What Happened to the Church in the Middle East? — Lucas Hilty — Ep. 225

I do really find in the story a sort of a warning for me, not—not that I know exactly what went down and how they—why things happened the way they did. But for me, I want—I take it as a warning not to embrace an identity with an earthly kingdom or even an ethnic identity too closely. The gospel is—is beyond all that.

Well, Lucas, welcome back to the Anabaptist Perspectives podcast. We just done a previous episode with you on the early church in the East, or like what we would think of as Middle East, Iran, you know, India, some of these places, and like really, really early church history, you know, right after the, the, um, crucifixion of Jesus on up, um, through and pulling some lessons and, and some interesting perspectives from them. But one of the questions I have out of that, uh, is we talking about this, it seems like a pretty established, you know, church, uh, or, uh, Christianity in this part of the world, and that's not the case anymore. So a lot of what I want to talk through in this episode is like, what happened to these people?

But before we jump too deep into that, maybe just a quick overview of kind of bring our audience up to speed of, of who we're talking about, what time in history this is, and then, yeah, we could go into, okay, where did these people go? You know, they're not there anymore. So, yeah, I want to fill it—fill us in there. Yeah, thanks, Reagan. So, right from the first days of the church, it existed, of course, in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, but it started to spread to Antioch and from there west, but also it spread to Edessa, which is in kind of northern Syria, southern Turkey, and east. And so the first century of the church, we have Christians in Iraq, in Turkey, in, uh, probably in India as well.

Um, they—they weren't considering themselves necessarily a separate church from, um, the Roman church, for instance, because we didn't really have—that's not how people thought about church back in those days. But they became, um, they're known today because of the Syriac language, which—which they spoke and wrote in, as well as eventually the historical, uh, path would lead them, um, in a different direction than the Western church. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So you mentioned a lot of countries that don't really have many Christians in them at all, you know, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, um, Iran, etc.

Well, what happened to—to these people? Where did—where did they go? Yeah, that's a long story. So if we would trace the—the timeline forward, starting from, let's say, the year 100, when we have record of a church—of churches in those places in Iraq and Syria, um, those churches continued in fellowship with the rest of the Christian world for hundreds of years. And now, as, uh, you may remember, there was sporadic persecution in the Roman Empire during that time. So sporadic doesn't mean insignificant or minor. It just means that it might last for a decade or even just a couple of years, which is plenty of time for people to be killed, uh, to be exiled, to be tortured, and so on.

So there were very serious persecutions. Meanwhile, Christians started to go over into the Persian Empire. Persia was the other—one of the other great world powers at the time, right alongside Rome, and they kept fighting over the borderlands. And there were a lot of Christians who lived on the borders of Rome and Persia.

Um, in the year 313 AD, uh, Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, which was the edict saying Christians wouldn't be persecuted anymore in the Roman Empire. Uh, that actually took a little time to work its way throughout the Roman Empire. But, um, up until that point, there hadn't been any significant or serious persecutions probably in the Persian Empire. But around the year 340, as Christianity is now being proclaimed as the favored religion of the Romans, there are lots of Christians living in Persia, and the Persian Shah, um, is saying, "Wait a minute, I guess these people are a fifth column. They must be in the—in they must be working for the Romans, or at least they potentially could."

And I think that Constantine at one point sends a letter to the—the, uh, Shah, to the leader of the Persian Empire, saying, you know, "Be nice to these guys, be nice to the Christians." And that actually doesn't help very much. So it was there this sense that, okay, Christianity is all wrapped up with the Roman political system and Rome being our enemy, and then Christians get caught in the crossfire between those two empires, basically. That's right. And so just for context, there had been Christians who just moved into the Persian Empire because, well, A, it was their home, or B, they just decided to. But then as Rome and Persia fought, sometimes Persia would conquer territory, and in the age-old tradition, they would—they would exile people, they would remove them from their homeland and take them back to Persia.

So there were—there were several batches of Christians who'd come over. So now, uh, around the year 340, there was a very severe persecution that started in the Persian Empire, and lots of Christians killed. It was particularly severe, and, you know, historians debate exactly the ins and outs, but it was particularly severe for people who had converted from Zoroastrianism to Christianity. It was one thing to be a Christian and move to—into Persia, but it was another thing to be—to be particularly a nobleman who converted from, um, the official Zoroastrian religion to, uh, Christianity. Mm-hmm. Persia and Rome continued to be rivals, um, right up until the Islamic conquest.

And, uh, Christianity did achieve some kind of recognition in Persia. It was never an official religion in Persia. So this is one thing we can say about Eastern Christianity or Syriac Christianity is that it was never the state religion.

It was never the official religion of any state. Oh, and that would be pretty different from what you're seeing in the more Western branches of Christianity, right? Where it's with Constantine and, and, and later on, you know, it's very tied in with government, politics, and empire. Is that—precisely. Okay. It becomes, first of all, the favored religion, and 325, Constantine sort of sponsored the Council of Nicaea.

That's—that's a—I feel like that's a pretty profound piece right there, you know, especially for us as Anabaptists, as we kind of point to that as like, ooh, that's when the church got really mixed in with world powers, you know, worldly powers, and so forth. And unfortunately—fortunately, unfortunately, the picture is actually a little more complicated than one would—would maybe wish for from just that statement of it was never an official religion. Mm-hmm. They—the Christians were in the courts of the Shah during periods when there wasn't severe persecution. They received, uh, official permission to have their, um, their organizations and so on. So, and in some places like Armenia, Christianity became the official religion before it did in Rome.

So Rome was not the first Christian empire. Oh, really? Okay. Even, even in Edessa, in the year around 200, we have a Christian king putting a cross on his coins. Um, so we don't know what kind of a Christian, or if he was a Christian, uh, he may have just sort of been, uh, a religious, uh, connoisseur and picked up some symbolism, put it on his coins. We don't know why. Um, Edessa didn't become a Christian, uh, city at that time.

So Christians were comfortable speaking to power, being in the presence of power, um, working with the state, but they were never doing—they were never conducting their missions under the official, uh, with the official force of the Persian government.

And in fact, um, then as we progress further into the 400s, um, these churches that are either in, in the Western Roman—or, I'm sorry, the Eastern Roman Empire, or the western part of the Persian Empire, there arises a controversy with some of the rest of the church over the way you describe the incarnation of Christ. And so a man named Nestorius is excommunicated, along with all the churches that agreed with him, which is kind of the whole East. And so those churches wound up going their own way. They were already going their own way before, uh, this. Um, but the Church of the East then becomes separated from the Roman Empire and the churches in the Roman Empire.

Mm-hmm. So, so there was a, a, um, division in the church. This happened around 431 with the Council of Ephesus, where a large portion of the Eastern Church left. And over the same issue, the emperor in, in Constantinople now, and the what would later become called the, the Greek Orthodox Church, or the Byzantine Church, they were trying to heal this rift and achieve a compromise. And what wound up happening was the Church of the East didn't come back. And also the people who had been most energetic about resisting the Church of the East, they also left the Orthodox Church because they felt like the Orthodox Church was compromising too much. And when I say Orthodox Church, they all called themselves Orthodox, but what we know today is the Byzantine Orthodox Church.

And so you have now kind of three groups, three major groups with small groups within them. Uh, in the East, you have the Church of the East, or known as the Nestorian Church. You have the Byzantine Orthodox Church, and you have what we might call the Syrian Orthodox Church, or the, um, Maya-Physite Church. And Maya-Physite comes from the way they talked about the natures of Christ. The thing to know about these is that the doctrinal differences really are, uh, not that great. They really can come together. It's—they had different ways, different ways of emphasizing and talking about the nature of Christ. Mm-hmm. In the East, they talked more about Christ's relationship with his Father, like the fact that he was a son, that he was a mediator, that he was a servant of the Father, which is biblical.

In, uh, the, the Maya-Physite Church, they tended to talk a lot more about the divine nature. So the word became flesh. And so this whole, uh, it was all—all the discussion was about the divine nature, but they had different ways of emphasizing aspects of the incarnation.

Um, and so, of course, it was also a power struggle. It wasn't purely doctrinal, but they did care about doctrine, and they, and they, um, they made it, uh, it was worth splitting the church for those doctrinal definitions for them. Mm-hmm.

The Maya-Physite Church, or the Syrian Orthodox Church, was now also without state power. Um, they were at times persecuting other Christians, at times they were persecuted. And, um, again, some things about that should trouble us, but also should, uh, it's notable that in their outcast status, they were tremendous missionaries. They were—they were zealous. They traveled, uh, one of their leaders, Jacob Baradeus, traveled, um, hundreds of miles by foot. He wouldn't take a donkey or a horse.

And ordaining, um, church leaders and strengthening their church. And so, um, they wound up, um, also spreading the gospel to new areas and new places. So the outsider status of the Church of the East, or the Nestorian Church, and the, the Syrian Orthodox Church, or the Maya-Physite Church, didn't inhibit, and maybe even kind of accelerated their spread.

Hmm. So all this is going on, we're starting to see the church in some places, especially in the West, getting much more tied to worldly kingdoms and so forth. That doesn't seem like that was happening as much in the East, is what you're—what you're outlining. Uh, but then ultimately, yeah, we go to say somewhere like Syria today, and there's just not nearly—what you were just describing is not really the case. So where, where's this story change?

So I wonder if we should look at the story as sort of a, a cautionary tale of success. Mm-hmm. Um, okay. The church, of course, in the 400s, with the emperor's sanction in the Roman Empire, was rapidly becoming, if not already, a majority of the population.

A similar thing was happening even without the emperor's blessing in Persia, in the Persian Empire. So that in the 600s, when the Muslim, uh, the Muslims invade and overthrow the Persian Empire, they're dealing with a majority Christian population.

And so, uh, we can only imagine how that affected church, how it felt to go to church with a majority of your neighbors versus a rather smaller minority who were really devoted. And that's not to say that there weren't many, uh, Christians who really loved the Lord during that time, but the nature of the church did start to shift, and you see, uh, church administration looking a lot more like politics, a little more like government. Mm-hmm. Um, but even, even after the Muslim invasion of all these areas, um, there continued to be really a Christian majority, probably for quite a while. We don't have hard numbers. People kind of extrapolate from the numbers we do have differently.

It's a common misconception that the Muslims came in the 600s and the church just crashed down, and now it was all, you convert to Islam at the point of a sword. Actually, the Muslims initially, and you would know better than about this than I do, but they initially really didn't want everybody to become Muslim because they could use outsiders, people who weren't Muslim, for, you know, tax purposes. There were benefits. Um, they could tax them higher, and et cetera, et cetera.

Nonetheless, the church continued to spread. So in the year, in, in, uh, the 800s, we have the Church of the East, known as the Nestorian Church. Um, they're baptizing what they call Catholicos in Tibet, and they have their strong presence in Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, China, um, and they're in Sri Lanka. So they're just right all the, all through Asia.

And they're, they're talking with Buddhists, they're talking with Taoists, and engaging in dialogue. So we see something there, which is, is maybe, um, the, the counterpart to, in the last episode we talked about, how these folks were kind of, they took Christianity really, really seriously, and their lives were anything but easy. Asceticism was a strong trait, and they, they made the Christian life so hard for themselves that it looked attractive to people. It was, it was something you would want to be. But along with that, they also, in these centuries, like we're talking 600, 700, 800, they were also translating Christian ideas not only into the languages of the people that they were going to, but what we would call it a contextualizing.

They were using Chinese philosophical language to describe, um, what Jesus did in coming to, uh, in his incarnation. They, um, sometimes used symbols that came from, uh, the, the culture that they were going to, the symbols that we would maybe associate with, with Taoism, let's say, or Buddhism. And they would use those as a way to explain Christianity. And so, uh, without, without being able to, to know exactly how that worked out on the ground, we don't know exactly to what extent they were faithful to the Christian message, but they were very happy to accommodate other cultures in their, uh, taking the gospel.

So they, they spread far and wide. They can maintain a strong majority in many, um, areas that were under Muslim rule. And occasionally there were some problems, and there was some persecution under Islam, but not so much until, at least, um, in Philip Jenkins' book, The Lost History of Christianity, he ascribes a lot of the sort of downfall of the churches in these areas to the Mongol invasion. So the Mongols were, they called themselves the scourge of God. They came from tribes that had actually been, um, had some evangelism. And so they had some Christian concepts, even if they weren't really Christian yet. And the Mongols came sweeping through Asia and, um, just devastating cities like Edessa, cities like, uh, cities that were, um, like Merv, which is in Central Asia, cities that had a strong Christian presence, but also just lots of people in general, um, just massacring people.

But the Mongols were, um, their, their onslaught was horrific. And so, um, but, and yet they were, they at least considered themselves kind of Christian sometimes, or at least they were influenced by Christian ideas. And so you have this strange mix where the most horrific fighting force on earth is sweeping through your country, devastating, you know, whole cities, ancient cities.

And, and the Christians are going, well, maybe this will be better than the Muslims. And a few, a few of the Mongols, at least family members of the Mongol rulers, do go to church. And so there's at least a perception in the general population that the Christians are pro-Mongol.

Whoa. Okay. I could see that being, that, that could cause some problems, you know, for, for the Christians. And how, you know, of course, we're just generalizing here. Sure. There was no doubt the people who were, whose family members were slaughtered by the Mongols, uh, weren't in favor of that.

Uh, and, and many, many Christians lost their lives under the Mongols. But that was a bit of a tipping point when, in response to that, there was, um, a concerted effort by the Muslim authorities, which hadn't happened before, Mm-hmm, to eradicate, at least to close down churches, to tear down monasteries. Jenkins, um, mentions that this is talking about Egypt now, but, um, there was, there had been a time when the monasteries in Egypt were so, so well established that you could walk hundreds of miles from south of Cairo down to, uh, I think, uh, close to the, the cataract of the Nile.

Anyway, several hundred miles, you could walk there the whole way in the shade of the gardens of the monasteries. Well, now that's the, those were all broken down. Those were all destroyed. Uh, and, and it's, it's just a, it's just a story to sit with. It's a sad story. And, uh, you know, there's not a real, uh, bright, um, you know, resolution to the story because, um, yes, no doubt many of the Christians in these churches were at this point cultural Christians or nominal Christians.

Um, it's hard. We, we wish we shouldn't presume to judge that from this historical distance. But they are, there are traditions, there are monasteries, there are beautiful churches that are just being wasted, and it's the destruction of a, of a tradition and a culture. Um, and that didn't mean the extermination of Christianity. Even today, in, in all these places, there are some Christians, uh, with Afghanistan probably being, um, almost an exception.

But the churches that are there have suffered repeated, um, attacks and repeated campaigns against them, including by the Ottomans and, and the Turks in the 20th century, uh, and also other groups as well. So, um, what happened to them? I, I'd be interested in hearing your comments on what you've seen there today.

Well, yeah, it's, I mean, it's a really hard question because, yeah, the amount of Christians across, I would think more of the Middle East is how I frame it, I guess, myself. But yeah, the numbers have just incredibly declined, even, even in the last 50 years. Um, it was definitely a minority, but it's become much more so of a minority. You take something like Iraq, you know, that I, I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but the percentage of decrease in the last, um, 30 years is, is almost hard to believe. It's like absolutely phenomenal how many Christians have either been driven out or killed or, or left as refugees or, or whatever.

Um, and that, I think a lot of that's more current day politics, but it feels like kind of a continuation of something that you're saying that started a long time ago and has been just slowly chipping, chipping, chipping away at the amount of Christians or Christian influence, Christian culture, whatever you want to call it. You know, of course, you have to be careful with that. Some of it is more culture Christians than real Christians, sure. But regardless, uh, it does feel like it's just been this steady, like chipping away at it for a very long time, which makes me pretty sad. And this was something when we, again, when we were having lunch a couple of days ago, we were talking about this, um, and you said, I'm trying to remember, um, this whole idea that, that we have about Christianity's steady march forward idea.

Uh, but do you, do you want to talk about that a little bit? Uh, explain what you mean by that phrase. Well, a lot of our historical consciousness, I'm speaking as a Western, as an Anabaptist, and as a young person, um, we, we don't have a very rich historical, uh, background to our thinking about missions. And so for us, sometimes we think of, of missions as being born with William Carey, Hudson Taylor, you know, wonderful, uh, figures of, of the faith, by the way.

But, uh, and so we see it advancing first to China, first to India, then to China and throughout Africa. And it's a steady march forward in which the gospel gradually overcomes all obstacles. And at the end, you know, every tribe and nation has been evangelized.

The, the, the reality is that in some of these places, such as China, the gospel was there a long time ago. Mm-hmm. And so we, we do tend to forget the contributions of the churches of the past. We also tend to forget that, um, faith can be lost. Mm-hmm. Churches can decline and, uh, come to a point where they're no longer vibrant and, and no longer effective.

And, um, this is part of our story too. And so when I look at the decline of the churches in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world, um, you know, it wouldn't be appropriate for me to, um, assign blame or to, to analyze that except to, to realize maybe that sometimes we do tend to measure success in rather earthly terms, even as a church. You know, we have Christian, uh, well, we're as Americans, we, we look at our, you know, Christian founding, founding principles and so on, and we feel that, uh, our nation has been friendly to Christianity and so on. The fact is that maybe identifying too closely with the, with the external markers of success, we have so many churches, so many people and so on.

Maybe that's a mistake. Maybe we shouldn't even make counting noses and counting churches our goal. Maybe we should make it our goal to be faithful to, to Christ.

It matters how many people come to know him. That, that matters. But, but faithfulness and, um, and remembering not to get caught up in, in the, uh, the allure of the powers of this world. I do, I do really find in the story a sort of warning for me, not, not that I know exactly what went down and how they, why things happened the way they did. But for me, I want, I take it as a warning not to embrace an identity with an earthly kingdom or even an, an ethnic, uh, identity too closely. The gospel is, is beyond all that. And probably, probably we'll come back to Bidas if we, uh, if we wave the American flag, um, as Christians too, too much and identify too much with, with an earthly force.

Because the thing about earthly kingdoms is they win and then they lose. And, um, they're certainly not a safe place to trust in. That's a really great point. Because, because you can imagine the, some of these churches in the East, you know, way back in the day, say, feeling very established, like we've been here for a very long time. This is incredible. It's growing. It's, you know, getting well established. And now we look at those places, you mentioned Afghanistan earlier, you know, as a place where there was a lot of, I guess a lot, it depends on how you define all this, but there was definitely a thriving church. I don't know. Yeah, there was a church there, right?

You know, so who knows how, how many, sure, all of that. But we cannot say that today. That is definitely not the case, um, in the same way, at least, you know, in that particular country of China, some of these other regions, Turkmenistan, um, where really this is one of the things we don't like to talk about maybe as much. Instead of the steady march forward, that was a slow falling, like a decline, you know, in the church, you know, in these places. And that's really sad, you know, and I'm not entirely sure what to do with that. It's kind of painful.

At the risk of, of, uh, of trying to do an end round around that issue, you mentioned China. Of course, there's a thriving church in China today. Um, that's not directly related to the efforts of those early, um, of the Eastern Church, the Syriac speaking missionaries that came there. So there are, there are resurgences, there's hope, um, some of which we haven't seen yet, um, in some of these regions.

But certainly, isn't it, isn't it appropriate with some of these stories to weep with those who weep? Just acknowledge that, um, I was just reading one of the Syriac authors this morning, and he was talking about how we should live together as, as though our concerns are one and saying, you know, if somebody sins, we should, we should work together. We should consider our own problem. You know, if, if, if a brother in the church gets angry, um, that, that's my problem. And we should consider it. And so I, I even historically, can we look at it that way? Like the Church of the East, the, the Syrian Orthodox Church, we should weep with them for their losses.

And if, if some of it has, if they haven't perfectly followed Christ at times, that's, we're not denouncing them. We're, we're, we're considering them in a sense our brothers and we weep with them. Mm-hmm. That's, that's, that's not a resolution, but it's something I think about. It feels like a very relevant response to, you know, because I'm assuming a lot of people hearing this, these, these, this is the second one we've done with you, but these two episodes are going to be hearing things that, oh, I, I didn't know that part of the church's story. I mean, that's been, I mean, I'm learning all kinds of things, you know, with these conversations, but also remembering the tragedy, the sadness, the, how devastating that was, say, when the Mongols invaded or the, you know, this empire rose and fell and the way that affected the church.

And now, you know, the vibrant church that used to be in Afghanistan and now has definitely been, you know, uh, squashed and persecuted and all of these really, really terrible things. It is easy to try to come up with pat answers and be like, oh, well, you know, it's all part of this great plan and it'll be better in the end, but okay, and maybe so, but we don't really know what all God's doing either. He hasn't, you know, we, we can never, uh, claim to have that perfect knowledge, but it does feel very biblical to mourn these things, you know, and I wish we could have this episode come to a wonderful conclusion where it's all better now, but it's, it's not really, uh, at least at this point, you know, and maybe in a hundred years that will be different.

But we can leave this episode with mourning the loss and caring about those brothers and sisters that do still live in these, some of these places where it is very difficult, you know, to be a Christian, to follow Jesus and to, and to be in that environment and have a thriving church. There are, that is happening, but it is rare in some of these places and that, and that is sad. I think that is a tragedy. Um, yeah, wow. Thanks for, um, outlining these things. I, I think this will give our, our audience a lot to think about. Is there more you want to add, more things we can learn from, from these people or anything you'd like to say in conclusion?

Maybe the, the one thing I'd say in conclusion is that, uh, Jesus said, if you, if he persecuted, persecute you in one city, you flee to the another. And that's sort of a principle that it does demonstrate that it's not always going to be possible to, to live, have a thriving, faithful church in any particular geographic location. Mm-hmm. And some of the, the churches of the East point to that verse and say, that's our story.

Wow. And so today you'll find thriving expatriate, or no longer expatriate, but churches, a diaspora of the Church of the East and, and the Syrian Orthodox Church in other places. One of the, the strongest places, by the way, is India.

That would be like more of the Syrian Orthodox tradition. So a lot of them like either fled or, or, or in different ways kind of made their way there in time, in the past. Well, this, that's kind of often actually India, because of their, their very early beginnings, they didn't experience some of the things we were talking about with the Islamic invasion. They experienced lots of their own persecutions and so on, but they've just grown in those locations. Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah. So in the United States, in Russia, in, in other places around the world, you find communities of Christians maybe calling themselves Assyrian or something, but continuing the traditions that they've received and singing the songs and so on.

And so they're, they're dealing with a whole mix of, um, influences, some positive possibly and some not so positive as they move into, you know, the United States, let's say, where there's a very, uh, interesting religious kaleidoscope, uh, and influences that their young people are getting. And again, some of those might be beneficial and some might not. But, uh, it's good to see these communities in the diaspora, um, trying to retain and, and even grow some things that they've received. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I like that. That's a, I feel like that's a good note to end on. We've covered a lot of ground in these last two episodes, and I thank you for taking the time to come on this podcast and share what you've learned.

Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode with Lucas about the early church in the East. We actually did another episode with him that went into a lot more of the history and provides a lot more context for this episode. So I encourage you to listen to that. It's linked down below as well as other resources that he mentioned in this episode. Thanks so much for listening. As always, you can find all our content on our website at anabaptistperspectives.org, and we'll catch you in the next episode.