From the blog On the Square, and intriguing and insightful post on the Assyrian church...
As you may be aware, several Christian churches in Kirkuk, Mosul, Basra, and Baghdad, as well as throughout the rest of Iraq, cancelled their festivities this past Christmas. Ever since the massacre of worshippers in Baghdad’s Church of Our Lady of Salvation last November—followed by attacks on Christian neighborhoods in the city—the Christians of Iraq have been living in a state of unrelieved terror, and they simply do not dare celebrate their faith too openly right now. Moreover, there is no reason to imagine that their situation will become any more tolerable in any conceivable near future.
There are beleaguered Christian communities throughout much of the Muslim world, of course, but it is quite possible that the last remnants of ancient Persian Christianity in Iraq and perhaps Iran will disappear in our lifetimes. If so, and if Persian Christianity is largely reduced to a fragmentary diaspora community, it will mark the end of yet another tragic episode in one of the more extraordinary tales in Christian history—though it is a tale regarding which most Christians know absolutely nothing.
Most of the Christians of Iraq belong to “Assyrian” tradition: the tradition, that is, of the Church of the East (often, and somewhat opprobriously, called the “Nestorian” Church) and of its sixteenth-century offshoot the Chaldean Catholic Church (occasionally, and somewhat opprobriously, called the “Uniate” Chaldean Church). Today, even many Christians who know something of the Eastern churches tend to think of the Assyrian communions as little more than exotic marginal sects; even among the “Oriental” churches (that is, the ancient Eastern communions that did not adopt the Christological formula of Chalcedon in the fifth century) they are often regarded as the least significant.
And yet at one time—from late antiquity right up into the high middle ages—the Church of the East was, in geographic terms, far and away the largest Christian communion in the world, and the most actively evangelical. Had there been such a thing as accurate cartography in the early thirteenth century, any good map of the Christian world might have suggested to a casual observer that European Christianity was little more than a local phenomenon, a sort of provincial annex at the western edge of Assyrian Christendom. Demographically, of course, the balances tipped in the opposite direction. Still, though, the Church of the East was anything but a marginal communion...
There are beleaguered Christian communities throughout much of the Muslim world, of course, but it is quite possible that the last remnants of ancient Persian Christianity in Iraq and perhaps Iran will disappear in our lifetimes. If so, and if Persian Christianity is largely reduced to a fragmentary diaspora community, it will mark the end of yet another tragic episode in one of the more extraordinary tales in Christian history—though it is a tale regarding which most Christians know absolutely nothing.
Most of the Christians of Iraq belong to “Assyrian” tradition: the tradition, that is, of the Church of the East (often, and somewhat opprobriously, called the “Nestorian” Church) and of its sixteenth-century offshoot the Chaldean Catholic Church (occasionally, and somewhat opprobriously, called the “Uniate” Chaldean Church). Today, even many Christians who know something of the Eastern churches tend to think of the Assyrian communions as little more than exotic marginal sects; even among the “Oriental” churches (that is, the ancient Eastern communions that did not adopt the Christological formula of Chalcedon in the fifth century) they are often regarded as the least significant.
And yet at one time—from late antiquity right up into the high middle ages—the Church of the East was, in geographic terms, far and away the largest Christian communion in the world, and the most actively evangelical. Had there been such a thing as accurate cartography in the early thirteenth century, any good map of the Christian world might have suggested to a casual observer that European Christianity was little more than a local phenomenon, a sort of provincial annex at the western edge of Assyrian Christendom. Demographically, of course, the balances tipped in the opposite direction. Still, though, the Church of the East was anything but a marginal communion...
Complete article here.
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