RELIGIOUS SMOKE (part 2): The Inquisition

If the Crusades were a European Vietnam that lasted almost as long as the United States has been in existence, the Inquisition was the McCarthy era to the 10th power.
During the “red scare” of the 1940s, Americans of various stripes and stations were accused “of political disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence and the use of unfair investigatory or accusatory methods in order to suppress opposition;” “those accused during the McCarthy trials had nearly no (sic) chance of proving their innocence.” See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy

As I write I am listening to a piece by Aaron Copeland, my wife’s favorite composer, who—along with Charlie Chaplin and others—was a victim of McCarthyism.

The McCarthy trials have been called “witch-hunts,” an “American Inquisition.” This inquisition essentially lasted from 1950-1956, and in those six long years profoundly impacted the way Americans view government and personal freedom.

The Catholic Inquisitions lasted 650 years and profoundly impacted the way Europeans view Christianity and the Church. There were four distinct though related Inquisitions: Medieval (begun by the Pope in 1184 to control heresy in Southern France), Spanish, Portuguese and Roman.

The Roman Inquisition (begun in 1542) blacklisted all of Galileo’s works condemning him for "grave suspicion of heresy" due to the influence of Copernicus. Thus in many Europeans’ minds today, Christianity remains associated with self-preserving obscurantism.

Galileo's trial

The Spanish Inquisition was notoriously grisly (and fertile as it gave birth to the Peruvian and Mexican Inquisitions). In 1478 under King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, subsequent to the Christian recapture of Spain (see previous blog: the Crusades), the Inquisition was mandated to convert Muslims and Jews to Christian faith; torture was a legitimate means to gain information and lead heretics to repentance (though at times they were thus persuaded to confess but not permitted to recant).

Disembowelment

A Catholic encyclopedia unreassuringly attempts to debunk Inquisition fiction by presenting the facts:

“Curiously enough torture was not regarded as a mode of punishment, but purely as a means of eliciting the truth.… The general rule ran that torture was to be resorted to only once. But this was sometimes circumvented -- first, by assuming that with every new piece of evidence the rack could be utilized afresh, and secondly, by imposing fresh torments on the poor victim (often on different days), not by way of repetition, but as a continuation.” http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08026a.htm

The Wheel

Now to be pragmatically cynical about this, if the Inquisition had only condemned Europe’s enemies, I doubt that it would not have become the pejorative term that it is today. “All’s fair in… war.” But the Roman Church also unleashed the Inquisition on its own people, the Europeans, in order to ferret out religious unorthodoxy through a “reign of violence, terror and torture” (Monty Python).

The Judas Chair

Like under McCarthyism, Europeans could be turned in on hearsay. But unlike McCarthyism, the Inquisition was permitted to employ torture to extract confessions, utilizing methods such as the Judas chair, the head vice, the pear, the wheel, the stake, burning at the stake, sawing, disembowelment. (I’ll let you do the research on these techniques, but be warned that they carry an R-rating.) The Inquisition was a religious Gestapo, the mere mention of which struck terror in Europeans’ hearts.
(I can sense a bit of the revulsion that today's Europeans might feel about the Inquisition. Do you remember the old Vincent Price movie, “the Pit and the Pendulum”? That was set in the Inquisition years. I saw it as a kid. Just last year I was reading “Ten Great Mysteries” by Edgar Allan Poe. Well, I only read nine and left “Pit and the Pendulum” for stronger stomachs.)

When a person was found to be a heretic, the Church turned the apostate over to secular authorities for punishment because “the Church does not shed blood.” Thus in some Europeans’ minds, the Church is viewed as the worse kind of hypocrite, having coerced secular authorities to act as its executioner.

The following is an authorized (with imprimatur) Catholic Encyclopedia's attempt to put the Inquisitions in their context so that the 21st century reader might better understand how such things could have happened:

“Moderns experience difficulty in understanding this institution, because they have, to no small extent, lost sight of two facts.
On the one hand they have ceased to grasp religious belief as something objective, as the gift of God, and therefore outside the realm of free private judgment; on the other they no longer see in the Church a society perfect and sovereign, based substantially on a pure and authentic Revelation, whose first most important duty must naturally be to retain unsullied this original deposit of faith. Before the religious revolution of the sixteenth century these views were still common to all Christians; that orthodoxy should be maintained at any cost seemed self-evident.”
“The dogmatic teaching of the Church is in no way affected by the question as to whether the Inquisition was justified in its scope, or wise in its methods, or extreme in its practice. The Church established by Christ, as a perfect society, is empowered to make laws and inflict penalties for their violation. Heresy not only violates her law but strikes at her very life, unity of belief; and from the beginning the heretic had incurred all the penalties of the ecclesiastical courts.” http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08026a.htm

I will allow you to draw your own conclusions from the above text, but I know absolutely no European who views the Church as “a perfect society” due in part to the obscurantism, hypocrisy, abuse of unbridled power, torture and carnage of the Inquisition.

In the 16th century, believers were burned at the stake in Dijon were I live. This sort of religious smoke clouds people's understanding of the gospel even today.

If just six years of McCarthyism imprinted political paranoia upon the American psyche, try to imagine this...

Imagine, if you dare, that an evangelical doctrinal police force had existed since the birth of the United States until now, and that this evangelical gestapo will float from California to Texas to Florida to New York over the next 400 years. In order to keep the faith pure, and based upon allegations of doctrinal deviation by anonymous witnesses, they will continue to arrest, torture and turn people over to the civil authorities for capital punishment.

Now in the year 2406, what sort of thoughts and feelings might your descendants have concerning the Church and Christianity?

That might be how the Spaniards felt about the Church and Christianity by 1834 when the Inquisition finally came to an end.

And so the Inquisition explains in part why today, Spaniards and other Europeans appear to be so resistant to the gospel in a way that is inconceivable to Americans. But would you pray right now? Pray that the light of the Good News would cut through the religious smoke of the Crusades and Inquisitions; pray that these people who have suffered under the heavy hand of religion would nonetheless be drawn to Jesus Christ.

RELIGIOUS SMOKE (part one): The Crusades

When I ask my friend Jay Bell for Vietnam stories his countenance changes. Jay always smiles (except for when he is laughing), but mention Vietnam and his face drops, his eyes lose focus. This man who is always ready to tell a story avoids the subject. Vietnam was a grueling 25-year ideological war that undid men, demoralized a nation, changed the American psyche and altered political views concerning future international intervention.

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning," exclaims Lt. Col. Kilgore
(Robert Duvall in "Apocalypse Now")

In a sense, the Crusades (1095-1291 A.D.) were a European “Vietnam” lasting not 25-years, but 196 years! These religious wars set the stage for the current European allergic reaction to religion. As you saw in my previous blog, three factors—religious carnage, atheistic philosophy, high civilization—form a triple-thick, all-but-impervious, full-body armor worn by a vast majority of Europeans. This armor forms a plausibility structure—the unquestioned, preconceived “givens” in the European culture that act as an irrational, unconscious filter through which all ideas about God and religion pass.

For example, years ago I was helping my son prepare for a 4th grade history test. He faithfully copied down the teacher’s notes about the Crusades which stated,

“INFIDELS: for the Christians the infidels were the Muslims. INFIDELS: for the Muslims the infidels were the Christians.”

The valid conclusion is that religious war is absurd and bloody. A second invalid conclusion that most Europeans adopt, however, is that one is best off keeping one’s distance both from religion (since both Islam and Christendom* committed atrocities) and from the Christian God who, in their imagination, somewhat resembles Mars, the god of war, capricious and gory.

*(Here I use "Christendom" as the Church wedded with political power and as a doppelganger of Christianity—the community of believers who have entered into a loving, obedient relationship with Christ through faith.)

But what were the Crusades all about? Was sort of it like Indiana Jones’ quest for the Holy Grail?!

Europe was Christendom and Christendom was Europe, so when the Muslims seized the Church of the Holy Sepulcher it was up to the Europeans to retaliate because, well, Deus volt (“God wills it”); it was unequivocally assumed that God was on Europe’s side. The nine Crusades, therefore, were led by French, English, Austro-Hungarian kings and Holy Roman Emperors to retake Jerusalem from Muslims (see the film “Kingdom of Heaven”).

In "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," do you remember the bit about the “Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch”? It goes like this:

King Arthur: How does it... um... how does it work?
Sir Lancelot: I know not, my liege.
King Arthur: Consult the Book of Armaments.
Brother Maynard: Armaments, chapter two, verses nine through twenty-one.
Cleric: [reading] And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, "O [god], bless this thy hand grenade, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy." And the [god] did grin. And the people did feast upon the lambs and sloths, and carp and anchovies, and orangutans and breakfast cereals, and fruit-bats and large chu...
Brother Maynard: Amen.
All: Amen.

"Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it." (from "The Holy Grail")

We chuckle and even belly laugh at Monty Python’s Holy Grail because we take it as a fictitious comedy. But Europeans know that this is parody based on the historical Crusades, the cynicism having deep roots in the European mind. For example, St. Bernard who initiated the Second Crusade, supported by the theological inference of the day, stated, "The Christian glories in the death of a pagan, because thereby Christ himself is glorified." And thus under the banner of “God wills it” coffers were emptied, multitudes were slaughtered and in the end Jerusalem was lost to the Muslims anyway. As I said, a 196-year European Vietnam.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux was, by the way, born in Dijon (where I live)

Today there is a resurgence of interest in spirituality especially among European youth. And though I believe many Europeans would like to believe in the Christian God, the triple whammy of the futility of religious war, carnage in the name of the Christian God, and a fear of once again being duped by religion, hinders these Europeans from knowing Jesus in the present, Jesus who preached, “Love the Lord your God…. Love your neighbor….” And “by this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one for another.”

The smoke of the Crusades obscures the spiritual sight of many Europeans; Christendom’s bloodshed hinders them from seeing the true light of Christ who warned of atrocities like the Crusades. Jesus predicted that there would be killing done in his name and that the perpetrators would claim to be “offering a service to God. They will do such thing because they have not known the Father or me. I have told you this, so that when the time comes you will remember that I warned you” (John 16:2-4). But Europeans having been deprived of Jesus’ words by the Roman Church for centuries and do not remember his warning.

Unfortunately next week things grow bleaker for the cause of the Christian religion. So stay tuned for: RELIGIOUS SMOKE (part two) — the Inquisition.

Smoke, mirrors and incandescence (introduction)

The light of the star guided the Persian astrologers. The light of men was born in Israel; “I am the light of the world,” declared the bright Morning Star. “You are the light of the world,” said the Son.

We just celebrated Christmas, the arrival of “God-with-us.” Immanuel's best friend wrote in his memoirs about Him, “The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.”

Could this somehow supply a clue as to why only 0.35% of all Spaniards are evangelical compared to a whopping 35% of all Americans ?! (Whether these people are born again is another issue, but by definition evangelicals consider their ranks to be individuals who have received spiritual life by God’s unmerited favor through trust in Christ’s salvific work. And there are of course regenerate people who are not evangelical.) These percentages mean that if one randomly selected 300 Americans to receive free tickets to the Super Bowl, 105 of them would claim to be evangelical. If one randomly selected 300 Spaniards to receive free tickets to the World Cup final, there would be 1, that’s right just ONE, very lonely Spanish evangelical !

Now, the apostle John went on to write, “Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” In light of the above reliable Joshua Project statistics, a syllogism could go like this: Americans love good and therefore receive the light, while Spaniards love evil and therefore remain in darkness. Hm-m-m, I think I just heard the tearing of cloth as David and Paul rent their garments in unison (Psalm 14:1-3; Romans 3:10-12).

So how then might one explain such numbers, an enthusiastic response in one part of the West — U.S. Americans = 35% evangelical, and lack thereof in another, Western Europe — English = 8.5% evangelical, Portuguese = 3.1%, Germans = 2.9%, French = 0.4%, Spanish = 0.35%, Czechs = 0.25% ?

This will be the first in a series of blog posts about missional dynamics in Europe entitled, “Smoke, mirrors and incandescence.” We will explore differences between the N. American and European contexts salient to the spread of the gospel because there are reasons for why there is just 1 Spanish evangelical among 300, as compared to 105 Americans.

Three factors, relatively unimportant in the United States, that have forged the European ethos provide some enlightenment: 1) religious carnage that led to 2) atheistic philosophy, both of which were embodied in 3) high civilization. These three factors form a triple-thick, all-but-impervious full-body armor worn by a vast majority of Europeans.

So sometime next week we’ll plunge into “RELIGIOUS SMOKE (part one): the Crusades.” (To prepare for this, all of you Orlando Bloom fans may want to re-watch the film “The Kingdom of Heaven.”)

But before signing off, a few observations. One thing is obvious, the sparse evangelical presence in Western European cannot be attributed to a lack of quality or faithfulness of the Christian workers serving among these people groups because these are statistics for all evangelical denominations.

A second observation, I believe we can readily understand that the one Spaniard would be confronted by a more daunting task, face different challenges and use different means to reach the other 299 ticket winners for Christ, than would the one-hundred-five Americans to reach the remaining 195 people. Equity would, therefore, dictate sending at least a handful of the 105 to help the lonely Spanish brother in need of reinforcements.