Posted by
D W W Robertson on Friday, April 11, 2008 3:17:42 PM
As an argument regularly leveled against Christianity, some say that Christianity is responsible for a great number of deaths fought in religious wars namely the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Salem Witch Trials. Well, I like Dinesh D’Souza’s response in reply to Christopher Hitchens that Christian’s will take responsibility for these evil deeds committed in the name of Christ, if Atheists take responsibility for deaths committed in the name of their ideologues Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Jong Il, Guevara, Chavez, and others. (I would even lump in Hilter. Although Hilter used some religious rhetoric, he was largely and directly influenced by the writings of Nitchze who proclaimed, “God is dead.”) While I believe that this argument ultimately wins the day. I also found this illustration from history supports the classic Christian response and provides an important lesson.
Many of the Crusaders would get baptized by the church with their swords before going off to battle. They would, however, symbolically hold their swords out of the water during the baptism.
You see, these soldiers understood that their actions were not within the will of God. They knew that their behavior was not supported by Christ’s teaching; it was just the opposite in many cases.
The classic response, then, to the argument against Christianity cited above has historical support. The response, or rebuttal, is that those rapists, murders, and pillagers were not acting in accordance with Christianity, but in moral opposition to it. The atheists mentioned above acted in logically consistent ways with their atheistic beliefs.
The lesson to learn is something that the non-Christians are right about. We must not carry the name of God in vein. That is, we must not go to war in God’s name against the will of God. To do so is a violation of the second of the Ten Commandments given to Moses by God. It is morally destructive to the victim, the perpetrator, and to the cause of Christianity as a whole.