Category: A Set Of Random Thoughts
I recently read accounts of a papal bull issued in 1452 by Pope Nicholas V. That bull (which is sort of like an Act of a National Assembly or an Edict or Decree of a government) was named Dum Diversas. Dum Diversas means ‘until different’. That bull was addressed to the kings of Spain and Portugal. The part of that document that caught my attention is this:
We grant you by these present documents, with our Apostolic Authority, full and free permission to invade, search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be, as well as their kingdoms, duchies, counties, principalities, and other property … and to reduce their persons into perpetual servitude.
This is not a leaked facsimile of the drunken rants of a highly placed church official caught in a moment of indiscretion. Nope. It is an official church document, dating back to 1452, issued at a time when the church commanded loyalty with the bible and with arrows, issued to kings to permit them to persecute all infidels wherever they may be, issued to Christian political leaders charging them to reduce all non-Christians to perpetual slavery, for as long as they remained non-Christians. You can check out what Wikipedia has to say about Dum Diversas here.
This document is one of the many documents that illustrate how, over time, Christians moved from being the ones who were persecuted because of their faith (in the first few centuries AD) to becoming the ones who persecuted every other person, group, principality, region, or country who did not share the belief that Jesus is Lord as well as those who did not share the prevailing belief about the exact manner in which Jesus' lordship was conducted. It is another illustration of the view I hold about the potential tyranny of faith, the dictatorship of every ideology that deliberately divorces reason from ALL of its convictions, the totalitarianism that invariably results when religion mixes so closely with politics that both become a homogeneous entity. After all, one reason Jesus Christ was murdered by the Jewish authorities was that the message of compassion that he preached rankled when placed side-by-side with their interpretations of the mechanical “will of God”.
This post is not a criticism of the document or of the institution that promulgated it and saw to its implementation. Many others have done that before me. Many continue to do that today. I have no wish to lend my feeble notes to that resounding orchestra. Besides, thankfully, the Christian world has since been irrevocably wed to the divorce between the Church and the State (at least in print, but also in many cases, in fact).
It is rather a gentle reminder to my holy Christian friends who, on account of Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, ISIS, etc., dismiss all muslims as terrorists, and who proudly point to Christianity as the religion that has been spread to the ends of the earth exclusively by peaceful means, by the power of the Father, the miracles of the Son, and the tongues of fire of the Holy Spirit. It is a gentle reminder to those peaceful, holy friends of mine that whatever evils those islamist terrorists are violently perpetrating today in the name of Allah, there are precedents, precedents left for them by our fathers in faith, heinous precedents committed in the name of the Lord, Jesus Christ.
Of course, that our fathers in faith were guilty of the subjugation of peoples of different faiths, the oppression and execution of blasphemers, heretics, and infidels (abi unbelievers) several years ago as they strove to spread Christianity does not justify the perpetration of the same crimes by others today, as they supposedly seek to spread Islam. But the generalizations we make about people who believe in God in different ways than we do or even in different Gods than we do, are often unhealthy. Those generalizations, to me, are mustard seeds of the same kind of intolerance, which only need the right mix of circumstances to make us also terrorists.
Let us then beware, because the log we see in our neighbor’s eye may just have been hewn from the giant tree that is happily growing in ours, watered by our own prejudices, well nourished by the manure of our own oft-unrecognized bigotry.
