Thinking about War and Peace:

A Christian Primer

3. CHRISTIANS AT WAR AND PEACE THROUGH HISTORY

Maple Grove United Church

Oakville, Ontario, Canada

Links

The First Crusade

Ms. Weid, a school teacher in Missouri, has a huge site on the First Crusade

A very usable website on the First Crusade maintained by an Australian/British medical editor with an interest in medieval history

A lecture by Lynn Nelson, a retired professor at the University of Kansas on the First Crusade

A virtual course on the First Crusade by Dr. Skip Knox of Boise State

Some primary source documents from the website of the modern Knights Templar order.

2. The Tolystoyans

The home page for a Tolstoy website, with links to e-texts of some of the works identified here.

Tolstoy links from the University of Toronto.

A biography from Columbia Encyclopedia.

A comparison of Doukhobors and Quakers from a Quaker website.

Take the link to the Doukhobor website.

A brief overview of Doukhobor history from a University of Alberta website, plus links.

3. Bonhoeffer

The home page of the Bonhoeffer Society

Bonhoeffer from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Bonhoeffer section of the website of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

A brief biography of Bonhoeffer by Victor Shepherd of Tyndale Seminary

Transcript of a sermon on Bonhoeffer, preached at Westminster Abbey in July 2002

The Barmen Declaration, 1934

Three historical cases: Christian crusade, Christian pacifism, Christian resistance

1. A Christian crusade: The First Crusade 1095–1099

IN 1095, the Christian emperor in Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey) asked the Pope for help from western Christians to defend the Church from pagan Turks. Perhaps this wasn't a good idea. The request changed the course of history. On Nov. 27, outside the cathedral in Clermont, France, Pope Urban II preached a crusade. Thousands and thousands responded, at great cost and personal sacrifice. Over the next few years they made their way to Constantinople, either overland through Hungary or by sail across the Adriatic and then through Serbian territory (see the map), and then down the coast of Asia Minor to Syria. There was no commander-in-chief, and rivalries among the European leaders were intense and frequently bitter. The loss of life among Moslems, Jews, and Christians was enormous. Crusaders finally captured Jerusalem itself from the Moslems. All those inside the walls, men, women, and children, were butchered. On Christmas day, 1100, a French leader named Baldwin (French "Baudouin") was made king (see left). Later a Latin cleric was made bishop. (The cross above right is "the Jerusalem Cross".)

Among the principles of the Crusade: (1) the killing of heathen was declared to be no sin; (2) the pope declared the crusade a holy cause for God, and promised absolution of all sin for those who completed the crusade; (3) the pope promised to excommunicate those who committed themselves to the crusade but turned back prematurely; (4) popes, who had never raised armies before, were now very much part of the military structure of Europe; (5) divisions among Christians were escalated; (6) by the time the crusades were completed, the reputation of Christians for butchery and perfidy was permanently established in the east.

On September 16, 2001, President George Bush announced a new "crusade" against terrorists and evil-doers (see the report from CNN), and repeated the word "crusade" several times over the next three weeks before officials in his administration began to disown this language.

2. The Tolstoyans

LEO Tolstoy (1828-1910) was as influential as a Christian pacifist as he was as a novelist. Born to a family of landed aristocrats, and serving with distinction in the Russian army in the Crimean War, he then wrote his masterpieces War and Peace (1865-1869) and Anna Karenina (1875-1877). He then entered a period of spiritual struggle, finally rejecting the Russian Orthodoxy in which he was raised, in favour of a non-dogmatic, ethically centred Christianity. He described the struggle in A Confession (1885). He presented his new religion in An Examination of Dogmatic Theology (1880), What I Believe (1884, published 1888), and The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1893). He took the Sermon on the Mount with utmost seriousness, and accepted Christ's teaching "resist not him that is evil" literally. He taught pacifism and non-resistance. Many of his religious and moral writings were suppressed in Russia. He gathered a considerable following in Europe and the United States, where "Tolstoyan communities" of non-resistance sprang up. In India, Gandhi read The Kingdom of God Is Within You when it first appeared, wrote him in 1909, and in 1910 established a rural retreat which he called Tolstoy Farm.

In 1895 Tolstoy adopted the cause of the Dukhobors, who were antimilitarist peasants, mostly illiterate, in southern Russia. They were subject to imprisonment and internal exile in Russia for refusing military service. Tolstoy donated the royalties from one of his books to pay for transporting them to Canada, where the government passed an Order in Council in 1898 to exempt them from military service (in addition to Quakers, Mennonites, and Brethren in Christ, who were already exempted). They settled first in Saskatchewan and then, after the provincial government created problems for them, to British Columbia. There are about 30,000 Doukhobors in Canada today, still pacifist.

3. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the resistance to Hitler

BONHOEFFER, a Lutheran pastor who studied and taught theology at the University of Berlin, was implicated in a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler in the 1940s. His career is sometimes divided into three periods. In the first, he was part of the established church. Then, after the established church began to be controlled by the Nazis, he joined the "Confessing Church", who objected to the anti-Jewish and nationalistic teachings of German Protestantism, and who were therefore disparaged by many Lutherans as illiberal and sectarian. Finally he moved into a kind of "religionless Christianity" where his work for the Gospel went into the world and underground. At each step, he gave a clear theological rationale for his position. He moved from a position very close to pacifism in the early 1930s to a posture of resistance, even violent resistance, before secular evil. "It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life," he wrote among the documents that were later published as his Letters and Papers from Prison. He was arrested in April 1943 and held in a military prison while evidence could be found against him for a trial. Evidence was found in September 1944, and he was transferred to a Gestapo prison, then to a concentration camp in February 1945. He was hanged on April 9, while Hitler, in a bunker under Berlin, was awaiting his own end.