The Significance of Early Libyan Christianity -- By: Thomas C. Oden

Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 167:668 (Oct 2010)
Article: The Significance of Early Libyan Christianity
Author: Thomas C. Oden


The Significance of Early Libyan Christianity

Thomas C. Oden

* This is the final article in a four-part series, “Early Libyan Christianity,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas Lectureship, February 3-6, 2009, Dallas Theological Seminary, Dallas, Texas.

Thomas C. Oden is the Henry Anson Buttz professor of theology emeritus, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey, and director of the Center for Early African Christianity, Eastern University, Radnor, Pennsylvania.

Christianity in North Africa has a much longer history than its European and American expressions. North American Christianity has survived a scant five hundred years, since 1492, and in the United States only since 1776, a little over two centuries. Libyan Christianity, on the other hand, is still alive after two millennia.

The Bare Survival Of Libyan Christianity

Libyan Christianity has survived over twenty centuries, since the early decades of the first century. Moreover, Libyan Christianity has played a continuing role in the formation of Christian culture all over the continent of Africa. Of significance is its impact on the whole of world Christianity in every century since the apostles. From its North African platform it has influenced every corner of world Christianity today.

Libyan Christianity begins with familiar names: the cross-bearer Simon of Cyrene, the mother of Mark who offered her home to the disciples at Passover, and above all the evangelist Mark, apostle to the lower Nile Valley, the middle and upper Nile, and symbolically to the whole of Africa.

From modest beginnings Libyan Christianity has touched the whole arena of Christian believers for more than twenty centuries

—from the earliest layers of exegetical, doctrinal, and philosophical-cultural development to the present day.

But the profound ways North African teachers have shaped world Christianity have never been adequately studied or acknowledged. Some of the most decisive intellectual achievements of Christianity were explored and understood first in Africa before they were in Europe. How did the African mind shape the Christian mind in the earliest centuries of Christianity? Libya is a dramatic example of the neglect of this subject.

The Growing Challenge Of Muslim-Christian Interaction

The Challenge

The challenge that lies ahead for young North Africans—both Muslim and Christian—is to rediscover the textual riches of ancient African moral and religious beliefs while preserving the recent values achieved in modern political independence and economic justice. Th...

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