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EDITORIAL
Crusades

Jim Coggins

In our January 22 issue, we carried an article on the Reconciliation Walk. This is an effort by Western Christians to walk from Europe to Jerusalem following the route of the first Crusade. The first Crusade began in 1096, after Pope Urban 11 formally called on European knights to go to Jerusalem and free the Holy Land from the control of Muslims. The Crusades lasted off and on for two centuries and, despite some early success, ultimately ended in failure.

There were many factors involved in this call. One was the growing wealth and power of Western Europe. Europe now had the money and population to undertake such an expedition. There were a growing number of knights’ younger sons, trained in war and spoiling for a fight; it was thought that it would be better if they fought Muslims in a distant land than each other at home.

Another factor was the Pope’s desire to increase and demonstrate his power over the ruling classes, and possibly to extend his power into Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Another factor was the changing doctrine of the church in the West. It was a time when the sacramental system – including pilgrimages, shrines, relics, penances, prayers to Mary and the saints, cathedrals, statues and other church art – was developing. Under such a system, places and objects were deemed holy, and pilgrimages to shrines were thought to bring merit to the pilgrim – in short, going to holy places such as Jerusalem was a way of earning salvation. What holier place to visit than Jerusalem? What better place than Palestine to acquire relics (saints’ bones, pieces of the cross, holy water from the River Jordan – all of which were thought to magically bring grace to those who touched them)? What better pilgrimage than freeing the Holy Land from “the Infidel” and thus improving access for other Christian pilgrims?

The Crusades are a dark chapter in Christian history, which still haunts us today (it is one reason why evangelistic “crusades” are treated with suspicion and fear among non-Christians). Some of the Crusaders had noble motives. Some fought bravely and developed a relationship of respect with their Muslim opponents. Others used the Crusades as an excuse for cruelty and a path to wealth. Some Crusaders slaughtered men, women and children of all faiths indiscriminately. Some raped women and plundered cities of their wealth. It may well be that the “Christian” Crusaders committed more atrocities and acted more unjustly than the Muslims they were attacking.

The Crusades vindicate certain Anabaptist principles. They show the danger of aligning the church with the state and the folly of trying to build the Kingdom of God by force. They demonstrate that the nonresistant way of the cross will often be more successful in the long run. Four centuries later, the early Anabaptists (our Mennonite ancestors) refused to fight the Muslims, and indeed may have sent missionaries to them. They rightly saw the Crusades as a denial of the “cross” (even though, ironically, the term “crusade” is derived from the word “cross”).

The Crusades also show the folly of the sacramental system which Protestants and Anabaptists reacted against when they left the Roman Catholic Church. There are no “holy places”; God is more interested in calling us to be holy people. We become holy by following Jesus’ way of love, not by touching some supposedly holy object. The Crusaders went to the Holy Land, that holiest of places, and committed atrocities there.

Yet there is another aspect to the Crusades. All wars have two sides to them. The Muslims were not strangers to the use of force. They were in control of the Holy Land because they had conquered it by force. One of the other motivations for the Crusades was to help defend the Byzantine Empire (a “Christian” empire based in Turkey) from Muslim invasion. Muslims did, in fact, later overthrow the Byzantine Empire, and their advance on Europe was finally halted only at the gates of Vienna. (The current animosity in the former Yugoslavia between Western Christian Croats, Eastern Christian Serbs and Muslim Albanians is a legacy of those wars.)

I fully support the idea of the Reconciliation Walk. Yet I do think it is significant that this initiative grew out of a Christian revival movement in Europe, not in Muslim lands. Why is it that the Crusades and the other Christian-Muslim wars of past centuries are “a footnote in history” for Western Christians but “living parts of the culture” for Muslims? One of the reasons, surely, is that while Islam has a deep commitment to law and justice, Christians also have a theology of forgiveness. To some extent, we have long ago forgiven and assumed we had been forgiven for the wars of past centuries. In their theology, Muslims may see little reason to forgive and little need to seek forgiveness.

There are many facets to the religion of Islam which Muhammad founded. One of those is that Muhammad, disgusted by the loose living and cheap grace of the state-church Christians around him, moved back toward an emphasis on Old Testament law. We should not preach or practise cheap grace or cheap forgiveness. But this does not mean that we do not believe in the reality and the necessity of costly grace and real forgiveness – all based on the self-sacrificing love of Jesus Christ dying on the cross for our sins.

Jesus died to bring forgiveness to His enemies. Our commitment to the possibility and the reality of forgiveness should lead us to take the first step toward reconciliation, no matter who is at fault or even if both sides are. That is why the Reconciliation Walk is so good an idea, so in keeping with the spirit of Jesus.

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Last modified July 8, 1999.

© 2000 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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