By Bill Leonard
Everybody is quoting the Bible these days. In the church and the public square Bible-based rhetoric and mandates echo throughout the culture, often with varying, even contradictory, interpretations. Such convictions can be deep and culture transforming; they can also be mistaken, perhaps even dead wrong. The Bible may say it and we may believe it, but that doesn’t always settle it.
Christian history suggests as much. Lent, the season of reflection and repentance, offers opportunity for those of us who live in and out of the Bible to acknowledge that the church’s history is full of acts and imperatives thought to be grounded in Holy Scripture that led the church to make horrible mistakes. Reflecting on those errors, and their sinful ramifications (it is Lent after all); we might revisit our own claims to be “Bible-believing Christians.”
Such reflections came home to me on a recent Sunday when our pastor reminded us that the church has produced some of “history’s best bullies,” asserting that their actions were “Bible” while undermining good faith. Even the briefest illustrations signal a broad, tragic ecclesiastical legacy.
When the 4th century puritanical Donatist sect was rebaptizing and reordaining persons who had received those rites from morally questionable bishops, St. Augustine initially attempted, with little success, to reconvert the radicals to Catholic faith. As their doctrines gained increasing influence, he acknowledged that punitive responses might be necessary to protect the faithful from Donatist heresy.
In The Correction of the Donatists, Augustine cited Jesus’ words “compel them to come in” (Luke 14: 16-23), and wrote: “Why… should not the Church use force in compelling her lost sons to return, if the lost sons compelled others to their destruction.”
When the Donatist Bishop Petilian responded that such action contradicted Christ’s teaching of love of neighbor, Augustine reminded him that the Savior used a whip to punish money-changers in the Temple. The saint’s arguments helped establish a “biblical” rationale for church/state aggression against heretics, sowing the seeds of Inquisition.
The 13th century quest for Catholic orthodoxy led to crusades against the dreaded Cathars, charged with denying papal authority, the sacraments and other heresies. In Heresy in the Roman Catholic Church: A History, Michael Thomsett writes that Cathars were “required to wear a yellow cross on their clothing … serving as a symbol of shame.”
The crosses were called las debandoras, (“winding machines”) “but they are more accurately described as ‘a millstone around the neck.’” That text (Luke 17:2-3) was frequently used to support cases against persons convicted of heresy and excommunicated by the church, then turned over, as Thomas Aquinas wrote, to the “secular tribunal to be exterminated thereby from the world by death.”
Maryland, the first Catholic colony, issued a Toleration Act (1649) offering religious tolerance to Protestant and Catholic settlers alike, but warning that “whatsoever person or persons within this Province … that shall deny the holy Trinity the father son and holy Ghost, or the Godhead of any of the said three persons of the Trinity or the Unity of the Godhead, or shall use or utter any reproachful speeches, words or language concerning the said Holy Trinity, … shall be punished with death and confiscation or forfeiture of all … .lands and goods….” Not great news for Unitarians, certain Anabaptists and non-Christians. They were better off in Rhode Island.
Catholics weren’t alone in seeking biblical support for legal sanctions against dissenters. In colonial Massachusetts, Records of the Governor declared of Quakers: “The doctrine of this sect of people … tends to overthrow the whole gospell & the very vitalls of Christianitie ….” The colony passed legislation (1658) banishing Quakers “on payne [sic] of death.” Two years later Bible-believing Puritans hanged Mary Dyer for preaching Quaker views, the first woman executed in America.
And then there were the Baptists. In an 1822 address to the South Carolina legislature, Baptist pastor Richard Furman insisted: “Had the holding of slaves been a moral evil, it cannot be supposed, that the inspired Apostles, who feared no the faces of men, … would have tolerated it for a moment, in the Christian Church….” The biblical writers, Furman said, let the master/slave relationship “remain untouched, as being lawful and right.”
He concluded: “In proving this subject justifiable by Scriptural authority, its morality is also proved; for the Divine Law never sanctions immoral actions.” “Biblical defenses” of slavery flourished throughout the antebellum South.
And what of us? While grateful that such destructive misuses of Scripture are no longer acceptable, we must ask ourselves: what texts are we using to promote practices for which later generations will call us to account?
For which of our “biblical defenses” will our children or grandchildren be compelled to repent? Good questions for reflection, perhaps even repentance, then and now. Lent, you know.