Recently, a group of Christian leaders, mostly missionaries to the Muslim world, gathered in Jerusalem, at the spot where 900 years earlier Christian knights and soldiers stormed the walls. They read historical accounts of the Jerusalem massacre. Then they formally apologized for the Crusades. I apologize for their apology.
Not because I’m a cheerleader for the Crusades. I cringe when I think of the centuries of slaughter and pillaging done in the name of Christ, with the blessing of the church. I’m saddened by what Muslims and heretics suffered. As philosopher David Hume put it, the Crusades stand as a “durable monument to human folly.”
But it’s too easy, when we repudiate actions of Christians of other times and places, to subtly repudiate those Christians. They become the distant uncle with the dark and troubled past—someone we don’t talk about. And when we’re forced to, we shift nervously and turn a little red.
For too long, modern Christians have assumed the crusaders are not spiritual parents but distant uncles: “If these crusaders were real Christians, they wouldn’t have done such a thing!”
But the crusaders were real Christians. They deplored their sins. They longed for forgiveness. They loved fellow Christians in the East. They yearned to do something noble and lasting for their Lord. They prayed and fasted before battles and praised God after victories. Their devotion and courage make ours look juvenile.
So much of what they did was wrong. Yes, and all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. So there’s little point in becoming judgmental. Better to try to understand the crusaders in the context of their times.
This issue focuses on crusades to the Holy Land, made between 1096 and 1291, especially on the First Crusade. But church-sponsored military action, with an indulgence attached, continued against unbelievers and bad believers (heretics) through the sixteenth century. Some historians, as you’ll see in our interview, suggest that in parts of Christendom today, crusading is alive and well.
We present you, then, with a movement and a time in which the good, the bad, and the ugly mingled, when Christian men and women did wonderful and horrible things, when they desperately loved God and neighbor and yet fell so short, as do all of us.
Copyright © 1993 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine. Click here for reprint information on Christian History.
