Author: David Opderbeck

This week has been very busy as I’ve started teaching my class in Ireland. Here are some new pictures from Belgium and Ireland.

I don’t have any pictures today because I didn’t travel. We had lectures this morning, and in the afternoon I went to the dentist (to relieve and infected crown) and did my laundry. This evening I stayed in Leuven and had a fabulous dinner: green bean and bacon salad, followed by lamb tenderlion with sauce creme au poive, and a Leffe Triple (Belgian Trappist beer, the lighter version), seated at an outside table on a cobblestone street overlooking the 15th-Century town hall and St. Pieterskerk, a gothic church constructed in 1425, all for 35 Euro. It just doesn’t get much better than that. Then I ambled through town and got a marvelous ice cream and ate it while strolling through the park. I found some of my students camped out at a cafe table in the Oude Markt, a large open area flanked by cafes and brasseries. There I enjoyed a Leffe dark and some good conversation before rambling back to my room.

Leuven is just wonderful. It’s too bad we’re leaving tomorrow, although I’m looking forward to Galway, and I hope I get back to Leuven someday for a more extended stay.

At the laundromat today, I finished reading Thomas Asbridge’s The First Crusade: A New History. It’s an excellent and readable history, which I highly recommend. Reading this history spurred me to think about parallels between the spirituality of the First Crusade and today’s “culture wars.”

The First Crusade was spurred, in part, by Pope Urban II, whose fiery sermon delivered in 1095 promised “eternal rewards” to all who participated in a holy war to defend eastern Christians against Islam and recapture Jerusalem. Asbridge is unique among modern historians in that he does not paint the first crusaders as merely a rapacious mob of disenchanted nobles seeking plunder. Although they were indeed often rapacious and greedy, Asbridge argues that the first crusaders persevered mainly because of their “[i]ntense spiritual conviction.” But this conviction was not so much in the justice of their cause as in their belief that crusading valor would lead to salvation. Thus, Asbridge concludes, the crusaders “suffered the horrors of the crusade to fulfil and intimate and ultimately self-serving need: to overcome their desperate fear of damnation and to emerge, purified, at the gates of heaven.”

This mixture of violence and piety is illustrated starkly in Asbridge’s discussion of the sack of Jerusalem. On July 15, 1099, after years of bloody campaigning, the crusaders had reached and captured Jerusalem. Once the city was taken, the crusading armies engaged in mass pillage and slaughter of combatants and civilians alike. Yet, even as they butchered Jersualem’s inhabitants and stole their possessions, the crusaders marched to the Holy Sepluchre of Jerusalem (which marks the spot where Christ is supposed to have been crucified) in tears of praise. As Asbrige describes it, quoting a contemporary source, “[I]n a moment that is perhaps the most vivid distillation of the crusading experience, they came, still covered in their enemies’ blood, weighed down with booty, ‘rejoicing and weeping from excessive gladness to worship at the Sepluchre of our Saviour Jesus.'”

The incongruity of this scene is beyond comprehension for most of us who claim to follow Jesus today. And that incongruity is disturbing. Are there times when we rejoice though we are at least figuratively covered in our enemies’ blood? Are our deeper motives in fighting the culture wars sometimes largely self-serving? Do the ghosts of the first crusaders haunt even the phrase “culture wars?”

Thankfully most Christians today abhor crusading violence. But it seems to me that some of the crusading spirit still survive in the angry rhetoric and aggressive tactics we often bring to the so-called “culture wars.” Even the unfortunate imagery of a culture “war” hearkens back to the crusading ideal. I do believe we as Christians are called to be “salt and light” in society, and that we must take our place in the public square. Our warfare, however, is “not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” (Eph. 6:12). We must always remember that our interactions with others, even over the values we hold dear, are rooted in love, not war.

Terri Schiavo’s recently disclosed autopsy report reveals that her brain was severly atrophied. She would have been unable to see, and therefore almost certainly was unable to respond to visual stimuli. There was no possibility of recovery through any therapy. In short, the autopsy was consistent with the credible neurological evaluations presented in the trial court indicating that she was in a persistent vegitative state.

This should chasten those who insisted that their viewing of a few snippets of videotape trumped the extensive evidence presented to the trial court. It should cause those who pounded the drum for special federal legislation, and who raised the cry of “judicial activism,” to understand why they must tread more carefully on the right of a state trial court to make factual determinations in cases arising under state law. In my view, much of the evangelical right was naive about the Schiavo case and much of the Republican leadership exploited that naivetee. I hope the substantial medical evidence of this autoposy teaches us to think before speaking.

Today’s pictures from Belguim, including a visit to the EU: http://www.davidopderbeck.com/pictures4.htm

Today I visited Brugges in Belgium. Pictures are here.

Tonight I head to Europe for a month of teaching in Brussels and Ireland. My wife will join me for a week, but the kids will stay home. It will be the longest I’ve ever been away from the kids.

Last night we went to Friendly’s for a little “last meal” before I leave. Lord willing, I’ll be back home in mid-July for the rest of the summer, and we’ll have lots of time together after that. But, it felt a little like I wasn’t coming back. It made me think of what I would want to do if I knew I really wasn’t coming back. And it struck me that I was doing exactly that — a cheesburger and ice cream with my wife and kids. Thank God for these wonderful little moments of life!