Lecture 16: The Fall of Rome and the Rise of Islam

The lecture, section by section

1. The councils in one glance

   A rapid review locks in the framework: Nicaea and Constantinople defend the deity of Christ and articulate the Trinity; Ephesus, Chalcedon, and the second and third Constantinople all wrestle with how the two natures relate, from Theotokos to the hypostatic union to the two wills; the seventh council, on icons, stands apart. Six councils, one thread: fully God, fully man, one person, with Scripture, not the councils themselves, as the measure, and the secret things left to the Lord.

2. An empire splits, then crumbles

   Theodosius the Great died in 395 as the last man to rule the whole Roman world; the empire split into east and west, and the weakened west began to dissolve. The Visigoths sacked Rome itself in 410; Britain was abandoned to the Angles and Saxons; the Vandals crossed to Africa and took Carthage in 429, closing in as Augustine lay dying in 430 with the City of God barely finished; Attila's Huns were turned from Rome around the 440s, persuaded by bishop Leo, possibly with a bribe, the pastor conducting the empire's foreign policy because its emperors no longer could; the Vandals plundered Rome in 455, bequeathing us the word vandalism. By 476 a barbarian king sat in Rome, the date historians use for the fall.

3. What the barbarians became

   Barbarian was Roman onomatopoeia for speech they could not understand, bar-bar-bar, but the tribes were not mere destroyers: drawn by Rome's roads, schools, and wealth, they came to inherit as much as to invade, and they became the nations of Europe. The Franks gave their name to France, the Angles and Saxons to England, the Huns to Hungary; the romance languages, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, are Roman in name and descent. Remarkably, most tribes had been evangelized in the fourth century by Arian missionaries, but the Franks embraced trinitarian Christianity and carried the rest of the tribes with them, and Arianism finally died out among its last adherents.

4. The Middle Ages, bracketed by two falls

   The eastern empire, richer and better led, did not fall; Greek speaking, centered on Constantinople, it endured another thousand years until 1453. Historians bracket the Middle Ages between the two collapses: 476 in the west opens them, 1453 in the east closes them, the latter also marking gunpowder's arrival in major warfare and the threshold of the modern age. The irony Busenitz savors: for a millennium there was still a Roman Empire, but Rome was not in it, and east and west would quarrel over which of them was the real one.

5. The empty chair in Rome

   After 476 the west had churches but no emperor, and since Constantine the emperor had styled himself the visible head of the church. Into that vacuum stepped the bishop of Rome, pastor of the west's most prestigious church, gradually assuming the standing the emperors had vacated: a decisive step in the making of the papacy. The Franks meanwhile grew into Europe's dominant power, halting Islam's advance at the Battle of Tours in 732 under Charles Martel, and on Christmas Day 800 pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, a realm that would persist in some form into the modern era, and a coronation that sharpened the east-west rivalry over the Roman name.

6. Why Islam belongs in this course

   Busenitz gives two reasons. First, from the seventh century onward Islam is the most significant external force pressing on Christianity and Christian lands, through the Crusades and beyond. Second, and more pointedly, Islam positions itself as heir to the Bible, and by the lecture's three mark test of a cult, a wrong view of the Scriptures, a wrong view of salvation, and a wrong view of the Savior, it qualifies as a pseudo-Christian cult: it exalts the Quran above the Scriptures it calls true, teaches salvation by works, and denies Christ's deity, and even his crucifixion.

7. Muhammad

   Born in Mecca in 570, raised under an uncle's care, Muhammad became a prosperous merchant, marrying at twenty five. He suffered recurring seizures that he at first feared were demonic; at forty he declared them revelations, delivered through the angel Gabriel, naming him the prophet of Allah, a deity long worshiped in that region of Arabia, whom Muhammad's teaching infused with Judeo-Christian ideas and equated with the God of Israel. His followers recorded his words in the Quran. Opposed in Mecca, he became ruler in Medina around 620, took eventually twelve wives, and launched conquest under the summons of Islam, tribute, or the sword, taking Mecca before his death in 632.

8. A hundred years to Spain and India

   Within a century of Muhammad's death Islam ruled from Spain to the borders of India. The speed had an explanation: power vacuums everywhere. The western empire was gone, the eastern empire had exhausted itself fighting the tribes, and the old Persian empire of the Sassanids was declining; Muslim armies filled the vacated space, checked in the west only by the Franks at Tours in 732. That map, drawn in the seventh and eighth centuries, is essentially the Muslim world still.

9. Caliphs, Sunni and Shia, and the dynasties

   Muhammad was succeeded by four rightly guided caliphs, Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and finally his son-in-law Ali, and the great division of Islam traces to them: Sunnis accept all four successions, Shiites hold that leadership belonged to Ali alone. The Umayyad dynasty carried the great expansion; the Abbasids after them presided over the Islamic golden age; centuries later the Seljuk Turks would face the Crusaders, and the Ottomans would carry the banner until the first world war, whose aftermath drew the modern Middle East's borders.

10. What Islam teaches

    Six articles of faith, concerning God, angels, scriptures, prophets, the last days, and a thoroughgoing fatalism about all events; five pillars of practice, the profession of faith, the daily prayers, almsgiving, the Ramadan fast, and pilgrimage, with jihad standing so close behind them as to function as a sixth duty. The Quran affirms the writings of Moses, David, and the gospel of Jesus as true revelation, then contradicts them, which is the cult pattern in a single sentence: borrowing the Bible's credibility to overturn the Bible's message.

11. An old strategy reused

    The lecture closes on the striking parallels between Islam and Mormonism: a self-proclaimed prophet, revelation delivered by an angel, new books elevated to scripture, polygamy in the founding era, early violence, pervasive legalism, denial of Christ's deity, and a constant appeal to the Bible for legitimacy. Busenitz's sober inference: an enemy who watched the strategy succeed once in the seventh century ran it again in the nineteenth. For the church, the defense in both cases is the same as it was at every council: the sufficient, unchanging Scriptures.

1. The bishop of Rome rose partly because a chair sat empty. What does that teach about how institutions drift, and how churches should watch the roles they let history hand them?

2. Islam and Mormonism both borrowed the Bible's credibility to overturn its message. How do you help someone see the difference between a religion that quotes Scripture and one that submits to it?

3. The tribes that broke Rome became the nations that carried Christianity for a millennium. Where else in this course have you seen God's providence working through collapse?