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.”
The Nestorian Christian communities of Syria, Iraq, and Persia, sometimes called the Church of the East, survived what?
Survived the assault of Islam, but they did so as shrinking communities of second-class subjects, regulated minorities forbidden from propagating their message to Muslims. They also abandoned religious paintings and sculptures, fearing to offend the Muslims, whose artistic representation was of the Divine
What Church was initiated in 635 by a Persian missionary monk?
a small and highly creative Nestorian Church, which had taken root in China with the approval of the country’s Tang dynasty rulers.
What were the written texts themselves of the Nestorian Church known as?
the Jesus Sutras, which refer to Christianity as the “Religion of Light from the West” or the “Luminous Religion.’
What did the Jesus Sutras describe God as?
as the “Cool Wind”
What did the Jesus Sutras describe sin and a good life as?
sin as “bad karma,” and a good life as one of “no desire” and no action.”
What did the Jesus Sutras declare?
“People can live only be dwelling in the living breath of God.”
Who did the Chinese state turn against in the mid-ninth century?
all religions of foreign origins, Islam and Buddhism as well as Christianity. Wholly dependent on the goodwill of Chinese authorities, this small outpost of Christianity withered.
What offered a brief opportunity for Christianity’s renewal?
The Mongol conquest of China in the thirteenth century offered Christianity’s renewal, as the religiously tolerant Mongols welcomed Nestorian Christians as well as people of various other faiths.
Who was one of the Mongols who became Christian?
one of the wives of Chinggis Khan
What did the Mongols consider Jesus as?
as a powerful shaman they appreciated that Christians, unlike the Buddhists, could eat meat and, unlike Muslims, could drink alcohol, even including it in their worship
When did Mongol rule end?
In 1368, and a small number of Chinese Christians ensured that the faith almost completely vanished with the advent of the vigorously Confucian Ming dynasty
Where had Christianity become the religion of the majority by the time of the Muslim conquest around 640?
Egypt and for the next 500 years or so, large numbers continued to speak Coptic and practice their religion as dhimmis
What are dhimmis?
Legally inferior but protected people paying a special tax, under relatively tolerant Muslim rulers.
What changed by the 13th century in Egypt?
Christian Crusaders from Europe and Mongol invaders from the east threatened Egypt
What happened in the mid-fourteenth century in Egypt?
It witnessed violent anti-Christian pogroms, destruction of churches, and the forced removal of Christians from the best land. Many felt like “exiles in their own country.”
