The Crusades and Historical Charity

Still working through this history of the Crusades, which I find to be fascinating. In general it is an incredible idea, and whatever one thinks today about the Crusaders or the ideology that launched such an endeavor, it is hard not to be a bit amazed and what was accomplished by a disparate group of Europeans.

A group of 20,000 or so, knights, princes, and peasants marched some 2,000 miles, laying siege to various Muslim outposts along the way, and eventually broke through the formidable gates of Jerusalem and laid claim to the city, holding it despite erratic support from the West for nearly 200 years. For some perspective, 200 years ago in American history James Madison was president and we were still fighting the British over this or that. In other words, it is a long time. Were their motives always pure? Nope. Were some greedy for gain? Yep. Was their senseless slaughter? Definitely. Do I wish for something like this to happen again? Hell no. But I think it is a fault of the imagination and a failure to acknowledge subjectivity in human experience to demonize a whole contingent of past humanity for failing to live up to present--and relatively new--ideals. Blaming the Crusaders for violence is like blaming them for being opposed to gay marriage. The idea is so modern, it is absurdly anachronistic to judge something that happened 1,000 years ago as if they operated by the same moral and social codes.

When Tolkien was having conversations with the impenitent C.S. Lewis about Christianity he told him that the Christian story would have immense appeal to the story-loving Lewis if it didn't carry the emotional/historical/doctrinal baggage that Christianity presents to someone reared in our culture. In other words, the story of God made man, his birth heralded by angels and swains alike, his monastic life, his temptation in the desert, his betrayal, crucifixion and resurrection would all seem wonderful to Lewis if they could be casually dismissed as mythology, but became considerably more complex when he was asked to not only appreciate the artistry and beauty of the story, but also to believe that it was true and to attach his faith to the G0d-man as his savior. 

While I don't want to conflate these two very different issues, I feel like something similar is at work in how we approach the Crusades. If they were simply a story we read in an adventure novel, the story of a great journey with heroes and villains and iconography and visionaries and deception and luck and bravery we would love to read of it. But there is something so grounded about the Crusades. We are not merely confronted with a great story (I use the term great broadly), but one that actually happened, one that in many ways is constitutive of the way we Westerners see ourselves. A similar story set in the Far East would likely not provoke as visceral of a reaction. The Crusades feel personal, somehow, and we have been trained from a young age to feel very guilty about them. And I carry that tendency as much as anyone. 

But reading the other day about the siege at Antioch it was hard to remember the way we have been trained to feel about the Holy Wars. The Crusader army had laid siege to the city and broken through the walls. They were unable to capture the citadel, backed up against a mountain and it remained in Muslim control. Immediately upon their breakthrough at Antioch the Crusader army was besieged itself by the Muslim army of al Afdal. The Crusaders found themselves vastly outnumbered and running low on supplies. Rather than wasting away behind the walls, they decided to attack. One morning, at the break of day, they did just that. In his account, Asbridge seems careful to be clear that most of the Crusaders were motivated by genuine piety, not lust or greed. And there, in the midst of the battle, priests moved among the troops chanting prayers and giving them encouragement. The Crusaders, bolstered by faith, routed the Muslim army who was unprepared for their sudden attack. They returned to Antioch and were free to press on toward Jerusalem.

There is something about that image--the priest moving among the tumult of battle, chanting and praying--that despite the fact I find it theologically ridiculous, is entirely romantic to me. And if it were simply a story in a book I would love it. But understanding that the Crusaders weren't simply barbarians and that many were motivated by genuinely held religious feeling and that they were products of their culture doesn't mean that what they did was not often objectively wrong. Subjectively justifiable decisions can still be objectively wrong. I am not here trying to make the Crusades sound hunky-dory or not that big of a deal. I do think, though, that they are different than we are commonly led to believe--more complicated--and that our distance from this time ought to give us pause before blithely passing judgment.

The culture that spawned the Crusades and sustained them for 200 years might not bear much resemblance to our own, but they operated by a different set of values, not without values. We can rightly condemn the actions of much of the wars as incompatible with the teachings of Christ, but I am hesitant to condemn the values underlying the wars: bravery, faith, and the willingness to fight for what is important.

History Ain't Simple

In all of my years of reading the title of this post represents one of only a very few solid conclusions that I have been led to believe without qualm. Nothing is as easy as we would like it to be: no one, with very few exceptions, is either as noble or as villainous as we have either been conditioned to believe or just sort of implicitly feel. John Calvin was a great man—one of my heroes—and he ordered that a heretic be executed in his city of Geneva for advancing anti-Trinitarian views. Does this mean that nothing Calvin wrote is of any value? Of course not. But it is something you have to deal with when praising (justly) Calvin. Did the Founding Fathers of this nation establish our country on largely Christian principles, having in mind the structure of our nation to be contingent upon Christian believers? Yep. Did a lot of them believe heterodox things about Christianity or God or merely utilize Christian morality as a convenient rallying point? Yep. Which is merely to say that they were not twenty-first century evangelicals.

I was thinking about this one solid historical dogma—nothing is simple—as I read the introduction to Thomas Asbridge’s single volume history of the Crusades, The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (on whose authority, sir?). Asbridge is very careful in refusing to attribute pat motives to either the Christian or Muslim factions that fought the two century war for control of the Levant.

In other words, there is no one explanation for Christian aggression at the end of the eleventh century. Today we seem to ascribe to the Crusades the worst possible motivations, making the Church out to be greedy, land-hungry, manipulative and bent on destroying the cultured Muslims of the Near East, even when there is little evidence for this claim. We choose to take Saladin, the genuinely noble Muslim commander, as representative of all the Muslim commanders, ignoring the hellacious warlord Zangi, who would kill any Muslim, Byzantine, or Frank in brutal fashion for the slightest offense.

But there are charitable possibilities: Muslim armies did, after all, conquer Jerusalem from the Byzantines in the seventh century, and it is not crazy to imagine that Christians genuinely wanted to recover control of their holiest sites. There is also some evidence that Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land were being attacked, robbed, and even murdered by Muslim groups before being able to reach Jerusalem. St. Augustine had theorized the possible circumstances justifying a war—proclamation by a legitimate authority, a just cause, and right intention—paving the way for popes and other leaders of the Christian world to advance a military cause in good faith.

Another charitable option is just really bad theology. Medieval preoccupation and concern for avoiding hell was ubiquitous. The power of the pope, never a secure hold at this time, enlisted their belief that they were spiritually responsible for the fate of every soul under their care. Promoting a holy war that functionally cleanses one of the guilt of sin could then be seen as an altruistic act, opening up the door to salvation for more and more members of the flock. While someone like me reads this and scoffs and mutters under my breath a quick prayer of thanks for Martin Luther, granting the intense fear at the time of the fires of hell and the uncertainty of salvation, it only makes sense to advance surefire ways to guarantee one’s spot in the celestial realm (believers of various stripes believe the same thing to today).

In any event, whether one subscribes to a charitable explanation or merely chooses to believe that all Christians of the time were bloodthirsty murderers bent on conquest, less subjective elements, sometimes referred to as facts, throw a bit of cold water on the Church=bad equation. For one, the goal of the sanctioned Crusades was limited: reclamation of the Holy Land. The project, as Asbridge notes, was not “to eradicate Islam, or even convert Muslims to the Christian faith. Rather, it was a consequence of Islam’s dominion over the Holy Land and the sacred city of Jerusalem” (17).

Whether or not this goal is noble, and I really don’t have much of a dog in this fight, we have to be careful, self-righteous as we tend to become at a distant historical remove, to not always assume the worst either because that is what we have been taught or that is what is most easy to believe. Every Christian at one point or another has been asked to defend their fidelity to a faith that propagated the Crusades. This is fair enough as it goes, but the next time someone asks me for my defense I am going to simply ask them just what it is they know about the Crusades. If their answer is something other than Church=bad than I will engage them on the subject. If not, they are not really looking to be convinced anyway. It can be snug, after all, to have one’s head in the sand.

God is Impassible and Impassioned

What we believe about God--not only elementary questions about ontology--but our deeply held theological beliefs about the way he manifests himself, relates to us and the rest of creation, relates to the other members of the Trinity, are vastly important for determining how we will navigate the complexities of this world. What we believe about God defines how we will react when life is hard, when we read the news, when the next big disaster--either manmade or natural--strikes. We cannot be too careful or too thoughtful about what doctrines we claim on this count.

There was a guy a few years older than me on my small group in Texas who had suffered a traumatic accident when he was a child that had impaired both motor and psychological functions. He was still able to hold a job and even graduated college, but there is no doubt that this accident shaped his life, and continued to do so down to the time I met him, when the accident would have occurred some 20 years in the past. He was one of few people I have ever been around who just did not like me at all. While he was attending our small group we read through John Piper's book Desiring God. Piper, committed Calvinist that he is, has a chapter early in the book where he talks about the sovereignty of God and how it extends to every part of our lives and the events of this world. I happen also to subscribe to this doctrine, finding it biblically necessary as well as deeply comforting. To this young man, though, this doctrine was abhorrent. If God was in control, why would he have allowed this terrible accident to happen when to this man he was just a kid? I challenged him by asking how he found comfort in a God who was out of control of the events of this world but felt sorry for us when bad things happened? If that's all God is good for, then why bother? He walked out of the room, never to return. 

I don't like this story, but what it did teach me is how inclined we are to believe what we want to believe about God and how dangerous and limiting that position can be, based as it generally is on our limited experience in this world as well as our own experience of emotions. This background, along with many other similar stories, has made me very grateful for the opportunity to read Rob Lister's recent book God is Impassible and Impassioned: Toward a Theology of Divine Emotion. Lister, a professor of theology at the Southern Baptist's flagship institution, takes aim at the rather recent and widespread movement broadly called Open Theism, which essentially puts forth that God is changeable, adaptable, and deeply emotional (passible). While most adherents of this belief would not be so bold as to state their beliefs that baldly, it seems to have taken root at the popular level that God feels our pain literally, that prayer changes his mind, and that he is not completely sovereign over his creation. On this last point, I was having a conversation with a Pentecostal friend in Tulsa last summer and when I told him that I believed God to be sovereign over everything in this world, good and bad, you would have thought by the look on his face that I just kicked a puppy. We are charitable enough to God, it seems, that we want to leave him off of the hook for the bad stuff that happens in this world.

Lister hones in on the question of divine emotion in this book, taking aim at the two poles in the conversation: on the one hand, those staunchly impassible (inability for God to be moved at all) who deny any emotional involvement between God and creation, and on the other hand those for whom God is deeply impassioned, an emotional rollercoaster on par with, well, us.

The first half of the book is an historical exploration of the Church Fathers, the Medievalists, and the Reformers who, Lister contends, held the doctrine of divine impassibility while allowing for God to be moved by passions. Many of the Open Theists, including their grandfather Jurgen Moltmann, argue that the Church Fathers were unduly influenced by the Greek metaphysics of Aristotle, positing a removed and unfeeling deity, and therefore refashioned the emotional God of the Bible into a Greco-Christian hybrid, ignoring the many scriptures pointing to God's emotion. Lister rebuffs these claims, maintaining that the Fathers were obedient to the Bible above all else, and asserting that the Open Theists, presumably free from murky philosophy of their own, are merely beholden to a newer philosophy of deity, one that makes God very much like us. 

This survey I found to be the most worthwhile part of the book and recommend the book for the mere chance for one to read the words of such a diverse group of early believers. I hope I never lose the thrill of reading Augustine or Aquinas or Calvin. If I could offer one critique of the book, it would be that the original chapters in the latter portion, particularly chapter nine, are merely derivative of what has come before. Lister at times even requotes material already handled in the earlier portions of the book. This critique is minor because Lister seems aware of this himself. While laying out the thesis for the work, he holds that he is not creating something new so much as subtly redeveloping or reemphasizing an ancient doctrine.

Lister's essential charge against the Open Theists, and others who emphasize God's emotion to the diminishment of his sovereignty, is that they mistake divine emotion as being of the same substance as human emotion. For example, these thinkers have a tendency to sort of glibly assume that when the Bible says God is angry we are to interpret this within the framework of our own experience of emotions. This tendency is not limited to the negative emotions. When told that God is love--a quality that is not entirely emotional at all--we moderns assume that God would define love roughly how we do. This is a grave error: to anthropomorphize God until he resembles us, to make God in our image and in our likeness.

The reality of divine emotion, and Lister is firm in the fact that God does experience emotion, is that it is far different than what we experience. When we are aroused to an extreme emotion we often lose control. I don't need to provide examples of this, it being self-evident and as close to universal as people get. It is ludicrous to think that God experiences emotion in the same way. Lister's main contention here, and one I happen to agree with, is that when God is moved to emotion it is only because he allows himself to be: no external stimulus forces God into an emotional display.

An interesting question, and one that popped into my mind as I read the prefatory chapters, was, what about Jesus? He suffered. Experience emotion and hunger and thirst and tiredness. And, he was God. The concluding chapter is about the incarnation and it answers these questions beautifully. Lister proposes that the reason God had to become man is because God could experience no lack if he remained always in his triune glory. In other words, God could not suffer as God, but had to become man to suffer. The Apostle Peter hints toward this in his first epistle: “Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin” (4:1). Earlier in Peter’s letter he writes that Christ bore our sins “in his body on the tree” (2:24). Peter teaches us, then, that the divine nature didn’t suffer at the crucifixion, but the fleshly body of the God-man Jesus Christ. This distinction between the divine nature and Christ’s body in no way discredits the work of the cross. As Lister argues, the work of Christ on the cross is enhanced when we have a proper view of the suffering of Christ on the tree. He quotes Catholic theologian Thomas Weinandy on this score: 

Even if one did allow the Son of God to suffer in his divine nature, this would negate the very thing one wanted to preserve and cultivate. For if the Son of God experienced suffering in his divine nature, he would no longer be experiencing human suffering in an authentic and genuine human manner, but instead he would be experiencing "human suffering" in a divine manner which would be neither genuinely nor authentically human. . . Thus to replace the phrase "the Impassible suffers" with the "Passible suffers" immediately purges the suffering of all incarnational significance.

In other words, in trying to show that the divine nature suffered on the cross, we actually dilute the power of the human suffering of Christ. The miracle of the incarnation, of the reality of God-become-man, is that Christ emptied himself of his rights to divinity and experienced things as a man that he could never experience as God. That is how he could atone for our sins: it was not the divine nature that was crucified at Calvary, but the human nature in all of its depravity.

I could write much, much more about this book, but will relent there if anyone has even read this far. This book has encouraged me and enlivened me to think about what I think about God and to be careful about this thought process. How thankful I am that God is not like me, yet has chosen out of his great mercy and grace to be passionately for me in all things. He has shown us, through Christ, a standard for experiencing emotion and clinging to the unchanging truths of God. 

Choking on the Whistle

Referees in any sport have a hard job. I get that. They are tasked with a nearly impossible mission in an utterly thankless job. As such, I think it is good to give them grace for their mistakes. The NFL referee fiasco from the beginning of the year should teach us once and for all that the real professionals are indispensable. But I must take umbrage with one tendency that seems almost uniform across the profession: the way that in last second plays the defending team could sodomize the opposing player with a yardstick and the referees would still choke on their whistles.

We have seen this twice this past week in two big games. One, obviously, the granddaddy of them all, when in the Super Bowl a clear pass interference was neglected on the deciding play of the game. The other, last night's excellent college basketball game between Michigan and Ohio State.

Now at the outset I want to say that there is nothing worse than a referee becoming the star of the game. They are there to maintain order and not decide the winner. I also don't want referees being quick with the whistle at the end of the game. My fellow K-Staters will recall with dismay the end of the Pinstripe Bowl in 2011 when we were hosed by a personal foul celebration penalty that pushed our game-tying two point conversion attempt from the three yard line to the 18. That was egregious and unnecessary  not to mention completely disconnected from the play. If our player had pushed off severely to free himself it would be hard to argue with the penalty. But this a different consideration altogether; it is not a question of taking the game into their hands, but a question of neglecting their job for fear of making the big call.

During that play in the Super Bowl it was almost humorous to me to hear the justifications from the commentators who as a group resolutely refuse to hold officials accountable for bad calls. They pointed out that Crabtree was making contact with the defender on the play as well, which was certainly true. But they neglected to mention why he was making contact with the defender. The answer: the defender was grabbing him and he was trying to extricate himself so he could, you know, catch a game-winning touchdown. Grabbing a receiver so he can't finish his route and trying to free oneself from a grip is not the same thing. And the official standing ten feet away knew it. But the defender knew, and everyone in the crowd knew, that he could do about anything he wanted without being flagged for a penalty. And he took advantage. This one hurt a bit because I wanted the 49ers to win.

The other game--Michigan vs Ohio State--ended with Aaron Craft's drive to the basket where he was clobbered by two Michigan defenders. Again, no call. This time I wanted Michigan to win due to my disdain for everything having to do with The Ohio State University, so the bad call benefited my side, but it was still a bad call. Ohio State was down two points. Craft at least deserved the chance to try and tie it from the charity stripe. Instead the referee in position to make the call looked blithely on as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. The ESPN talking head, making the standard justification in these cases, said that while there was certainly contact it was the end of the game and you can't expect that call to be made. This seems like pretty awful circular logic to me: you can't make a big call at the end of a game because it is the end of the game and you don't make big calls at the end of a game.

But this isn't supposed to be a point of consideration of the referees. Why is something that is a foul with 5 minutes left suddenly not when there is 5 seconds left? In what world does that make sense? It needs to stop. It ruins the integrity of those big plays to have them tarnished by blatant non-calls.

I don't expect any commission of officials to read this and institute new rules, I just wanted to vent. And if you read this far, I imagine you probably agreed with me already. Didn't that feel good?