Many of you have probably already watched the recent “Religious Roundtable” PDB Podcast hosted by Patrick Bet-David, which saw our dear brothers Daniel Haqiqatjou and Jake Brancatella (“The Muslim Metaphysician”) face off against Robert Spencer and Rachid Hammami, some of the most prolific career Islamophobes in both the English-speaking and Arabic-speaking worlds respectively.

Considering all the points that were brought up, this discussion—which, right off the bat, became a completely one-sided encounter with the Christian panelists facing utter humiliation—could be methodically fragmented into a vast array of different articles.

Here, however, we’ll just be concentrating on one issue in particular: that of how Christianity has perceived violence.

We won’t be looking at the Old Testament, despite it being part of the Bible and YHWH being Jesus in Trinitarian view. This is due to the fact that the Christian side essentially exposed themselves here as Marcionites. For those who don’t know, Marcionism was Christianity’s very first heresy. It was named after an individual called Marcion, who believed that the Old Testament and the New Testament could not possibly have come from the same God, since he was wrathful and vengeful in the former; and caring and loving in the latter.

In fact, Brad East, himself a Christian theologian, has called it “the oldest and most virulent temptation in the church’s history.” Considering that virtually every Christian seems to share this feeling (of their sacred scriptures containing such spiritual schizophrenia), very few would openly admit it and render themselves heretics, unlike Spencer and Hammami, who could thus be applauded for their courage in this regard if for nothing else.

We won’t be looking at the Crusades either, as Christians often frame it as a mere reaction to the Islamic conquests, and we’ll simply grant this here for the sake of argument.

What we will be looking at, are scriptural sources and historical facts that no believing Christian could ever legitimately deny.

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Eschatological Violence and Revenge

Daniel Haqiqatjou argued that the main reason behind Christians not being violent early on is that they simply didn’t have the power and political authority required to exercise their might and be coercive.

This really isn’t that controversial of a proposition. Jacques Ellul, who was one of France’s most respected Christian philosophers—and is also known as having been an astute critic of the technocentric modern civilization—, authored entire books and articles dedicated to how, following Roman emperor Constantine’s conversion in 312, Christianity became violent when it was made the state religion, which is to say that Christianity did indeed resort to violence as soon as it was in a position to successfully do so.

Ellul was himself an anarchist ideologue and thus felt a instinctive repulsion towards any sort of centralization and authority. As such, he had his own personal reasons for projecting the conversion of a Roman emperor as some sort of major tragedy that had polluted Christianity, but the roots of violence actually trace all the way back to Christian eschatology.

Eschatology, i.e., the theological conceptions concerning the end of times, occupies a central place in Christian thought, conveyed almost entirely in the Book of Revelation (also called the Apocalypse of John).

According to Christianity, at the end of times, a triumphant Jesus will grant “political authority” to the Christians… and how do you think these Christians will react?

Will they casually discard the Old Testament when invited onto podcasts?

No. Simply put, they’ll go on a vengeful rampage.

For instance, Christians frequently recall and speak fondly of their martyrs, how they suffered for their faith and remained passive in the name of truth.

Apart from the fact that Candida Moss has shown how this martyrology is exaggerated, there’s another angle that is missed:

These martyrs will have their violent revenge.

We read in Romans 12:19:

Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord.

Note how, in this epistle attributed to Paul, he quotes the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 32:35). It is as though, unlike Spencer and Hammami, Paul had no problem with the Old Testament (he didn’t seem to have any problem with the extremely violent Old Testament conquests in Hebrews 11:32-34 either, which used to be attributed to him).

Anyway, we see this urge towards violence in Revelation 6:9-11:

When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. They called out in a loud voice, “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” Then each of them was given a white robe, and they were told to wait a little longer, until the full number of their fellow servants, their brothers and sisters, were killed just as they had been.

Tertullian, the influential second-century theologian who coined the term “Trinity,” wrote what is essentially a sort of moral treatise called De spectaculis (“The Shows”), in which he argued against Christians attending pagan amusements (in our times, this would be analogous to things such as cinema, music concerts, and so on).

Tertullian presented numerous reasons for Christians to avoid such pagan leisure activities. One of these was that, for Christians, a “real show” would be to witness the suffering of the élite pagans in hell and at the end of times. This included, of course, revenge for the martyrs.

We read:

But what a spectacle is that fast-approaching advent of our Lord, now owned by all, now highly exalted, now a triumphant One! What that exultation of the angelic hosts! What the glory of the rising saints! What the kingdom of the just thereafter! What the city New Jerusalem! Yes, and there are other sights: that last day of judgment, with its everlasting issues; that day unlooked for by the nations, the theme of their derision, when the world hoary with age, and all its many products, shall be consumed in one great flame! How vast a spectacle then bursts upon the eye! What there excites my admiration? What my derision? Which sight gives me joy? Which rouses me to exultation? — as I see so many illustrious monarchs, whose reception into the heavens was publicly announced, groaning now in the lowest darkness with great Jove himself, and those, too, who bore witness of their exultation; governors of provinces, too, who persecuted the Christian name, in fires more fierce than those with which in the days of their pride they raged against the followers of Christ.

Basically, Tertullian, unapologetic as he was, would have agreed with Daniel’s assertion that Christians refrained from violence because they just simply couldn’t afford to be violent, but when they have the aid of a returning, empowered Christ, they’d enjoy their revenge.

Mind you, thus far we have only looked at one particular detail of the Book of Revelation, i.e., that of the martyrs’ revenge, but there’s much more that can be explored in terms of violence.

The Book of Revelation is so violent that, when John Dominic Crossan—acclaimed as one of the world’s leading Christian authorities on the New Testament and early Christian history—decided to evaluate the violence contained therein, he titled his book: How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (published in 2015).

Readers can analyse many of these violent verses on their own, but I believe our point has already been made very clear.

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Christian on Christian Violence Before Islam

As we had mentioned at the beginning, we tried to look at the sacred scriptures of the Christians without mentioning the Old Testament since, like Spencer and Hammami, most Christians today are neo-Marcionites. As such, prior to his incarnation, Jesus has no real value to them.

And as we had also mentioned, we’d be taking a look at history with the exclusion of the Crusades, considering that contemporary Christians attempt to rationalize it by focusing on Islam.

However, Christians were killing fellow Christians over the nature of Jesus even before the historical rise of Islam (we say “historical” here considering that we as Muslims, of course, do not believe that Islam was suddenly “created” in the seventh century).

This is the subject of Philip Jenkins’ book, Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years (published in 2010).

Jenkins is a professor of history who is himself a Christian. He has often written enthusiastically about how “global Christianity” will shift from the West to the East, especially China, as, once upon a time, Christian apologists were anticipating some 100-150 million Christians in China. So “rapid” was its spread. However, a recent Pew Research survey has debunked this fantasy, showing that, for many years now, Christians in China have in fact stagnated at around 20 million, with their numbers actually dwindling.

It was a sort of coping mechanism:

“Christianity might be dying a slow death in the West, but it’s rising in the East!”

And, a few years ago, Jenkins was perhaps the main advocate of this prediction.

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Anyway, the point I’m making here is that Jenkins is most certainly not anti-Christian.

His book, as we have already mentioned above, is about how Christians would slaughter other Christians because they disputed with one another regarding the nature of Jesus. As readers may already be aware, the nature of God in Christianity—and thus the concept of the Trinity too—was settled earlier. However, the debates surrounding how to reconcile both the supposed divinity and humanity within Christ continued to rage on, for centuries.

This debate was to be ended following the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and this is something that remains relevant till today because the Coptic Church of Egypt, for example, rejects the Council (so when you encounter Copts, who are among the most Islamophobic of demographics, you can taunt them by bringing up the Council).

At the beginning of his book, Jenkins contextualizes it as follows:

We cannot speak of Christ without declaring his full human nature, which was not even slightly diluted or abolished by the presence of divinity. That Chalcedonian definition today stands as the official formula for the vast majority of Christians, whether they are Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox—although how many of those believers could explain the definition clearly is open to debate. But as we are told, Chalcedon settled any controversy about the identity of Christ, so that henceforward any troublesome passages in the Bible or early tradition had to be read in the spirit of those powerful words. For over 1,500 years now, Chalcedon has provided the answer to Jesus’ great question.

 

But Chalcedon was not the only possible solution, nor was it an obvious or, perhaps, a logical one. Only the political victory of Chalcedon’s supporters allowed that council’s ideas to become the inevitable lens through which later generations interpret the Christian message. It remains quite possible to read the New Testament and find very different Christologies, which by definition arose from churches very close to Jesus’ time, and to his thought world. In particular, we easily find passages that suggest that the man Jesus achieved Godhood at a specific moment during his life, or indeed after his earthly death.

 

In political terms, the most important critics of Chalcedon were those who stressed Christ’s one divine nature, and from the Greek words for “one nature,” we call them Monophysites. Not only were Monophysites numerous and influential, but they dominated much of the Christian world and the Roman Empire long after Chalcedon had done its work, and they were only defeated after decades of bloody struggle. Centuries after Chalcedon, Monophysites continued to prevail in the most ancient regions of Christianity, such as Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. The heirs of the very oldest churches, the ones with the most direct and authentic ties to the apostolic age, found their distinctive interpretation of Christ ruled as heretical. Pedigree counted for little in these struggles.

 

Each side persecuted its rivals when it had the opportunity to do so, and tens of thousands—at least—perished. Christ’s nature was a cause for which people were prepared to kill and to die, to persecute or to suffer martyrdom. Modern Christians rarely feel much sympathy for either side in such bygone religious wars. Did the issues at stake really matter enough to justify bloodshed? Yet obviously, people at the time had no such qualms and cared passionately about how believers were supposed to understand the Christ they worshipped. Failing to understand Christ’s natures properly made nonsense of everything Christians treasured: the content of salvation and redemption, the character of liturgy and Eucharist, the figure of the Virgin Mary. Each side had its absolute truth, faith in which was essential to salvation. Horror stories about Christian violence abound in other eras, with the Crusades and Inquisition as prime exhibits; but the intra-Christian violence of the fifth-and sixth-century debates was on a far larger and more systematic scale than anything produced by the Inquisition and occurred at a much earlier stage of church history.

 

We have given such relatively long excerpts so readers could be intrigued and look into the whole book if interested, but notice Jenkins’ wording: Such intra-Christian violence, certainly not a reaction to Islamic conquests, was worse than the Crusades (or the Inquisition), meaning that when Christians do have the political power they’re ready to victimize fellow Christians on matters of Christology.

In fact, authors such as Sir Thomas W. Arnold in The Preaching of Islam (published in 1896) have shown that early Islam’s success in places such as Egypt but also Syria, and elsewhere, was precisely due to such intra-Christian persecution, the “heretical” Christians preferring a more merciful Islamic rule over a rival and harsher Christian power.

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In conclusion, we have tried to show that, even if Spencer and Hammami become heretical neo-Marcionites who virtually reject the Old Testament (despite them possibly claiming otherwise), the New Testament itself shows the extent of the avenues through which Christian violence can materialize. We have also attempted to look at how, pre-Islam, Christological disputes, that is, argumentation about the nature of Jesus, unleashed intra-Christian violence that is difficult to quantify. In fact, it very well may have been far worse than the Crusades which came later and which is often projected as being a mere “reaction” to Islam.

Considering that Spencer and Hammami have already removed themselves from mainstream Christianity, we hope that Christians who are still faithful to Christianity will now reappraise the question of violence in relation to Christianity and Islam. It’s about time they admit to themselves that the former is not a totally secularized and liberal pacifism as is often wishfully advocated by apologists.

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