Summary: This week’s episode is titled – “Challenge.”We’ve tracked the development and growth of the Church in the East over a few episodes. To be clear, we’re talking about the Church which made its headquarters in the city of Seleucia, twin city to the Persian capital of Ctesiphon, in the region known as Mesopotamia. What today historians refer to as The Church in the East called itself the Assyrian Church. But it was known by the Catholic Church in the West with its twin centers at Rome and Constantinople, by the disparaging title of the Nestorian Church because it continued on in the theological tradition of Bishop Nestorius, declared heretical by the Councils of Ephesus in 431 and Chalcedon 20 years later. As we’ve seen, it’s doubtful what Nestorius taught about the nature of Christ was truly errant. But Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, more for political reasons than from a concern for theological purity, convinced his peers Nestorius was a heretic and had him and his followers banished. They moved East and formed the core of the Church in the East.While that branch of the Church thrived during the European Middle Ages, the Western Catholic Church coalesced around 2 centers; Rome and Constantinople. Though they’d reached agreement over the doctrinal issues regarding the nature of Christ and expelled both the Nestorians to the East and the Monophysite Jacobites to their enclaves in Syria and Egypt, the Western and Eastern halves of the Roman Church drifted apart.The Council of Constantinople in 692 marked one of several turning points in the eventual rift between Rome and Constantinople. Called by the Emperor, the Council was attended only by Eastern Bishops. It dealt with no real doctrinal matters but set down rules for how the Church was to be organized and worship conducted. The problem is that several of the decisions went contrary to the long-held practice in Rome and the churches in Western Europe that looked to it. The Pope rejected the Council. à And the gulf between Rome and Constantinople widened.This gap between the Eastern and Western halves of the Church mirrored what was happening in the Empire at large. As we’ve seen, Justinian I tried to revive the gory of the Roman Empire in the 6th C, but after his death, the Empire quickly reverted to its path toward disintegration. What helped this dissolution was the emergence of Islam from the southeast corner of the Empire.Historically, the Arabs were a people of multiple tribes who shared both a common culture and distrust of one another which fueled endless conflict. But the early 7th C saw them united by a new and militant religion. The endless struggles that had kept them at each other’s throats, were merged into a shared mission of setting them at everyone else’s. Why steal from each other in generations of just transferring the same loot back and forth when they could unite and grab new plunder from their neighbors?And so much the better when those neighbors who used to be too strong to attack, were now in decline and under-defended?It was a Perfect Storm. The emergence of the Muslim armies in the early 7th C, bursting forth from the furnace that forged them, came right at the time when the once unstoppable might of the Roman Empire was finally a relic of a bygone age. Constantinople was able to hold the invaders at bay for another 700 years, but Islam spread quickly over other lands of the once great Empire; into the Middle East, North Africa, and was even able to get a foothold in Europe when they jumped the Straits of Gibraltar and landed in Spain. In the East, the Muslims swept up into Rome’s ancient nemesis, Persia, and quickly subdued it as well.It all began with the birth of an Arab named Muhammad in 570.Since this is a podcast on the history of Christianity rather than Islam, I’ll be brief in this review of the new religion that moved the Arabs out of their peninsula during the 7th C.Islam marks its beginning to the Hegira,
