Welcome back to another episode of Five Minutes in Church History.

On this episode, we are looking at Raymond Law.

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 Mallorca 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, Loll, 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 Loll. This 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 Loll 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,

Law saw his mission as particularly to the Muslims. Now we're in the later 12-hundreds. 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.

Law went to Tunis, not to conquer them, but to try to convert them.

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