Bullies and Saints

An Honest Look at the Good and Evil of Christian History

John Dickson

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780310118374
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Is the world better off without Christianity?

Combining narrative with keen critique of contemporary debates, author and historian John Dickson gives an honest account of 2, 000 years of Christian history that helps us understand what Christianity is and what it's meant to be.

To say that the Christian Church has an "image problem" doesn't quite capture it. From the Crusades and the Inquisition to the racism and abuse present in today's Church--both in Catholic and Protestant traditions--the institution that Christ established on earth has a lot to answer for. But the Church has also had moments throughout history when it has been in tune with Jesus' teachings--from the rise of charity to the invention of hospitals.

For defenders of the faith, it's important to be able to recognize the good and bad in the church's history and be inspired to live aligned with Christ. For skeptics, this book is a thought-provoking introduction to the idea that Christianity is, despite all, an essential foundation of our civilization.

Bullies and Saints will take you on a big-picture journey from the Sermon on the Mount to the modern church:

• Giving contextual accounts of infamous chapters of Christian history, such as the Crusades, and acknowledging their darkness.
• Outlining the great movements of the faith and defending its heroes and saints, some of whom are not commonly recognized.
• Examining the Church beside the teachings and life of Jesus and how it has succeeded in its mission to imitate Christ.

1

The Day I Lost Faith in the Church

A Christian Massacre in the Year 1099

Whoever for devotion alone, not to gain honour or money, goes to Jerusalem to liberate the Church of God can substitute this journey for all penance.

—POPE URBAN II

The title of this chapter is an exaggeration, but not a large one. I find myself in a dilemma. The formal creed of Christianity, known as the Nicene Creed, asks the faithful to declare their belief in “the holy catholic and apostolic Church” (by the way, “catholic” here just means universal, not Roman Catholic). In a very real sense, then, Christians are meant to have some kind of faith or spiritual confidence in the institution Christ established. He did himself say, “I will build my church, and the gates of Hades [death] will not prevail against it” (Matt 16:18). Yet, anyone who knows the story of Christianity through the centuries knows that the church has been anything but consistently “holy.” Sometimes it has been the ally of Hades itself. As a long-time student of history, and an even longer church attender, I feel conflicted. I know where the bodies are buried in the graveyard of church history, yet I am also somehow meant to mouth the words of the Nicene Creed.

“Men Rode in Blood Up to Their Knees”

I have never felt this inner conflict more acutely than when I stood on the site of one of the greatest atrocities in religious history. I was in Jerusalem filming scenes about the Crusades, that series of unsuccessful “holy wars” in which European Christians sought to expel the infidel occupants of the Holy Land, that is, the majority Muslim population of the Middle East.

We were granted permission to film at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, which sits on a massive plaza known as the Haram al-Sharif, or Temple Mount. Sharing the plaza is the Dome of the Rock, the beautiful golden dome that appears in every Jerusalem postcard. Almost thirty American football fields would fit into this giant 150,000 m² open-air court.

On 15 July 1099, something like ten thousand European Crusaders burst through Jerusalem’s protective walls. Marching through the narrow streets of the city, they fought anyone who resisted. They made their way up to the Haram al-Sharif, where they discovered thousands of residents cowering in fear, hoping against hope that their sacred precinct would provide them with protection, practical and divine. But these fighting men, “pilgrims” as they called themselves, had been marching for two years. They had journeyed two thousand miles from France to Jerusalem. They had been besieging the city for a month. They were not about to let a victory go to waste. According to our records, the Crusaders whipped themselves up into a such an unholy frenzy that they slaughtered men, women, and children. They threw some victims over the plaza’s high walls to their deaths three storeys below. They butchered the rest with swords, daggers, fire, arrows, and spears. They even gave chase to those who had climbed the roof of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and had them killed on the spot.¹ The blood reportedly filled the great promenade between the mosque and the dome. We have eyewitness accounts of the events. With gruesome glee and obvious exaggeration, Raymond of Aguilers, a leader of the First Crusade, wrote of this fateful day in the “ides of July”:

Wonderful sights were to be seen. Some of our men cut off the heads of their enemies; others shot them with arrows, so that they fell from the towers; others tortured them longer by casting them into the flames. Piles of heads, hands, and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city. . . . It was a just and splendid judgement of God that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it had suffered so long from their blasphemies.²

As if this were not enough, old Raymond goes on to tell us that the next day, 16 July 1099, the pilgrims held a thanksgiving service in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, just five hundred metres away from the site of the massacre the day before. “How they rejoiced and exulted and sang a new song to the Lord!” he tells us. “This day, I say, will be famous in all future ages, for it turned our labors and sorrows into joy and exultation.” It is a confronting fact of history that a church originally designed to mark the place of the unjust and brutal crucifixion (and resurrection) of the humble man from Nazareth became the venue of jubilant songs and prayers to celebrate a ruthless military victory in Jesus’s name.

Retelling these horrible details to camera as I stood in the sacred plaza outside the Al-Aqsa Mosque was the moment I sensed a loss of faith in the church. It was not simply that I had read the sources, rehearsed my lines, and now found myself standing in the hideous spot where it all happened. It was because directly in my line of sight as I delivered the lines, just a metre to the left of camera, was our Muslim guide and “minder” assigned to us to show us around the site and keep onlookers satisfied that we really did have permission to film in this spot. Her name was Azra, a Jerusalem Arab Muslim with perfect English. She watched me deliver my lines, over and over until I got them right (I am not a one-take wonder). By the time we got the take the director liked, I could see that Azra had a tear in her eye. I suddenly realised this is not just a gory piece of history. For Jerusalem Muslims—for many Muslims, actually—this event is a source of pain, shame, and even anger.

Not that Azra was at all bitter. As we were packing up, I said to her, “I’m so, so sorry. That must have been difficult for you to watch!” She was beautiful. “No, no,” she replied, “It’s fine. It’s all fine.” But I could tell it was not fine. The date, 15 July 1099, has left a nine-hundred-year-old wound in the soul of many.

Any triumphalist feelings I harboured about the historic church died that day. I could not get the juxtaposition out of my mind: Azra’s quiet tear and Raymond of Aguiler’s ecstatic “splendid judgement of God.” Declaring my belief in the “holy Church” could never have the same meaning again. I still say the words of the Creed, but they function as much like an aspiration as they do an affirmation of the history of Christianity through the ages.

I acknowledge that this experience at the Al-Aqsa Mosque was not wholly or strictly rational. Does it make sense for me to say “Sorry” to Azra? I was not there in 1099. I like to think I would never have taken part in the massacre of her Jerusalem forebears. I am not morally responsible for any of it. I certainly do not bear the guilt of it. All of this is true. So why does “Sorry” still seem like the right thing to say? I suppose it is because I am connected to my “team,” just as Azra has a connection to her “team” (“family” might be the better metaphor). As someone representing Christianity in that moment, it was appropriate to feel some shame that blood was spilled in the name of Christ. And it was right to communicate that sentiment to Azra.

Were the Crusades Really “Religiously” Motivated?

All of this raises a connected matter. Were the Crusades a religiously motivated series of wars? It is tempting to hide behind the alternative explanations sometimes given: that the Crusades were really just a European land grab under the guise of religion; that they were part of a search for new resources; or even that they were a confected scheme to keep tens of thousands of otherwise out-of-work men occupied. Christopher Tyerman, the well-known authority on the Crusades from Oxford University in the UK, has rightly said, “Most of what passes in public as knowledge of the Crusades is either misleading or false.”³ And this applies just as much to Christian knowledge of the Crusades as it does to secular knowledge.

It is difficult to read the primary sources of the Crusades without being confronted by the strong religious motivations and aims expressed—the importance of defending co-religionists, upholding the honour of sacred sites, and bringing glory to Jesus Christ over the advancing “paganism” of Islam. Raymond of Aguilers, whom I quoted earlier, was actually a chaplain to the First Crusade. His specific role was to remind others of the spiritual mission inherent in these acts of violence. Speaking of the massacre in 1099, he declared, “This day, I say, marks the justification of all Christianity, the humiliation of paganism, and the renewal of our faith.”⁴

This expression, “the renewal of our faith,” is important for understanding the Crusades. It chimes with the perspective of the instigator of the First Crusade, Pope Urban II. I have to be careful here because it is easy to offer simplistic accounts of these things—on both sides of the equation—and it is true there is a huge backstory to the rise of “holy war” in Christianity in the centuries before Urban (more on that later). Yet, it is clear the pope had a spiritual mission in mind when he officially called for the First Crusade, four years before that bloody breach of Jerusalem’s walls.

Whatever Pope Urban’s political ambitions—whether to exert a unifying force over a fractious Europe, or to join together western and eastern Christendom—it was his theology that undergirded his thinking. Urban longed to recover what he saw as the purity of the church of earliest times in matters of doctrine and morals. He believed the church needed a grand moment of repentance and unity if it was to experience the renewing grace of God. That moment presented itself to him when he received pleas for help from the faraway Byzantine Christian emperor Alexius I Comnenus (AD 1056–1118), whose kingdom lay on Islam’s western front (basically what we call Turkey today).

Ever since its origins in the 600s, Islam enjoyed a highly developed and successful practice of “holy war.” Muslim armies spread throughout the Middle East, Egypt, and on toward Europe. By the 1050s, Islamic forces had captured much of the old Byzantine Empire, and within a couple of decades they were knocking on the door of Alexius’s capital, Constantinople (now Istanbul). Alexius promptly sent envoys to the pope (who lived in France in this period, not Rome) begging for assistance. Surely western Christianity would not stand to see the last remaining outpost of eastern Christianity swept away. Urban saw this as the moment he had been waiting for, when the church could redeem itself by assisting a fellow Christian (Greek Orthodox) kingdom and winning back the holy sites of Jerusalem, which had been occupied by the “unbelievers” since the year 637.

After a four-month preaching tour throughout France promoting his plan, Pope Urban officially called for the First Crusade in a sermon delivered outside the cathedral at Clermont, in central France, on 27 November 1095. The sermon itself is lost to us, but we have eyewitness accounts. We also have a few of Urban’s own letters describing the project. The central theme was clear: with full papal blessing, this war was not sinful but redemptive. Any pilgrim willing to go to the east, fight the Muslims, and reclaim Jerusalem for the Lord would receive pardon for sins and the promise of salvation. “Whoever for devotion alone, not to gain honour or money, goes to Jerusalem to liberate the Church of God,” he declared, “can substitute this journey for all penance.”⁵ Urban writes of how he “imposed on them [the Crusaders] the obligation to undertake such a military enterprise for the remission of all their sins.”⁶ This is a remarkable new theology within Christianity: salvation is found in fighting the infidel. Apparently, the crowd that first heard Urban’s sermon at Clermont responded in unison—perhaps led by the pope’s assistants—Deus lo volt, “God wills it.”

The religious nature of the First Crusade is clear. It is underlined by the key piece of theatre performed by all crusading soldiers who took the vow to win back Jerusalem. They each received a piece of cloth in the shape of a cross and sowed it onto their garments as a sign that they were obeying the words of Christ himself: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it” (Mark 8:34–35). Any modern reader of this passage will protest that Jesus obviously meant that his disciples should be willing to bear persecution for his cause, all the way to their own death. It plainly does not mean that they should fight for his cause. But in France in the eleventh century the key public interpretation of this passage—and it was a favourite passage—was that able-bodied Christian men should bear the cross of fighting against the enemies of Christ. The very word “Crusade” comes from the Latin crux or “cross,” referring to this ceremony of taking up the sacred emblem.

There was a time when I would dodge the criticisms relating to the Crusades and other low points in church history by saying that they were not really “done in Christ’s name”—they were secular projects unrelated to theology. Obviously, I no longer think that. The more I have learned about the Crusades, the more I understand why so many people see these middle centuries between the decline of Rome in AD 500 and the birth of the modern world in 1500 as the “Dark Ages.” They were a period of barbaric gloom, when the church reigned and people suffered. I do not hold that view, as I will explain in chapter 19, but I am certainly sympathetic toward those that do.

Just how thoroughly I have changed my mind on these things will become apparent in the next chapter. This book is not exactly a chronological history of the church, or a history of the Crusades, but I think it is worth offering an overview of these “wars of the cross” lest I give the impression that what happened in the First Crusade was a five-year aberration in the otherwise good-natured story of the church. Once we have confronted these troubling middle centuries, we will press REWIND to the first century, examine the life and teaching of Christ briefly, and then press PLAY to see what happened in Christian history to make warfare against unbelievers (and worse) seem plausible to many medieval believers.

2

The Crusades in a Nutshell

Holy Wars from the 1000s to the 1200s

Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.

—PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, 2015

I have already talked about the First Crusade in some detail. Its themes and aims can, to some degree, stand as the model for later Crusades. It also represents a pivot point in the history of Christianity.

First Crusade (1096–99)

Before Pope Urban II’s preaching campaign of 1095–96, warfare had an ambiguous status in Christian teaching. It was sometimes viewed as a necessa...