Chapter 3. Something went terribly wrong. It is now full time for the Emperor to provide for the safety of the Catholic Church and prevent those rash men from terrifying the people whom they cannot seduce. Such were the fatal words decreed at a Church Council held at Carthage in the year 404. Three bishops presided: Alypius, Fortunatus, and the well-known bishop whom history has called Saint Augustine. It was during this council that Augustine's legendary just war theory had its formal debut.
As I studied this just war theory, I didn't like what I found. Its origin goes back to a series of debates that Augustine had with several theological opponents. I read that after years of theological debate, Augustine had begun to lose confidence in his power of verbal persuasion. His chief opponents at the time, the Donatists, had broken away from the main body of the Catholic Church almost a century before. Many had tried to convince them to rejoin the Catholics, but none had succeeded.
These Donatists were zealous and persuasive. Worst of all, they were growing in number. But now, at this council in Carthage, North Africa, the Church decided that these heretics must be stopped, regardless of the means used. The council asked the Roman government to intervene by reinstating laws that the pagan Romans had written originally against Christians many decades before. The Roman Emperor was already under great pressure.
During this time, a group of invaders from Eastern Germany, known as the Visigoths, had crossed over the borders of the Roman Empire, looting cities as they came. Eventually, they made their way to the main cities, and by AD 410, the city of Rome was finally taken. During that dreadful siege, many citizens starved to death, and it is reported that some even succumbed to acts of cannibalism. With the obvious pressures from the outside, domestic troubles could not be tolerated.
Internal division from the rapidly growing Christian religion was the last thing the Emperor wanted. With such an invitation, the state gladly stepped in to fix the Church's problem.
The Emperor eventually proclaimed, "We decree that the Donatists and the heretics, who until now have been spared by the patience of our clemency, shall be severely punished by legal authority, so that by this our manifest order they shall recognize that they are detestable and have no power of entering into contracts of any kind, but they shall be branded with perpetual infamy and separated from honorable gatherings and from public assemblies.
Those places in which the dire superstition has been preserved until now shall surely be joined to the venerable Catholic Church, and thus their bishops and priests, that is, all their prelates and ministers shall likewise be despoiled of all their property and shall be sent into exile to separate islands and provinces." I was staggered. What a switch! The persecuted Christians had now become the persecutors. The abuse and persecution that followed was dreadful.
Historian Edward Gibbon reports that at this time, 300 bishops, with many thousands of deacons and other ministers, were torn from their churches, stripped of their church possessions, and banished to remote islands. If the ministers decided to stay, they were put under strict laws regulating every part of their lives. Furthermore, all the members of their churches, both in the cities and in the country, were deprived of the rights given to other Roman citizens.
Naturally, worship or any other type of religious gathering was completely forbidden to the Donatists. Large fines of gold and silver were copiously charged. Resistors were put into prison, and eventually, if they would not repent, were killed. The Donatists, in a plea for mercy, challenged Augustine, saying that he was making martyrs out of their bishops and elders. They warned him that God would require him to give an account for their blood on the day of judgment.
To this, Augustine defiantly replied, "I know nothing about your martyrs. Martyrs! Martyrs to the devil! There are no martyrs out of the Church." Beside, it was their obstinacy. They killed themselves. Augustine's Theology Entangled within Augustine's view of a just war were his views of purgatory and eternal judgment. He felt that since the Donatists actually were misguided Christians, torturing them in this life actually could be viewed as an act of mercy.
Even if they were killed, he reasoned, it would be to their eternal good. Looking for support from a passage of Scripture customarily used for evangelism, Augustine gave a novel interpretation to Jesus' words in Luke 15 about compelling people into God's kingdom. Augustine reasoned, "It is indeed better that men should be brought to serve God by instruction than by fear of punishment or by pain. But because the former means are better, the latter must not therefore be neglected.
Many must often be brought back to their Lord like wicked servants, by the rod of temporal suffering, before they attain the highest grade of religious development. The Lord Himself orders that the guests be first invited, then compelled, to His great supper." The seed grew. A contemporary of Augustine, named Cyril, was ordained in AD 412 as the Bishop of Alexandria. With the thought of defending God and purifying the Church, Cyril took the ideas of the just war theory and ran with them.
Under his influence, things quickly went from bad to worse. Like Augustine, he took a strong stand against the Donatists, but he also led attacks on other groups of Christians, such as the Novatianists. The Novatianists were a zealous group of Christians who also had left the Catholic Church a century earlier due to growing worldliness in the Church. Cyril and his monks led persecuting campaigns against both the Donatists and the Novatianists, but he did not stop with Christians.
He also led attacks against synagogues and burned down whole libraries, killing heretics, Jews, and any pagan that came in his way. One of the most graphic examples of the appalling nature of the times was a hideous scene that occurred when a band of Cyril's men met a famous pagan philosopher named Hypatia as she drove by in her carriage. The men recognized her, stopped the chariot, and then dragged her from her seat.
Demonstrating nothing but barbarous savagery, the group proceeded to strip her flesh from her bones with sharpened seashells while she was still alive. After she finally died, the zealous group carried pieces of her body around through the streets and eventually threw them into a fire along with her pagan books. Certainly, all would agree that something had gone terribly wrong. However, given the nature of the times, it all seemed justifiable, even rational. In this case, no one was even punished for the murder.
Cyril went on to persuade the Emperor, Theodosius II, to banish all remaining Jews from Alexandria and to increase the persecution of pagan priests. By AD 416, the Church and state had grown so close together that Christians not only were joining the military, but mass baptisms also were conducted, and anyone who had not converted to Christianity was kicked out of the army. Unfortunately, this venomous ideology did not stop with Cyril.
Throughout the centuries, other Church leaders have leaned on Augustine's logic to sanctify their own just causes. It was not hard to see that throughout history. Haunting the Church like a generational curse, Augustine's just war theory has continued to defile the Church by twisting the simple words of Jesus. Church historian F.W.
Farrar, considering the ramifications of Augustine's theology, makes a candid confession: "Augustine must bear the fatal charge of being the first, as well as one of the ablest offenders of the frightful cause of persecution and intolerance. He was the first to misuse the words 'compelled them to come in.' He was the first and ablest asserter of the principle that led to the Albigensian Crusades, Spanish Armadas, Netherlands' butcheries, St.
Bartholomew massacres, the accursed infamies of the Inquisition, the vile espionage, the hideous bale fires of Seville and Smithfield, the racks, the gibbets, the thumbscrews, the subterranean torture chambers." It is mainly because of his later intolerance that the influence of Augustine falls like a dark shadow across the centuries.
It is thus that "centuries of brutal persecutors can look up to him as an authorizer of their enormities and quote his sentences to defend some of the vilest crimes which ever caused men to look with horror on the religion of Christ and the Church of God." Most Christians today would agree that these historical accounts are both grotesque and inexcusable. We scratch our heads in bewilderment as we ponder how professing Christians could have ever come to such a point.
Reading of the accounts surrounding the Church during these times of debate and unrest sobered me. The Crusades The Crusades are another poignant example of the dangers lurking in a just war theology. Today, most Christians see the Crusades as a big mistake, both politically and spiritually. As obviously wrong as these wars seem to us now, it is instructive for us to see how justifiable they looked to their perpetrators at the time.
In an epic, world-changing speech, Pope Urban II called on all of heaven and earth to aid in his initiation of the First Crusade. In his speech, he exclaimed that the Muslim people had committed great atrocities against the pilgrims to the Holy Land and postulated what that meant to the Church everywhere if the Muslims were not stopped. So sure was he in his campaign that he then promised eternal salvation to all who fought and died for this cause.
These are the words taken directly from that speech, which started the First Crusade: "On this account, I, or rather the Lord, beseech you as Christ's heralds to publish this everywhere and to persuade all people of whatever rank, foot soldiers and knights, poor and rich, to carry aid promptly to those Christians and to destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends. I say this to those who are present. It is meant also for those who are absent. Moreover, Christ commands it.
All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested." This battle cry greatly moved the crowd to action. It is reported that in a shout of triumph, the crowd roared and chanted with one voice, "It is the will of God! It is the will of God!" Nazi Germany In World War II Germany, the Nazis demonstrated a spirit much like the religious enthusiasm of the former Crusaders.
The fanatical dedication, ethnocentric rhetoric, and symbolism of Nazi Germany were frightfully similar to those of the Holy Roman Empire during the time of the Crusades. Revival-like fervor, flashing swastikas, and battle cries inspired the German people to terrorize the entire Western world. Yet, throughout all the bloodshed and terror, each benighted Nazi soldier believed that the German cause was just and even blessed of God.
A look back at war memorabilia from this era plainly reveals this fact: blazed right across such items as cigarette lighters, trinket boxes, and every soldier's belt buckle was their presumptuous banner, "Gott mit uns" (God with us). When in Germany, Tanya and I had the opportunity to visit with some people who were alive during this time. One elderly couple we talked to, Hans-Jacob and Renata, were older than 70 years when we met them. Hans was a young man during World War II. I asked him, "How did it happen?
How did the majority of the Church just go along with it? How did it seem reasonable?" He looked at me soberly and said, "It's hard to explain. It just swept over us like a spirit." Me As I first pondered these displays of pride and egocentrism that I read about from these old wars, I told myself that they were merely old-fashioned and archaic attitudes out of place in the modern world.
However, as I thought longer about it, I had to admit to myself that these attitudes were a whole lot closer than I cared to believe. I found that these same root motives and prejudices actually were lurking deep down in my own heart. Thinking back to my basic training experiences, I recalled a gruesome exercise that could possibly have made even some of the Crusaders envious.
Standing in an open field with 500 vigorous, enthused young men, we were ordered to raise our M16 machine guns high into the air and scream at the top of our lungs various morbid cadences. I vividly remember the faces of these men surrounding me. They were brutal and serious, veins popping, cheeks puffing, and spit and froth flying. We were all screaming with everything we had in us.
In one of these cadences, I recalled how the drill sergeant stood in front of us, shouted out a few intimidating expletives, and then bellowed out the chilling cry, "What makes the grass grow?" To this, we were to reply as loud as we could scream, "Blood! Blood! Blood! Blood makes the grass grow!" Then, while thrusting our machine guns equipped with bayonets up and down into the air as if we were impaling the sky, we began to scream and chant rhythmically the words, "Kill! Kill with cold blue steel! Kill!
Kill with cold blue steel! Kill! Kill with cold blue steel!" Looking back, I'm not quite sure what we all were thinking. It felt surreal, almost humorous, much more like a bunch of little boys playing army than anything really serious. Afterward, we all just went on to the chapel or lunch without much thought of the drill. After thinking about it more, however, I realized the whole thing wasn't funny at all. What we were doing was not make-believe. It was very real.
Those toys we had in our hands fired real bullets that killed real people. But even more serious than this, I distinctly remember that even when I did soberly reflect about actually using my weapon to kill someone, I somehow felt completely rational about it all. Much like the Nazis or the Crusaders, I too reasoned that we were the civilized and right ones. I felt that somehow all this was okay and that God was with us and blessing us.
Just like the enraged Roman soldiers running to the papal battle cry, I was convinced that my cause was just. Later, I felt convicted that I needed to repent of this root of evil in my heart. The more I read, the more I asked questions. The more I asked questions, the more uneasy I became. I was beginning to accept the words of Jesus more and more. But for a time, it just seemed that the more I accepted the words of Jesus, the more questions I found myself asking.
Perhaps one of my biggest questions was what to do with the Old Testament wars. If I was to receive the entire Bible as the word of God, then how could I explain the paradox of God clearly calling for war in the Old Testament and Jesus clearly forbidding war in the New Testament?