puzzling. In fact, the search for meaning is not as hopeless as it may appear, but the questions raised must be addressed. Besides the missionary theology cultivated by many churches, we also need a theology of extinction.
Explaining Disaster
The ruin of Christianity in a particular region might confound Christians who have long been accustomed to seeing the expansion of their faith as a fundamental expectation. Missionaries through the ages have been inspired by the Great Commission that Jesus gives his followers at the end of the Gospel of Matthew: go and make disciples of all nations. Certainly for the last five centuries, the trajectory of Christian history seems to have been one of constant growth beyond the confines of Europe. That pattern has never been more true than in our own time, as Christianity has spread so rapidly in Africa and Asia. In the triumphant words of a hymn composed a century ago, at the climax of the Western missionary boom:
Lift high the cross, the love of Christ proclaim
Till all the world adore his sacred Name.
God, it seems, wants to spread the news of his truth to the whole world, and that mission is coming daily closer to fruition.
But how then to explain the failures? What if Christians do make disciples of all nations, but subsequently lose them or their descendants? How can we account for such devastating reversals as the annihilation of the church in North Africa, the crushing of Catholic missions in Asia, and, above all, the strangulation of the faith in the Middle East? Presumably, each of these failures happened regardless of countless fervent but unanswered prayers. In terms of its global reach, only in very modern times has Christianity resumed the span that it had achieved a thousand years ago. Christianization, obviously, is not an inevitable process, nor a one-way road.
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 particular at the many cases in the Old Testament in which Israelite kingdoms fell to massacre and exile, leaving only a tiny righteous remnant as the basis for later building. These disasters are generally explained in terms of the failings of those societies, their refusal to obey divine laws, especially to enforce strict monotheism. When the Turks sacked Edessa in the 1140s, Michael the Syrian described how
the city of Abgar, the friend of Christ, was trampled underfoot because of our iniquity.…Some aged priests…recited the words of the prophet, “I will endure the Lord’s wrath, because I have sinned against Him and angered Him.” And they did not take flight, nor did they cease praying until the sword rendered them mute.2
Such punishments could be understood as a form of correction from which the society would learn lessons for the future, and from which it would emerge stronger. This was, after all, a society in which fathers were expected to apply strict corporal punishment to erring children.
For centuries after the Arab conquest, Christians explored the scriptures to understand the scourging they were enduring. In the tenth century, Bishop John of Córdoba described the compromises that Spanish Christians had to make under Muslim rule, which he delicately described as “the great calamity that we suffered for our sins.” The Syriac-speaking churches often favored this interpretation. Solomon of Basra in the 1220s traced the history of Muslim victories in the form of a retroactive prophecy:
[T]here shall the fat ones of the kingdom of the Greeks, who destroyed the kingdoms of the Hebrews and the Persians, be destroyed by Ishmael, the wild ass of the desert; for in wrath shall he be sent against the whole earth, against man and beast and trees, and it shall be a merciless chastisement. It is not because God loves them that He has allowed them to enter into the kingdoms of the Christians, but by reason of the iniquity and sin which is wrought by the Christians, the like of which has never been wrought in any one of the former generations.
And such an analysis is by no means confined to medieval thinkers: we think of modern-day evangelicals like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blaming the horrors of September 11 on the immorality and sinfulness of contemporary America. God might be chastening his people, or perhaps the explanation was even more fundamental: sin had become so rampant that he had determined to destroy the society utterly, and to begin again, by forming a whole new community. Some early Eastern writers thought the Arab victories might be an apocalyptic sign, the overthrow of worldly rulers that presaged the end of things.3
A modern reader of literal inclinations might also see the destruction of the historic churches of Africa and Asia as a form of punishment. Perhaps they had failed in theological or moral terms, leading God to withdraw his favor from them, or else God was punishing them actively, using them as an object lesson for other Christians. The English Victorian editor of the works of historian John of Ephesus explicitly adopted such an Old Testament perspective when he wrote that
the young Mahomet, repelled in his first inquiries by the idolatrous aspect which Christianity outwardly bore, was rising to be the instrument of God’s just anger against the Eastern Church. For the picture which John has drawn for us…of the narrowness and bigotry, the fierce strifes, the want of self-restraint, the injustice and cruelty and utter absence of Christian charity, which characterized all parties in his days alike, makes us feel that the times were ripe for punishment.4
Many of the vanished African and Asian churches were, after all, heretical by the standards of the Catholic/Orthodox tradition—largely Monophysite, but also Nestorian.
Obviously, such opinions carry little weight for most mainstream Christians today. Few would contemplate a God so rigid in his devotion for precise orthodoxy, as laid down in the fifth-century councils, that he would allow his mildly erring servants to suffer massacre, rape, and oppression. And Orthodox and Catholic believers have repeatedly been the worst sufferers from persecution and ethnic cleansing, especially in medieval Asia Minor. Nor do we have any evidence that the uprooted churches were any more sinful or lacking in faith than those anywhere else in the world. Some of the main victims included such missionary powerhouses as the Nestorian churches of the high Middle Ages.
It is no less repellent to think of God discarding portions of the Christian world that do not fit in with a long-term process of sculpting or shaping. Can we imagine a deity permitting churches to be slaughtered because they do not mesh with a particular vision of the Christian future—for instance, that the destiny of the church was to be in Europe, so that the older centers no longer mattered? Creative destruction is a controversial enough theory in economics, and is still more dubious when applied to theology.
Like a Watch in the Night
Other possible approaches demand more respect. For one thing, we must be careful in describing a religion as extinct, either entirely, or in a particular area; churches end, but The Church goes on. A conservative Catholic once criticized my statement that the North African church had ceased to exist. Of course it had not, he argued. True, the dioceses in question happened, at present, to have no clergy, no members or lay believers, and no buildings. But regardless of the number of people it included, the church never ceased to exist as a body at once mystical and institutional. Diocesan names and identities survived, and the Catholic Church still used them as honorary titles. A modern cleric might be given the honorary title of an African or Asian see that ceased to exist as a functioning body a thousand years ago and was now in partibus infidelium, in the lands of unbelievers. At various times, such phantom bishops have been quite numerous in the Roman church.
At the time, I thought my colleague’s views sounded absurdly legalistic: if Christianity had lost all its living and breathing followers in Tunisia (say), what did it matter if the institutional minutiae survived? But on reflection, I think he was making a worthwhile point about the time span of human history. The scriptures of many religions remind us that the divine does not necessarily work according to our concepts of time. As the Psalmist declares, “[A] thousand years in your sight are just like yesterday when it is past, like a watch in the night.” Perhaps only our limited awareness of time leads us to think that the ruin of a church has happened “forever,” when all we mean is that, by our mortal standards, we can see no chance of it being reversed. In fact, religions are like biological organisms, which do not become extinct just because they are driven from a particular environment. Provided they continue to exist elsewhere, they might well return someday to recolonize. And often, in the human context, memories of that historical precedent help shape the new settlement.
Other religious traditions offer powerful examples of how historical memory shapes the return to old habitats. The best-known example of this process is the return of the Jews to the land of Palestine, from which they seemed to have been definitively expelled in the second century. For many centuries, most outside observers thought that the uprooting of the Jews was a clear sign of divine wrath, an eternal judgment, yet this verdict was utterly reversed some eighteen hundred years after the original catastrophe.
Other final exits have proved less terminal than they might once have seemed. In Spain, Muslim political power was broken in 1492, and Muslims as a community lingered on only into the early seventeenth century, when they were altogether driven out. After a 350-year gap, however, Muslim immigration resumed as the Spanish economy boomed, and today Spain has perhaps a million Muslims, the new Moros. As a proportion of the population, Muslims will undoubtedly grow in importance over time, because of the difficulties of regulating migration into Europe, and also because of the historically low birthrates of old-stock Spaniards. Of course, the mainly poor North African migrants who flooded into Spain did not choose that destination because of vague memories of the lost splendors of al-Andalus, but educated Muslims are anxious to reestablish old ties. An evocative symbol of the new presence came in 2003 when the Spanish Muslim community dedicated the new mosque at the historic capital of Granada, near the ancient Alhambra palace. However totally eradicated Islam seemed, it came back.
Christianity offers similar stories, and the global Christianity that perished in the late Middle Ages has revived in the past century. China offers an amazing example of long-term continuity. The Christian faith has established itself in that nation on at least four occasions, and the first three missions ended in ruin. This was the case with the first Nestorian mission, which operated from the seventh century through the ninth; their second attempt in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; and the Roman Catholic venture of the sixteenth and seventeenth. This last mission collapsed after 1700, when the Vatican prohibited Jesuit attempts to accommodate Chinese customs and language in the liturgy, provoking the Chinese government to persecute Christians as agents of a foreign power. The last remnants of that particular underground church disappeared in the mid–eighteenth century. The fourth Christian incursion began with Protestant and Catholic missionary ventures in the nineteenth century, although this, too, seemingly suffered total defeat when the Communists took over in 1949. Since that date, however, China’s Christian community has flourished, growing in number from perhaps 5 million in 1949 to anywhere between 50 and 90 million today. Although estimates vary widely, even the lower figures would already give China one of the world’s largest Christian populations. And China’s revived churches have a potent missionary dynamic, rooted firmly in memories of Asia’s Christian roots. The country’s Back to Jerusalem movement aims to send thousands of Chinese missionaries across central Asia into the Middle East so that Asian missionaries will re-evangelize what is now the Muslim world. They plan in effect to restore the Silk Road as a highway for Christian missions.5
Knowing this subsequent history must affect how we judge the earlier ventures. In the late tenth century, for instance, an Arabian Nestorian monk reported the horrible discovery he had made on a visit to China. “Christianity had become quite extinct in China,” he found. “The Christians had perished in various ways; their church been destroyed; and but one Christian remained in the land.”6 Perhaps the Nestorians were tempted to write off their Chinese missions as having failed forever, but as we have seen, forever can be a risky term to apply to human affairs, and so can extinction. And even if particular denominations or churches perish, Christian believers do in fact return, and flourish. Nestorians planted, Catholics watered, and many churches ultimately benefited. To return to Endo’s example, any thought of Christianity returning in force to Japan seems absurd today, but who can speak with confidence of matters in a hundred years, or a thousand?
Also, while it is far from clear whether different phases of such missions have any connection with each other, we should not presume that just because we cannot see such linkages, they do not exist. In some cases, even failed missions leave memories that guide later ventures, while mystics discern spiritual connections that cannot be approached through the techniques of conventional history. As the historian Leopold von Ranke once remarked, all ages are equidistant from eternity, and just as immediately accessible to God’s presence. Catholic doctrine includes the idea of the Communion of Saints, in which the holy and redeemed of all generations and all eras stand equally before God, and are equally accessible to those who invoke them.
Alongside Endo’s Silence, we might read another great Christian novel—namely, Charles Williams’s Descent into Hell, which also deals with themes of martyrdom and, in worldly terms, failure. One of the book’s characters is a sixteenth-century Protestant about to be executed for his faith, but his fear of suffering and pain means that he dreads giving in to his persecutors. He draws courage from a mystical linkage with his descendant, a woman in the twentieth century. The lives of both individuals find meaning and purpose across long centuries that for us demarcate separate worlds, but which have no existence in the mind of God. Such a connection is absurd in terms of secular thought, as God does a miserably poor job of respecting human precision about time and space. But such a story reminds us that long ages of Christian absence that we might clumsily term an “eternity” might in reality be no such thing.
God in History
Similarly, in terms of our limited perceptions, we should be careful about speaking of “blind chance,” or assuming that the rise or fall of Christian communities is solely a matter of political and social circumstances. Deeply ingrained in the Christian tradition, as in the Jewish and Muslim faiths, is the concept of a God who intervenes in history, through many and diverse ways. In the Bible, we hear of God guiding history through determining the outcome of battles, through granting or withholding children, through shortening or extending lives. Often, God permits his chosen people to suffer defeat and dispersal, for reasons no mortal can discern at the time. The book of Isaiah presents the pagan king Cyrus as the agent fulfilling God’s will in this world, whether or not the Persian ruler had any inkling of the fact. To paraphrase an earlier remark, the fact that we cannot discern purpose or guidance in earthly events does not mean that none exists. To the contrary, we might argue that a purpose that can be easily traced—for instance, God always granting victory to his Catholic servants, or his Muslim followers—would be evidence of a simple deity of brute strength more like those of pagan Greece or Rome, rather than the complex God of history presented by later faiths.
For Christians, the destruction of churches also focuses attention on the role of other religions in the divine plan, assuming that such exists. If we assume for the sake of argument that Christianity’s claims are genuine, why did God permit that religion to suffer so many severe setbacks at the hands of Islam, and in fact to be replaced by Islam over so large an area of the world? How might Islam be fitted within that Christian worldview?
Through much of the Old Testament, outside peoples like the Assyrians and Babylonians feature chiefly for their relevance to the fate of Israel, and serve as walk-on characters only in that particular drama: their story has no interest in its own right. In much Christian history, too, other religions—especially Islam—play a comparable role. Islam is commonly seen as the alien force that God, for whatever mysterious reasons, permits to scourge or destroy his church. Little thought is given to those Christians, individuals or communities, who accept other religions: they just drop off the map of faith. They become immaterial to the main story, except as possible future targets for reconversion. When in 1933 Laurence Browne published his innovative and wide-ranging work The Eclipse of Christianity in Asia, he concluded with a brusquely dismissive chapter titled “The Empty Triumph of Islam.” Although Islam triumphed across the Middle East, largely eliminating Christianity, this scarcely mattered because the victors inherited a dying society, and anyway, he continued, their own faith was bankrupt:
Lest any suppose that the eclipse of Christianity was in any sense a real triumph for Islam, it is well to remember that this very period marks the turn of the tide for Islam…. From the fifteenth century Islam had no religious contribution to give to the world, unless one includes its effect in modern times on the primitive races of Africa.7
While we can see here an element of sour grapes, Browne was accurately reflecting a then-common Western view of Islam as a spiritual and cultural dead end.
Although they still might not know exactly what to make of it, many modern Christians would reject the assumption that Islam represented either the dark side of the force or, perhaps even more insultingly, an irrelevant state of nonbeing. If Islam is not understood as the scourge that God applies to faithless Christians—and nor is it, as Muslims believe, the only true faith—then how exactly should it be seen? Might Christians someday accept that Islam fulfils a positive role, and that its growth in history represents another form of divine revelation, one that complements but does not replace the Christian message? The linkage between the two religions goes far beyond an ultimate grounding in Abrahamic tradition, for as we have seen, the development of Islam can scarcely be understood except in the context of centuries of close contact with Eastern Christianity.
However difficult such a reappraisal might be, we recall how fundamentally Christian views of Judaism have changed over the past few decades. Not long ago, the common Christian approach was one of supersession, the idea that the Christian covenant replaced and invalidated the older Jewish covenant. More recently, many contemporary Christian theologies accept the eternal value of God’s covenant with Israel, with the implication that Christian evangelism of Jews is unnecessary and unacceptable. On the same grounds, even to speak of the “Old Testament” has unacceptable implications of supersession, and many prefer to use the term Hebrew Bible.
Determining the proper relationship between Christianity and Islam appeared much less critical when Muslims were not a common presence in Western societies, but of course they are today, particularly in Europe.8 And international conflicts give special urgency to such a rethinking. Christian theologians must of necessity give thought to the nature of Islam, whether they see it as a global adversary in a spiritual cold war, as a Christian heresy, or as an equally valid path to God. That rethinking has obvious implications for understanding the closely linked history of the two faiths through the centuries. Do churches simply die? Or does something positive rise from their ruins?
Winning the World
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 to political power, and even military victory. Although such a linkage to worldly success was commonplace in earlier times, it has fewer adherents today. Instead of seeking explanations for the loss of divine favor, Christians should rather stress the deep suspicion about the secular order that runs through the New Testament, where the faithful are repeatedly warned that they will live in a hostile world, and a transient one. Nowhere in that scripture are Christians offered any assurance that they will hold political power, or indeed that salvation is promised to descendants or to later members of a particular community. Perhaps the real mystery of Christianity is not in explaining failure or eclipse at particular times, but rather in accounting for the successes elsewhere.
Indeed, someone from the Anabaptist tradition might argue that minority status and persecution are the natural and predictable outcome of attempting to live a Christian life, and it is the communities that coexist comfortably with state power that have departed from the norm. What matters is not the size or numbers claimed by churches, but rather the quality of witness demonstrated by Christians in their particular circumstances. Of course, Christians were persecuted in seventeenth-century Japan, and in many other places before and since. And just as evidently, Christians have often experienced the status of being persecuted minorities, or, commonly, persecuted majorities, sometimes in societies they had once dominated. Why should any historically informed observer expect matters to be different? As the letter to the Hebrews declares, here, we have no abiding city.
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 Empire was not to exist forever. Yet while Christian states have come and gone, not all the apparent disasters that afflicted particular communities have prevented the growth of what is today the world’s most numerous religion, and which will remain so for the foreseeable future. Although he was describing the Roman Catholic papacy, the nineteenth-century Lord Macaulay might well have been writing of the wider church that spans denominations:
She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.9
The more we study the catastrophes and endings that befell individual churches in particular eras, the better we appreciate the surprising new births that Christianity achieves in these very years, in odd and surprising contexts. Just as Turkish power was reaching its height in the traditional Christian lands of the Middle East and the Balkans, so the seafaring Christian powers were bringing their faith to the New World and the Pacific. And while the 1915–25 period in the Middle East marked the extinction or ruin of ancient Christian communities, this was exactly the era in which the religion began its epochal growth in black Africa, arguably the most important event in Christian history since the Reformation. But the history can be appreciated in its fullness only by acknowledging the defeats and disasters alongside the triumphs and expansions.
The fictional Father Rodrigues could find no explanation for the divine silence in the face of the annihilation of churches. Yet perhaps, the silence is not as baffling as it seems. Silence, after all, comes in two very different forms. Sometimes, indeed, nobody is speaking; but on other occasions, people are unable or unwilling to listen to what is being said. 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 is one thing, but losing their memory and experience so utterly is a disaster scarcely less damaging. To break the silence, we need to recover those memories, to restore that history. To borrow the title of one of Charles Olson’s great poems: the chain of memory is resurrection.