Tag Archives: philip jenkins

September 30, 2022

Divine Violence and the Character of God: by Claude Mariottini. A Review

By Clarke Morledge

I had not planned on reading a book on violence in the Bible this year. Then came the crisis in the Ukraine.

Those who know Russian history and Vladimir Putin will tell you that Putin’s reasoning behind the “special military operation” in Ukraine is an effort to revive that ancient vision of a Holy Orthodox Russia, Ukrainians and Russians together as one people, with Moscow at its ecclessial and political center.  Many devout Eastern Orthodox Christians are divided on this perspective, some being on one side and some on the other. But apparently Vladimir Putin accepts this narrative wholeheartedly, and he is willing to commit military boots on the ground to fulfill this vision.

Within a few weeks after the start of the war in the Ukraine, which began in February, 2022, the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill gave a sermon that a number of analysts have interpreted as sanctioning Putin’s efforts to take over Ukraine. Kirill cited what he understood to be “a test of loyalty to [a] new world order… the world of excess consumption, the world of false ‘freedom’.” In particularly, Kirill singled out the Gay Pride parade, which has become a large annual event in the Ukraine, as that litmus test of loyalty. The annual June event was relocated from Kyiv to Poland this year, due to the war. In Patriarch Kirill’s words, “If humanity starts believing that sin is not a violation of God’s law, if humanity agrees that sin is one of the options for human behavior, then human civilization will end there.”

Reconciling conflicted branches of Christianity, as between the Ukrainian and Russian Orthodox churches, is something that every Christian should pray and strive for. Furthermore, many Christians like myself, including many Eastern Orthodox ones, will agree with the Russian Patriarch that same-sex marriage is contrary to God’s purposes, as set forward in the Bible. Division with the Christian church and the secularizing trend of the West is continuing to marginalize historically Christian views of morality, and Ukraine has been no exception. Christians will differ as to how we as believers should respond to the changing moral compass in the world of Western democracies, and how to respond politically. But does any of this serve as a justification for the violence we have been witnessing in the Ukraine for these many months?

Obviously, there are many other reasons why the Ukraine and Russia are at war with one another, that have nothing directly to do with the overtly theological justifications that I am addressing here. There are concerns about NATO expansion, corruption on both sides, etc. that complicate matters. I do not pretend to be a political analyst. But I am most concerned with how the Bible is used, or more properly speaking, misused as a pretense for justifying this war.

In an attempt to justify the war against the Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin quoted from Jesus in John 15:13 for support: “…this is where the words from the Scriptures come to my mind: ‘There is no greater love than if someone gives his soul for his friends.’ ”  To make an appeal to Jesus, as an excuse for an ever expanding list of documented potential war crimes, particularly when many victims of Putin’s war are God-fearing Ukrainian Christians, is a perversion of the worst kind. Furthermore, the threat of a nuclear disaster looms large when Ukrainian power plants have been under the control of Russian forces, where Ukranian workers are under incredible stress and safety concerns are paramount.

When the “culture war” is transformed into a war with tanks and missiles, I can not think of a more dreadful misuse of the Bible than this. Instead of drawing nonbelievers to the Gospel, this type of thinking only repels people from Christianity. Thankfully, there are many, many Christians who are not convinced by President Putin’s application of Jesus’ teachings, and instead insist that the justification for war against Ukraine is a denial of the very Gospel itself.

Most American Protestant Evangelicals probably completely missed the schism in Eastern Orthodoxy back in 2018, when the Ukrainian Orthodox Church split from Russian Orthodoxy after being together for more than 300 years. But I never would have imagined that this theological crisis within Christianity would have precipitated Putin’s decision to wage war in Ukraine just four years later. It just goes to remind me that ideas really matter, especially theological ones.

Continue reading

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Apologetics

December 23, 2020

The Crucible of Faith, by Philip Jenkins. A Review.

By Clarke Morledge

The so-called “inter-testamental” period, that 400-year period between completion of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament, is nothing but a black-box to the majority of evangelical Christians. As the story goes, Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament, was the last of the great Jewish prophets, before John the Baptist appears at the dawn of the New Testament period. Israel was without an inspired prophetic voice during this 400-year void.

The problem with this narrative is that it suggests that nothing of any substantive theological value was happening during that time. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It was during the era of Second-Temple Judaism, after the Temple was rebuilt following the Babylonian exile, when the subsequent invasions by the Greeks, the Seleucids, and the Romans, completely reshaped the world inhabited by the people of the Hebrew Scriptures. Respected Baylor historian, Philip Jenkins, has written a popular-level, sweeping history of the time, Crucible of Faith: The Ancient Revolution That Made Our Modern Religious World, that necessarily fills in the gap. Crucible of Faith makes for a fascinating read, but it can be unsettling at certain points. Jenkins’ work both strikingly illuminates the radical, Judeo-centric and often neglected developments of thought that created the theological culture that Jesus of Nazareth lived in, while inadvertently at times casting a shadow of doubt over the inner workings of progressive revelation in the Bible (if one is not careful).

Jenkins has written widely on topics related to Christian history, including a book that I highly recommend and that I read a few years ago, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia–and How It Died. Lost History is a fascinating survey of the much ignored churches of the Christian East, extending from the Middle East to Africa and Asia, during the first millennium of Christianity, that once dominated the Christian world, only to be crushed underneath the rise of Islam, and other Christian-opposing elements in Asia.

Jenkins’ more recent book from 2017, on the era just prior to the birth of Jesus, Crucible of Faith, was one of the last books I finished reading in 2020, and it has left me thinking more and more about it. Aside from my review of Tom Holland’s Dominion, this is my most in-depth book review of the year, … and the most challenging to write.

 

Continue reading

10 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Topics

December 17, 2014

The Christmas Truce of 1914

By Clarke Morledge

They said that the war would be over by Christmas…

This Christmas marks the 100th anniversary of the so-called “Christmas Truce” between the German and British armies along the Western Front during the “Great War.” When the fighting began in August, 1914, both sides were expecting a fairly quick outcome. But by the time the bitter cold of December set in amid the muddy trenches near the Marne River, devastated by terrible casualties resulting from the horrors of modern warfare, it became clear that the bloody end was still some years away.

But why the war in the first place? As Baylor University historian Philip Jenkins argues in the The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade, the typical narrative offered by secular historians, that the war was basically a great imperial contest among European colonizing empires, fails to adequately and fully explain what happened. Jenkins maintains that “the First World War was a thoroughly religious event, in the sense that overwhelmingly Christian nations fought each other in what many viewed as a holy war, a spiritual conflict” (Wall Street Journal book review, by D. G. Hart, June 6, 2014, but also consider this review from Reformation21).

Prior to the war, the majority of Christians were optimistic about the future spread of the Gospel changing societies for the better, an essentially postmillenial view of the “End Times.” But after these supposedly “Christian nations” of the world had managed to annihilate millions of people, at least indirectly all in the “name of God,” the mood and perspective of many Christians began to change. A type of pessimism took over, so it should come as no surprise that the great “Christian nations” of Europe would eventually enter a steady decline towards apostasy. It was as though the “War to End All Wars” had compromised the witness of the church. But what was not so evident at the time was that in the aftermath of the war, the spread of the Gospel would increase rapidly across the “Global South”, where the Christian faith continues to expand even today all across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Is there anything we can learn from all of this?

For me, the event during that war that most captures the contradictions and the absurdity of “Christian nations” fighting one another, while still offering a glimmer of hope, is in that unusual truce between the German and British armies that lasted for several days beginning Christmas Eve, 1914. What started off as German soldiers singing Christmas carols to one another became a type of peaceful interchange between the warring parties.

The truce would turn out to be brief, as the fighting renewed just a few days later… Charlottesville, Virginia folk singer, John McCutcheon, tells the tale of the Christmas Truce:

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Topics

%d bloggers like this: