BEMA 197: AD 1000–1300

Transcription Status

30 Jun 24 — Initial public release

26 Mar 24 — Transcript approved for release

AD 1000–1300

Brent Billings: This is the BEMA Podcast with Marty Solomon. I’m his co-host Brent Billings. Today we examine one of the darkest chapters in the history of Christendom.

Marty Solomon: Alright, remember that we got a little presentation for you. Probably just one, I believe today, one slide worth of timeline for you to look at. Remember all the disclaimers we always have about putting pins in the perfect places, we’re not striving for perfection. Alright, here we go, we left our last conversation. Our last episode with the world of Christendom having been rocked to its core, with the departure of the Eastern Church. The danger is that it would raise a whole new sense of papal rejection. When I say papal, what do I mean, Brent?

Brent: The Pope.

Marty: The Pope. Essentially, it has to be shorthand. It’s bigger than that, but the papacy in general, the whole papal system. There’s a new sense of papal rejection if folks can just tell the Pope, “No.” What does that mean? You can’t just tell the Pope, “No.” I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. This was a real crisis, historically speaking.

Brent: The idea is that the Pope was the direct descendent of the apostles.

Marty: Apostolic succession. Mouthpiece of God, vocationally. Absolutely. Well, as the saying goes, “Nothing brings people together like a common enemy.” To be fair, I’m not going to wade into the spicy conversation surrounding the Crusades and present myself as a historian or an expert here in this field. I know talking about this period of history can be incredibly charged emotionally, and it should be. I know some historical reconstructionists have attempted to put a “positive spin” on the crusades, and what the intentions were behind them. I will be attempting no such explanation. For me, this chapter of Christian history is dark and marked with all sorts of problems, which most of us have simply been able to keep out of sight and out of mind.

Brent: We are talking about something that happened about 1,000 years ago. It is easy to set aside. We don’t have a reason to think about it.

Marty: Absolutely. On a very practical level, that is absolutely correct. On another level, we did slaughter millions of people, so it should be—a portion of “in Jesus’s name”—we should probably not forget those things.

Brent: It does come up quite often.

Marty: Absolutely.

Brent: As far as events in history go. It is brought up disproportionately more often than almost anything else. It is something that we should wrestle with and be able to think about critically.

Marty: Absolutely. I can remember the chapter in Blue Like Jazz, another book by Donald Miller. We’ll be putting it in the show notes down there. While we’re at it, Brent, let’s just link the movie as well. They made a movie based on the book. It’s a totally different thing. It’s not—I don’t know what I was expecting when I went to see Blue Like Jazz as a movie. It was just different. I’m not going to say it was bad, or it was good. It was just different. You had the book and then you had the movie.

Brent: This is the first I’m hearing of the movie. I have read the book, though.

Marty: There you go. Enjoy the movie. It’s not the same thing. Based on some of the same ideas. I remember reading Blue Like Jazz for the first time, and he spoke—there’s a whole chapter in the book where he speaks about his experience at—I can’t remember what he called it exactly, but it was like a reverse confessional. He talks about how they set up a confessional booth at Reed College, where he was going to school, and instead of receiving the confessions—that’s what you do at a confessional, right? You go into the confessional, you sit down, you tell that priestly figure—you practice the discipline of confession.

Instead of receiving confessions, they offered confessions on behalf of their faith. Both current and historic. I have not stopped hearing the kickback from readers over the years since that book was released. Readers or thinkers who say, “But why would I, or they, apologize for something that happened centuries ago?” This question shows our blatant disconnection from our faith and where it comes from. This disconnection stops us from being able to think critically about how this could ever get to that place. How we could get to that place.

A dark history disowned by the descendants of it will be bound to repeat itself—if I could adapt that famous saying. I’ll say that again. A dark history disowned by the descendants of it will be bound to repeat itself. Some would say we are on the verge of such an era potentially even right now. I won’t present myself as an expert. I’m not an expert in these things. I’m not trying to tell you I know everything. I’m just a learner. I’m a student of history, and I’m a fellow thinker like all of you.

Brent: We’ve talked about this contrast before, but the Jewish concept of, “WE were in Egypt… WE were in the desert.”

Marty: Absolutely.

Brent: They own every part of their whole history.

Marty: Absolutely. The ‘we’ historically, and then there’s also just the concept of ‘we’ in general. Part of the reason that we’re able to disconnect from our history is because we see all of our faith as just so personal. It’s just a personal relationship with Jesus. It’s just a personal—it’s a “God and I,” it’s “me and Jesus,” it’s just me as an individual rather than ‘us’ as a people, because if we thought more as an ‘us,’ it’d be much harder to disconnect from the ‘us’ that extends on the timeline. Past and future ‘us.’ That’s just the difference between Eastern and Western thinkers going all the way back to our last episode, and all the way back to our introduction of just the difference between Eastern versus Western thought.

I can remember Brent, on one of our trips to Israel, we were using a different company than what I typically am used to. Not the company that I use personally. I was with another group. I was kind of helping lead this other tour, and there was a guide there. I remember us having a Q&A with this Jewish guide one night. One of the questions that always gets asked—and it was asked very respectfully. Sometimes it’s not asked respectfully at all, but this question was asked respectfully of our guide. They said, “There’s so much overlap, there’s so much parallel, there’s so much beauty in seeing Jesus from a Jewish perspective. Why don’t you follow Jesus? If Jesus was so Jewish, why don’t you get it and why don’t you follow him?”

His response, I will never forget, he said, “With all due respect, we as Jews have never been able to understand how Christians can see Jesus in a vacuum. We can’t see Jesus just as this independent Jewish rabbi 2,000 years ago. For us, Jesus is connected to 1,800 years of brutal Church history, much of which has been just filled with the slaughter of people in the name of this Jesus.” That was an answer that will go with me for a long time.

It’s my belief that our desperate need to unify Christendom—to go back to our historical conversation if we can—this is somewhat my hunch, I won’t say that I’ve been taught this necessarily directly by anybody—but as I’ve studied history, my personal hunch, my personal belief, is that in order to unify Christendom, which was splitting apart and splintering, the East-West Schism, we seized an opportunity that arose at just the right time. Shortly after the East-West Schism, the Islamic movement was making its way to capture Palestine. There is no way that I’m going to give you a history of the Islamic faith here. It would be helpful to know that as Muhammad was doing the work of canonizing his teaching, and the creation of the Quran was underway, there were three dominant worldviews at play within Islam at this point in history.

There was what we might have called the progressive movement, which wanted to live peaceably with everybody. There was a moderate movement that saw itself as the correct faith, and others as largely apostate, but it did not seek to convert them by force. The progressive movement would have said, “Hey, let’s just coexist with Christians and other people groups and other tribes.” The moderate group would have been like, “We’re the right one, and they’re the wrong one but we’re not necessarily here to take everybody over.” Then there was a radical bunch of the Islamic faith that were bent on violent overthrow of the pagan idolaters.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. We studied Judaism of the Second Temple period and its different sects of Judaism—its five different responses to Hellenism. We have seen the same movements grow and disappear within Christian history as well. If we want a really good book, really good book, this is on my favorites shelf, a book by Karen Armstrong, we’re going to link in the show notes. Battle for God. Battle for God by Karen Armstrong. It’s a history of fundamentalism of the three Abrahamic faiths. She walks through where fundamentalism comes from, why it shows up, and why it can be so dangerous, and she does it for Judaism, she does it for Christianity, she does it for Islam. I thought it was a very helpful read.

I find this whole conversation helpful because most people choose which groups they want to represent their own faith story. While Christians would, typically, never define themselves by the fringe radical edges of fundamentalism, we consistently do the opposite to the other in the conversation. What I mean by that is Christianity would never want to be painted with the same brush as the most radical fringe Christian thinkers out there.

We usually do that to Islam. We look at Islam, we think of the most radical Islamic people we know, and we paint Islam with that brush. I would say the movement of Islam toward capturing Palestine did not represent the Islamic faith as a whole. I would say, not even close, personally, as a historian. It did have a lot of traction at this point in history, though, and it did provide a perfect opportunity for the Church and the West to find a common enemy and use it as a scapegoat to bring unity to a struggling Christian kingdom.

[music]

Marty: Now, like I said, this is my unauthoritative, probably far too oversimplified opinion on this point of history. I am no expert in the crusades, so I will not try to explain my way through crusade history. It’s probably one of those areas that people are going to get mad that I didn’t get into more detail, but let’s just say that these few centuries were an absolute mess, and the mess seemed to galvanize an unfortunate unity in Christendom. Before we move on to the next chapter of history, it would be worth pointing out that not everyone is fighting in the crusades.

Brent, you brought this point up last episode. Not everyone is fighting, they never are. We let the poor, we let the uneducated, we let the commoners do that work for us. The wealthy, the influential, the people in charge, they’re usually not fighting these wars, they’re not fighting these crusades. They’re making the decisions, but they’re letting the other people do that work for them.

Brent: They use the money and power that they have to influence people to do their bidding, knowing that probably a lot of them are not going to survive, and they will never have to be paid. They can offer these ridiculous sums of money to get all these people to go do things.

Marty: Brent Billings, bringing the truth. Bringing the fire. Yes. What does that sound like to you, Brent? It sounds like a blast from the way distant past. Any BEMA material that you think of when we start talking about this? Let me read that line again. Not everyone is fighting in the crusades, they never are. We let the poor, the uneducated, the commoners do that work for us. What kinds of things do you think of?

Brent: Probably the first thing I would think of would be the Israelites making the bricks in Egypt.

Marty: Oh, yes. Absolutely, that’s exactly where I was going. Just this juxtaposition of Empire and Shalom, of stick versus invitation, of force and coercion versus voice. This is very clearly Empire to me. We identified, all the way back in Session 1, what Empire looked like, and what Shalom looked like. We remember God taking his people out into the desert to teach them what it was like to live on every word. To love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your might. This is not that, this is not even close to that, this is not even—some people are going to write me emails and get really mad that I said that. This is something totally—this is Egypt. This is Pharaoh, that’s what this is. This is hieroglyphics. Anyway, enough.

Brent: We’re not glossing over the crusades and only briefly mentioning them here. There has been much written and recorded about the crusades. Please, go do your own study because it is important, and it’s interesting in how they got to the point where they thought that was the right thing to do. The different crusades and how successful each of them was. What did success mean for them? It’s dark.

Marty: Absolutely.

Brent: It is good to know, and it’s good to wrestle with.

Marty: Absolutely. Yes. Not everybody is fighting in these crusades, we let certain groups of people do that for us. Simultaneously, as the crusades are being fought, we witness the rise of what we are going to call Scholasticism, an ever-widening gap between those who have and those who have not. This is a gap we are well acquainted with today. It’s very popular today to talk about the gap between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the world. In the Middle Ages, this gap was driven more by education and academic privilege, than some of the privileges we would talk about today.

While the middle and bottom classes were fighting the crusades, the cream of the crop was being taught and educated at a level we simply hadn’t seen before in history. With the rise of science, the accomplishments it brought, a university system that we still understand and rely on today began to take shape. Apprentices were taught not only how to read and to write, which was an incredible, almost inconceivable advantage, by the way, but they were also instructed in the blossoming fields of mathematics, science, theology and the arts, most of which was driven by Greek philosophy and of the- that came out of Hellenistic Era that we’ve studied before.

Brent: It’s maybe hard to get a picture of what this was like. The universities that we know today were not established at that point. We’re talking like a small room with five people in it. This is a very exclusive club of people. The universities would move around, and the university was kind of more of a roaming concept than a physical institution and location like we know it today. Yes, 1% might even be overstating the case. It was so elite.

Marty: Yes. Absolutely. That’s a great point, great point. One of the most revered names in Church history is often that of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas, without a doubt, changed the face of Christian history by bringing into a logical order the many fields of education. Aquinas showed how the world of mathematics and science could blend with the world of philosophy and theology.

The Western world would never be the same because of this. The way we understand our education system today is largely shaped by the perspective brought to us through the work of Thomas Aquinas, and obviously, others. He’s the name that usually gets tied to that. Many would call him the father of logic and reason. I’ll resist my desire to be critical until we conclude our study of history, if you can imagine that.

Brent: Will you?

Marty: I’m showing such self-restraint and discipline. I am hoping that my Western-minded listeners will notice that somewhere around a millennia before this, we lost some things that were absolutely crucial to the health of the Church. While I realize that we’re still enamored with the pillars of Hellenism today, I hope we have learned enough to critically examine just how lost we are 1,000 years after the Judaic movement of Jesus. I digress—or do I? [chuckles] We shall see.

Brent: Well, I think that’ll do it for this episode. A little shorter this time.

Marty: Yes.

Brent: Even more time for the listener to go and study and read.

Marty: To he who has ears…

Brent: I love it.

Marty: …and a printing press, and is literate, and has so many things that God has given us.

Brent: So many advantages we have.

Marty: The Internet.

Brent: It’s fantastic. Well, thank you for joining us on the BEMA Podcast today. If you have any questions, go to bemadiscipleship.com, you can get in touch with us there, and we will talk to you again soon.