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The First Crusade and the Culture Wars

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.

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Terry Schiavo's Autoposy

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.

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Today in Begium

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

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Today in Belgium

Today I visited Brugges in Belgium. Pictures are here.

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My Last Day

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!

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One of Those Moments

Today we had a pee-wee baseball game with my seven-year-old son’s team. I’m the manager. My four-year-old son tags along (he even wears baseball pants). After the game, the three of us Opderbeck men went to McDonald’s. Sitting there with my boys, watching them devour their McNuggets and joke around with each other, it struck me that this is it. This is one of those moments that you want to bottle up for a rainy day. “Sons are a reward from the LORD, children a heritage from him.” (Psalm 127:3). Amen!

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EO Blog Symposium Award

I’m quite pleased to announce that my post Judeo Christian Morality, a Pluralistic Society, and the Courts was chosen for an award in the Evangelical Outpost Blog Symposium.

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Spiritual Perils of Blogging

While I’m on vacation in Florida, I’ll recycle a few old posts. Here’s one of my posts in my “Spiritual Perils of Blogging” series:

This is the second in my “Spiritual Perils of Bogging” series. Today I focus on Envy.

Envy is a danger inherent in any “public” work. As an academic, for example, publication is the coin of the realm. All academics compete for space in the presigious journals within their fields. It can be extraordinarily difficult to appreciate the work of other academics without thinking “why should he have gotten this great article placement — I could have done it better.” Sometimes there’s a temptation to criticize and discredit others out of envy. This is particularly the case early in an academic career when life is “publish or perish.”

The same dynamic can apply, I think, in the blogsphere. I know I’ve thought many times, “why does so-and-so get all that traffic? He doesn’t say anything remarkable. I should be the guy mentioned in Hugh Hewitt’s book, not him.” The motivation for maintaining and promoting a blog can become more to compete than to participate in a conversation.

Most of us in the “tail” of the faith-based blogsphere will need to make peace with the fact that we will never get to the fat part of the traffic curve. Maybe sometimes we “tail-ers” will have more of substance to say than the “big guys,” but our responsibility is to keep saying it as well as we can and to make it available as best we can. If God has plans to expand the influence of my little blog He’ll accomplish them, and if He doesn’t, I’ll try to be faithful to whatever His purposes might be.

For those of us who name Christ as Lord, our blogs, like anything else, are His to use as He sees fit. There’s no place, then, for any of us to envy the “success” of other bloggers. “Success,” after all, shouldn’t be counted in page hits, unique visits, or Instapundit mentions, but in faithfulness.

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Today in Florida

On vacation in Florida….

Uh, ok…

Does he look hungry?

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What I Learned at the Square Dance

Last night was the girl scout square dance. What a blast! A couple of hundred goofy, paunchy dads do-si-do’ing with their little girls in the high school gym. In addition to some good clean fun, I learned two things through this:

1. There are words to the “Chicken Dance” song. You know the dance — it starts with the chicken beaks, goes to the flapping wings, and then to the little tail wiggle. So picture that, with about a hundred little girls, singing spontaneously, in unison, and at the top of their lungs: “I don’t want to be a chicken, I don’t want to be a duck, so kiss my butt!” Where do they learn this stuff? I almost doubled over laughing.

2. All high school gymns are kept at a balmy 99 degrees and 90% relative humidity, they all look and smell the same, and as soon as you walk into them, they trigger long repressed memories of that whimpy kid who never could seem to do anything right, who never quite lived up to his potential, and who was mortally afraid that the other guys might notice his relative lack of hair in various manly places. You know, that “friend” of yours who grew up to become a lawyer or pastor or teacher or something, who wonders how he came to be living in a nice house full of little kids who call him “dad,” and who now spends way too much time in front of a computer screen talking to people he’s never even met.