Chapter 1: What challenge did the rise of Islam present to Christianity in the Middle Ages?
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. Binger. 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 Ligonier 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 gains 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 the doctrine of purgatory.
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Chapter 2: How did Pope Gregory influence the papacy and church society?
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 message. 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 Koran, 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 711, they had crossed into Spain.
They captured Spain and reached as far north as the French cities of Poitiers and Tours in 732. So they had pushed into the very heart of northwestern Europe by 732. 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 blue.
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 1683. 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 beast 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 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.
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Chapter 3: What are the early foundations of the doctrine of purgatory introduced by Gregory?
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 so there are these, what we regard as oppressive dimensions of of Islam, although I was intrigued. 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 Koran, could recite any part of the Koran you wanted recited in Arabic. Because you can't really translate the Koran. 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, Westerners 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, recent decades in the West. It is a religion that is also a culture. The two are 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 the Christian West.
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