Body of Christ: What do we do with the church’s past?
Last week, I wrote a post about how we need to understand what it means to criticize the church, which is such a precious and beloved thing to Christ — his bride. But there are plenty of people who are adamant that the church deserves the criticism, and one of the topics that comes up the most is the church’s past.
I mean, no matter what it’s doing today, the church’s history is filled with terrible things like the crusades, inquisitions, warfare, and imperialism. No one can deny that. Gandhi is famous for saying, “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” Considering the environment Gandhi lived in, can he really be blamed for that?
However, just like “the church” or “Christians” don’t carry the guilt of the sins of individual Christians, I also don’t think “the church” or “Christians” must carry the guilt of the things some Christians did a long time ago.
Still, it has to be admitted that the things of the past are a very different beast from the things of the present. The person who knows his history will have all sorts of cruelties and barbaric acts perpetrated by Christians, or professing Christians, to bring up. These were not isolated acts by the rare monster, either — some were carried out by huge groups of people, even entire nations.
So what do we, who claim the same faith they did, do with this stuff? Do we try to disavow it? Defend it? Apologize for it? Ignore it?
Those are usually the things we try to do with the past. And we don’t always need to think about it much, because most people aren’t historians and don’t think much about ancient history. Yet, I don’t think we can afford to ignore it. The history of Christianity is a substantial stumbling block for some unbelievers. We don’t need to be expert historians, but I think we do need to have answers for those who ask us. So here’s five principles I think we ought to remember when addressing the history of the church:
1. We can’t just say that those who did terrible things weren’t Christians.
It’s very tempting to do this. It should be obvious, we think, that a knight who enthusiastically engages in a massacre of Muslims and believes God wills that he kill as many infidels as he can is probably not a real follower of Christ. And that’s probably true. Jesus did say, “By their fruits you will know them,” and that’s pretty bad fruit. But when it comes to history, we have a particular habit of passing judgment on people we don’t understand. We can’t grasp the background and culture and situation and worldview of someone by reading a few Wikipedia articles or a history textbook. I don’t know that any of us could say that in their shoes we wouldn’t do many of the same things. We need to accept that at least some of them identified with the same belief system we do, and were either led into sin the same way we can be given the wrong circumstances, or even genuinely believed they were serving God.
2. What we can and must say, however, is that people who did terrible things, even terrible things in the name of Christ, did them in spite of their professed faith, not because of it.
Jesus never in any way taught a faith that was spread by the sword. At no point did he ever equate the kingdom of God with holding physical territory, at no point did he ever advocate using the force of law to enforce observance of his teachings, If people ever conflated the two, it was as a result of someone, typically someone with great political power, creating an invalid distortion of Christ’s teachings. To put it another way, people don’t do un-Christ-like things because they are Christ-followers — they do it in spite of it.
3. We need to be aware of the incomplete and distorted historical narrative that exists.
Most people get the basis of their knowledge of history from what they learn in school, on Wikipedia, or watch on TV. History classes, articles, and documentaries have to condense hundreds or thousands of years into a few hundred pages or a couple hours. They can’t possibly tell the whole story. So they tend to focus on three things: 1) major movements; 2) political events and figures; and 3) warfare. They often present only bare facts and leave out religion where it’s not central to the narrative. They also tend to highlight the things that are culturally relatable. Based on that, modern scholastics have constructed a historical narrative that highlights the central events on the world stage, and the direct reasons behind them.
So, basically, there are two major periods in world history where Christianity played a central role on the events of the world stage: 1) the Crusades and 2) the Reformation. The crusades obviously were a terrible thing, and highlight some of the worst acts and expressions of the visible organization that was called the Church (and the chosen emphasis tends to be on the period where Christians were the aggressors, glossing over the 400-year period before the crusades where the Islamic caliphates were the imperialist aggressors invading Christian territory). And as for the Reformation, while we Christians may put heavy emphasis on the individual figures who made great things happen, the historical narrative taught in schools tends to turn its focus toward the political and warlike conflicts that spawned from that period. While we look at the religious reformers like Tyndale, Luther, and Calvin, history tends to focus on the religio-political reformers like Henry VIII, Bloody Mary, and the leaders of Salem, Massachusetts. With a narrative like that, how could Christianity not come across as a political and warlike religion? Based on the selections for the narrative, the worst and most divisive aspects of Christianity are highlighted and the good is glossed over.
Yet it can and should be questioned whether these events are the product of Christianity, or Christendom — the product of the teachings of Jesus, or of the greed and vengefulness of human nature colored with Christian-ese.
4. In the interest of providing a real balanced perspective, we should also highlight the good the church has done.
What the scholastic narrative of history misses is a lot of the good Christians, members of the body of Christ have done — most of which had nothing to do with politics and warfare. If you’re going to point to the propagation of politics and warfare conducted by Christians (or professing Christians), then you also need to point to the advances in science, medicine, education, industry, charity, etc., made by Christians (or professing Christians). A lot of what made the good things in the modern world possible today was pioneered by Christians. Many of the scientists and teachers and doctors who pioneered their fields wrote about theology as well, and were inspired by their belief that God had made an ordered, discoverable world.
These things didn’t happen in a vacuum. While it’s true that the continent dominated by the profession of Christianity, Europe, was plagued by warfare and imperialism and religious persecution (like the rest of the world), it was also the breeding ground for innovations that greatly helped the human race. And making strides to heal the sick, teach people, and discover God’s world is a lot more Christ-like than the former evils. So it follows that those advancements and innovations, then, are more representative of the actual fruits of Christian faith, since they more closely resemble the actual principles Christ taught.
5. History is the most powerful example of all that claiming to be a Christian is meaningless without the fruits of the Spirit.
We must acknowledge that people who claimed to be, and may have been, Christians did terrible things. But they did them contrary to what they claimed to believe. Such things are not the real fruits of being a follower of Christ. There is no more powerful illustration of the utter uselessness of mere profession of Christian faith and intellectual knowledge of the gospel than the horrible things that color the past of Christendom.
We can’t hide from or deny the past, but Christ is not defined by what people claiming association with him have done — and nor is the church, his bride. Ultimately, I would propose that the message we need to be sending is not, “Look at the church and all the bad things it has done and is still doing to people; we’re sorry, but we’re better.” The message we should be sending is, “The evil things that Christian institutions and individuals have done are not what the body of Christ does; here’s what the body of Christ really does.”
And it’s on us to demonstrate, as individuals and congregations, what the body of Christ is really supposed to be.
