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The specter of the "Christian terrorist" presented by the recent capture of accused bomber Eric Rudolph has raised again the old charge of the skeptic: "Why should we be surprised when Christians kill people? They've always done so. Church history itself is the best advertisement against the church."

Christianity's opponents love to use church-historical examples to "prove" that violence is inherent to the Christian church. The favorites are the Crusades and the Inquisitions. The critics ask: Don't such violent blots on the church prove Christians have never followed their Lord's loving, non-violent lead and obeyed the Commandment "Thou shcaption not kill."

In his book The Case for Faith, pastor-apologist Lee Strobel records an interview he conducted with church historian John D. Woodbridge about the Crusades, the Inquisition, and other historical episodes that have provided the church's enemies with so much fodder. Woodbridge was careful to admit that even genuine Christians seeking to serve their Lord have proved capable of violent acts. But he insisted that this is neither within the spirit nor the practice of Christianity as it has been lived over the two millennia since Christ. Here is a quick summary of his responses, as reported by Strobel.

Strobel sets the scene with an eyewitness description of the First Crusade's first hours in Jerusalem. There, at the Temple of Solomon, "men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins." Added the triumphant eyewitness, "It was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it had suffered so long from their blasphemies."

Of course, to Woodbridge, as to Strobel and to us, such horrors were anything but "just and splendid." From the first Crusade, launched by Pope Urban II in 1095, to the last, in 1291, at least some of the crusaders "thought they were doing something magnificent for Christ." The goal, after all, was to retrieve the Holy Land from the Muslims, who (it seemed obvious) were enemies of Christ. However, even such high motives did not keep the Crusaders from indulging in far less noble pursuits. Woodbridge reminds us that in one of the most notorious crusades, the Fourth, "the participants didn't even make it to the Holy Land. They got as far as Constantinople, seized it, and set up their own kingdom. Tremendous bloodshed ensued. Western 'Christians' killed Eastern Christians."

Clearly the Crusades were anything but Christian. From Popes who promised people their salvation if they went on Crusades to transparently bloodthirsty and money-hungry people who used Crusades as an excuse to pillage, these bloody enterprises "made a mockery of the teachings of the Bible and can't in any way be squared with historic Christian beliefs."

What, then, are we to conclude? Woodbridge put it like this: "The Crusades … need to be confessed as being totally contrary to the teachings of the one the crusaders were supposedly following. It's important to remember that it's not Jesus' teachings that are at fault here; it's the actions of those who, for whatever reason, greatly strayed from what he clearly taught: we are to love our enemies."

What, then, of the Inquisition? Here we have an undertaking set up with the highest of theological motives: keeping pure the teachings of the church, and preventing innocent people from being led away from the saving gospel of Christ. How could such goals produce such terrible results?

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