Raymund Lull: Medieval Missionary
Raymond Lull devoted his life to proclaiming the gospel to Muslims and Jews. Today, Stephen Nichols tells the story of this medieval missionary whose love for Christ led him to a ministry of study, debate, and bold witness.
Welcome back to another episode of 5 Minutes in Church History. On this episode, we are looking at Raymond Lull. He was born around 1230s, and he died in 1315. He was a theologian, a philosopher, a scholar, and a missionary to Muslims. He wrote in Latin, and he also wrote in his native language, Catalan. He was quite the linguistic scholar and studied Arabic and Hebrew and Greek. Well, let's go back to the beginnings. His family had great wealth, and they moved from Barcelona to Majorca just a few years before he was born. He was by his own account following a very profligate lifestyle as a young man. He was appointed to the king's court, and he had all the resources and entitlements to go along with it. And in the midst of it all, Lull, again by his own account, had a vision of Christ. It was a vision of Christ on the cross, suffering for sin and calling after young Raymond Lull.
This caused law to see his guilt, and so he dedicated his life, devoted his life to turning his back on his wealth and the pursuit of success and all of those things, and instead following after God. In Majorca where Lull had grown up, he had been around Muslims. Majorca was Muslim, then it was taken back by Spain, but many Muslims remained. And so, as part of his newfound calling to service Lull saw his mission as particularly to the Muslims. Now we're in the later 1200s. This is squarely in the era of the Crusades. Much of the medieval Catholic church was not concerned with converting Muslims. Instead, they wanted to conquer them. They wanted to drive them out of the holy land. And out of the early Christian cities and lands where they had now been inhabiting Lull went to Tunis, not to conquer them, but to try to convert them.
He met with Muslim leaders as soon as he arrived in the town, and he offered to debate them on Christianity versus Islam, and they took him up on the offer. Ruth Tucker in her wonderful book, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: A Biographical History of Missions, writes of the aftermath of the debate, noting that the majority were stung by the verbal attack. As a consequence, Lull was arrested. They ordered him out of the country, and so he left Tunis and he went to Naples. Then he went on to France. During this time, he wrote a number of books. He tried to recruit others to join his missionary efforts among the Muslims. But in 1307, at the age of seventy-five or six or so, he went back to Tunis. He again engaged in debate. Here, the historian Samuel Weimer references that Lull would stand up, hold up a copy of the Ten Commandments, and then proceed to catalog from the Quran and other Muslim writings where Muhammad violated every single one of the commands.
Well, as you can imagine, this was not very well received. He is arrested again in his mid-seventies and deported again, but in 1314, now an octogenarian, he went back to Tunis. He had some correspondence with the King of Tunis, and it appears that Lull was hopeful that this king might just convert to Christianity. But when he got to Tunis, he realized that wasn't the case, and he was rather discouraged. It's unclear about what happened next. One text has it that he died on the voyage from Tunis back to Majorca. Others have him dying in Majorca. It's hard to tell. Lull's legacy was as a scholar. He wrote a very significant book called The Art. It presents an entire logical system. He also presented and wrote other books on philosophy and logic. He encouraged the study of Hebrew and Arabic for the sole purpose of mission work to both Jews and Muslims. He is very clearly an apologist. We've mentioned his work among the Muslims, but he also was engaged in missionary work and debate among Jews, much like Paul trying to reason with them from the Old Testament that Jesus is indeed the Messiah. Well, that is Raymond Lull, the Medieval missionary to Muslims. And I'm Steve Nichols and thanks for listening to 5 Minutes in Church History.
