In the Middle Ages, Islam's rapid growth presented a challenge to Christianity.
So the threat of Islam to the West was a serious and ongoing one through the Middle Ages. And that's why in the 16th century for the reformers, it was often difficult to be sure who the Antichrist really was. Was it the Pope or was it Muhammad? It was a close call for a number of the reformers. Welcome to the Friday edition of Renewing Your Mind.
I'm Nathan W. Binga. Today, we conclude our time considering the Middle Ages with our featured teacher W. Robert Godfrey. The messages this week are from the second installment to his six-part overview of church history.
And we'll send you all six, that's 73 messages on DVD. When you donate before midnight tonight at renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 800-435-4343. Don't miss this opportunity to add this popular resource to your library. Dr. Godfrey is our chairman here at Legionnaire Ministries.
He's one of our teaching fellows, and he's a gifted church historian. Here he is to continue helping us understand the Middle Ages and today, The Rise of Islam. We were looking at the end of the last lecture at Pope Gregory, Gregory the Great, right around the year 600. Who began to lay the foundations of an increasingly independent papacy in the West as a key force in the society of the West? And we talked about various elements of Gregory's theology.
I want to read what one historical theologian said of Gregory. Almost everything in Gregory has its roots in the teaching of Augustine, and yet scarcely anything is really Augustinian. The fundamental spirit of Augustine has vanished. and superstition gained supremacy. Everything is coarser, more fixed, and ordinary.
The controlling motive is not the peace of the heart which finds rest in God. But the fear of uncertainty which seeks to attain security through the institutions of the Church. And that may be a bit of a very broad statement about Gregory, but I think it's fairly accurate. I think it captures what's going on there. The great center of Christianity for Gregory was repentance, that we would be constantly repenting, constantly recognizing our sinfulness, constantly seeking grace, and never quite sure where we stood with God.
And that meant that for Gregory, The life of the church in this life was central, but he began also to introduce some of the early beginnings of a doctrine of purgatory. The doctrine of purgatory is that if you die as a Christian with sins not sufficiently taken care of in this life. There will be a place of suffering beyond this life, not hell. but a place of purging.
so that those sins can be taken care of in the next life. And while Gregory doesn't have a formal doctrine of purgatory, that will develop as the centuries go on in the Middle Ages. We're beginning to see in Gregory some notion. That sin is such a great problem in this life, we probably can't completely take care of it, and there's hope that it can be taken care of by suffering beyond this life. Gregory could talk about grace.
Uh and mean it. But Gregory once said, that which is a gift of the omnipotent God becomes our merit.
So God gives us grace, but that grace in it becomes our merit by which He judges us. And so we get The beginnings of this increasingly complicated notion of how grace and merit, God's work, and our work, are really related. to one another, and we see that in Gregory. And so for him, the sacraments of the church become the key way in which we begin to experience, receive, and have some hope. in the grace of God.
Now while We can say a number of negative things about Gregory and think We must, we also have to remember some positive things about Gregory. And one of the intriguing positive things is to look at his very influential book called the book of pastoral rule. Here he's talking principally to bishops who are the pastors of their diocese, but he's looking at the church as a whole and what the function of the clergy is as a whole. And what's interesting when we read this book is that the focus is primarily upon preaching.
So when Gregory thinks of the pastor's role in the life of the church in the year 600, it's still primarily a role of preaching. And if we go back a little more than a century to John Chrysostom, the great preacher but also patriarch of the church in Constantinople, when he wrote his book on the priesthood, That was a book almost entirely on preaching. And so, when we look at the conviction of the ancient church, the early medieval church, as to what the principal role Of the clerical leadership of the life of the church ought to be, it was still a conviction, it ought to be preaching. Preaching might not have. quite lived up to our standards theologically.
But there was still this sense that was the work. That will be progressively lost as the Middle Ages. wears on. Partly it will be lost because of an ever declining level of education. in the common parish clergy.
There will still be very educated people in the church, but the clergy as a whole, the priests as a whole, will see a real decline in their education as the Middle Ages wears on. And If you're not very well educated, you still may be able to memorize the Latin canon of the Mass, so you can recite it at the altar. But you won't be much of a preacher if you're not well educated. And that's what happens as time goes on. But for Gregory, Preaching was still critical, was still central.
Another thing for which we can commend Gregory is his continuing commitment to Christian missions. He was aware. that there were still significant parts of Northwestern Europe that were not yet Evangelized, had not yet really heard the gospel and responded to the gospel. And Gregory was one who, amongst others, really promoted a mission to England. And I mention that because the man he sent to England was a man by the name of Augustine.
Who became Saint Augustine, but not to be confused with Saint Augustine of Hippo, this is Saint Augustine of Kent. And this Augustine went to England to do missionary work. He arrived in Kent. and the capital of Kent in those days was a city called Canterbury. And he became the Bishop of Canterbury, and that was the first major see in connection with Rome in England.
And that's why to this day the Archbishop of England is the Archbishop of Canterbury. That is still the historic. Foundation. of England's Christianity. And in some ways, that goes all the way back to Pope Gregory, who saw the need to see missionaries sent further and further north and west in Europe and encourage that in dramatic ways.
Now The need for missionaries was because parts of Europe were still pagan. Parts of Europe were Under heretical Christian leadership, particularly Aryan leadership. Parts of Europe were continuing to see the influx of a variety of barbarians. from different parts of the east. and that barbarian pressure I meant there was constant pressure on the church to find ways of coming to terms with these newcomers.
First half of the Middle Ages, one of the newcomers from the East that caused a lot of trouble were the Mudjars. The Hungarians, since my wife's a Hungarian, I always have to mention the Hungarians whenever they come up in history. But they were constantly pressuring in the first half of the Middle Ages from the East and finally settled down after the conversion of their king Istvan, King Stephen. Who was converted to Christianity, became a saint.
So there's this constant pressure of sustaining the faith. And spreading the faith in the early Middle Ages. And one element of that pressure came particularly from the rise of Islam. And um I find people are interested in Islam today. And so we're going to spend a little bit of time talking about Islam.
Islam developed as a religion. Primarily in the seventh century, so in the six hundreds. And it was born of The Visions claimed by a man named Muhammad. born in Mecca around five seventy. He was born to a good family, but not a wealthy family.
And he came to be convinced. That the religions that surrounded him there in Arabia, today what we'd call Saudi Arabia. was pagan religion and was idolatrous. He was not well educated.
Some claim that he couldn't read or write. And he claimed that the Quran was dictated to him. By divine inspiration. And he began to have Visions as a result of a time of prayer and fasting. growing concern about the state of religion and what What motivated him above all else was a fanatical, determined monotheism.
He wanted an absolute insistence that God is one. that there are not Many gods, there is only one God, and that one God is God. Allah is the Arabic for God. There is no God but God. That's the central confession.
of Islam. Initially, very few people believed him, that he'd had revelations, were attracted to his monotheism. And in 622, he was forced to flee from Mecca. And was forced to flee north some 250 miles to the city of Medina. And that flight becomes crucial in the history of Islam.
And that's why Mecca and Medina remain holy sites, centrally holy sites for Muslims. That's why ultimately it became a foundation of Muslim faith that any pious A Muslim who possibly can must make a pilgrimage to Mecca once in his life. That's an essential part. of the faith. After his flight, he raised a small army and was able to return in triumph to Mecca in 630.
And the cry of the movement became: there is but one God, and Muhammad is his prophet. And so that's the essential Confession of Islam. Islam believes there were other prophets that preceded the coming of Muhammad, but Muhammad is the final prophet, the last prophet who brings the final definitive. Word. He died in Mecca in 632.
The brilliance of his mind and of the Quran, which he taught, was received by divine. Revelation, the simplicity of the religion. Attracted followers very quickly and soon became a remarkably powerful movement. And The spread of Islam. is really remarkable.
And within 21 years of the death of Muhammad, Islam ruled a realm as large as what had been the Roman Empire.
So they spread both north along the eastern Mediterranean. capturing Jerusalem, only a few years after the death of Muhammad. And then moving through North Africa. By 707, most all of northern Africa was in the hands of Islam.
So that's only, what, 70 years, 80 years after the death of Muhammad? By seven eleven they had crossed into Spain. They captured Spain and reached as far north as the French cities of Poitiers and Tours in seven thirty two.
So they had pushed into the very heart. of Northwestern Europe. By 7:32. There they were stopped. and then pushed back.
South of the Pyrenees Mountains. But Maintained a dominant presence there and were not finally driven from Spain altogether until 1492. When Columbus sailed the ocean blew.
So there was this explosion of energy, of intellectual energy, of religious energy, of military energy coming out of. Arabia and spreading out and suddenly capturing really remarkable sections of the world. In the ninth century, Islam spread into Persia, Afghanistan, and even into India. And as I talked about before, eventually took Constantinople. In 1453.
And continued to threaten Vienna from the east. as late as sixteen eighty three. The last major Muslim attack on the eastern outskirts of Vienna was in 1683.
So the threat of Islam to the West was a serious and ongoing one. through the Middle Ages. And that's why, in the 16th century, for the reformers, it was often difficult to. be sure who the Antichrist really was. Was it the Pope or was it Muhammad?
It was a close call for a number of the reformers. And it was easier when you had the beast from the land and the beasts from the sea. That was the Pope and Muhammad.
So it simplified things. But there was this profound sense at times, not at all times, but at a number of times in medieval history of this. this rising power following a prophet. A prophet who claimed not to be Entirely at odds with the Old Testament and the New Testament, but to have gone beyond. the Old Testament and the New Testament.
In effect, Muhammad was the first postmodern person or post-Christian person. Muhammad taught that Jesus was a prophet. He was in the line of prophets. But that the New Testament had falsified things about Jesus.
So that most of what was taught in the New Testament about Jesus was true up until the point of his death and resurrection. He did not die on the cross, and he was not raised from the dead. He was a prophet who taught from God. He had miracles, he was virgin-born. But He did not die for the sins of his people, and he certainly was not divine.
From a Muslim point of view, the claim that Jesus is divine is polytheistic. And they continue to insist that However much Christians claim to be monotheists, their doctrine of the Trinity is inherently tinged with polytheism. And so that's part of the conflict, part of the contrast. that exists between Christians and Muslims.
Now the theology of Islam. Is based on the Quran, which it is claimed is immediately inspired by God. It is written in 114 chapters or surahs. It is basically poetic. in its character But it is a book of directions.
It is not a book of history. It doesn't have a clear logical development. It is discrete statements of revelation, not necessarily clearly related to one another. And from a Christian perspective, though not a Muslim perspective, it seems to have contradictions within it. From that The basic theology of Islam emerges, the radical monotheism, but the monotheism of a God who is primarily conceived in terms of transcendence.
Primarily conceived in terms of power. There seems to be little love in the conception of Allah. He is the great one. He is the majestic one. He is the one who must be obeyed.
Who must be served, who must be submitted to. And that's the basic meaning of. The word Islam, it's submission. It's submission to the will, to the moral revelation of. God.
It's pretty radically deterministic. The pious Muslim can't be entirely assured of salvation either. That's in the hands of Allah. There's a kind of fatalism that pervades the religion. It is interesting that the great cry of the Muslim is: God is great.
And that does perhaps most accurately capture their vision of God. God is great. It's interesting when you look at the Old Testament, there are plenty of statements that God is great. But if you had to find A dominant Old Testament statement, it would be God is good. And I think there's a real Contrast between the religions there in terms of their emphasis.
Now, I'm sure a Muslim would say that their God is good, but. The emphasis is really on the greatness, the transcendence, the holiness, the. Almost abstractness of God who must be served and to whom one can look for little. goodness or encouragement or love, support. The moral requirements of Islam are relatively simple: no alcohol, no pork.
There is to be a month of fasting annually. There is to be daily prayers. There is to be Friday worship. The daily prayers are to be recited five times a day facing Mecca. There is to be a month of Fasting during the daylight hours, Ramadan.
And there is ideally to be a pilgrimage to Mecca once. in lifetime. That's requirement. That is the goal.
So, it is fairly simple in a sense. The foundations are fairly simple, and they talk about. the five pillars of Islam. The first is the confession that Allah is God and Muhammad is His Prophet. The second pillar is the prayer five times a day, and that's what You see from those minarets that are raised in Muslim cities, the mullahs used to climb up in those minarets before the day of public address systems and they would call the faithful to prayer.
That's that chanting sound that echoes through the city, the call to prayer five times in the day. The third pillar was giving alms to the poor. The fourth pillar was fasting during the month of Ramadan. And the fifth pillar was the visit to Mecca.
So that was the foundation of the religion. And you see the simplicity of it. But it was a religion, again, from a Christian point of view, that was pretty hard on women, I think continues to be hard on women. Divorce was easy for a man and almost impossible for a woman. Polygamy.
was possible for a man. He could have up to four wives. but women were not permitted to have more than one husband. Women were to be veiled. Because women are so irresistibly alluring that they are forever contaminating men.
And it's really their fault. And uh so there are these what we regard as oppressive dimensions. Of Islam, although I was intrigued that we had a lecturer at our seminary who had been a Muslim, who had actually been a professor of Sharia law at a Muslim school in Africa. And had memorized the Quran, could recite any part of the Quran you wanted recited in Arabic. And um Because you can't really translate the Quran.
I mean, you can translate it, but translations never really count. You can't have much assurance that a translation works. Only the original Arabic text is authoritative. And he said, Westerns often say, well, Islam is so difficult for women and so oppressive to women. He said, the reason that Islam survives and flourishes is because.
The women support it so passionately. And I'm not sure of all the psychology of that, whether it's simply the stability that it seems to bring to life, the practices that are so clear and reassuring. But this was. A religion of tremendous Power, but not just a religion, and that's what we have increasingly learned, I think, in recent decades in the West. It is a religion that is also a culture.
The two art. Indistinguishable. They cannot be separated from one another. And that's why Islam believes that wherever it spreads, it must take not only its religion, but its whole set of cultural values and laws, that they are indivisible, the culture and the religion, and they have a strong eschatology. that where Islam spreads, it will never retreat.
And that's why it's so hard for them to recognize the loss of any land. to any other person. And that's what the West, the Christian West faced. throughout almost all the Middle Ages as Islam would in wave after wave, sometime in between, beat against. a Christian lesson.
What a timely message from this week's featured teacher on Renewing Your Mind, W. Robert Godfrey. I'm glad you've joined us today as this message reminds us why it's so important to study history and especially church history. There's so often a line that can be traced from the present day back to key moments in history. and many, many lessons that we can learn.
may each of us have a renewed desire to study Biblical history, and our family history as it's seen in church history.
Well, to help you to that end, for the final day you can request the entire six part seventy three message monumental study series, a survey of church history, when you donate before midnight to night at Renewing Your Mind dot org or when you call us at eight hundred four three five four three four three. All of the messages will arrive on DVD, but we'll also unlock the messages and the six study guides in the Ligonier app. Listen to these messages while you're on a run or a drive. or watch them at home with your family or small group. But don't delay.
As this offer ends tonight, Simply give your gift at renewingyourmind.org or by using the link in the podcast show notes. And if you live outside of the US and Canada, that digital global offer is waiting for you at renewingyourmind.org slash global. Thank you for extending the reach of this program through your generosity. And if these past few days have given you a taste for church history, then I commend to you the podcast Five Minutes in Church History. Every Wednesday, in less than five minutes, Lignier Teaching Fellow Stephen Nichols introduces you to a person, place, or thing from church history.
Be educated and sometimes entertained by following the Five Minutes in Church History podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, or visit five minutesinchurchhistory.com. I try to only make promises that I can keep, especially to my children. But there is one who has never broken a promise. One who is a promise keeper.
Next week, RC Sproul will introduce us to the Promise Keeper and Covenant Theology.
So make plans to join us beginning Monday here on Renewing Your Mind.
