The Resurgence of the Gospel, Part Five: Glimpses of the Work of God

Historian Woodrow Walton helps us look back over the big events and movement of history to see how God was working to make the story of Jesus known throughout the world. In this postscript to the Resurgence of the Gospel series, he ties together what the challenge of the Turkic-Moslem curtain meant and how it affected the people of Europe and the global mission of Christianity. Part of The Gospel in History series.

Part 1: “The Medieval Prologue and the Remapping of the World”

Part 2: “Recharting the Christian World Mission”

Part 3: “The Challenge of the Muslim Curtain”

Part 4: “The Reconversion of Europe”

This postscript and bibliography is Part 5 of the “Resurgence of the Gospel” series.

What has been offered in the “Resurgence of the Gospel” series is an overview of Eurasian and African Christian mission leading up to the time of the Ottoman takeover of Asia Minor and the capture of Constantinople, an action which prompted both recovery of the water route and overland roads to central and east Africa and initiation of deep-water navigation. Not only was Europe re-connected with Asia through this process, but this also opened a never-before meeting of Europe with southern Africa and the Asian countries bordering the Indian and Pacific oceans.

Global navigation also brought about the happy accident of connection with the Americas. Olaf Tryggvason, king of Norway and a convert to Christ several years before 1452, was influential in the baptism of the first European discoverer of North America, Leif Ericson, as well as Hallfred, the Scandinavian poet of skaldic verse. About thirty years before 1452, there was a contact with Greenland in the Atlantic, northeast of Canada. Greenland became Scandinavian property. The last Norwegian shipment of Cod and timber left Greenland approximately ten years before the fall of Constantinople.

Portuguese fisherman also had contact with the North Atlantic. On one Portuguese fishing operation there was a visiting sailor from Venice, Italy, by the name of Cristobal Colombo, known better by the English rendition of his name, Christopher Columbus. In the early 1490s, both Columbus and another Italian made attempts to reach Asia by turning west beyond the Gibraltar into the Atlantic. Columbus made landfall in what is now known as the Dominican Republic on a Sunday. He named the bay, Santo Domingo, “Holy Sunday.”

Columbus sailed under the auspices of Spain. Another Italian sailed under the auspices of England. He reached what is now known as Nova Scotia. His name was Giovanni Caboto, better known in North America as John Cabot.

At the tip of South America is Tierra del Fuego and a strait called the Strait of Magellan, where the Atlantic meets the Pacific. The strait is named after another navigator, Ferdinand Magellan, who sailed through that strait by entering the South Atlantic and traveling further south than any other navigator. After a scary passage, they passed into the South Pacific and eventually reached the Philippines. He died in the Philippines but his crew took over after his death and struck out west and completed the first circumnavigation of the globe.

That is another story to be told.

PR

Coming in the Fall 2019 issue:

“In the Wake.” Historian Woodrow Walton continues his study of how the story of Jesus spread to the uttermost parts of the world.

Bibliography

Angold, Michael, ed. The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. 5: Eastern Christianity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Atiya, Aziz S., A History of Eastern Christianity (London: Methuen & Co., 1968).

Cooper, Derek C. Introduction to World Christian History. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic , 2016..

Cragg, Kenneth, Arab Christian, The: A History in the Middle East. (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991.

____________. The Call of the Minaret. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956.

Frankopan, Peter. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016).

Griffith, Sidney H. The Church of the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press,, 2008.

Kidd, Rev. B.J., The Churches of Eastern Christendom: From A.D. 451 to the Present Time (New York: Burt Franklin, 1973 Reprint of the 1927 edition, Faith Press, London.)

McGuckin, John Anthony, The Path of Christianity: The First Thousand Years (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2017.

Sunquist, Scott W. Explorations in Asian Christianity: History, Theology, and Mission (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2017).

Recommended Reading

Cahill, Thomas, How the Irish Saved Civilization (RandomHouse Penguin).

Dawson, Christopher, The Formation of Christendom (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2008. Original ed., 1965, Sheed & Ward, New York).

Goheen, Michael, ed. Reading the Bible Missionally. The Gospel and Our Culture Series (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2016).

Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, fl. 428. The Bazaar of Heracleides, Newly translated from the Syriac and edited with an introduction, Notes and Appendices by G.R. Driver, M.A., & Leonard Hodgson, M.A. (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1925).

Oden, Thomas C., Early Libyan Christianity: Uncovering a North African Tradition (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Press, 2011).