Customer Reviews

The Church of the East and the Church of England: A History of the Archbishop of Canterbury's Assyrian Mission

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A comprehensive account of the Church of England's Mission to the Church of the East in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which details successes as much as it does the many, sad, failures. Though a bit hard-going at times, and some cringe-inducing letters from the English about the so-called "uncultured" Assyrians [though we can't apply standards today back then, it still jarred for me], this is an in-depth account which helped fill in many gaps of my knowledge of this interesting Mission.

This book has little to commend itself, and less to recommend itself with. I had high hopes, wanting to read about this fabulous church, the largest in the world until 1000 AD, with one million people, spread throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, China, India, and maybe even Japan and SE Asia. But the writing is very poor, and not gripping. And the author seems lost without a main point. It is as if he did a lot of research on the relationship between the Anglican and ancient Nestorian Church, and then dumped it all out, without any clear format or guiding principle. It is chronologically written, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but there is no main point by which the author displays his data. When reading a research book, I expect that it is not just a catalogue of research, but guided by a point the author is trying to communicate. I couldn't see this point, and it made for very boring reading, in many different directions.

Coakley writes about the coming of the Anglican Church to revitalize the ancient Nestorian/Assyrian Church/Church of the East/Church of Theodore of Mopsuetia. (They have a number of names.) The Anglican Church desired not to proselytize or convert the ancient church to the Anglican beliefs, but to revitalize a church that had become stagnant, with the leaders having no care for God, the people knowing little of faith or belief, and the hierarchy becoming hereditary rather than by merit. But this history seems mostly filled with what I can only describe as gossip. The Anglicans seem to have mostly difficulty with other missions, like the despised American Protestants, and see the Assyrians as a backward people, with little redemption. They go there to educate, but face constant obstacles, which seem mostly of their own making, for not truly valuing the people inn the Nestorian Church. Though they claim to not want to proselytize, they end up trying to get the ancient church to change it's beliefs to come in line with the rest of Christendom. (The Assyrians' Christology believes Christ is "two natures, two persons"- but it's not entirely clear what that means in the context of Syriac, their liturgical language, and within their culture.) I desired to read about stories of people coming to God and God's great work, and behold, gossip. I wanted to hear about the changes wrought by this mission within the politics of the region, and behold, random imperialistic pericope.

Two stars, for the last chapter, where we finally get some stories, and some more clear interaction of this ancient church with the rest of the world. And in the final chapter we learn that, in the 1930's, the ancient Nestorian people in large part fled the area due to massacres by Kurdish and Turkish troops. When they sought to return to their homeland, they faced great difficulties, because Turkey now controlled the region. They ended up settling in Mosul, but again faced new difficulties, because the new Iraqi regime, created by the European powers, now controlled Mosul, and the Arabs were in the majority. Some worked to create an independent Assyrian land covering much of Kurdistan, including Mosul, but it came to naught. And so many of the ancient Assyrians, including their patriarch, moved to the United States. The only ancient church with the patriarchate in the U.S. is the Assyrian, based in Chicago. A remnant is left in modern-day Iraq/Iran/Turkey, what is called Kurdistan, and is currently being bombed in Mosul by the Americans and the British, who once came to revitalize their church.