Some people see only the positives of Christianity and find in it a source of pride and a sense of superiority over others. Others see only the negatives of Christianity and find it a curse to humanity that would be best eliminated. In this series I am trying to be honest with both aspects. But seeing the negatives in all their horror (in contrast to the transforming power of Christ’s life and teachings) raises the question, how can the same religion be so powerful for good and so evil at the same time?
You see, religion is a human response to the perception that God is at work in a particular context. To celebrate God’s actions and teachings in a particular context, and to create a context in which others can learn about these, humans beings create a religion. And as a response to the perception of God’s presence in the world, religion is a beautiful thing. But over time, religions tend to become less and less focused on the original mission and more and more focused on preserving the institution. And so every religion has a beautiful side and a dark side. The overall biblical explanation for this is that all religious institutions, including Christianity, are a battleground in the universal conflict between Christ and Satan. God is at work in Christians and in Christian institutions. But Satan is also at work in the same. History is the evidence that both forces have been and are at work among the followers of Jesus. So the broader, biblical answer to the problem is that Christianity is an arena in the cosmic conflict between Christ and Satan over the character and government of God.
In the New Testament, more specifically, there are a number of considerations that address this issue. One of them is the concept of the two ages (Mark 10:29-31; Luke 20:34-35), the now and the not yet. Jesus brought in the new age of the Kingdom (Matt 4:23; Mark 1:15; Luke 4:43), but the old age of sin and suffering is still with us (Rom 8:18-23). So the New Testament speaks of the same things as present realities (the now—Heb 6:5), yet not fully so (the not yet—Heb 9:26-28). The life of heaven has been realized yet not fully realized (I Cor 10:11 and 15:22-24; 1 Pet 1:20 and 1:5). So the life of the church was expected to be a struggle more than a foretaste of heaven. There would be tares among the wheat, even in the church (Matt 13:24-20). There would be a Judas, even among the disciples. So the New Testament predicted in advance that the church would include people of all kinds, some of them teaching things contrary to the teachings of Jesus (Luke 12:51-53; Acts 20:29-30; Rom 2:24; 1 Tim 4:1). The founding document of the Christian faith was very clear that the future church would portray a very mixed picture (while very symbolic, Revelation 13 seems to offer a similar prediction about the church).
The mixed picture of the church can also be understood in terms of behavioral science. Sociologists speak of two types of religion that people may embrace. Intrinsic religion is freely chosen as a good in itself, worth pursuing on its own merits. One goes to church because one wants to, not because of outside factors. Extrinsic religion is a means to another end. One goes to church to please others, to keep a job, or to look good within a particular community. From a Christian perspective one might distinguish between genuinely converted and those who are there for other reasons, whether or not they realize that. Christian faith as a whole should not be judged on the basis of those who are not truly committed or do not truly understand the implications of Jesus’ teachings. So there needs to be a distinction between “Christianity” (as the faith of Jesus) and “Christendom” (the institutional version that is often compromised by the desire for wealth and power in this world. For many the faith goes no deeper than commitment to a football team. Not everyone who identifies themselves as Christian has been transformed by the gospel. While the history of the Christian church is very disappointing, it should not be surprising.
In today’s world the only church that will have positive influence on society is a church that goes back to the basics of Jesus’ teaching. It will avoid worldly forms of church government.
It will renounce political power and influence. It will root out corruption (enhancing wealth and worldy power) within itself (both systemic corruption and individual corruption). It will renounce intimidation in religion or church politics. In short it will be a church that embraces weakness out of an overwhelming focus on the character of God that embraced the cross. Those who truly know God will not settle for less.
Monthly Archives: May 2021
What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? The Dark Side of Christian History III
The saga of misdeeds performed by seemingly committed Christians is not only out there in places like Germany, Spain, France, and Rwanda. America has its own questionable history. One incident that is frequently mentioned is the Salem Witch Trials, which occurred in colonial Massachusetts in 1692-1693. Over that time period several hundred people, both men and women, and including small children, were accused of witchcraft. Some twenty were executed and others died in prison. What is particularly horrifying is that these executions all occurred in a relatively small twin community where people largely knew each other, and they were encouraged and supported by the famous preacher Cotton Mather. The communities of Salem Village and Salem Town were, in fact, rather fractious to begin with. Personal vendettas, combined with some extreme views regarding the operations of Satan in everyday life, led to an escalating situation in which many people seem to have been falsely accused, and many people wrongly executed. Torture, even of children, was at times used to gain both confessions and accusations. While such witch trials in colonial America were not unique to Salem, Massachusetts, the scale of the Salem witch trials was unprecedented and led to the general rejection of “theocracy” as a model for American government. On the positive side, the biblical requirements of “two or three witnesses” led the church to see that these trials and executions were not based on sound religion, so the church belatedly brought them to an end after a year and several months. But that intervention could not recall the toll in lives and in the emotional and spiritual consequences of these witch trials.
As we will see, slavery was pretty much the norm around the world until movements in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries finally brought it to an end. But before that, the slave trade was often practiced even in Protestant lands and was frequently justified by the misuse of biblical texts. After the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, slavery was brought to an end in America, but continued on for another hundred years in a different form through segregation and the power of the lynching tree. While lynching usually took place in the hours of darkness, at times it occurred in the light of day with the full blessing of Protestant churches and pastors. And the consequences of slavery and its aftermath still impact African-American communities to this day. In South Africa, apartheid became official government policy in the Twentieth Century, with the strong support of the prevailing Protestant church.
From the Fifteenth through the Twentieth Centuries, colonialism was the public manifestation of the “Enlightenment” sense that white Europeans were inherently superior to others in science, technology, and even religion. While some Christians in general and many Adventists in particular, protested the exploitation of native peoples around the world, Christian missions often benefitted from and participated in activities that led to the marginalization of many non-European cultures around the world. To this day, lighter-skinned people often expect and get preferential treatment around the world, a lingering legacy of colonialism. And this legacy has resulted in some non-Christian cultures claiming the moral high ground in their interactions with the Christian West.
The above examples are probably sufficient to show that I am well aware of the kinds of accusations leveled against the Christian church today and of the validity of many of those accusations. There is much more that could be said, including the exploitation of child labor in England during the Industrial Revolution and the corrupt behavior of some television evangelists and their treatment of women. One could also add the sexual, physical, emotional and spiritual abuse of children by clergy, most prominently Roman Catholic priests. All of this must be acknowledged as part of the legacy of Christianity. As a result, unprecedented numbers of young people in the West have abandoned religion entirely and often all faith in God. The Asins of the church@ are used as an excuse to reject Jesus and all the good He brought to the world.
But is the whole story really being told? Would the world really be better off if Jesus had never been born? A good historical researcher will not be limited by one side of the story, but will consider the whole body of evidence. Based on the whole body of evidence, I would argue that Jesus= life and teaching unleashed more innovation and positive outcomes than any other human being in all of history. But before we get to that more positive story, I want to explore the question of why? If the impact of Jesus’ life and teachings is so positive, why have so many of His followers had such a negative impact on the world?
What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? The Dark Side of Christian History II
When listening to atheists and other opponents of Christian faith, one would think that Christianity is the worst invention of human history. That viewpoint is certainly an exaggeration, but it will not do to completely ignore the dark side of Christian history. That story often begins with the Crusades to rescue Jerusalem and the surrounding territories from the Muslim Empire. While a certain leeway tends to be given for “just war,” the massacre which occurred in Jerusalem in 1099 seems excessive even by ancient, pagan standards. On July 15, 1099 the Crusader armies entered Jerusalem, breaching the walls in the Tower of David area, and quickly spread over the Old City. After defeating the defenders of the city, they slaughtered both Jews and Muslims, men, women and children in numbers estimated as high as 40,000. While such actions were not uncommon in more ancient times, the slaughter of innocent civilians is certainly contrary to Christian principles, whether or not done in the name of God. As the Crusades wore on, the quality of the Crusader armies decreased even further. They were often made up of the criminal elements of Europe. Bernard of Clairvaux, leading medieval cleric, commented that it was better for Europe to be rid of these elements. While they fought in the name of Christ, many or most Crusaders were Christians in name only.
A second major blot on the history of Christianity is anti-semitism, which reached its peak in supposedly Protestant Germany during World War II. It is odd that so much anti-semitism arose within Christianity, since Jesus Himself was a Jew. But the worst persecutions of Jews through the centuries have almost always been in AChristian@ Europe. Until recently, Jews treated much better in the Muslim lands than the Christian ones. Muslim leaders during World War II were politically sympathetic to the Axis powers and learned anti-semitism from the Nazis. That legacy remains in the Middle East to this day.
Another blot on the history of Christianity was the Spanish Inquisition (15th to 17th Century). If the church is necessary for salvation, as the medieval church taught, all disagreement with the church is dangerous and must be stamped out. The concept of an inquisition originated in the church’s wars against the Waldensees and the Albigenses in the 12th Century and beyond. But it reached its full flower during the reigns of the famous Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, the same era as the voyages of Columbus to the New World. The purpose of the Inquisition was to identify “heretics” in Spain who had converted from Judaism and Islam to Christianity, particularly after such conversions became mandatory around 1500 AD. Over the centuries, hundreds of thousands were prosecuted and imprisoned, thousands were executed for various “heresies”.
A particular stain on Christian history is the numerous times when wars of religion were fought between so-called “Christian” powers. The first of these was the war between Catholics and the Huguenots in 16th Century France. It climaxed in the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre (August 23-24, 1572), when a combination of targeted assassinations and mob violence massacred tens of thousands of Protestant. Not long after, one of the longest and most brutal wars in human history was the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). The war began as a battle between Catholic and Protestant states in central Europe, when the Holy Roman Emperor tried to enforce Catholicism on all states under his rule. The Emperor was supported by Spain and some smaller territories, but the Scandinavian countries entered the war on the Protestant side. When it seemed that Protestantism was about to be overthrown in central Europe, Catholic France, ironically, entered the war on the Protestant side. Including the military engagements and the resulting famine and disease, there were between five and ten million casualties.
More recently, the religious conflicts in the former Yugoslavia pitted Catholics, Orthodox and Muslims against each other, with massive brutality and cruelty perpetrated by all sides, particularly the two Christian sides. But lest one think that evangelical Protestantism is immune to such things, Rwanda, is not only a Protestant country (with a high percentage of Seventh-day Adventists), it is an evangelical Protestant countries. Yet neighbor on neighbor massacres claimed the lives of some 800,000 people in 1994 and many of these massacres occurred in the very churches where many sought refuge.
Those seeking evidence of Christian misdeeds do not have to look very hard in the annals of the history of the last two millennia. But the issues summarized here are not alone. There are many other evidences of Christianity’s “dark side.” To be continued.
What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? The Dark Side of Christian History
There have been and are many who wish Jesus had never been born. For example, Friedrich Nietzsche, the famous 19th Century philosopher had this to say: “(Jesus) died too early; he himself would have revoked his doctrine had he reached greater maturity. . . . (The Christian church) is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions. . . .” Nietzsche had explored the history of philosophy and found the philosophy of Jesus to have fallen short as a path to a better life in this world.
Charles Markmann, an author and New York Times journalist in the mid-20th Century wrote: “If the otherwise admirably civilized pagans of Greece and their Roman successors had had the wit to laugh Judaism into desuetude, the world would have been spared the 2000-year sickness of Christendom.” Markmann clearly thought that Judaism itself was not worthy of consideration and that Jesus had not only added nothing useful to it, but, if anything, had developed a religion that, in his mind, was even worse.
Not to be outdone, Christopher Hitchens, recently deceased author of 30 plus books and a well-known atheistic orator and debater, wrote a book entitled “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.” One does not need to go far into the book to understand that when he speaks of religion he means the religion of Jesus and Christianity. Writers like the above have had a considerable impact in prejudicing a whole generation of Western youth against the religion of Jesus.
We live at a time today when the world’s primary influencers are generally hostile to the religion of Christianity. The news media, the film industry, and academia have leveled repeated barrages of criticism at Christian faith and its most unpopular positions in today’s world. Whether you are watching the news, or the way Christian faith is often portrayed in Hollywood, or at seeking a college or university education, you cannot avoid learning about the following blemishes on Christian history (see next blog). No portrayal of the positives of Jesus’ legacy would have any historical credibility without an honest assessment of the “dark side” of Christian history. The Seventh-day Adventist Church has never been shy about admitting the flaws of Christendom in the past, and it won’t do to ignore them in this series either. So we won’t.
What If Jesus Had Never Been Born?
I was having dinner a couple of years ago with Ted Baehr, founder of Movieguide and the Christian Film and Television Commission. I consider him the single most effective Christian influencer in Hollywood. His web site (movieguide.org) get tens of millions of hits every month and has helped a whole generation “learn to discern” when it comes to the media and the entertainment industry. He urged me as a historical religions scholar to consider a question I had not thought about much before. What difference did the life and teachings of Jesus make in the world, as evidenced by history? How is today’s world different because Jesus lived? It stands to reason that if Jesus was who He claimed to be, a member of the godhead come to earth to show us what God is like, He would be expected to have had an outsized impact on history beyond his brief recorded life. If a historian traced the impact of Jesus’ life on the world today, what would he or she find?
I decided to take on that task and spent about six months exploring the work of others who had asked such a question, and the evidence of history that could either back or refute their findings. For your convenience, I list the major book-length sources I found. 1) The first major book-length attempt to answer the Jesus question was by Edward Ryan, The History of the Effects of Religion on Mankind (London: J. F. and C. Rivington, 1788). It was reprinted in 2018 by a London-based book publisher names Forgotten Books. 2) In the following century came a major two-volume work by William Edward Hartpole Lecky entitled History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne. The first volume was published in 1876 and the second in 1869 by the New York publisher Appleton. The first volume is available in the Leopold Classic Library collection and both are accessible online. This Irish historian was considered significant enough in his time to be awarded honorary doctoral degrees by the Universities of Dublin, St. Andrews, Oxford and Cambridge.
This theme has received much more attention in the last several decades. 3) In 1994 there appeared a book whose title inspired the title this blog series: D. James Kennedy and Jerry Newcombe, What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? The Positive Impact of Christianity in History (Nashville: Nelson Books, 1994). Kennedy at the time was senior pastor of the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He earned a PhD in world religions from New York University. Newcombe was a documentary filmmaker and often served as a co-author of books. The book was specifically written to counter the charges against Christianity that were mounting at the time. 4) Alvin J. Schmidt, How Christianity Changed the World (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2001). Schmidt, at the time, was a retired professor of sociology at Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois. While the first two works written by historian, the books by Kennedy and Schmidt are deliberately apologetic for Christianity.
5) More recently came a book by David Bentley Hart, an American philosopher and Orthodox theologian. Hart has taught at a number of American universities, including Virginia, Duke and St. Louis. In 2015 he was appointed as Templeton Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Notre Dame. His most relevant work for this topic is entitled Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 6) And finally, there is the work of John S. Dickerson, an award-winning journalist, entitled Jesus Skeptic: A Journalist Explores the Credibility and Impact of Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2019). Each of these six books contributed to the insights I will share in the course of this blog series.
I will begin this series by considering the arguments that Jesus had a net negative effect on history. We will look honestly at the “dark side” of Christianity’s legacy. We will also explore some of the reasons the followers of Jesus had such a negative effect on the world. We will then take up the positive legacy of Jesus on education, science, health care, slavery and race relations, government and economics. In historical terms, the legacy of Jesus and His teachings is complicated.