Christian historian Woodrow Walton takes another look at the causes and effects of global navigation by ships sailing from Europe and how the mission and message of Jesus was carried throughout the world.

The Maritime Global Expansion: End of the Fifteenth Century to the Present

A few year prior to the fall of Constantinople in 1452 to the military prowess of the Ottoman Turks, a Norwegian long boat arrived back in Norway after a lengthy voyage across the north Atlantic from the Davis Strait separating the southwestern shoreline of Greenland from northeastern Canada. It was the first known crossing of the North Atlantic. The long boat carried marketable goods for Norway and its neighbors as Denmark and Sweden and other countries facing both the North Sea and is neighboring Baltic Sea.

Denmark, the Faero islands (circled), and Greenland are highlighted in red.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Unlike the expansive Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea is squeezed between Great Britain and Denmark and the Baltic flowing between the shorelines of Sweden, Poland, Prussia the Slavic lands and northeastward along the shorelines of Finland.

In a way, it was not an extraordinary feat of seamanship because the voyage to Greenland involved landfalls at the Shetland and Faero Islands and Iceland, making the distance between that Scandinavian settlement and Greenland feasible. By the late 1400s, there were settlements on those islands, and an occasional influx of Christians. Nonetheless, the voyage was an important one as far as negotiating an extremely wide expanse of ocean.

Before 1452, Europeans confined their sea voyages to the Mediterranean squeezed between the shorelines of southern Europe and North Africa, the Arabian Sea between the horn of Africa and the shorelines of Iran and northeastern India. There were also smaller bodies of water that were navigated such as the Adriatic and the Aegean, both inlet extensions of the Mediterranean. The Adriatic separates the eastern shorelines of the Italian peninsula, from the western shorelines of Illyria and Greece. The Aegean Sea flows between the eastern shorelines of Greece and Macedonia from the shorelines of what we know now as Turkey. The tiny and narrow Sea of Marmara is actually not a sea as it is squeezed in by Macedonia and northwestern Turkey and becomes the Bosporus, a strait that almost trickles into the Black Sea. Where the Marmara flows into the Black Sea is the City of Byzantium, later re-named Constantinople, and after 1453, became known as Istanbul.

Christian historian, Woodrow Walton, invites us to take another look at the early church and the struggles it faced as it emerged from the Apostolic Age and became the state religion of the crumbling Roman Empire. Part of The Gospel in History series.

What is attempted here is to reappraise the condition of the church as it spread the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ in the years after the persecutions meted out to the Christians by Domitian and subsequent to the attacks made by critics of the gospel by both the powers that be and those of philosophical bent. This goes beyond the period of the first apologists of the faith, as for instance, Justin Martyr, and Tertullian, and extends into the period when the gospel had to face off the spiritualizing gnostic mentality which invaded the Mediterranean world out of Persia and beyond with the return of Roman forces after armed conflicts with Persian armies. The role that Irenaeus of Lyons had in his polemic Contra Haeresies (“Against Heresies”) was crucial for the future of the gospel.

“The Favorites of the Emperor Honorius” (1883) by John William Waterhouse.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.

The subversive effects of Gnosticism in both its Docetic (that the humanity Jesus or his material body was only an illusion) and non-Docetic forms and of esoteric pantheism were great. Syncretism during the reign of Alexander Severus was also challenged by the church’s leaders and apologists. Mithraism and syncretism returned with Roman soldiers from differing parts of the empire.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ also contended with eastern-type spiritualities coming out of Persia, India, and elsewhere. This writer argues that “Spirit,” as spoken of in the Bible, refers to the Personhood of God as revealed in the person and work of Jesus Christ. This stands in stark contrast to the way “spirit” is defined by the New Age spirituality of Marilyn Ferguson, pantheism, panentheism, the self-engrossed spiritualism of the Yoga practitioners, and the intuitive spirituality marketed by popularizers such as Tolle and Chopra.  A contemporary defender of biblical spirituality against the mentalities of these teachers is Ravi Zacharias, particularly in his book Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality.

Timothy Yates, The Expansion of Christianity (Inter Varsity Press, 2004), 190 pages, ISBN 9780830823581.

I learned long ago that the IVP produces quality, well written publications and Yates’ book, though small in size, is no exception. Yates is and for years was an Anglican Priest who taught at University levels and his view of history or the expansion of Christianity is in many ways far different than mine.

The text includes nine chapters which describe the growth of Christianity in the ancient Mediterranean World and Asia and Europe to 1500. I learned of much Missionary effort in Asia and Europe that was new to me. Yates’ emphasis on the activities of the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican church confronted me with the need to rethink the attitude and bias that I prefer as I look at this subject as a Protestant and an enthusiastic Pentecostal believer.

My genre of thought has a tendency to brand much of the effort of the Roman Catholic Church as political and empire building with its forced conversions part and parcel of that expansion. Hence there is much here that you who share my views will find uncomfortable and confronting as you must adjust this thinking to accommodate Yates’ well researched and well written history.

I found his statements that Roman Catholicism (and not Protestantism) had the resources in the sixteen century to well evangelize and divide South America as far as boundaries and who got what made me rethink or at least wonder about much of what I have assumed for years. I have spent time in South America in missionary efforts that rejoiced in the renewal that the Pentecostal church has brought to that continent over against the established church that to our view was more political than spiritual.

Yates also covers America, early Africa, Oceania and the 20^th Century which to his view is an African Century. I share that thinking that God has indeed visited Africa in recent years but Yates’ view again was different than mine, and that was challenging and discomforting.

I learned of many Missionary sending agencies that began in the 19^th century in England and other European Countries. I was unaware of that the Paris Evangelical Mission ever existed, let alone those it sponsored. I also learned that these sending agencies were not particularly concerned with one’s theology or denominational leanings if any but with presenting the gospel to far off places. Some of the people and their contributions that Yates’ described were familiar but many were not.

The older I get the more I realize that much of the thought I carry around needs improvement, refinement and revision. I tussle at times with the fact that when I became a Christian 40 plus years ago, I left the Roman Catholic Church of my youth, and became an avid Protestant because that was where I found a saving knowledge of Christ. My early days in evangelical Christianity did not encourage dialogue or any sympathy with the part of our Christian world called the high church. Indeed the opposite was encouraged. Was that correct? Books like the one Timothy Yates has written challenge my opinions and thoughts. It will do the same for you.

Reviewed by H. Murray Hohns

Publisher’s page: www.ivpress.com/cgi-ivpress/book.pl/code=2358