Post on 17-Dec-2015
(How Allah is Saving Humanity)
“Prophecy is a difficult business, especially when it involves the future.”
Voltaire Marx
“From Voltaire to Marx every Enlightenment thinker thought that religion would disappear in the 20th century because religion was fetishism, animistic superstition,”says Harvard’s professor emeritus Daniel Bell
Freud
The Future of an Illusion
H. G. Wells, in 1933, predicted that before 1960, all the world’s national governments would collapse, paving the way for a World State based on worldwide air transport.By 1977, this state would suppress all religions.
OCTOBER 1942
Will the Christian Church Survive?
Bernard Iddings Bell
“… the Church is hardly likely to matter any more tomorrow than it mattered yesterday or than it matters at the moment, which is just about not at all.”
Episcopal Bishop Spong wrote a book called Why Christianity Must Change or Die and fellow-Episcopalian Arthur Peacock wrote that Christianity must abandon its “incomprehensible and unbelievable” supernatural beliefs and present faith in a “credible manner.”
The New York Times said, “Visit a church at random next Sunday, and you will probably encounter a few dozen people sprinkled thinly over a sanctuary that was built to accommodate hundreds or even thousands. The empty pews and white-haired congregants lend credence to those who argue that traditional religious worship is dying out.”
Burnham Beckwith’s The Next 500 Years (1968) listed 31 trends he thought would shape the next semi-millennium. Trend #4 was “the decline of religion and superstition.”
In 1910, John R. Mott predicted that by 2000 all Africa would be Muslim.
In 1900, at the end of what Latourette calls “the Great Century of Christian Missions” 40 million out of the world’s 1620 million people were real Christians.
1900 AD
40
0
20
40
60
80
100
19001910192019301940195019601970198019902000
Forty years later, the retreat of the West began
Percent of the non-Western world under Western political control
0
20
40
60
80
100
19001910192019301940195019601970198019902000
Lebanon, Syria, Iceland
Forty years later, the retreat of the West began
0
20
40
60
80
100
19001910192019301940195019601970198019902000
Jordan, Philippines, Korea, Indonesia, Pakistan, India, China
Forty years later, the retreat of the West began
0
20
40
60
80
100
19001910192019301940195019601970198019902000
Sudan, Morocco, Congo, Nigeria, Cyprus
Forty years later, the retreat of the West began
0
20
40
60
80
100
19001910192019301940195019601970198019902000
99.5%
.5%
Forty years later, the retreat of the West began
1900-2000 The Retreat of the West1. Two world wars left major cities in Europe and Asia in ruins.2. The world-wide depression of the 1930s took away any feeling
of economic security.3. The Holocaust showed human depravity.4. The rise of Communism and the threat of nuclear annihilation
crushed an optimistic belief in inevitable progress.5. Philosophers turned away from Kant’s sweet reasonableness
to Nietzsche’s pursuit of irrational power or Sartre’s desperate embrace of the absurd.
6. Theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr scoffed at the last century’s Pollyanna dreams of human perfectibility.
7. Thousands of missionaries exiled from China felt a deep sense of failure.
8. With the withdrawal of the colonial masters tribal warfare gripped Africa.
BUT WHAT HAPPENED TO THE KINGDOM?
0
20
40
60
80
100
19001910192019301940195019601970198019902000
99.5%
.5%40
648
Forty years later, the retreat of the West began
The number of real Christians increased more than 1600% and their proportion more than quadrupled.
2000 AD
9
Next Sunday
Where will more people go to church?
Next Sunday
Anglicans
Next Sunday
Pentecostals
Next Sunday Presbyterians
By the end of what many think was the worst century in human history (two world wars, the Communist revolutions, the AIDS epidemic) Christianity had spread to 648 million of the 6055 million in the world.
If present trends continue, by 2025 888 million of the world’s 7823 million people will be real Christians.
The turn of the twentieth century was marked by obsessive list-making--almost all of which neglected religion.This is comically myopic, akin to reviewing the 18th century and neglecting the French Revolution.For the last 500 years most Christians have lived in the West. In the last 100 years a revolution occurred. Today most Christians live in the South.
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
Europe NA SA Africa Asia
560 260 480 360 313
The turn of the twentieth century was marked by obsessive list-making--almost all of which neglected religion.This is comically myopic, akin to reviewing the 18th century and neglecting the French Revolution.For the last 500 years most Christians have lived in the West. In the last 100 years a revolution occurred. Today most Christians live in the South.
0
200
400
600
800
1000
West South East
820 840 313
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
Europe NA SA Africa Asia
By 2025 this situation will have changed dramatically with almost 2/3 of all Christians living outside the West.
555 312 640 633 460
0
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
1400
West South East
By 2025 this situation will have changed dramatically with almost 2/3 of all Christians living outside the West
867 1273 460
How could this happen? What were the causes?
Of course, the grace of God. But God’s grace is not an innovation of the last century.Why did Christianity explode at this time?Andrew Walls argues Christianity grew when Christendom ended.
Bible Translation
Helping people hear God’s Word in their own heart languages
Mark Noll: Bible translation is a second incarnation
God had preceded the missionary in Africa
and everywhere else, too.
zwyl[ la El Elyon Gen 14:18 Melchizedek
logoLogos John 1:1 Heraclitus
The unknown God Acts 17:23 Epimenides
ZeusTheosDeusAllah The way to say God in Hausa and many other languagesSo Allah is saving humanity in two senses:
1. Since Allah is just another name for God, God is saving humanity through Jesus.
2. Since Allah is the vernacular way to say God, the use of Allah in Bible translation helps people to know the God they have worshiped ignorantly.
1. Don’t believe the pessimists.
2. Thank God for what he is doing.
3. Join God in doing his work of saving the world.
Pray
Give
Go