Part Three: “Do the Dark Pages in Church History Make the Christian Faith Hypocritical?”
In last week’s blog, we saw when Christians sin, non-Christians frequently accuse them of being hypocrites. This accusation fails to qualify as real hypocrisy because a hypocrite is a person who purposely and secretly claims to be something they are not. Christians who are honest and open about their sinfulness, therefore, are not hypocrites. I explained this “less serious charge” in detail in last week’s blog.
The More Serious Charge
This week we’ll look at the more serious charge of hypocrisy against Christians; this time not against just individual Christians—but the entire Christian Church. This much more severe objection is the claim that Christianity, as a religious faith, is hypocritical and thus fraudulent because the Church’s action in history have contradicted its professed standards of love, forgiveness, and morality.
The Christian Church has indeed been involved in some very brutal acts against non-believers, false religions, and even fellow Christians. Witches have been burned at the stake in the name of Christianity. Slavery has been sanctioned. Holy wars and inquisitions resulted in the deaths of countless thousands of people. Science has been censured. Even our present ecological crisis has been blamed on Christian principles. (By the way, this is a false accusation. See my book, Should Christian Be Environments, Kregel Publications, 2012).
In short, many people, judging Christianity according to the dark pages of its history, have concluded that little or no good has ever come from the Christian faith. They consider Christianity a hypocritical and, therefore, fraudulent religion and refuse to investigate it’s truth-claims.
It is undeniable that historically the Christian Church has sometimes been on the wrong side of moral issues that are unambiguously contrary to the teachings of Jesus Christ. (Of course, this was even more the case in the contemporary cultures at the time.) Although such ungodly behaviors are now virtually nonexistent in the Church, the dark pages of church history still give fodder to critics of Christianity. They choose to focus on the dark pages of history and ignore the overwhelmingly positive influence the Church has had on societies and cultures everywhere throughout the world. I’ll give examples of this in Part Five.
Next week: There are two responses to the claim that the Christian faith is hypocritical because of the dark pages in its history. Next week we’ll explore the first and see that the criterion critics use to judge Christianity has its source in Christianity. In other words, the very ethical standard used by critics to condemn atrocities, slavery, witch burnings, and the other un-Christlike behaviors that Christians have sometimes been guilty of turns out to be Christian ethics! ©