WWUTT 135 Q&A What About the Crusades and the Inquisitions?

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The history of the church is just ruined by the Crusades and the Inquisitions, right? How can anybody call themselves a
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Christian after all of that? Well, you will not have to answer for the Crusades, but you will have to answer for your sin when we understand the text.
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Many of the Bible stories and verses we think we know, we don't. When we understand the text is an online ministry committed to teaching sound doctrine and exposing the faulty.
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Visit our website at www .utt .com. Now here's our host, Pastor Gabe Hughes.
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Thank you, Becky. I've had a few questions about the kids. How are they doing? They're well. No sickness.
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We're all healthy. I hope we can stay that way for longer than just a few days this time.
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But thank you for your prayers and concerns. They are greatly appreciated. I had the chance last night to go see the movie
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Risen, a film starring Joseph Fiennes. He plays a Roman soldier who is tasked with investigating the disappearance of Jesus' body.
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Where did it go? Did he rise from the dead? Or did the disciples run off with it? I thought the film was absolutely terrible.
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And I wrote about it in my blog, so you can find the full article there, PastorGabeHughes .blogspot .com.
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That's not right. PastorGabeHughes .blogspot .com. There you go. It's not an email address.
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It's a blogspot page, blogger page, but it's still blogspot. It's blogger, but it's blogspot. I've never understood that.
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Anyway, okay, we're answering a question today. It's Friday, so we're taking a question from a listener slash viewer.
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This doesn't have to do with a what video, but rather the absence of a video, because Mark in Tucson, Arizona, I guess wanted to know why we don't have a video about the
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Crusades or the Inquisitions. He says, hello, I love your ministry, and I have been extremely blessed by your videos and broadcasts.
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I mean, podcasts. Clever, Mark. You've been listening for a while. I appreciate that.
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I was hoping you could do a video or a podcast on the Inquisitions. I'm often confronted with what about the
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Inquisitions? How can Christianity be the right religion if it kills so many people? It's no different than any other religion.
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Thank you so much and keep up the great work. Well, Mark, I appreciate your email. Now, I'm going to go ahead and assume that you mean not only the
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Inquisitions, but also the Crusades, because it was this time a year ago, February last year.
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At the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama talked about the Crusades and the Inquisitions.
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He talked about how humanity has been grappling for ages with the tension between good and bad deeds done in the name of religion.
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And he talked about Christian love and ethics. But then he added this caveat, lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place.
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Remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.
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And he said Inquisition singular, but there was actually more than one Inquisition. It's one of those things that you'd almost think it's a fool's errand to contest.
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To defend the Crusades is like defending the Holocaust, right? But I'd lay money down that most people who make this argument, including our president, no disrespect,
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I just think this is the case. Most of those people couldn't even give you a CliffsNotes summary of the
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Crusades or the Inquisitions. All we know is that people died and the church had something to do with it.
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Now, a simple response, Mark, would be this. When somebody says, what about the
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Inquisitions? Well, then try them on it. Say, OK, what about them? And maybe add, what were the
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Inquisitions? Put it on them. See if, you know, if they're going to make the comparison, make them own it.
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See if they actually even know what they're talking about. But you yourself need to know at least some basics about the Crusades and the
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Inquisitions to see if this person has actually thought this response through or if they're just full of hot air.
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I'd also encourage you not to have this discussion on the Internet. Most every argument online turns into a search drill rather than an opportunity to mutually encourage one another.
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You're predisposed to disagree. You've got Google at your fingertips. So whatever the other person says, you're going to search for the best answer to present in disagreement or it becomes a link war.
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Whoever has the best links wins. If anything else, though, this needs to come back to the gospel.
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No matter what kind of debate we engage in with skeptics, it's got to come back to the gospel, which is the power of God for salvation to all who believe
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Romans 1 16. Winning an argument about the Crusades is not going to make anyone a
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Christian. They need to hear about their sin and that Christ has saved them from their sin.
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And whoever believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life. But let's say that you do get into a debate about the
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Crusades or the Inquisitions. What sort of facts do we need to know so that we sound like we know what we're talking about?
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In order of historical occurrence, I'll hit the Crusades first and then we'll get to the Spanish Inquisitions here.
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So the the word crusade comes from the Latin crusae signati, which means those signed by the cross.
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That should make any secular use of the word crusade mildly humorous to the person who knows its meaning.
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Like when somebody says we're on a crusade for adult literacy, you can say so you're bound by the cross of Christ to teach adults how to read.
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All right. Anyway, the Crusades began in 1096 with the first crusade and went through the fifth crusade that began in 1221 and went pretty much through the
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Protestant Reformation. In his book, The New Concise History of the Crusades, which is a concise book, by the way, it's only 225 pages long.
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I would highly recommend that you pick it up. Thomas F. Madden is the author, and he begins his history lesson in the book with Islamic Jihad and the influence
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Mohammed had on the expansion of Islam, converting the heathen through war. Now, from Mohammed to the
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Reformation, Muslims conquered three fourths of Christian lands. Madden begins talking about the
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Crusades this way because it's what prompted the Crusades, the violent spread of Islam. He makes the point that the
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Crusades were not the Christian equivalent of a holy war. Christianity was too fragmented to centralize around a fundamental doctrine.
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Very few crusaders considered their mission to be evangelistic. The main goal was to reclaim lands that had been taken by Muslims and defend those who had been overrun and captured by Muslim armies.
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Imagine if ISIS sacked Washington, D .C., and the caliphate sat in the
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White House killing thousands of D .C. residents. And they began to sweep through the United States from east to west, conquering as they went.
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Would you consider it unjust for Americans as far away as the West Coast from different factions and different walks of life?
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Would you object to them taking up arms and reclaiming our nation in the capital, putting our enemies to death?
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Well, that's basically the first crusade, and it was a huge success, reclaiming two of the best defended cities in the world,
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Antioch and Jerusalem. Now, sure, there are going to be Americans in that fight who end up doing some brutal things.
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War is hell, as it's been said. Some might even claim to fight Muslims in some kind of holy conquest.
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And we're going to have some leaders standing up and saying that Christ compels us to fight, leafing out false propaganda to gain recruits.
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And that happened with the Crusades also. But there would also be many well -meaning individuals giving up land and title, investing their fortunes and defending those who had been conquered and reclaiming lost lands.
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Now, the idea that brutal crusaders attack peaceful Muslims, that comes from Sir Walter Scott's novel
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The Talisman and Sir Stephen Runciman's History of the Crusades. Runciman's three volume series concludes with this line.
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The Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the
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Holy Ghost. That's not to say that all of Scott and Runciman's portrayal of barbarism wasn't without merit.
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Kevin DeYoung, with the Gospel Coalition, he writes the following. The Crusades were often barbaric and often produced spectacular failures.
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Children died needlessly. Coalitions splintered endlessly. Jews were sometimes persecuted mercilessly.
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Ancient cities were ransacked foolishly. And on occasion, infidels were forced to convert or die while the crusaders holding the swords were guaranteed immortality.
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In short, many of the Christians who went to war under the sign of the cross conducted themselves as if they knew nothing of the
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Christ of the cross. Brutal and unnecessary. Yes, the Crusades were definitely that, particularly the later
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Crusades and a colossal failure. The Roman Catholic Church in particular is greatly to blame.
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For some of the false propaganda that they put forth to keep the Crusades in swing for so long. But the Christian equivalent of Jihad, they were not.
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The Crusades were a response to the violent spread of Islam. That's what you can know about the
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Crusades. OK, so that's that. Here's the inquisitions. And this is something
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I'm going to be a lot less defensive of because this was strictly a Roman Catholic thing to combat heresy or basically what what they thought was heresy.
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It was really just anything that was against what the Roman Catholic Church taught. Some Protestants were were even put on trial for this because the
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Roman Catholic Church expanded the inquisitions once the Protestant Reformation came into play.
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The inquisitions occurred at four different times in four different areas. The medieval or the Episcopal Inquisition that was in 1184 to 1230, the
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Spanish Inquisition in 1478, the Portuguese Inquisition in 1536, and then the
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Roman Inquisition in 1542, which then continued on into the 17th century.
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Of these four, the Spanish Inquisition is perhaps the most infamous. Some have estimated the loss of life to be in the millions.
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But I really think that's an extrapolated figure. Most historians put the number tried to about three hundred and fifty thousand people.
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That's just the number that appeared at trial. About 10 percent of them were executed. Thirty five thousand and roughly two thousand of those executed were burned at the stake.
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The Roman Inquisition is famous for the trial and condemnation of Galileo Galilei.
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That was in 1633. The thing he was being tried for was his belief in heliocentrism, proposing that the earth revolves around the sun rather than the heavenly bodies around the earth.
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And the Roman Catholic Church considered heliocentrism to be heresy.
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But here's the thing. The Roman Catholics were the ones embracing naturalism, not
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Galileo. He was on the side of Christ as creator. The Roman Catholic Church was not geocentrism, which is the idea that the universe revolved around the earth, was proposed by Claudius Ptolemy, a naturalist who lived in Rome in the second century.
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The church adopted his teaching rather than understanding the teachings of the scriptures.
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And Ptolemy was the guy who estimated that were that there were only 1600 stars in the sky because he went outside and tried to count them.
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The Bible says that the stars are innumerable and science has confirmed that to be the case.
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Galileo studied the earth and the universe in light of what is said in the Bible, not the ramblings of false church leaders.
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So the inquisitions were anti -biblical. And that's the way that we should understand them. They're not to be defended.
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The Roman Catholic Church was following secular humanist and naturalistic ideals, not
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Christian ones. I was just reading an article yesterday in The New York Post about Twitter changing their policies regarding censorship.
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And in doing so, they've already started the process of silencing conservative voices.
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It's only a matter of time before Christians will become some of those voices that get stifled, even having their
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Twitter accounts shut down. That's closer to being like the inquisitions than anything you see happening right now in the
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Protestant church. They're secular persuasions with no biblical warrant.
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So there you go. That's the inquisitions. But again, even when we're talking about the crusades or the inquisitions, we've always got to bring this back to the gospel.
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Tell a person about their sin and that it's not the not the crusade. You know, they're not going to be able to appear before the throne of God one day and say, well,
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I just didn't believe because God, the crusades or God, the inquisitions. God is going to say to them, depart from me, you worker of lawlessness.
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I never knew you. And they will be consigned to hell for all eternity. They don't need to hear an answer for the crusades or the inquisitions.
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They need to hear the gospel of Jesus Christ. Only that has the power to save.
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Mark, thank you so much for your email. If you would like to submit a question, the address is when we understand the text at gmail dot com.
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God bless. We get into the doctrine of original sin on Monday as we continue our study of the book of Romans.
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You can find a complete list of videos, books, devotionals and other resources online at www .utt