Gregory
Koukl
Sunday
January 16, 1994
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I had a caller yesterday that has called before from the
San Francisco area who is very upset with Christians. The first time he
called he suggested that money ought to be sent to organizations that
would hire people with high powered rifles to kill Christian missionaries
because they were destroying indigenous cultures. He also brought up the
issue of Christians being the ones who have caused more death on this
planet and more destruction and more evil, and the God of the Bible being
responsible for that, than any other religion or group. The same issue
came up again yesterday. Sometimes it's not necessary to go into all of
the facts and figures which I attempted to do, at least in some fashion,
with the gentleman yesterday. Sometimes it's enough to ask a simple
question. What I'd like to do here is give you a simple question that you
can ask someone who makes the same point. |
It's not appropriate to finger God in this case and
Christianity for crimes that are completely inconsistent with the
teachings of Christianity and the commands of that God
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The point is based on
my contention and belief that people who committed crimes in the name of
Christianity were not Christians. Now, some of you might be saying, that's
easy for you to say. It's a way of getting out of the issue. It is a way
of getting out from underneath the issue, but it's not an illegitimate
thing to say. It's a very legitimate thing to say. The reason I know
they're not Christians is because they're not doing the things the
Scripture tells them to do, and they are doing the very things that the
Bible tells them not to do. It's not appropriate to finger God in this
case and Christianity for crimes that are completely inconsistent with the
teachings of Christianity and the commands of that God just simply because
the people who did these things said they were doing them in the name of
God.
The person who is taking the easy way out is the person leveling that
charge knowing full well that it's quite possible for someone to do
something in the name of the other person without having that other person
being involved at all. That, in fact, is the case here. I'm not trying to
get around the crimes of Christendom because Christendom has committed
crimes. But whether those crimes necessarily came out of a Christian world
view is another thing altogether. My point is it didn't come out of a
Christian world view because when you read the Bible you don't read the
kinds of things that would lead you to these actions--witch burning,
crusades, inquisitions.
By the way, this is in contrast to Islam where you actually have in the
teachings of Islam itself the justification for Islamic jihad, or holy
war, spreading the religion of Islam by force. You can point to a doctrine
that leads to destruction and killing. You don't see that in Christianity
so it's unfair to finger all of Christianity for that.
The question you can ask when someone makes the accusation that
Christianity is responsible for all of these crimes is this. If you were a
builder and you regularly sent out crews with detailed plans for building
houses, and then another group went out and destroyed buildings and said
they were working for you, would you be responsible? Would you be
responsible for the destroyed buildings? The police come to you and arrest
you for the destruction of homes and you say you have nothing to do with
these people. The police say the group said they were working for you. But
how do the police know they were working for you or not? Do they have any
evidence that they were working for you? If the police have no written
instructions from you, then the other people are impostors. It's entirely
fair and reasonable for others who raise this accusation. |
How do we know that these people are not Christians?
Because they don't have the written instructions.
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Unless they have
written instructions from God to do the things they're doing then they are
not from God, they are impostors. You cannot place the crimes on God's
doorstep. That really is the key, by the way. How do we know that these
people are not Christians? Because they don't have the written
instructions. When you look at the written instructions it condemns them.
John wrote in his first epistle that "we know these people are not of
God because they do the works of unrighteousness." It's that clear.
It just points out that this objection is not only inconsistent with
the facts. Christianity is not responsible for most of the killing,
atheism is when you look at the great killers of history. It just is not a
fair accusation of Christianity or God. The people who do these kinds of
things are doing them contrary to the teachings of Christianity, not as a
result of the commands of Scripture. So there's something you can share
with somebody if they raise this issue once again. First, you can appeal
to the facts. Apart from an appeal to the facts, it's also fair to say the
people who committed these crimes just simply were not representatives of
Jesus Christ. If they were they would have lived in a very different
fashion. |
