From its very beginning, the Christian faith has been engaged with
religious violence. The first Christians were persecuted by their
co-religionists and then by imperial Rome. Jesus taught them, in
such circumstances, not to retaliate, but to be peacemakers, to
love their enemies, and to pray for their persecutors. Jesus's
response to religious violence of the first century was often
ignored, but it was never forgotten. Even during those centuries
when the church herself persecuted Christian heretics, Jews, and
Muslims, some Christians still struggled to bear witness to the
peace mandate of their Lord. In the thirteenth century, Thomas
Aquinas wrote a theology to help his Dominican brothers persuade
Cathar Christians to return to their Catholic faith peacefully.
Ramon Lull, a Christian student of Arabic and the Qur'an, sought to
help his fellow Christians recognize the elements of belief they
shared in common with the Muslims in their midst. In the fifteenth
century, Nicholas of Cusa, a Church Cardinal and theologian,
expanded Lull's project to include the newly discovered religions
of Asia. In the seventeenth century, Lord Herbert, an English
diplomat and lay Christian, began to identify the political union
of church and government as a causal factor in the religious
warfare of post-Reformation Christendom. One and a half centuries
later, Thomas Jefferson, a lay theologian of considerable political
stature, won a political struggle in the American colonies to
disestablish religion first in his home colony of Virginia and then
in the new nation he helped to found. All five of these theologians
reclaimed the peace mandate of Jesus in their response to the
religious violence of their own eras. All of which points us to
some intriguing Christian responses to religious violence in our
own century as recounted in the epilogue.
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