Ramon Llull (Raymond Lully) on the Incarnation

Appropriate during this season of Christmas:

But as you are the God man and since your physical humanity naturally participates with all physical creatures, all creatures find rest in you like things that are likened find rest in their likeness, for you as a human are their ultimate purpose and end.

De contemplatione Raymundi

Quote from Ramon Llull (Raymund Lully)

Blessed Ramon Llull (1235-1315), Missionary to the Muslims and Martyr

"Death has no terrors for a sincere servant of Christ who is laboring to bring souls to a knowledge of the truth."

Can you figure out why this guy is my hero? I mean, he combines the best elements of catholic Christianity, evangelical zeal, and a missio-centric spirituality focused on the unreached--especially Muslims. What more could you want? Oh yeah: he was a married man and lay missionary.

(Abu Daoud is listening to The Division Bell by Pink Floyd. Have you all heard this album? I really like it, what do you think?)

The Catholic Church and frontier mission today

I guess you could count this as part II of a continuing conversation, after my rather short post a few days ago on Raymund Lully, and the loss of missionary zeal in the Catholic Church today. I specifically was quite careful in choosing my words, and here is what I said:

There were great examples here and there to the contrary, but placing frontier mission and world mission at the center of the Church's life never took root in Catholicism. (Yes, I'm gonna say that, and it makes me sad.)

But Rob answered my post thusly:

I don't buy this "RC's don't mission", Abu Daoud. We were almost everywhere long before anyone else. We got kicked out of Japan before most people knew where it was. If our growth has slowed, forgive us as we organize a billion people.

Of course this is not what I said, that RC's don't do mission. I said that today they don't do frontier mission, and that frontier mission, when it was successful was never really owned by the people historically, but by this or that religious order. Orders are very important to the life of the Catholic Church and I know this well, having studied for years theology with one of them. But if they are the center of the Church's mission to the frontier (definition forthcoming), then it is a losing strategy, as most religious orders cannot even supply enough priests to keep their institutions in the West functioning within a recognizably Catholic framework.

Rob mentions that his neighbors are not Christians, does he live on the frontier of missions? The simple answer is no. Mongolia, which he mentions may indeed be frontier mission though. Much of sub-Saharan Africa is no longer the mission frontier. Almost all of N. Africa is. How many new churches and converts have been baptized into the Catholic Church in North Africa? None that I know of. How many have become part of evangelically oriented home churches? Probably several thousand, maybe more than 10k.

But here is the definition for frontier missions:

Frontier Missions is a Christian missiological term referring to the pioneering of the gospel among ethno-cultural and ethno-linguistic population segments where there is no indigenous church. The phrase was originally used with reference to Catholic, and later Protestant, mission stations in the Western United States. In the 1960s missiologists began to re-employ the term to distinguish between two kinds of missionary work: that which was being done among peoples where the indigenous church was already established, and new efforts among peoples where the Christian Church was very weak or non-existent. The contemporary usage of the term is part of a general trend to look at the missionary task more in terms of social, cultural and linguistic isolation from the gospel, rather than strictly geographic isolation.

My original point still stands. This sort of mission was never and is not owned by the core of the Catholic Church, notwithstanding notable exceptions here and there and the zealous former work of certain religious orders. It was the idea of Blessed Raymund Lully that it should be the heart beat of the Catholic Church and he lived out this vision powerfully.

World Mission and Ramon Llull (aka Raymond Lully)

In case you didn't know one of my great heroes of all times is Raymund Lully, and I have a nice quote about him from one of the many old history books I am reading these days that was dug up from the underbelly of my college's library. The author, speaking of Lull says:

The mission to the non-Christian world, he believed, should be the first concern of the Church, claiming its most capable men and a worthy portion of its property. He advocated missions not only to North Africa but to the east, not only to the Muslims but to the Mongols. He knew the Muslims best, however, and said of them, “Once they were converted, it would be light thing to convert the rest of the world." […] Lull’s idea that the whole church should take up this task came to nought. It continued to be the concern of only a few, chiefly from these two Orders [Franciscans and Dominicans], who were scattered over North Africa and, as occasion offered, in Palestine and Syria. Some did go on to the land of the Mongols.

Beginning From Jerusalem: Christian Expansion through Seventeen Centuries
John Foster, London, 1956, pp. 59, 60

Lull's focus on world mission and frontier mission being central to church life would have to wait for the Reformation and then the birth of evangelicalism, but ultimately in the early 19th Century it gained a very significant following among certain Western evangelical and (later) charismatic churches. There were great examples here and there to the contrary, but placing frontier mission and world mission at the center of the Church's life never took root in Catholicism. (Yes, I'm gonna say that, and it makes me sad.)

Raymund Lull (Ramon Lully): Tears and Blood

I see many knights going to the Holy Land beyond the seas and thinking that they can acquire it by force of arms; but in the end all are destroyed before they attain that which they think to have. Whence it seems to me that the conquest of the Holy Land ought not to be attempted except in the way in which Thou and Thine apostles acquired it, namely, by love and prayers, and the pouring out of tears and blood.

Blessed Raymund Lull (Ramon Lully)

Qtd. in Zwemer, Samuel M. 1902. Raymund Lull: The First Missionary to the Moslems. London: Funk & Wagnalls Company.

P. 52-53

The Reverse Jonah Effect

I just returned from a meeting that brought together dozens of ministries that have a desire to see Muslims come to faith in Jesus Christ as well as a good number of Muslim-background Believers (MBB's). Great work is being done in inner cities among Black Muslims, immigrants from places like Turkey, Yemen, Iran, and Bosnia. There are some vibrant student ministries that are thinking creatively about witnessing to students who come here to study from places like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

One of the speakers called it "The Reverse Jonah Effect." Jonah, you will recall, heard the Lord and ran away. The Reverse Jonah Effect stipulates that there are people who have not heard the Gospel and come to us. And it is happening.

I don't want to sound triumphalistic though: every year about 50,000 people in the USA convert to Islam. Every year in the USA about 20,000 Muslims convert to Christ. (Note that I do not say they convert to Christianity because there is a debate among those who evangelize Muslims as to whether deciding to follow Christ necessitates adopting the title 'Christian', but that's a topic for another day.) So the balance is not exactly in our favor, and if one factors in demographics, Islam is growing quite well in the USA and even more so in Canada.

Many denominations were represented at this meeting--even the Orthodox! (One person, a priest no less.) Except for the Catholics. Are there NO ministries in all the USA/Canada run by Roman Catholics that have the desire to share the Gospel with Muslims, and if they receive it to baptize them and teach them all our Lord has commanded us?

For shame. I would love to see the emergence of an RC ministry that serves the Muslim community, being ready in and out of season to give an answer for their faith. You start with a love for Muslims, with the conviction that the Gospel is in a very real GOOD NEWS, about peace with God, forgiveness of sin, inclusion into a community of life and rebirth (the Church), and you serve. You serve with the conviction that Jesus knew what he was talking about when he said that men would see our righteous deeds and glorify our Father in heaven.

So, there is the challenge, my dear Roman Catholic brothers. Post it on your blogs and forward it to your friends. Pray and fast and ask how you can reach Muslims in your city with the Gospel. Pray without ceasing.

And then, I hope, in two years when this convocation comes together again, we will see Catholic laity and clergy in attendance with sundry evangelicals sharing ideas, strategies, and experiences regarding how they have, by God's mercy, brought Muslims into the Kingdom of God.

I am pretty sure that Blessed Raymond Lully is somewhere up there praying for you Catholics, that you would get with it and like my old pastor used to say, "Read the Bible and do what it says."

Raymond Lully (Ramon Llull)

Raymund Lull (aka Raymond Lully, in Latin Raimundus or Raymundus Lullus, or in Spanish Raimundo Lulio) is one of my great heroes. There is much to read about him in terms of Christian missions, but due to his philosophical work he is considered to be a pioneer in information theory and also wrote the first novel in the Catalan language. Please read it all and gain courage from his example. In many ways his focus on preaching, conversation, debate, and the use of Islamic sources to reach Muslims, coupled with his disdain for the use of force, was and is the pattern found today among missionaries to Muslims. He was way ahead of his time.

From the Christian History Institute:

Raymond Lull would have seemed an unlikely person to remind the church of its missionary vision. A court gallant (that is, a fashionable ladies' man) and poet, he squandered his life in frivolity, romantic stories, love poems, and seduction. He was thirty before that changed.

But Jesus Christ, of his great clemency,
Five times upon the cross appeared to me,
That I might think upon him lovingly,
And cause his name proclaimed abroad to be...

It is reported that Lull's conversion was precipitated by a shock. He tried to lure a beautiful woman into a few moments of pleasure in bed with him. With quiet dignity, the woman revealed her breast to him--cancer-eaten. In a flash, he saw the futility of his lusts, and later transferred his love to the eternal Christ.

Born in Majorca, Spain, five years after the Island was freed from Saracen rule, Lull drank in Jewish and Islamic lore. He was the first Christian philosopher to study the Jewish Kabbalah (a book filled with mystical and occult knowledge) and one of the first to read the writings of the Islamic mystics known as Sufis. He developed a passion to win Moslems to Christ and took up the challenge of the Grand Mufti of Bugia: "If you hold that the law of Christ is true and that of Mohammed false, you must prove it by necessary reasons,"--that is, by air-tight logic.

Convinced that true reason could produce no results contradictory to true faith, Lull poured his intelligence into philosophy. The result was a philosophy of "combination" by which he thought all knowledge could be derived by combining every idea with every other idea. Although admired for centuries because it was clever, his Ars Magna ultimately proved to be a dead end. But Lull went beyond mere philosophy. His passion was too deep to stop with scholarly games.

The first crusades had failed. Lull crisscrossed Europe, urging kings, popes, and cardinals to develop mission schools and evangelize Islam. "Missionaries will convert the world by preaching, but also through the shedding of tears and blood and with great labor, and through a bitter death," he said. His three-point plan was simple. First, missionaries must obtain a comprehensive knowledge of Arabic and other mid-eastern languages. Then they must study Islamic literature until they could refute any Muslim argument. Finally they must give their lives in witness to Christ. He convinced the pope to allow Christian universities to teach the Jewish and Islamic languages and literature.

Lull followed this plan himself. He established a missionary school and personally studied Islamic lore. Three times he sailed to Islamic countries to reason with Islamic scholars. The first time he was exported just when he had won several Imams (Moslem religious leaders) to request baptism. The second time he was imprisoned for six months. On this day August 14, 1314, when he was in his eighties, he sailed a third time for Islamic North Africa. For a year he preached Christ and the Trinity openly but then was brutally stoned. Christian merchants carried the broken man aboard their ship. Probably he died in sight of Majorca.