How Allah is Saving Humanity

1. How Allah is Saving Humanity (How Allah is Saving Humanity)

2. “Prophecy is a difficult business, especially when it involves the future.” Voltaire Marx “From Voltaire to Marx every Enlightenment thinker thought that religion would disappear in the 20th century because religion was fetishism, animistic superstition,” says Harvard’s professor emeritus Daniel Bell

3. Freud The Future of an Illusion

4. H. G. Wells, in 1933, predicted that before 1960, all the world’s national governments would collapse, paving the way for a World State based on worldwide air transport.By 1977, this state would suppress all religions.

5. Will the Christian Church Survive? Bernard Iddings Bell “… the Church is hardly likely to matter any more tomorrow than it mattered yesterday or than it matters at the moment, which is just about not at all.” OCTOBER 1942

6. Burnham Beckwith’s The Next 500 Years (1968) listed 31 trends he thought would shape the next semi-millennium. Trend #4 was “the decline of religion and superstition.” Episcopal Bishop Spong wrote a book called Why Christianity Must Change or Die and fellow-Episcopalian Arthur Peacock wrote that Christianity must abandon its “incomprehensible and unbelievable” supernatural beliefs and present faith in a “credible manner.” The New York Times said, “Visit a church at random next Sunday, and you will probably encounter a few dozen people sprinkled thinly over a sanctuary that was built to accommodate hundreds or even thousands. The empty pews and white-haired congregants lend credence to those who argue that traditional religious worship is dying out.”

7. In 1910, John R. Mott predicted that by 2000 all Africa would be Muslim.

8. In 1900, at the end of what Latourette calls “the Great Century of Christian Missions” 40 million out of the world’s 1620 million people were real Christians.

9. 40 1900 AD

10. Forty years later, the retreat of the West began Percent of the non-Western world under Western political control

11. Forty years later, the retreat of the West began Lebanon, Syria, Iceland

12. Forty years later, the retreat of the West began Jordan, Philippines, Korea, Indonesia, Pakistan, India, China

13. Forty years later, the retreat of the West began Sudan, Morocco, Congo, Nigeria, Cyprus

14. Forty years later, the retreat of the West began 99.5% .5%

15. 1900-2000 The Retreat of the West 1. Two world wars left major cities in Europe and Asia in ruins. 2. The world-wide depression of the 1930s took away any feeling of economic security. 3. The Holocaust showed human depravity. 4. The rise of Communism and the threat of nuclear annihilation crushed an optimistic belief in inevitable progress. 5. Philosophers turned away from Kant’s sweet reasonableness to Nietzsche’s pursuit of irrational power or Sartre’s desperate embrace of the absurd. 6. Theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr scoffed at the last century’s Pollyanna dreams of human perfectibility. 7. Thousands of missionaries exiled from China felt a deep sense of failure. 8. With the withdrawal of the colonial masters tribal warfare gripped Africa. BUT WHAT HAPPENED TO THE KINGDOM?

16. 648 40 Forty years later, the retreat of the West began 99.5% .5% The number of real Christians increased more than 1600% and their proportion more than quadrupled.

17. 2000 AD 9

18. Next Sunday Where will more people go to church?

19. Next Sunday Anglicans

20. Next Sunday Pentecostals

21. Next Sunday Presbyterians

23. By the end of what many think was the worst century in human history (two world wars, the Communist revolutions, the AIDS epidemic) Christianity had spread to 648 million of the 6055 million in the world.

24. If present trends continue, by 2025 888 million of the world’s 7823 million people will be real Christians.

25. The turn of the twentieth century was marked by obsessive list-making--almost all of which neglected religion. This is comically myopic, akin to reviewing the 18th century and neglecting the French Revolution. For the last 500 years most Christians have lived in the West. In the last 100 years a revolution occurred. Today most Christians live in the South. 560 260 480 360 313

26. The turn of the twentieth century was marked by obsessive list-making--almost all of which neglected religion. This is comically myopic, akin to reviewing the 18th century and neglecting the French Revolution. For the last 500 years most Christians have lived in the West. In the last 100 years a revolution occurred. Today most Christians live in the South. 820 840 313

27. By 2025 this situation will have changed dramatically with almost 2/3 of all Christians living outside the West. 555 312 640 633 460

28. By 2025 this situation will have changed dramatically with almost 2/3 of all Christians living outside the West 867 1273 460

30. How could this happen? What were the causes?

31. Of course, the grace of God. But God’s grace is not an innovation of the last century. Why did Christianity explode at this time? Andrew Walls argues Christianity grew when Christendom ended.

33. Bible Translation Helping people hear God’s Word in their own heart languages Mark Noll: Bible translation is a second incarnation

35. God had preceded the missionary in Africa and everywhere else, too.

37. zwyl[ la El Elyon Gen 14:18 Melchizedek logoH Logos John 1:1 Heraclitus The unknown God Acts 17:23 Epimenides Zeus Theos Deus Allah The way to say God in Hausa and many other languages So Allah is saving humanity in two senses: 1. Since Allah is just another name for God, God is saving humanity through Jesus. 2. Since Allah is the vernacular way to say God, the use of Allah in Bible translation helps people to know the God they have worshiped ignorantly.

38. So What?

39. Don’t believe the pessimists. • Thank God for what he is doing. • Join God in doing his work of saving the world. • Pray • Give • Go