It does not go unnoticed that Christians show hypocrisy as they deal with violance in Christianity. Their only explanation to Christian violence is that NT does not contain any form of violence, which in fact explains nothing at all.
While they accuse Islam as tolerating violance, they should know that their own religion had to be worked out to fit into the similar context “when and why Islam allows fighting”. But since this was not done by God but by humans, Christians showed the most brutal forms of violence history recorded.
If the Church as you believe is the representation of God’s authority in this world, then you have to accept that there is inherent violance in Christianity and the excerpt below outlines how it is so. Visit the site, there’s more to the story. Interesting read indeed.
http://www.mts.net/~tonyhj/Writing/SacredViolence/Contents.html
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Although early Christians taught that God forbids human violence, they never doubted that God himself had the right to shed blood. St. Paul forbids his hearers ever to avenge themselves, “For,” he says, “it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’”43 St. Luke writes into his Gospel the marvellous poem, often called The Magnificat, which rings with praise of God’s justice, and proclaims that God shows “strength with his arm” and puts down the mighty from their thrones.44
Neither the New Testament nor the early church, however, is clear about just how God is going to accomplish the avenging of wrong or the pulling down of the mighty, at least not while ordinary history goes on. At the end of time, yes, the statements are unanimous that everything will be set right by the direct act of God. But what about now? Will the victim of injustice have to wait until Judgement Day? The early Christian witness has no clear answer. We are to understand that God can do it, and that God will do it, even now. How, it does not say.
But there is a hint: In the letter to the Romans, St. Paul tells his readers to be good citizens. He suggests that the government is God’s agent to maintain peace and justice. The ruler, he says, “is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.”45 This appears to mean that the government, or individuals with legitimate power, acting according to the rules of this world, are actually agents of God, doing violence to right wrongs, and to avenge the innocent!
It is almost as if God is expected to use non-Christian violence as a means of bringing about justice for Christians; as if the church could practice its own non-violence because law and order was being maintained by the violence of someone else! The fledgling church could assume all this because it had begun among people who had no political power, and never expected to have any. In their formative period, while their scriptures were still being assembled, questions of public policy, of war and peace, of the prevention of crime and the maintenance of justice, just weren’t addressed. But as their religion spread, more and more police and soldiers, more and more politicians and civil servants, came among them, and there was simply no precedent, no guidance from the Lord, for how a person who bore responsibility for the public safety should behave.
The question had to be answered. What would Jesus say about the decisions of a Christian government? A new approach to the remarks which Jesus had made before Pilate, began to emerge. “My kingship is not of this world; if my kingship were of this world, my servants would fight....”46 Could it be that this was not a blanket prohibition of fighting? Could it be that Jesus forbids fighting to individuals, for religious reasons, but permits fighting to governments for public reasons? Eventually church thinkers began to answer “yes,” and a kind of duality began to emerge: between church and state, sacred and secular, body and soul. Christians began to live in two worlds at once, each with its own set of rules. They were citizens of heaven, where violence was forbidden, and citizens of the Roman Empire, where violence in the public interest was permitted.
The Later Church, St. Augustine, and Public Order
Eventually it emerged that some people were to live more by the rules of heaven, such as clergy, while others, such as politicians and soldiers, were to live more by the rules of the world. Ambrose, in the fourth century, made it explicit: while all individual Christians must live by Christ’s teachings, and respond peacefully to aggression in their private lives, soldiers, in their capacity of public servants, can bring glory to God by fighting to defend the state. Clergy, however, must never fight, even in the defence of the state, because their public duty is to be concerned with matters of the spirit.47
Augustine agrees: “As to killing others to defend one’s own life I do not approve of this, [he says] unless one happens to be a soldier or a public functionary acting not for himself, but in defence of others or of the city in which he resides.”48
Again, the religious, the secular clergy, and the monks must not engage in warfare at all.49
Augustine, who developed a full-blown theory of “Christian” Just War, could not find anything for his code in Christ’s teachings, for it is not there. He borrowed, rather, from Plato and from Cicero, declaring that war exists to bring about a condition of peace. It may be used to repel attack, and to enforce violated treaties. A request to end hostilities must be honoured. There must be no massacres, no desecrating of temples, no vengeance, and no atrocities. Good faith must be kept with the enemy.50
To include Jesus’ ethic in his system, Augustine had to intensify the duality that was already growing within Christianity. With him, the division between personal and interior on the one hand, and public and external on the other, became complete. What he taught was that privately, in our hearts, we must be loving and forgiving; externally we must do our duty to the state and fight. Bodily, we must kill the enemy, but spiritually, we must love that enemy.51
For all that Augustine permitted violence, he never went as far as to consider it “godly” or “good.” To him it was very much an ugly necessity in a very sinful world. As far as he was concerned, God did not ordain violence. It is part of human evil. Only when, in the interests of public order, it becomes the lesser of two evils, does it become permissible.
Augustine always considered the task of public administration to be thoroughly distasteful, as it involved the continual violation of Christ’s commands. A magistrate must order executions, even torture, when required, but he must hate it, and ask God to deliver him from the necessity.52 In the years that followed, however, Christians became quite used to the public administration of violence, and some may even have enjoyed it.
The Crusades
When the Crusades began, even monks and clergy, whose job had been the care of heavenly things, were putting on armour and setting out to attack the occupants of Jerusalem. By some accounts they relished the experience. “A Christian glories in the death of a Muslim,” said Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, “Because Christ is glorified.”53 “Therefore, ye knights, attack with confidence... the enemies of the cross of Christ, assured that neither life nor death can separate you from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”54
Monks and knights broke the walls of Jerusalem on the 15th of July, 1099.
“With drawn swords [writes someone who was there] our people ran through the city; nor did they spare anyone, not even those pleading for mercy. If you had been there, your feet would have been stained up to the ankles with blood. What more shall I tell? Not one of them was allowed to live. They did not spare the women or children.
“The horses waded in blood up to their knees, nay up to the bridle. It was a just and wonderful judgement of God.”55
Christians had certainly come a long way from the days when police and soldiers were refused membership in the church because of their violent professions!
There is no doubt that the Crusaders completely violated the teaching and example of Christ. But they even fell far short of the Graeco-Roman standards of war which Augustine had so regretfully adapted. Where was his prohibition of atrocity, or of the desecrating of temples? Where was his obligation to respond to pleas for mercy? Where, even, his prohibition of clergy taking up arms? Gone. And where was his stipulation that war be declared only as a response to aggression?
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