Rethinking the Crusades, Part II

A "Theology" of Haj

Rodney Stark argues that the Crusades were prompted not by the desire to re-take Jerusalem and the Holy Land per se, but rather by the objective of keeping pilgrims safe. After all, Jerusalem had long been subject to Islamic rule--since 638 in fact--and the First Crusade was not "preached" until 1095, over four hundred and fifty years later.

Pope Urban II had received a letter from Alexius Comnenus, emperor of Byzantium detailing gruesome tortures of Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land, asking for help from Western Christendom. Pope Urban determined to answer the call. He arranged for a church council at Clermont, during which he delivered his famous speech:

They (the Turks) destroy the altars, after having defiled them with their uncleanness. They circumcise the Christians, and the blood of the circumcision they either pour on the altars or pour in the vases of the baptismal font. When they wish to torture people by a base death, they perforate their navels, and dragging forth the extremity of the intestines, bind it to a stake; then with flogging they lead the victim around until the viscera having gushed forth the victim falls prostrate on the ground . . . What shall I say about the abominable rape of women? To speak of it is worse than to be silent. On whom therefore is the labor of avenging these wrongs and recovering the territory incumbent, if not upon you?
Cited in Stark, God's Battalions, p.3

As a result of Urban's support, and seven crusades later, the West managed to control much of Palestine and the eastern Mediterranean coastline for two hundred years. But were the Crusades of God? Were they faithfully and consistently Christian? We believe most professing Christians today would say, no. Yet, why? Regardless of Stark's setting much of the record straight (which we will endeavour to summarize in future posts) with respect to the Crusades, is there a successful biblical case to be made?

We do not believe so. The "theology" underpinning a Christian haj to Jerusalem was just flat out wrong. Had the Western and Eastern churches been more faithful to the Scriptures and to the early church fathers, they would have long before preached and taught against pilgrimage to Palestine. The attempt to make holy what Christ had pronounced desolate could only result in gross superstition and idolatry over time. Moreover, the problem of protecting pilgrims would never have arisen in the first place. Bad theology has bad consequences. The Crusades are an example.

But the Western church--having long preached and taught the merit of a haj to Jerusalem--was caught in the bind of being responsible to protect those who took it seriously and actually went.

Pilgrimage can be defined as "a journey undertaken from religious motives to a sacred place." Amongst Christians, especially in the West, the "religious motives" increasingly had to do with atonement--with obtaining forgiveness for one's sins. Some who made the long journey were seeking forgiveness for the accumulated sins of a lifetime, none of them particularly terrible. But by the ninth and tenth centuries, the ranks of pilgrims had become swollen with those who had been told by their confessors that there only hope of atonement lay in one pilgrimage, or even several, to Jerusalem.

Perhaps the most notorious pilgrim was Fulk III, Count of Anjou (972-1040), who was required to make four pilgrimages to the Holy Land . . . . Fulk was a 'plunderer, murderer, robber, and swearer of false oaths . . . '

Fulk's case reveals the most fundamental aspect of medieval Christian pilgrimage. the knights and nobility of Christendom were very violent, very sinful, and very religious! . . . . Consequently, the knights and nobles were chronically in need of atonement and quite willing to accept the burdens involved to gain it; there was widespread agreement that for terrible crimes, only a pilgrimage could possibly suffice. Consider these excerpts from the "Laws of Canute" written about 1020 and attributed to the Viking king of England and Denmark:

39. If anyone slays a minister of the altar, he is to be an outlaw before God and before men, unless he atone for it very deeply by pilgrimage. . . .

41. If a minister of the altar becomes a homicide or otherwise commits too grave a crime, he is then to fofeit both his ecclesiastical orders and his native land, and to go on a pilgrimage.

Stark, op cit., p.87f.

Parties of a thousand pilgrims travelling at a time to secure atonement for their sins was common.

The theology of haj for atonement is a human superstition. It falsely attempted to maintain continuity between Zion of the Old Covenant--"the city of our God, His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation, the joy of the whole earth" (Psalm 48: 1) with the earthly Jerusalem, the city in Palestine, we know today. This, despite the fact that the New Covenant makes clear that the Christian era earthly Jerusalem--that is, Jerusalem in Palestine during the Years of Our Lord in which we now live--is a slave city (Galatians 4: 24,25), but that Mount Zion is now above, in heaven. She is our mother. Thus there can be no continuity between Old Covenant Jerusalem and the city that is in Palestine. The Shekinah glory has ascended and now dwells in heaven. Heaven and manumission for all sin is open to all, in every place on earth. The veil in the now obsolete Temple was torn.

The Crusades, in trying to protect pilgrims, were one more mistake compounded upon repeated errors. The Kingdom of God had become perverted by the lies of men. Very little good could ever come out of them--as has subsequently proven to be the case.