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CHRISTIAN JIHAD by Ergun Mehmet Caner and Emir Fethi Caner, Kregel, 192 pp.; $12.99

In a recent online commentary, I asked, "Is Islam a religion of peace?" After evaluating the violent history and teachings of Islam, as well as some encouraging recent developments, I answered (charitably, I thought), Not yet.

I didn't get any arguments about my conclusion, but I did get some pointed responses from Christians about an unspoken premise: that Christianity is a more pacific faith than is Islam. Pointing to violence perpetrated in the name of Christ down through the last two millennia, they asked whether Christianity is any better.

A new book, Christian Jihad (Kregel, 2004), by Ergun Mehmet Caner, of Liberty University, and Emir Fethi Caner, of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, examines this uncomfortable question. The authors bring an unusual perspective to the task. Two former Muslims who now follow Christ, the Caners have drawn international attention for their tough critiques of Islam in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Now, in a clear attempt at intellectual balance, they have exposed to the light what many Christians would no doubt prefer to be left in darkness: the propensity of professed followers of the Prince of Peace to advance and maintain the faith through brutality. In a day in which Islamic extremism terrorizes millions, the Caners have issued a call for Christian humility, knowing that we have traveled much the same violent path. The Muslims' impulse to holy war is doubly horrible for us—horrible because of the slaughter done in the name of God, and horrible because of the self-recognition it ought to produce.

"True authenticity demands that we denounce acts in history in which innocent non-believers were slaughtered for the sole crime of being a non-believer," they write in the introduction. "True authenticity demands that we confront and learn from dark chapters in the past."

The book scans the gamut of ecclesiastical history, from the days of the early church, when Christians were persecuted as dangerous sects or ignored as theological oddballs, through the merging of temporal and spiritual power that began with Constantine. The authors survey the gradual evolution of Christian involvement in war from pacifism (A.D. 30-300) to participation (150-325), from Augustine's Just War doctrine to Christian jihad in the Crusades, from Catholic inquisitions of "heretics" to persecutions of the Anabaptists endorsed by the Protestant Reformers.

Indeed, the saddest and most painful chapter in the book for evangelicals must be the one entitled "Magisterial Mayhem: When a State-run Church Leads to Blood in the Streets." When I was a new Christian, I sloughed off the usual diatribes against Christianity that used the Inquisition and the Crusades as clubs with which to batter the reputation of the faith. After all, I reasoned, these admittedly dark deeds were carried out by Roman Catholics, who did not have much of the Spirit; they had so encrusted the Bible with man-made interpretations that it is no wonder they descended into barbarity.

But what can we say of the barbarity of Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, who cracked down mercilessly on the radical Anabaptists and other dissenters after risking their own lives for religious liberty? Remember, the Reformers were men who recovered the primacy of Spirit-inspired Scripture for the church, yet, disturbingly, their more pure faith did not inoculate them from the virus of Christian jihad.

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January (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49