Michael Horton’s Follow-Up To ‘Burning Books or Proclaiming Christ’

I have to admit that many of the responses to my post have surprised me. Some of them sound eerily like the beliefs and attitudes of Muslim extremists. This may be in part because so many Christians in the United States still assume some of the errors of “Christendom.” On a cold November day in 1095, Pope Urban II roused a Christendom plagued by internal wars to take up the cause of holy war against Islam. “If you must have blood,” he exhorted, “bathe in the blood of infidels.”^[1] Substituting itself for its ascended Lord, the church assimilated a civilization to that ecclesial body. “Our divinely favored emperor,” said the church father Eusebius concerning Constantine, “receiving, as it were, a transcript of the divine sovereignty, directs, in imitation of God himself, the administration of this world’s affairs.” With divine mandate, therefore, the emperor “subdues and chastens the open adversaries of the truth in accordance with the usages of war.”^{[2]  Continue reading >>>>}