What About the Inquisition?
by
Amy
on Wed 16 Apr 2008 04:00 AM PDT
We all expect the Spanish Inquisition to show up sooner or
later in our discussions with atheists.
Does the presence of the Inquisition in Christian history discredit all
of Christianity? Does it render our past
completely barbaric?
Here's a question that can help clarify the issues involved
with the Inquisition objection: Do you
honor Thomas Edison for inventing the light bulb, or do you merely scoff at him
for not inventing a computer? Edison
explored the same world we explore, and yet he only invented a light bulb. Was he a colossal failure? Absolutely not. Data (in this case, the data of the physical
world) takes time to work through, sort out, and apply. Edison had a less than
perfect understanding of the world, but he furthered the process of our
knowledge and application of the facts of nature by one more step, moving us
all towards a more precise understanding of the one reality of nature that has existed
since the beginning. Eventually scientific
data would lead to computers, but that doesn't mean we can't appreciate the
beauty and wonder of the invention of the light bulb in its own time. And even though at the time of the light
bulb's creation there were many other false ideas about how to apply the laws
of nature (the use of leeches, for example), the false applications did not
discredit science for all time.
Now move this same idea away from science and into the realm
of morality and Christianity. Like the
unchanging laws of nature, we have the unchanging words of God in the Bible. And as in the world of science, in the world
of Christianity we've had to work out our knowledge and application of those
unchanging words into our societies.
This takes time because human societies started off so far from the ideal--with
many false ideas and without knowledge of some true ideas of application that
hadn't yet occurred to them. (For
example, the idea that a pluralistic society could peacefully exist and not
tear itself apart looks obvious to us now, but before the cultural situation
made the discovery of this radically new idea possible, it was assumed that one
must enforce unanimity for the good of the citizens, in order to survive.)
It's no surprise, then, that 500 years ago societies had
only reached the moral equivalent of the light bulb and not the computer; but
the problem was in the application, not in the data. That is, as inevitably as an application of the
facts of the physical world led to computers, so the ideas of the Bible have
led to the free societies we now see in the West. But one ought not be surprised by the amount
of time it took the societies of the West to work through ideas based on
biblical data any more than one is surprised by the thousands of years it took us
to work through scientific ideas based on the observable data of nature. Nor does it make any more sense to fault the unchanging
Bible itself for those societies' slow pace than it does to fault the
always-present laws of nature for our formerly rudimentary ideas about science. The Bible and nature remained the same even
if the implications had not yet been fully explored and rightly applied. And, as with the light bulb, we ought to honor
the steps that were made in creating better societies rather than merely
degrade the people of the past for not creating the inventions and institutions
we have today.
But why, we may then ask, when first creating the nation of Israel,
did God not immediately demand that they live as we do today? The answer might be similar to the reason why
He didn't supply them with computers. A
computer would have been completely beyond their grasp. In the same way, Israel
had a difficult enough time adjusting their society to what God did give them explicitly at that
time. Some things, to be fully understood,
accepted, and lived out, have to be reached on our own as we struggle over time,
learning little by little. Applications
of ideas are discovered and then take time to permeate and transform a
society. This, in turn, lays the
groundwork for discovering more applications.
What God did do is speak to Israel
where they were. He addressed the world
as they knew it, and He set a foundation of ideas in place through the Old and
New Testaments that would infect societies in such a way that the spread of those
ideas would eventually lead us to where we are today. He told us that we're all--men and women--created
in His image (Gen 1:27) and equal in
value before Him (Gal 3:28, Philemon). We're not to kidnap people and sell them into
slavery (Ex 21:16), we're not to punish people in a way that humiliates them
(Deut 25:3), we're not to make converts by the sword (John 3:5-8, 18:36), the
State is under God and the law (Deut 17:14-20), no one--rich or poor (Lev
19:15), native or foreigner (Num 15:15-16)--is to be favored when justice is
dispensed, and the foundation goes on and on.
Unfortunately, just as the lack of good scientific
instruments slowed the discovery and application of the laws of nature, our moral
weaknesses--stubbornness, ignorance, biases, selfishness, and inherited false
beliefs--have made the application of the Bible to our societies a difficult,
slow process. This is why the
Inquisition, while condemnable, is not unexpected or surprising and so does not
successfully argue against the truthfulness of Christianity. And in fact, it gives further witness to the
truthfulness of the Bible's central message of our desperate need for Jesus and
the forgiveness He provides.
