The latest evidence of
culture war, fear driven unequal yoking with unbelievers is taking place on
social media as many Christians are gravitating toward a reflexive position of
screaming about the President making a "moral equivalency" between
the Crusades and the burning of a Jordanian fighter pilot by ISIS .
First it would be helpful if the majority of people ranting about this
perceived injustice would listen to President Obama's actual comments and
second if they knew what the term "moral equivalency" means, because
clearly they don't. As I posted previously in my post Obama Is Almost Always
Wrong....But Not This Time, what the President said was uncharacteristically
not completely off-base and/or insane. That hasn't stopped the
"conservative" corners of evangelicalism from rallying to the side of
Rome
Having said all of that, keep
in mind that Mr. Madden is a Roman Catholic and an apologist for not only the
Crusades but also for the Inquisition. That is not a joke. An essay from a few
years ago, The Real Inquisition, is full of choice quotes like these:
Its most startling conclusion
is that the Inquisition was not so bad after all. Torture was rare and only about
1 percent of those brought before the Spanish Inquisition were actually
executed.
-----
Heresy, then, struck at the
heart of that truth. It doomed the heretic, endangered those near him, and tore
apart the fabric of community.
-----
The Inquisition was not born
out of desire to crush diversity or oppress people; it was rather an attempt to
stop unjust executions.
-----
As this new report confirms,
most people accused of heresy by the Inquisition were either acquitted or their
sentences suspended. Those found guilty of grave error were allowed to confess
their sin, do penance, and be restored to the Body of Christ. The underlying
assumption of the Inquisition was that, like lost sheep, heretics had simply
strayed. If, however, an inquisitor determined that a particular sheep had
purposely left the flock, there was nothing more that could be done.
Unrepentant or obstinate heretics were excommunicated and given over to secular
authorities. Despite popular myth, the Inquisition did not burn heretics. It
was the secular authorities that held heresy to be a capital offense, not the
Church. The simple fact is that the medieval Inquisition saved uncounted
thousands of innocent (and even not-so-innocent) people who would otherwise
have been roasted by secular lords or mob rule.
Read further and you see
Madden suggesting that the heretical Reformers made the Inquisitions seem far
worse as a way to cover up "the 15-century gap between Christ’s
institution of His Church and the founding of the Protestant churches". So
in nutshell Madden argues: "Well sure some people were tortured and
murdered but it wasn't as bad as it seems!"
We are apparently supposed to
believe that the Roman church was an innocent by-stander serving to protect
"heretics" who repented under the practice and threat of torture and
murder. The Inquisition was actually a net positive that has been turned into a
horrible myth by those darn Protestants who have no answer for why a vicious
religious regime that tortured and murdered dissenters and kept the Scriptures
as far away from those without a vested interest in perpetuating the system
didn't have a lot of dissent to deal with. It is the same sort of risible logic
used by those who feel the need to defend Calvin for the murder of Servetus. The
difference of course ought to be obvious. I can recognize where Calvin was
correct in matters of theology while not feeling the need to defend his actions
regarding Servetus or some of his less charitable writings but for Thomas
Madden there is a need to defend Rome no matter how heinous the behavior
because considering the alternative undermines the entire house of cards.
For my fellow Christians,
something to consider. Someone who defends men who persecuted the church and
cheerfully murdered Christians for beliefs that most evangelicals commonly hold
is someone that the church should be very reluctant to use as a source. What
Madden seems to miss is that if even one person was executed by the state
acting at the bequest of and as proxy for "the church", it is
blasphemous and sinful. As far as I know Adolf Hitler didn't kill a single Jew
but no one doubts his culpability for the Holocaust. In the same way hiding
behind the subcontracting of your killing to control people and silence dissent
by sending the state to do your dirty work doesn't absolve popes and
inquisitors alike for their pronouncements which were de facto death sentences.
Had the pope declared that murdering people for heresy was sinful and worthy of
ex-communication I would imagine it would have stopped. Instead they chose to
act as judge and jury while leaving the executioner part to the state. Since
the state and the church were essentially indistinguishable other than a
prohibition on "priests" actually doing the killing themselves, the
argument that Rome
So really church, of all the
issues to get critical of the President over (his devotion to legalized
infanticide, his hypocritical flip-flop on marriage, his expansion of executive
power, year after year of trillion dollar deficits, Obamacare, etc.), this is
not one of them. It once again cements in the minds of those we are called to the
Gospel that the church and the Western states are at war with them. That serves
a lot of causes, mostly pagan causes, but does nothing for the cause of Christ.
Our tendency to be perpetual aggrieved is unbecoming and juvenile. Maybe a
thicker skin and greater humility is in order, along with a recognition that we
shouldn't expect unbelievers like the President to understand the Kingdom.
As a final note in honor of
Thomas Madden I present Mel Brooks on the Inquisition, one of my favorite movie
scenes of all time (with some coarse language):
3 comments:
There is a new alliance between some conservative evangelicals and conservative Catholics. What they have in common is that they gravitate around authoritarianism, especially when selectively applied to favorite American traditions. Their biggest complaint is that they have fallen behind in the culture war. This bothers them because what they want is to maintain Christianity's privileged position in society so it can legislate society's laws and control its mores.
This group's bend toward authoritarianism follows a worldwide political trend that crosses boundaries in the war on terror. Both the terrorists and the West have become more authoritarian especially since 9/11. So one might ask if the leftist criticism of the church has a significant degree of truth to it. That criticism is that the church is just another institution to maintain the status quo for the benefit of those with wealth and power.
Curt
I think both the left and right have some legitimate concerns about the church but both tend to be unable to divorce their preference for political coercion from the non-coercive nature of the Kingdom.
Not sure about what you mean regarding the non-coercive nature of the Kingdom when it comes to issues of death, theft, and environmental destruction. I say this because much of what the Church should address are serious transgressions of God's laws committed by groups, such as societies.
I think one thing the Church could do to rectify some of the legitimate concerns is to speak out regarding these concerns. Not that the Church should think of itself as an almost infallible source of wisdom about politics and economics, but at least it can point out the faults with the current system and move to help those who the system's victims.
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