Conversations with an Atheist                                                                            April 29, 2007           

Religion, Violence, and War                                                      Deut 13:12-16, Matt 5:9, 38-45

 

OUR CHECKERED PAST

 

There is absolutely no doubt that Christianity has a very checkered history when it comes to violence and unnecessary force.  Of course, atheist writings are all quick to point this out; the criminal side of church history.  This is the side of church history we don’t hear much about in seminary!  Many people whom the church has considered heretics have been put to death.  This is not only a Roman Catholic problem, but Protestants have put heretics to death as well – using Deut. 13 as textual support. 

 

The horrific and senseless killing of Jews and Muslims during the Crusades still resonates in both the Muslim and Jewish worlds to this day.  I’ll never forget hearing Rabbinical Students talk about church history as they learned it in their seminary.  They learn that the NT refers to the “synagogue of Satan” (2X in Revelations) – a view which has encouraged some to burn down Satan’s house.  During the Crusades – and every Rabbinical student knows all about this -  motivated by pope Urban himself, holy warriors who cried out “God wills this!” charged into the Jewish enclaves of many European communities and executed everyone they could find.  Whole communities were wiped out.

 

During the epidemics of the mid-14th Century, in which 38 million people in Europe died, the Jews of course got the blame.  Rumors were spread abroad that the plague was caused by Jews who were poisoning the wells.  The worst pogroms against this minority were carried out in Germany where more than sixty major Jewish communities were completely exterminated by 1351.  Many Jews fled eastward to Russia and Poland where they were offered protection.  Many Jewish parents actually killed their own children so they wouldn’t have to experience the pain of death at the hands of a Christian neighbor.  This is a part of our Christian past; people who believed in Jesus have done absolutely horrific things.  Truthfully, some Christian bishops and leaders tried to offer protection for Jews.  And these killings during the crusades or the bubonic plagues were not specifically sanctioned by the church.  But in the next case, they were.

 

NO PAT ANSWERS!

 

I think it is easy to simply put this out of mind; it happened a long time ago, it wasn’t real Christians who did the killing, or the like.  I read a book called  Constantine’s Sword a few years ago which documented the terrible history Christians have with Jews.  And it isn’t only Catholic abuses; Martin Luther, in a work called The Jews and Their Lies, said

Therefore be on your guard against the Jews, knowing that wherever they have their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of devils in which sheer self­glory, conceit, lies, blasphemy, and defaming of God and men are practiced most maliciously.  Therefore the blind Jews are truly stupid fools...

Luther’s words were used by the Nazi’s to justify the holocaust.  It would be hard to argue that Martin Luther, whose commentary on Romans was deeply influential in the salvation of John Wesley, was not a true believer.  Yet many early Christians saw that hatred of Jews who reject Jesus as simply being the flipside of loving Jesus as Christ and God.  The gospels themselves have the Jews calling for the blood of Jesus to be upon their own heads.  Perhaps the greatest preacher in the history of the church, St. John Chrysostom, in a series of sermons against the Jews advocated such hatred of the Jews that his sermons were put to use by the Nazi’s to justify the holocaust.  Can we say that John Chrysostom and Martin Luther were not real Christians?

BURNING WITCHES

Another type of violence that was perpetrated by both Catholics and Protestants is the torture and execution of witches.  The witchcraft trials which spread all across Europe from 1560-1650 ended in the execution of about 40,000 persons with about 100,000 prosecuted.  Usually it was poor women who were accused of having consorted with the devil in some way.  One witchcraft judge in France said that it was no surprise the devil tempted women to copulation because women craved carnal pleasures. 

 

The extraordinarily influential Malleus Maleficarum [Hammer of Witches] (1487) expresses the commonly held prejudices against women during this period. Two Dominican priests whose job was to conduct trials against witches wrote it. For three hundred years it was used it as a handbook for investigating witches and heretics in Europe. Here is an excerpt:

 

Women ... are more credulous, and since the chief aim of the devil is to corrupt faith, therefore he rather attacks them ... women are naturally more impressionable and more ready to receive the influence of a disembodied spirit ... Women are intellectually like children ...

 

I think you’ve heard enough.  Sam Harris describes witch trials thusly.  Without warning you are seized and brought before a judge.  Did you create a thunderstorm and destroy the village harvest?  Did you kill your neighbor with an evil eye?  Do you doubt that Christ is bodily present in the Eucharist?  You will soon learn that questions of this sort admit of no exculpatory reply.  You now have a choice of sorts: you can concede your guilt and name your accomplices.  Yes, you had accomplices. . . Or you can maintain your innocence, which is almost certainly the truth (after all, it is the rare person who can create a thunderstorm).  In response, your jailers will be happy to lead you to the furthest reaches of human suffering (I’ll not describe the hideous torture technology) before burning you at the stake.

 

To quote our college history textbook: Hysteria over witchcraft affected the lives of many Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  Neighbors accused neighbors of witchcraft, leading to widespread trials of witches. . .Common people – usually the poor and without property – were more likely to be accused of witchcraft.  Indeed, where lists are given, those mentioned most often are milkmaids, peasant women, and servant girls.  In the witchcraft trials of the 16th and 17th centuries, more than 78 percent of the accused were women, most of them single or widowed and many over 50 years old.

 

TRANSFORMING JESUS

 

Let me quote Sam Harris at this point. 

 

The question of how the church managed to transform Jesus’ principle message of loving one’s neighbor and turning the other check into a doctrine of murder and rapine seems to promise a harrowing mystery; but it is no mystery at all.  Apart from the Bible’s heterogeneity and outright self-contradiction, allowing it to justify diverse and irreconcilable aims, the culprit is clearly the doctrine of faith itself.  Whenever a man imagines that he need only believe the truth of a proposition, without evidence – that unbelievers will all go to hell, that Jews drink the blood of infants – he becomes capable of anything.

 

What he is saying here is that, while you can read the pleasant passages of Jesus, the fact is that the Bible is a complicated book that allows for many different understandings and it has plenty of violent passages which seem to encourage war and intolerance.  So if you want to burn witches, you just pick the passage most appropriate.  The Spanish Inquisitions based their terrors on Deut. 13:12-16 which we earlier read; putting to the sword inhabitants of a town that tempts you away from the worship of the Lord.  So, you’ve got differing text for differing occasions and which allow terrible acts of violence.

 

But Harris is also arguing that the totalizing nature of faith itself, and the nature of believing in things apart from actual scientific and rational evidences, causes people to be capable of doing anything.  If you believe unbelievers are hated by God and going to hell, why in the world worry about their welfare.  Faith and intolerance go necessarily together.

ATHEIST INTOLERANCE

So let’s turn our attention to the Christian rebuttal.  My first point is completely defensive: Violence is part of a human problem and not specifically results from Christian (or religious) belief.  Here is a huge blind-spot for atheism of this sort.  Militant Atheists simply ignore the fact that the most terrible acts of violence in the 20th century were committed by Atheists.  They completely airbrushes this out of his picture – Atheists would never do this.  They are living in la-la land. 

Let’s talk about just one atheist of note – Pol Pot – leader of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia from 1976-1979.  During his time in power Pol Pot instigated an aggressive policy of relocating people to the countryside in an attempt to purify the Cambodian people as a step toward a communist future. The means to do this included the extermination of an estimed 1 million to 2 million people disposed of in mass graves, seen as intellectuals and other "bourgeoisie enemies."  Pol Pot, along with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, is today regarded as one of the foremost mass murderers in human history.  Notice, two out of the three were atheists.

All humans have a tendency toward violence, not just Christians.  Atheists have a horrid track record.  Violence often transpires when people feel strongly about big ideas.  We all need to consider why we tend to kill each other.  But two things.  Atheists like Dawkins, to get their religion-free world, would require acts of violence to get what they need.  Secondly, Christians follow a teacher named Jesus Christ who is the clearest world example of a person choosing non-violence; “put away your sword.”  Atheists have no sacred texts with such power.  They’ve behaved accordingly.  Let’s talk about this a little more specifically.

THE LOGIC OF THE GOSPEL: THE VULNERABILITY OF GOD

Last week I talked about how the deep logic of the gospel requires a deep commitment to the way of non-violence.  I’ve been helped here by a theologian named Bill Placher.  I want you to think about the big story of Christ and Christ’s followers.  The gospel is the story of how God, in response to human sinfulness and violence, and in respect to the freedom of our will, chooses not to respond in violence – by putting sinners to death – but by himself taking on a human body and embracing the violence of the world in order that the world and those in it might be saved from violent destruction. 

Who is Jesus?  A key component to the gospel presentation of Jesus is this; Jesus, this Messiah and Son of God, is not what you might think.  Jesus proves his divinity and messianic status not through violence and force (as was expected) but by dying on the cross.  In doing this, he embraces violence and never responds in violence.  That is the genius of the gospel.  When we act in violence to advance the Christian cause we have defeated it already because we have rejected the way of Jesus. 

God could have destroyed sin on the earth with a frontal angelic attack.  But God chooses to be crucified instead – to take the hit himself so we, the perpetrators of violence, might go free.  As the gospels progress, Jesus becomes more clearly divine and at the same time increasingly powerless.  God is a bound prisoner, nailed to the cross. 

HOW THIS APPLIES?

In other words, our need to dominate others rests on our need to protect ourselves.  We seek power because we are afraid of weakness, afraid of what might happen should we be vulnerable.  The drive for power is inspired by an enslaving fear that dares not risk vulnerability.  God’s power does not look like imperious Caesar but like Christ on the cross.  God suffers because God is vulnerable, and God is vulnerable because God loves – and it is love, not suffering or even vulnerability, that is finally the point.

Any force used to enforce the gospel, and power used to manipulate obedience or faith, is a deep betrayal of the structure of a the gospel.  Jesus teaches us a God who chooses the way of suffering violence rather than committing violence.  This is the way of redeeming love.  We as Christians read all OT texts through this lens.  All else must fall away.  We define everything of God in the OT through the God we see in Christ.  Jesus said, “When you have seen me, you have seen the Father.”  Jesus redefines everything we know of God in the Hebrew Scriptures.  We are called to be Christians of the way of vulnerable, suffering love.  Strangely, and perhaps because this is so deeply counter-intuitive, it has taken the church many years to figure this out.  But it is truly a beautiful vision that inspires great peace and unity.

Christians seek to persuade others, but like God, we also respect the freedom of others to reject.  Any kind of manipulative pressure to enforce the gospel is deeply unchristian because it is alien to the nature of the God we see in Jesus.