Leaving Our First Love to Fight Each Other as “Heretics”

Christianity lost its true influence in the world when it pursued the power it could gain as a mass movement, stopped loving, and started fighting. One of the overlooked consequences of this was the rise of Islam.

Having first adopted a wrong measure of success–numerical and financial church “growth” resulting from a successful “mass movement”–we have also adopted wrong methods. We started fighting instead of loving. This issue was stated clearly by Muhammad in the Seventh century.

Muhammad was a sharp observer of what was going on in the religions to which he was exposed.  From his observations of Christians in southern Arabia and the recent history of his small corner of the world, he observed:

From those, too, who call themselves Christians, We did take a covenant, but they forgot a good part of the message that was sent them: so we estranged them, with enmity and hatred between the one and the other, to the day of judgment. And soon will Allah show them what it is they have done

Quran, 5:14 (Yusuf Ali tr.).

The nature of the message Christians had forgotten to live out by the early Seventh Century, at least so far as Muhammad could see, is also suggested by his statement that, because we forgot it, Allah sent estrangement among us.  Compare the following passages of Scripture, some of which Muhammad may actually have heard repeated in some form by Arab Christians he knew (though he wouldn’t have read them, as he was illiterate and there was apparently no Arabic translation of any part of the New Testament at that time):

To the angel of the church in Ephesus write: The One who holds the seven stars in His right hand, the One who walks among the seven golden lampstands, says this: ‘I know your deeds and your toil and perseverance, and that you cannot tolerate evil men, and you put to the test those who call themselves apostles, and they are not, and you found them to be false; and you have perseverance and have endured for My name’s sake, and have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have left your first love. Therefore remember from where you have fallen, and repent and do the deeds you did at first; or else I am coming to you and will remove your lampstand out of its place—unless you repent.

Revelation 2:1-5.

A new command I give you: Love one another.  As I have loved you, so you must love one another.  By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.

John 13:34-35.

“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”  

Matthew 22:36-40.

If, however, you are fulfilling the royal law according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing well. But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors.

James 2:8-9.

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

Romans 13:8-10.

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

I John 4:7-12.

Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates a brother or sister is still in the darkness. Anyone who loves their brother and sister lives in the light, and there is nothing in them to make them stumble. But anyone who hates a brother or sister is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness. They do not know where they are going, because the darkness has blinded them.

I John 2:9-11.

For this is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another. Do not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own actions were evil and his brother’s were righteous. Do not be surprised, my brothers and sisters, if the world hates you. We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love each other. Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him.

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.

I John 3:11-18.

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

Romans 5:1-5.

Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart, for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God. For,

“All flesh is like grass,
And all its glory like the flower of grass.
The grass withers,
And the flower falls off,
But the word of the Lord endures forever.”

And this is the word which was preached to you.

1 Peter 1:22-25.

Anyone with even a vague understanding of Christian teaching would certainly understand that God’s first command to us, “a good part of the message,” as Muhammad said, is love—love for God first, but love for others and, particularly, for other Christians, naturally flows from this.  (As the quoted passage from Romans states, God pours it out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit).  They would also understand that the proof that we are Jesus’ followers is that we love all other Jesus followers around us. 

And, by the time of Muhammad, they would also have been able to see that most of us were not doing this—instead, we were collectively seeking to build our own kingdoms and sending armies to murder or exile others who said they were Jesus’ followers but disagreed with us over points of doctrine or human leadership. Many exiles generated by the Christian doctrinal and political conflicts of the 3^rd-6^th Centuries settled beyond the borders of the Roman empire in Arabia, the “wild west” of that day.  Others set up their own, intermittently flourishing and persecuted, national or ethnic church organizations having different views than the Roman/Byzantine Old Catholic church organization concerning the relationship of the divine and human natures of Christ, in Persia, rural eastern Syria, upper Egypt, Armenia and Ethiopia. By the time of Muhammad, the Roman church organization had long since anathematized all of these alternative national or ethnic churches as “heretics,” and they had returned the favor. (For a very brief, but linked, introduction to all this, click here.)

Muhammad is known to have had direct contact with the Ethiopian “heretical” church through Yemen and through some of his family members and early followers who were given asylum in Ethiopia (Aksumite empire) while he was fighting for control of Mecca, with the Coptic “heretical” church through one of his wives, and with the Nestorian (Persian) “heretical” church through a cousin by marriage who was a Nestorian monk. Indeed, traditional Muslim sources state that that the first person to call him a “prophet” was also a Nestorian monk. (See Wikipedia’s article on Muhammad’s Views on Christians). The large Jewish community in Yathrib (now known as Medina) on Muhammad’s arrival there included a number of Ebionites–Jewish followers of Jesus as the Messiah who split from the Gentile Church in the Second Century over observance of the Law of Moses and various other things. Arabia also contained exiled Arian Christians, who differed from the orthodox Church about the Trinity, and descendants of the Charsimatic (in the modern sense) Montanists, who had differed from the orthodox Church over the manifestation of spiritual gifts, particularly prophecy. What was in very short supply in Southern Arabia, circa 610 CE, was Christians the official Church in Byzantium or Rome would recognize as “orthodox.”

The point of this small slice of history, for purposes of the present post, is that Christian division, up to the beginning of the Seventh Century, gave Muhammad ample grounds for concluding that Christians were hypocrites, who all taught that they they should love each other, but who in fact hated each other. If Muhammad had heard these words of Ezekiel from some of the many Jews in Arabia during his time, he might have thought they applied to us Christians (they actually sound suspiciously like 5:14 of the Quran):

As for you, son of man, your people are talking together about you by the walls and at the doors of the houses, saying to each other, ‘Come and hear the message that has come from the Lord.’ My people come to you, as they usually do, and sit before you to hear your words, but they do not put them into practice. Their mouths speak of love, but their hearts are greedy for unjust gain. Indeed, to them you are nothing more than one who sings love songs with a beautiful voice and plays an instrument well, for they hear your words but do not put them into practice.

Ezekiel 33:30-32.

I will, in some later posts, develop the historical thesis that Islam arose because of the violent dissensions in the Christianity of its day, misunderstood Christian teachings about Christ and the Trinity because we invited the errors, and derived some of its least endearing doctrines and practices from warring Christian sects. But, for now, the only point that needs to be made–and that is quite easily made–is that we lost our real influence in the world, as salt and light, when we left our first love and started fighting instead, even though we could justify our fighting by saying we were contending for doctrinal “truth.”

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