Monthly Archives: November 2022

November 25, 2022

Dan Jones: Powers and Thrones, a New History of the Middle Ages

By Clarke Morledge

In preparation for our 20th wedding anniversary trip to Europe, I knew I had to bone up on some of my Europe Medieval history. The popular British historian, Dan Jones, known for his tattoos on his forearms, had last year published “a New History of the Middle Ages,” as he subtitled it, Powers and Thrones. It did not disappoint.

The Middle Ages are often erroneously called the “Dark Ages,” but that description is not fair. A lot happened during the time span that Dan Jones covers between the sack of Rome in 410, and the later sack of Rome in 1527.

That 1,000+ year period is filled with Romans, Barbarians, Byzantines, Arabs, Franks, Monks, Knights, Crusaders, Mongols, Merchants, Scholars, Builders, Survivors, Renewers, Navigators, and Protestants, as Jones lays out in his chapters. The primary reason the label “Dark Ages” is still hard to shake off is because we have less written sources to work with during the first half of that era, as compared to the previous era of when the Roman Empire was at its greatest.

Yet Dan Jones manages to tell an engrossing story, giving the reader the flow of this immensely important era of European history. I gained a better appreciation of how just brutal the Monguls were, while ironically and simultaneously prefiguring the current age of cultural pluralism. Who knew that many medieval Christians at first mistakenly imagined Genghis Khan to be a new “King David,” who might push back against the scourge of the growth of Islam? But most interestingly, climate change, technological revolution, and pandemics play a significant part in the whole story, topics that sound eerily contemporary post-2020.

Veste Oberhaus, a castle overlooking the city of Passau, Germany, on the Danube River. The current structure was built in the late 15th century, and hosts a marvelous museum today. (photo credit: Clarke Morledge)

During our trip to Europe, I saw plenty of castles and cathedrals, resulting from the great building programs Jones describes from the medieval period. Admittedly, I did see attestation to the darkest sides of this period, as evidences of anti-semitism abounded in nearly every major city my wife and I visited. But the 16th century marks a clear break in Europe’s history, as any visitor to continental Europe can confirm. Beyond the fall of the Roman Empire, it could be fairly stated that the coming of Martin Luther, the age of the printing press, and the exploration of the Americas signaled the end of the Middle Ages.

Alas, as with any sweeping survey of history, I have some complaints with Dan Jones retelling, from my Protestant evangelical perspective. The work of any historian is by the very nature of the field selective, and so how the story is framed tells you a lot about the worldview bent of the historian.

Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the most influential Christian preachers during the early 12th century, and one of the most saintly figures of the age, comes across as wholly hostile to academic freedom in his condemnation of the progressive theology of Peter Abelard. I got the impression that the Christian movement somehow suddenly discovered for the first time the value of women under the reign of the 6th century Byzantine emperor Justinian, through the influence of the empress Theodora. Towards the end of the book, Christopher Columbus initially comes across as an insightful missionary to the American peoples, only to be revealed eventually as a liar and colonialist oppressor, willing to use every underhanded means necessary to gain converts…. and profits. The ultimately secular orientation of Dan Jones implies that just about for every minute advance of Christianity in the medieval world along with it came a devastating catastrophe for at least someone.

To be fair, the doctrinal controversies with the Christian church, in an era when religious commitments were tightly welded to political realities, often had horrific consequences. The fact that Alaric, the Hun who first sacked Rome in 410, the seat of the orthodox papacy, was a professing anti-Nicene-anti-Trinitarian Arian Christian does make one think twice about the theological role Trinitarian thought plays in Christianity today, something that most Christians never even consider. Pair that with the fact that Holy Roman Emperor Charles V employed Lutheran-sympathizing German mercenaries in his 1527 sack of Rome, then you get the sense that the theological conflicts within Christianity even today carry with them great power to indelibly change the lives of many people.

Nevertheless, the advantage of reading such a broad history as found in Powers and Thrones is that it inspires one to dig into some of the stories Dan Jones brings up in greater detail to gain a better understanding of historical context. Consider the story of empress Theodora, noted briefly above, and her efforts to encourage her husband, the 6th century Byzantine emperor Justinian, to uphold the value of women. Though Theodora had the history of being a prostitute, having come from a very lower class background, she became a big advocate of marriage, viewing it as the “holiest of all institutions,” a tip towards her Christian convictions as empress. Roman law was changed to allow marriages between men and women of different social classes. Dowry was described as being “strictly necessary,” in contrast to a more traditional view that made dowry essential to marriage. Justinian’s law stated that “mutual affection is what creates a marriage.” Justinian and Theodora made it more difficult for men to divorce their wives for frivolous reasons. The killing of adulterous wives was strictly forbidden.

These type of legal reforms may seem obvious to us today, but in the 6th century, these ways of elevating the status of women were unheard of in any comparable civilized society. This was a clear indication that far from being anti-woman, the Christian movement that had only gained cultural ascendancy a mere two hundred years earlier had managed to reshape popular Roman views of women, that would have scandalized the earlier cultures of Roman paganism. It would have been more helpful if Dan Jones had given the reader more context here, but I am glad that in reading Powers and Thrones it encouraged me to dig a little deeper into the historical context myself.

But such critique of a general historical survey is to be expected and should not in any way diminish the artful way that Dan Jones tells his “new history.” Powers and Thrones entertains just as well as it educates. This is a fantastic historical survey of an immensely important time period, and a good model for how such sweeping histories should be done. Highly recommended. Dan Jones also narrates the Audible audiobook version, which makes it even better. A good way to spend about 25 hours worth of time, such as I did, including on a long plane flight to Europe!

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November 23, 2022

The Stain of Antisemitism in “Christian” Europe

By Clarke Morledge

Our three-week journey across Europe this fall was fantastic. However, there were sobering moments. The most disturbing part that I learned about was the pervasive stain of antisemitism in Europe’s Christian history.

While my wife and I were away from the United States, the celebrity rapper Kanye West made a number of bizarre antisemitic comments , apparently cobbled together from conversations the singer/artist has had with Louis Farrakhan, that led to various corporate sponsors abandoning commercial agreements with Kanye, in an effort to distance themselves from the popular-rapper-turned-born-again Christian (since I originally wrote the rough draft for this post, some apologists are now saying that Kanye has been flirting with the theology of the Black Hebrew Israelites movement. Hear more about it on the Dallas Seminary Table Podcast, or with apologists Mike Winger and Allen Parr).

Christians and traditional Jews do not have the same view of Jesus, and that difference is significant. But Christians owe a tremendous debt to the Jewish people, for Jesus himself was Jewish. Sadly, extreme examples in European church history demonstrate that some have forgotten this simple truth.

Such incidents may seem rare in the 21st century, but in medieval Europe right up through the period of Nazi Germany, antisemitism poked up its ugly head far too many times. On our trip down the Danube River, our first stop was in Regensburg, Germany. We heard from a guide that the persecution of Jews there goes back at least to stories during the Crusade era of the late 11th century, when wandering bands of Crusade enthusiasts ransacked Jewish homes and businesses. Some church bishops thankfully offered sanctuary for their Jewish neighbors, but within centuries, anti-Jewish sentiment was stirred up again.

In the late 15th century, the preaching of a Bavarian Dominican preacher, Peter Nigri, led to the confiscation of Jewish property in Regensburg. But Roman Catholic leaders have not been the only ones to stir up persecution against Jews.

A generation later in 1519, another preacher in Regensburg, Balthasar Hubmaier, called for the expulsion of Jews from the city, an event that led to the destruction of the local Jewish cemetery and the turning of a Jewish synagogue into a church as Jews fled the city. Within a few years, Hubmaier got married, even though he was a medieval priest, and joined up with the Anabaptist cause, having himself re-baptized, actions that not only put him in bad relations with the Roman church, but also with Ulrich Zwingli, the leader of the Swiss Reformation. He and his wife were shortly thereafter martyred for their Anabaptist faith. Whether or not Hubmaier eventually repented of his mistreatment of Jews is unknown to me, but the mark he left on Regensburg’s Jewish community remains to this day.

When the Jewish cemetery in Regensburg was destroyed as a result of Hubmaier’s preaching, various citizens of the city took the gravestones and reused them in various building projects. One gravestone was set underneath the floor of a room used as a toilet, as seen in the following photograph, an obvious insult to a Jewish person.

Jewish gravestone placed underneath a toilet in a Regensburg, Germany home, after Jews were expelled from the city in the early 16th century. Expand the photo to see the Hebrew lettering more clearly (photo credit: Clarke Morledge)

 

Now, why would someone claiming to be a Christian do such a thing?

The great cathedral of St. Peter’s Church, in Regensburg, an otherwise beautiful building, has a strong hint of antisemitism embedded in one of its outward walls. Someone had carved a sculpture of three Jews sucking from a pig, looking in the direction of the old Jewish synagogue.

What an insult. Hardly Christ-honoring. Where was the church’s bishop when this sculpture was placed on the side of this otherwise glorious church building? Why did he not put a stop to such nonsense?

Reminders of Europe’s antisemitic past like these are sprinkled across Europe. For example, in Prague, in the Czech Republic, a Jewish ghetto was formed in the 13th century, when Jews were told to vacate their homes and live in one particular area of the city. While Jews were allowed during the day to traverse the city, at night a curfew was placed on the Jews that kept them inside their Jewish Quarter. Even as Jews were expelled from other areas of Europe, like Spain in the late 15th century, such Jews made their way to more tolerant cities like Prague, but they still had to live in these prescribed areas.

Entrance into the Jewish Quarter in Prague. Note the Jewish town hall clocks, where the top clock is displayed with Roman numerals and the bottom clock is displayed in Hebrew (photo credit: Clarke Morledge).

 

But nothing  compares to the utter brutality experienced by Europe’s Jewry during the Nazi years of World War II. At the beginning of the war, when Hitler’s German army occupied Prague, there were some 92,000 Jews living in this section of the city. But by the end of World War II, nearly 60,000 of those Jews had been killed, many of them in concentration camps, like Auschwitz, in neighboring Poland to the north. Today, less than 5,000 Jews live in Prague, though ironically the Jewish Quarter in Prague is considered to be the “hip” place to live in the city.

Just one more example of antisemitism on display in Prague’s history….. The following photo is one of many statues that populate the sides of the Charles Bridge, one of the most iconic places in all of the Europe, where many thousands of visitors walk across every year. At first glance, you see a picture of the crucified Jesus. As a Christian, I was quite impressed with this… until I looked a bit closer, and learned the whole story behind it. The sculpture itself has  gone through several revisions over the centuries.

Calvary Statue. Charles Bridge, Prague, Czech Republic. Original metal versions, 1657. Sandstone figures off to the sides, 1861. Bronze plaques added in 2000. More information here. (photo credit: Clarke Morledge)

 

If you look closer, the head of Christ is surrounded with Hebrew letters. The rough translation into English is “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of Hosts,” from the Jewish prayer, the Kedushah.

In my ignorance as a Christian, this is a pretty interesting and encouraging thing to see…  until you hear the backstory about it.  In 1696, a Jewish community leader, Elias Backoffen, was forced to pay for the gold-plated lettering, as a punishment for an alleged act of blasphemy, committed by another Jewish businessman. In other words, this was not a voluntary act of devotion to Christ, but rather it was a forced act of humiliation, for which Prague’s Jews had to look at for the next 300 years whenever they crossed the Charles Bridge, over the Vltava River.

In 2000, bronze plaques were affixed below the crucifix (hard to read from the photo), with explanatory text in Czech, English and Hebrew. In English, they roughly say, “‘The addition to the statue of the Hebrew inscription and the explanatory texts from 1696 is the result of improper court proceedings against Elias Backoffen, who was accused of mocking the Holy Cross.’ The addition to the Hebrew inscription, ‘which represents a very important expression of faith in the Jewish tradition, was supposed to humiliate the Jewish Community.’ It is signed ‘The City of Prague.’

Wow.

Some might protest that leaving these reminders of antisemitism up for public display is a bad idea, that they “celebrate” beliefs and behaviors that most everyone in a post-Hitler world would find abhorrent. I disagree. Rather, they should remain available for people to see for the exact opposite reason: that they should remind us that sinful humanity has the awful tendency to forget the sins of previous generations, and thereby end up repeating those same sins later on.

It is difficult to understand how such blatant acts of antisemitism went unanswered for centuries in a land which was so dominated by Christian devotion, along with its impressive church architecture, drawing one’s attention to the Glory of God. Anglican theologian Gerald McDermott has a response to this that I find quite helpful. A lot of our Bible translations have given rise to the wrong ideas about the Jews of Jesus’ day. While we all know that Jesus was indeed a Jew, he received a lot of opposition from the “Jews.”

In one rather unsettling passage, Jesus says to the “Jews” who challenge him:

Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word.You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies (John 8:43-44 ESV).

It is passages like these that were badly misinterpreted, often taken out of context and prompted various church goers in medieval Europe to call out “the Jews” as “Christ-killers,” as they exited their churches to go taunting their Jewish neighbors.

But professor McDermott makes the point that misleading Bible translations have been a big part of the problem. For example, the phrase “the Jews,” as found in many of these passages in various translations comes from the Greek term, “Iudaioi.” That word can also be translated as “Judeans,” that is, in this context, the leaders of the Jewish community in Jerusalem, the capital of Judea.

When Jesus had his earthly ministry, many Jews lived all across the Roman Empire, and not just in “Judea,” proper. Furthermore, to speak of “Judeans” is lot like talking about those in Washington, D.C., who make decisions for Americans. It simply is not true that the American political statespersons in Washington D.C. represent the viewpoints of everyone living in Washington. In the same way, it makes better sense to translate “Iudaioi” as “Jewish leaders,” instead of the overly broad designation as “the Jews.” Besides, nearly all of the earliest followers of Jesus were Jews themselves, in contrast with the Jewish leaders in Judea, who opposed Jesus’ ministry.

Consider therefore, the immediately following passage from John 8, which in the ESV reads:

The Jews answered him, “Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?” (John 8:48 ESV).

Professor McDermott’s suggestion is that we modify “the Jews” translation of “Iudaioi” with better clarity as “the Jewish leaders” instead:

The Jewish leaders answered him, “Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?” (John 8:48).

Not only does a reading like this avoid the stain of antisemitism, it makes better sense when reading the passage. It avoids the temptation to want to lump all Jews in the same category, when the Gospels make it abundantly clear that many Jews were indeed, not only sympathetic, but also enthusiastic followers of Jesus as their Messiah.

For years, I tended to dismiss complaints from non-Christians that Christianity harbored antisemitic elements in certain elements of the faith. After all, anyone who is truly Christian would never be antisemitic. My reasoning had been that opponents of Christianity will say and do anything to discredit the Gospel, including making false charges of “antisemitism.” There is still some truth to this, as some critics of the Christian faith will tend to focus on antisemitism as a reason for rejecting the Christian faith outright, which is not a fair representation of what most Christians have believed over the centuries.

About four years ago, I read and reviewed several books that touched on this topic, Joel Richardson’s When a Jew Rules the World, and in tandem, Paula Fredriksens’ magisterial Augustine and the Jews, along with a shorter work, Barry Horner’s Future Israel: Why Christian Anti-Judaism Must Be Challenged. I admit that a lot of the points raised in those works about anti-Judaic teachings being promoted at various times in church history seemed fairly suspicious to me. But after this year’s visit to Europe, and seeing quite a bit of this antisemitic history for myself, I find myself more grieved by such occasional teachings by even some of my favorite theological heroes. Such writing and preaching enabled antisemitic thinking, at least among certain segments of the Christian community, more so than I had imagined before.

While it helps to always remind ourselves that Jesus was a Jew, and that his most prominent followers in those early years, like the Apostle Paul, were Jews as well, we should do more than that, and be more vigilant in rooting out anti-Judaic sentiments as Christians. It is quite evident that Jews and Christians have a number of differing beliefs, as genuine Christians believe that Jesus is indeed the promised Messiah of the Jews, and that traditional Jews are still waiting for their Messiah to come, and therefore reject Christian claims about Jesus’ messianic status.

This is obviously a significant theological barrier that simply can not be ignored or waved off as unimportant. We should never trivialize such differences. I still want to engage my Jewish friends with the claims of the Gospel that Jesus is indeed that True Messiah that they have been waiting for these many, many generations. Many “Messianic Jews” and “Completed Jews,” as they are sometimes called, have come to discover that wonderful truth about Jesus.

But this is a far cry from the sad examples from church history, where Jews have been forced to live in segregated communities, expelled from cities, and having their cemeteries destroyed, all in the name of promoting certain extreme preachings popularized in certain segments of the Christian world. Being forced to pay for and sponsoring works of Christian art, that spring not from a voluntary act of worship, but rather as way of humiliating people, is something that we as believers should strongly condemn. Even if a popular rapper spreads lies about Jewish people, we as followers of the True Messiah, should take no part in such coarse and unguarded speech.

Instead, we should lovingly point others to the way of humility in following after Jesus, and giving God all of the honor and the glory and the praise, and not allow our petty agendas to distort how we view others, for whom our Savior and Lord died.

 

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November 11, 2022

Defenestration of Prague & The Thirty Years War

By Clarke Morledge

My wife and I had the privilege of traveling in Europe for three weeks. Six countries: Germany, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, and Italy. Seven, if you include an airplane switch in Zurich, Switzerland.

The main event was to see the Passion Play in Oberammergau, in southern Germany. But it was followed by an 8-day cruise down the Danube, from Regensburg, Germany to Budapest, Hungary. But what I want to blog about here is something I saw the next three days after the cruise, while touring in Prague, in the Czech Republic. So, make this the third post, in a multipart series looking at church history in Europe.

The Defenestration Window, at Prague Castle, where the Thirty Years War began. Several Roman Catholic representatives of the royal governorship were pushed out of the top window of this building, in protest over mistreatment of Protestant subjects.

The Prague Castle is a large complex of buildings overlooking the capital city of today’s Czech Republic, Prague. I had to ask our Czech guide where to find this particular spot, but I was interested in learning where the Thirty Years War technically started. I found it and took the snapshot above.

The Thirty Years War (1618-1648) devastated Europe. For nearly a century after Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door at the Wittenberg Church, the Protestant Reformation led to upheaval nearly all over the continent. Europe became divided between Roman Catholic and Protestant areas. The basic way this all happened was that each particular monarch or city-state would essentially declare what form of Christian worship would be permitted within that particular territory.

This was several centuries before the American Founding Fathers enshrined the concept of religious freedom within a governing document, so there was no room for dissension from any government decision. In other words, whatever the government decided the form of worship should be in a particular territory, then people living in that territory must comply…. or else!

But by 1618, the whole solution became unmanageable. For example, let us say that one particular sovereign declared their land or country to be Roman Catholic. There still were wealthy landowners in that country who were persuaded of the Protestant cause. Would they be forced to worship in a Roman Catholic Church? What about church lands that were being stewarded by certain benefactors? Would the right to earn monies from farming being done on those lands be taken away from benefactors with Protestant convictions?  The same type of questions would come up for Roman Catholics living in Protestant areas.

Once one’s personal convictions began to impact the pocketbook, then frustration easily resulted. It did and had serious consequences in 1618, when political power brokers got involved. Some 7% of the land in Central Europe was at one time property of the medieval church, much of it stewarded by church benefactors, which fits in this ambiguous category, which caused all sorts of tension throughout Europe.

The tension came to a head when a group of Protestant landowners met with royal governing authorities representing the Habsburg royal family, who were advocates for the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation efforts in Bohemia, surrounding Prague. Protestantism had grown greatly in Bohemia, dating back to the days of Jan Hus and his protests in the early 15th century. Instead, the Habsburgs wanted to reinstitute Roman Catholic worship throughout their realm, and Prague was under the domain of the soon-to-be new Habsburg emperor, Ferdinand II. Several Protestant leaders protested against the Habsburg policies and were subsequently arrested. When the Habsburg governors were challenged to release the prisoners, the governors refused to budge.

On May 23, 1618, these Protestant landowners staged a mass demonstration at Prague Castle. They argued with the royal governors, and pushed three Roman Catholic representatives out the third story of window of Prague Castle (above where I am standing in the photo above). This is known as one of the Defenestrations of Prague, in which “defenestrate” means to push someone out of a window.

Depiction of the Defenestration of Prague that precipitated the start of the Thirty Years War.

To the benefit of the victims, they survived the fall. My guide told me one version of the story, that they were saved by landing in a pile of manure at the bottom of the building below the window. That is probably the Protestant version of the story, as another version says that the Virgin Mary miraculously intervened and saved the men from their deaths. Nevertheless, and needless to say, the Roman Catholic governing authorities were not thrilled by this action. Both sides left the meeting intent on building up armies.

Two years later, the Protestant forces were defeated at the Battle of White Mountain, which effectively ended the Protestant revolt in Bohemia. But it was merely the first of many conflicts throughout Central Europe. Eventually, the Thirty Years War evolved from being a Protestant/Catholic conflict to a very complicated affair with alliances that crossed confessional boundaries, intent on settling old scores and exacerbating rivalries. Armies as far as Sweden rushed in across Central Europe, spreading disease with the troop movements, even threatening the small Bavarian village of Oberammergau (the topic of the first blog post in this series).

By the time the Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648, very little had changed in terms of who controlled what and where. The whole region was exhausted of war. Religious concerns gave way to nationalistic concerns, as the unity of the Holy Roman Empire had effectively crumbled, and different nation/states had formed all across Europe.

Roughly one out of four Europeans had been killed by either disease or battle. Tired of religious disputes, the European world had by then become preoccupied with nationalistic aims and concerns, and the days of European colonialism were in full swing, as new areas across the world, from India to the Americas, gained the attention of Europeans hoping to extend the influence of their native lands and cultures… and take their minds off of intra-European issues. Europe would not experience another major military calamity until Napoleon campaigned across these same lands in the name of Enlightenment nationalism in the early 19th century.

Gone were the days when a united Christian faith, at least under the oversight of the church in Rome, held the glue together for Western society. Denominationalism has since become the defining factor of the Western church.

You can still feel a sense of the Thirty Years War’s impact in the Czech Republic. Another Czech tour guide told me that there is a tragic connection between the religious strife of the Thirty Years War and the loss of Christian faith among most Czech people. For example, according to a 2021 census, for 70 percent of citizens who responded to the question about their religious beliefs, approximately 48 percent held none, 10 percent were Roman Catholic, 13 percent listed no specific religion, and 9 percent identified with a variety of religious faiths, Protestant evangelical being among that last group. For a country which was once the cradle of Gospel-driven Christianity in Europe in the 15th century, that is a sad statistic.

Lessons learned: denominationalism was never intended by God to happen in Christ’s church. But the combination of denominationalism and forced religious observance of a particular denomination is a recipe for disaster. Be thankful for religious freedom!! Nevertheless, we should use that freedom to engage in dialogue with other believers in Jesus, who do not read the Bible exactly the way we do. Better to learn how to have “impossible conversations” than trying to settle theological and worldview issues with weapons that kill!!!

My “postcard” photo of Prague Castle, looking across the river, with the famous Charles Bridge in front. Click on the photo to get the full impact. You can make out the “defenestration” window, just below the middle of where the cathedral is.

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