I have noticed a pattern across posts about Christianity that is impossible to overlook, and which I assumed far more Danes understood.
It does not seem to be the case, because it shows up here on the page as well.
Every time I write about Christianity's significance for the Western world, variations of the same comment appear. The Crusades. The Inquisition. The witch burnings. The abuses. The resistance. Backwards stock-conservative lack of understanding for the need for change.
Usually arranged as a list, and usually with an undertone that the matter is now surely settled. "Look what the church has done. So much for your Christianity."
And I want to say this without any reservation whatsoever, because it does not deserve a single reservation - Yes. It happened. All of it. The church has burned people, blessed armies, protected abusers and sold forgiveness for money. It has done so with the cross in hand and scripture on its lips. There is nothing in that list I will embellish, and nothing I will relativise.
What I will ask you to do, however, is to stand still for a moment at a question the list never asks.
Who judged the church for these crimes against Man?
Because someone did.
Every single time.
Las Casas rose against his own church's treatment of the natives in America - and his argument was not borrowed from outside, it was Imago Dei, that the Indian too bears God's image. Luther stood up against Rome with Rome's own book in his hand. The abolitionists who broke slavery were not secular philosophers, they were Christians who had read that there is neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free. Kierkegaard flayed the entire Danish Christendom apart - not with something new, but with the New Testament.
The church has been judged again and again, more harshly than any outsider has ever judged it. And the judgement came from within. Every time.
It is not a coincidence. It is a mechanism.
And it is what I want to write about here.
Christianity carries something no institution can own - a measure that stands above the institution itself. The church is custodian of a Word it did not write, and which it cannot rewrite. And that Word concerns a man who never owned anything, never led an army, never sat on a throne - a man whose sharpest anger was directed AGAINST the religious authorities of his own time, and who ended up being executed by religious and political power in beautiful union.
That means something quite concrete. It means that every time the church itself becomes power, it contradicts its own source. And then there is always someone who opens the book and points and says - "So… um… there is something here that means something different from what you are saying and doing right now…"
A monk. A priest. A layman. A heretic, whom posterity calls a saint.
The church could burn the man. And it did - men as well as women, on a large scale. But it could never burn the measure. Because the measure was its own foundation.
It is THAT mechanism that has worked its way deeper and deeper into the Western world's collective psyche and self-understanding through two thousand years. Not as a straight line, not without relapses, not without struggle, but like a crowbar lodged in civilisation's foundation that cannot be pulled out again.
The abolition of slavery. Freedom of conscience. The separation of faith and force - render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. The idea that the weak has a claim to protection, not because he is useful, but because he is Man. All of it grown out of the same sentence in Genesis, and all of it used - again and again and again - against the institution that proclaimed it.
And here is where the confusion happens. The confusion that carries almost every single attempt to dismiss Christianity's significance - one points at the church's sins and believes one has hit Christianity.
But. One has hit the opposite.
One has demonstrated Christianity's history of effects. Because that standard you judge the church by - that might does not make right, that the small must not be crushed, that hypocrisy is a sin - that standard you have from the Word the church betrayed. You judge the church with Christianity. And that is not an argument against it.
It is the strongest argument for it that exists.
One can see how decisive that mechanism is by looking at a civilisation where it points the other way.
Let us turn to the Islamic one. Because Islam also has renewal movements. Yes, it is a misunderstanding that it does not. Islam has had rationalists, mystics, modernists - though many of them did not survive long. And Islam has - precisely like Christianity - one basic movement when it wants to purify itself - it returns to the source. Back to the original. Away from the additions, the hypocrisy, home to the starting point. In that way the mechanism is the same.
But the Source is not the same.
Christianity's source is a powerless man on a cross. Islam's source is a lawgiver, a statesman, a military commander - a man who founded a state, led wars and left behind a unified order of faith, law and power in one.
He is not tradition's critic. He is its perfect exemplar, down to the detail.
So when Christianity returns home to its source, it returns home to Golgotha - and finds a judgement upon ALL religious exercise of power.
When Islam returns home to its source, it returns home to Medina - and finds precisely the image Christianity breaks with when it returns home to its own - faith, law and sword gathered in one hand.
That is why Christianity's reformations resemble a confrontation with power. And that is why Islam's reformations - from Wahhab to our day's Salafism - resemble a return to it. It is not because Muslims are different people. It is because the compass needle in the two traditions points in opposite directions, and it has pointed in opposite directions for fourteen hundred years.
Same movement. Opposite direction. One returns home and breaks with any power that would use faith as law and sword - and each break points forward, like a journey that is never finished, closer and closer to Truth, regardless of what it costs, and how long it takes.
The other returns home and purifies itself, confirms itself, precisely in the use of them to maintain a closed truth that is already fully and finally described in the Quran - there is nothing to journey towards, only something to turn back to.
That is the whole difference, and it is not small. It is civilisational.
So next time someone draws up the list - the crusades, the inquisition, the pyres and so forth - then agree with them. Fully and completely. And then ask where they think that judgement they have just passed came from.
The church stands accused.
Christianity wrote the only indictment that has ever worked.
And it keeps writing it, as long as we keep the Word alive among us.
Remove it - and within a short time we function and act again as all civilisations before us have done - power and the strongest decide.
Let us not do that, shall we?
Then afterwards we must work out how so many have been taught - and by whom - to see an enemy in the world's most peaceful national church.
Good evening, friends ❤️☀️
