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Facing Up to Christian History: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly

Facing Up to Christian History: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly

Last updated on: February 24, 2015 at 5:00 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Facing Up to Christian History: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly 2015-02-24T17:00:39-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Christians have made a great deal of history.

If you name Christ, we have to claim you since God alone knows the status of your soul and so we are responsible for you. Tomorrow I will review a book on the transformative power of God’s grace The Case for Grace by my colleague Lee Strobel. Today I will review a book that challenges Faith: An Account of the Things of Yucatan by Fray Diego de Landa.

The friar who wrote this book justified his time amongst the First People of the Yucatan. The great Mayan civilization had vanished decades before the coming of the Spanish, but he still found a prosperous and interesting people group. He brought Christianity to those people and fought hard against what he perceived to be their faults: “idolatry, repudiation of their wives, public gluttony, and the buying of and selling of slaves.” The friars tried to end those practices, sometimes with force, and so had a mixed reputation amongst the First People.

Church and royal Spanish authority refused the racist assumption that the First People were not people. They had God given rights and whenever the Spanish settlers went “too far” in oppressing the “Indians,” the government would react. Christianity provided a standard for justice and mercy that Fray Diego de Landa did not meet, but it also provided a way to judge his treatment of the Indians in his care.

His wholesale destruction of cultural artifacts and forced conversions are bad. At the same time, as a Christian and a scholar, he felt the need to preserve a record of the costumes of the Mayan peoples and justify his actions to the Court of Spain and to posterity. He asked to be judged as a Catholic and as a Christian and as a Catholic and as a Christian, he failed in justice, mercy, and holiness.

He also did things right. He opposed slavery and some of the exploitation of the Mayans. He cared enough to preserve some of their manners, arts, and customs in his book. The Aztec nation had no moral check on their exploitation of the people under their rule: the Spanish did. You cannot condemn the Aztecs, or the Mayan ruling class for their human sacrifice, their exploitation of the lower classes, or their warlike ways because they were living out the natural consequences of their ideas.

I can condemn them from the vantage point of the universal human rights God has granted each human being.

But it is the Friar and his ilk that deserve the harshest judgment of history. They should have done better than they did. They knew better, but too often the right of conquest (found no place in Christian teaching) justified barbaric practices. The Friar deserves credit for recording and condemning these and, yet, he too became co-opted by the systematic evil of the Conquest of Mexico.

Grace was at work in the lives of the Mayans before the Spanish came and the Spanish should have been bringers of the greater grace of Christian truth. Instead, they too often brought disease, rapine, and greed. The good news is that we can condemn them by their own standards and we must. Good Christians can do bad things, not because they are Christians, but because they fail to work out the implications of the Faith.

Amazing Astronomy Near Human Sacrifice

The Inquisitors brought a standard for universal justice, all men were equal before the law, but also torture. They may have been Christians and in some aspects even good Christians, but in other ways they were bad. In thinking about Christians, it is important to avoid the logical fallacy called “the no-good Scotchman” fallacy. The error is first to claim that all Scotchmen are good and when confronted with a bad Scot, to argue that only the good Scots are Scots. The argument is circular: viciously so.

Christianity is not genetic or so simple as being a Scot, however*.* Our beliefs are complex and work themselves out in our lives in complicated ways. Nobody is totally wicked and nobody is totally righteous because nobody gets it right. The problem is not the standard, we are the problem. No good Christian would hate his enemy, but no human is totally Christian in his lifestyle. Christians are on the way . . . not there when it comes to fulfilling the moral demands of God.*

Christians are in an encounter with a living God from a variety of starting points. This God has ideas and these ideas judge us and our ways. We must be transformed into His likeness. Being a Christian is more like being a Marxist (a Christian heresy!) than being a Scot. A good Marxist cannot side with capital against labor, though bad Marxists might. There are bad Christians when the bad Christians fail to live up to the standards of Christ. There are (after all!) very few “good Christians.”

The case for Christianity in history is this: did grace make what happened better than we would have expected or worse? As conquerors, I would argue the Christian Spanish were better than they would have been without the restraining power of Faith. The exploitation that occurred was evil, but evil from the point of view of the exploiters. They always had a guilty conscience and, in aggregate, this mattered.

Christians failed Christ, but Christ never fails to work steadfastly in history to bend our perverse and wicked wills to the justice of history.

No Christian should ever sanitize or run away from the facts of history. We have failed our Lord and we must confess that failure. Christian “history” that does not account for the sin of slavery in our Founders is a lie. Christian “history” that does not account for the exploitation of the First People (the genocidal maniac in the White House Andrew Jackson comes to mind) is a lie.

Nothing is helped by lies.

At the same time, we know that all Christians of all generations fail grace. We must stop and ask: “How will our capitulation to materialism and libertine morality look to future centuries? What did we do to end exploitation and human slavery in our generation? Where are we blind to a failure of morality, justice, or grace?”

It almost surely will be found where we bow to the world, the flesh, and the devils of our age. As a result, I would end by recalling the good that Friar Diego de Landa did . . . the better civilization he brought. . . the Gospel he preached . . . and the justice he practiced. I would end his account with the mercy I hope people bring to the broken and fallen story of our own time when Christians failed grace.

The case for grace is that grace makes bad men better, not that it makes bad men perfect. It makes bad nations better . . . not worse. God’s grace in history does not seem like much in the light of the enormity of all our crimes against humanity, but it is unthinkable to imagine a world without it.

——–

*I am not discussing justification but sanctification.

**For those interested in Mayan prehistory, it is interesting to note that the Friar records a legend of twelve tribes who came to the Americas on “dry land” across the sea. He speculated in this book about the coming of the Twelve Tribes of Israel to the New World! This speculation, obscure for much of two hundred years, is yet another attempt to sacralize American history that found its fullest expression in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons).

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