Page 98 - LD215 History of the Church in Africa A4 final

A History of the Church in Africa

century matters again went from bad to worse with the papacy.
At one stage, from 1044–1046, there were three very unworthy
men each claiming to be pontiff. (87)

Circumstances made it difficult for the Christian churches along the
Nile Corridor. By this time the Nubian church had come under Muslim
rule. The Ethiopian church was facing challenges but still expanding.

After Emperor Zara-Yaqob’s death in A.D. 1468, the challenge from
Islam increased. By the sixteenth century, Emperor Lebna Dengel
reigned, and Ethiopia faced its most difficult pressure from Islam. As
Muslim forces invaded the kingdom and persecuted Christians, Emperor
Dengel and his people fought courageously and appealed for help from
Portugal. However, as Ethiopian scholar Ephraim Isaac laments:

The help came too late. By the time it arrived, the Ethiopian
Church lost not only many of its great teachers, writers, and
leaders but also many of its treasures of literature and art. It was
the second phase of Muslim onslaught that brought the golden
age of monastic life in Ethiopia to a close. (quoted in Keener, 118)

When the Portuguese forces did arrive, they defeated the Muslims.
Then, as Paas observes, “Christian rule was reinstalled. But the church
and state had become weaker and more vulnerable” (45). After this,
Jesuit missionaries of the Roman Catholic Church attempted to take
over the Ethiopian Coptic Church. Their goals included correcting the
doctrinal error of Monophysitism and bringing the church under the
authority of Rome. Eventually, the Jesuit missionaries were sent home,
and the Ethiopian Coptic Church continued its independent, although
isolated, existence.

Keener summarizes this ill-fated attempt to force Catholicism on the
Ethiopian Coptic Church with a quote from Isaac: “When the Portuguese
discovered the legendary kingdom of ‘Prester John’ they unsuccessfully
tried to convert it to Catholicism” (124).

On the eve of the arrival of European settlers and missionaries,
there was already a large body of Christians in Ethiopia. The Ethiopian
church had prevailed in its own kind of Christianity. Some historians

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