Chapter 10 Flashcards
What Chinese woman, about twenty years of age around 1990, became distraught at discovering that her husband was having an affair and became a Christian?
Yao Hong
Where was Yao Hong from?
She was a migrant from a rural village to the huge city of Shanghai, where she found support and a sense of family in the Christian community.
What did Yao Hong observe in an interview in 2010 about the Christian community?
“Whether they know you or not, they treat you as a brother or sister. If you have troubles, they help out with money or material assistance or spiritual aid.”
How did Yao Hong feel about converting to Christianity?
She did not find the Christian faith alien to her Chinese culture, in fact, she felt conversion to Christianity as a patriotic act, even a way of becoming more fully modern. “God is rising here in China, If you look at the United States or England, their gospel is very advanced. Their churches are rich because God blesses them. So I pray for China.”
What other Asian countries also hosted substantial Christian communities along with China?
South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines, Vietnam, and parts of India.
What percentage of the world’s Christians lived in Asia, Africa, or Latin America?
60 percent
What flourishing communities did Christianity enjoy an Afro-Eurasian reach?
Anatolia, Arabia, Egypt, North Africa, Ethiopia, Nubia, Syria, Armenia, Persia, India, and China, as well as Europe.
By 1300, almost all of the societies from Ireland and England in the west to Russia in the east had embraced what teaching?
embraced in some form the teachings of the Jewish artisan called Jesus
What was the eastern half of the Christian world known as?
Known as the Byzantine Empire or Byzantium, which encompassed much of the eastern Mediterranean basin while continuing the traditions of the Greco-Roman world, on a smaller scale, until its conquest by the Muslim Ottoman Empire in 1453
Where was the Byzantine Empire centered on?
The magnificent city of Constantinople, Byzantium gradually evolved a particular form of Christianity known as Eastern Orthodoxy within a distinctive third-wave civilization
What particular form of Christianity did Byzantium gradually evolve into?
Known as Eastern Orthodoxy
What was the Western or Latin Christendom encompassing?
encompassing what we now know as Western Europe.
What features of Roman civilization weakened along with the Roman imperial order which vanished by 500 C.E.?
Roads fell into disrepair, cities decayed, and long-distance trade shriveled.
What replaced the old Roman order?
A highly localized society - fragmented, decentralized, and competitive - in sharp contrast to the unified state of Byzantium.
Like Byzantium, the Latin West ultimately became what?
thoroughly Christian, but it was a gradual process lasting centuries, and its Roman Catholic version of the faith, increasingly centered on the pope, had an independence from political authorities that the Eastern Orthodox Church did not.
The Western Church in particular and its society were far more what compared to the Byzantium?
Far more rural and certainly had nothing to compare to the splendor of Constantinople.
What happened after 1000 in Western Europe?
Western Europe emerged as an especially dynamic, expansive, and innovative third-wave civilization, combining elements of its Greco-Roman past with the culture of Germanic and Celtic peoples to produce a distinctive hybrid or blended civilization
Where was the decimation of earlier Christian communities most complete and fast?
In Arabia, the homeland of Islam, for within a century or so of Muhammad’s death in 632, only a few Christian groups remained.
In the 8th century, what did triumphant Muslims mark as a sign of the replacement of the old religion?
By using the pillars of a demolished Christian cathedral to construct the Grand Mosque of Sana’a in southern Arabia
What did Muslim forces do in 638, when they took control of Jerusalem?
They subsequently constructed the Muslim shrine known as the Dome of the Rock, that precise location had long been regarded as sacred
Why was the area where the Muslim shrine is known as the Dome of the Rock, a sacred location to the Jews?
To Jews, it contained the stone on which Abraham prepared to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice to God, and it was the site of the first two Jewish temples
Why was the area where the Muslim shrine is known as the Dome of the Rock, a sacred location to the Christians?
To Christians, it was a place that Jesus had visited as a youngster to converse with learned teachers and later to drive out the money changers.
When the Umayyad caliph (successor to the Prophet) ____ _______ ordered a new construction on that site, he was appropriating for Islam both Jewish and Christian legacies. But he was also demonstrating the victorious arrival of a new faith and announcing to Christians and Jews that “the Islamic state was here to stay.”
Abd al-Malik
In 649, what did a Nestorian bishop write, only fifteen years after Damascus had been conquered by Arab forces?
“These Arabs fight not against our Christian religion; nay rather they defend our faith, they revere our priests and Saints, and they make gifts to our churches and monasteries.”
