CAIR's Kafir-phobia

If you're here visiting from my article today in The American Thinker, Kafir-phobia: Americans as Violent Anti-Muslim Bigots, welcome! Feel free to put your feet up and look around a while! For my Islam-related posts, check the sidebar to the right.

Ya'll come back again!

UPDATE (09/01/06): Thanks to WorldNetDaily for linking to the article on their Commentary page.

Remembering the St. Bartholomew Day Martyrs

A contemporary portrait of the St. Bartholomew Day Massacre

It was on this date in 1572 that one of the most tragic episodes in the history of the Christian Church occurred. The slaughter of tens of thousands of Protestants began in Paris at 3am on St. Bartholomew's Day, August 24th to the sound of church bells. One of the first victims was Gaspard de Coligny, the Admiral of France and the leader of the French Calvinists, the Huguenots. Admiral Coligny was arguably the most powerful man in France at the time and one of the closest advisors to Charles IX.

Paris was full of thousands of French Calvinists who were in the city to celebrate the marriage of Henry, King of Navarre, a Protestant, to the Princess Marguerite, the sister of Charles IX. The wedding was held on August 18th much to the dismay of Charles' mother, Catherine de Medici - the she-wolf of European politics and a staunch Roman Catholic. The marriage was intended to resolve tensions between the competing religious factions in France.

When an assassins bullet struck Coligny as he walked the streets of Paris on August 22nd, taking off one of his fingers, Catherine de Medici saw an opportunity to strike against the Protestants while their leader was recovering from his injuries. She pressured her son, Charles, with the help of the Duke of Guise and the Duke of Anjou. She convinced Charles that a Calvinist revolt was imminent. The Huguenot leadership must be eliminated, she argued. She threatened to leave her 23-year old son and return to Italy if he refused to act. Finally, Charles cracked, shouting, "By the death of God, since you choose to kill the Admiral, I consent! But then you must kill all the Huguenots in France, so that not one shall be left to reproach me...Kill them all! Kill them all!"

With that, the butchery began. The king's Swiss Guards were summoned to dispatch the Huguenot leaders, including Coligny (pictured left), who was murdered in his bed by the Duke of Guise. Coligny's body was beheaded, his head presented to Charles, and his body hung up on display.

Spurred on by the Roman Catholic clergy, the masses soon seized upon any Huguenot that could be found. One Protestant witness who survived, Jacques-Auguste de Thou, who would later become a prominent Huguenot leader in his own right, described the horror:

"...the streets and ways did resound with the noise of those that flocked to the slaughter and plunder, and the complaints and doleful out-cries of dying men, and those that were nigh to danger were every where heard. The carkasses of the slain were thrown down from the windows, the Courts & chambers of houses were full of dead men, their dead bodies rolled in dirt were dragged through the streets, bloud did flow in such abundance through the chanels of the streets, that full streams of bloud did run down into the River: the number of the slain men, women, even those that were great with child, and children also, was innumerable."

Within days, 5,000 Huguenots lay dead in Paris alone. In the weeks and months that followed, the mass violence spread to virtually every region of France. In Lyon, Dijon, Tours, Troyes, Rouen, Bourges, and Toulouse, few Huguenots were spared from the savagery. The numbers of those murdered are estimated to be between 30,000-100,000.

The reaction to the massacre in Europe ranged from horror to jubilant celebration. The Spanish Ambassador in Paris rejoiced at the savagery: "As I write, they are killing all of them, they are stripping them naked...sparing not even the children. Blessed be God!" In Rome, Pope Gregory XIII welcomed the news of the massacre with a singing of the Te Deum. Pope Gregory also authorized the striking of a commemorative medal honoring the "Slaughter of the Huguenots" and commissioned the painter Giorgio Vasari to paint a mural of the massacre in the Vatican, bearing the inscription, Pontifex Colbni necent probat ("the Pope approves the killing of Coligny"). A portion of Vasari's painting is shown below to the right.

Commemorative medal struck by Pope Gregory XIII honoring the massacre of the Huguenots

The massacre had more impact amongst the Protestants across Europe. Perhaps one of the most important legacies of the event was the shift in Protestant political theory. For the next thirty years, printing presses would flow with new books contending against the "divine right of kings" and contending for constitutional monarchies. Francois Hotman's Franco-Gallia would argue that French kings were bound to follow the law and to protect their subjects. Calvin's successor in Geneva, Theodore Beza, argued in his The Right of Magistrates over Their Subjects (1574) from classical, medieval and contemporary history that subjects had a right to defend themselves against unbridled monarchical tyranny and that kings were not due unconditional obedience. Phillipe de Plessisis du Mornay -- another French Calvinist -- wrote in his Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos that Scripture allowed for the murder of a tyrannical monarch to defend liberty of conscience. In Scotland, George Buchanan authored a dialogue, De Jure Regni Apud Scots, dedicated to his pupil, King James of Scotland (later King James I of England). As many Founding Fathers attest to, these monarchomach treatises would play an important ideological role in the America War for Independence two centuries later.

The massacres did not have the intended effect in France that Catherine de Medici and her Roman Catholic supporters hoped for. Within two months, the French Wars of Religion flared again as Huguenots were forced by sheer survival to oppose Charles. Within a year, the Protestants had secured from Charles a guarantee of freedom of religion. In 1574, Charles IX died, which began what is known as the "War of the Three Henries". In the end, Henry of Navarre, who had survived the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre by "converting" to Roman Catholicism, became Henry IV of France. He had joined Protestant forces fighting against the Catholic League after again claiming his allegiance to the Protestant faith. When it became clear that Paris would not tolerate a Protestant king, he reconverted to Roman Catholicism in 1594, remarking, "Paris vaut bien une messe" ("Paris is worth a Mass") and was crowned King of France at Chartres on February 27, 1594. This act united the country and laid the ground for the prosperity that occurred under Henry's reign.

In 1598, Henry signed the Edict of Nantes, which granted official toleration of the Huguenots and purchased civil and religious peace for France for a century until Louis XIV revoked the edict in 1685, which prompted most Protestants to leave France forever (who were warmly welcomed by Protestant countries, including England, Germany, Switzerland, the Dutch Republic, South Africa and America).

Ahmadinejad's Apocalyptic Faith

My most recent article, Ahmadinejad's Apocalyptic Faith, is up today at FrontPage. For those of you just joining us in the 21st Century, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is Iran's current president and chief sabre-rattler. Here's a preview:

Ahmadinejad’s worldview is shaped by the radical Hojjatieh Shiism that is best represented by Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, the Iranian President’s ideological mentor and marja-e taqlid (object of emulation), of the popular Haqqani religious school located in Qom. The affection seems to be mutual: in the 2005 Iranian presidential campaign, Ayatollah Yazdi issued a fatwa calling on his supporters to vote for Ahmadinejad.

The Hojjatieh movement is considered to be so radical that it was banned in 1983 by the Ayatollah Khomeini and is still opposed by the majority of the Iranian clerics, including the Supreme Leader of the Supreme National Security Council, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei. That should be telling in and of itself. That opposition notwithstanding, it is believed that several adherents of the Hojjatieh sect are in Cabinet-level positions in Ahmadinejad’s government.

Most Shiites await the return of the 12th Shiite Imam, Muhammad ibn Hasan, the last direct male descendent of the Prophet Mohammed’s son-in-law Ali, who disappeared in 874AD and is believed to be in an invisible, deathless state of existene, or “occultation”, awaiting his return. Though it is discounted even by the most extremist clerics, a popular belief in Iran holds that the 12th Imam, also called the Mahdi or the sahib-e zaman (“the Ruler of Time”), lives at the bottom of a well in Jamkaran, just outside of Qom. Devotees drop written requests into the well to communicate with the Mahdi. His reappearance will usher in a new era of peace as Islam vanquishes all of its enemies. The Sunnis, who reject the successors of Ali, believe that the Mahdi has yet to be born.

But rooted in the Shiite ideology of martyrdom and violence, the Hojjatieh sect adds messianic and apocalyptic elements to an already volatile theology. They believe that chaos and bloodshed must precede the return of the 12th Imam, called the Mahdi. But unlike the biblical apocalypse, where the return of Jesus is preceded by waves of divinely decreed natural disasters, the summoning of the Mahdi through chaos and violence is wholly in the realm of human action. The Hojjatieh faith puts inordinate stress on the human ability to direct divinely appointed events. By creating the apocalyptic chaos, the Hojjatiehs believe it is entirely in the power of believers to affect the Mahdi’s reappearance, the institution of Islamic government worldwide, and the destruction of all competing faiths.

This is an important issue. Read it all (if I say so myself).

Getting Noticed Across the Pond

Every now and then when I think that no one is listening, evidence arrives that I'm being heard. A few weeks ago, I had a piece published by The American Thinker, entitled, Radical Islamists and Western Governments, about the collusion between Tony Blair's government (America's supposed partner in the Global War on Terrorism) and the Islamist Muslim Council of Britian, and the presence of known Islamists in Blair's Foreign Office, the equivalent of our Department of State. I received suprisingly little feedback, which is unusual for an article of this sort. At least I usually get some hate mail of the "Die Zionist Pig" variety. That's the standard indicator. The absence of any feedback at all led me to believe that it got lost in the wash or ignored altogether.

Lo and behold, a week ago my American Thinker article was positively mentioned in an opinion piece in the left-leaning British Guardian/Observer. It isn't every day that you get international media attention, even if it was offered with a bit of a political jab at conservatives such as myself. But hey, you take what you can when it's offered.

UPDATE #1: Oi vey! I entirely forgot to mention earlier that my FrontPage Magazine article, The Muslim Brotherhood "Project", was recently reprinted by the Paris-based Institut pour la Défense de la Démocratie.

I have some additional articles coming out hopefully this week. Stay tuned for updates!

In Memoriam: Leon Morris (1914-2006)

I was saddened to hear last week of the death of reknowned Australian Reformed Anglican scholar, Leon Morris. In recent years, Morris' works have been the source of tremendous spiritual encouragement and education for me. It was four years ago that I first read his The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, his PhD dissertation for Cambridge that is still today one of the most compelling defenses and expositions of the substitutionary atonement of Christ. Covering the biblical themes of Redemption, Covenant, "The Blood", "The Lamb of God", Propitiation, Reconciliation and Justification, it is a tour de force of biblical theology.

What has attracted me to Morris' work has been the centrality of Christ's work of atonement in the Gospel. There is little room for the works of man in our salvation, as this quote (one of my favorites) found in the closing pages of The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross argues:

The people of God on the scriptural view are those who have entered into covenant with Him, and this might well be viewed as an activity of man as well as of God. But the initiative is always thought of as resting with God, and man's part is no more than the accepting of a covenant whose terms have been laid down by God. Thus the very idea of covenant, as the Bible understands it, puts the stress on the divine activity, and this is reinforced by the fact that the covenant in the New Testament is established only because the Son of God died for man and thus put away his sin. There is very little place for human activity in this way of viewing Calvary, and once again we see that atonement is essentially something wrought for, rather than in, man. (p. 300)

The theme of the centrality of the Cross as the heart of the Gospel was a theme I encountered when I read his Galatians: Paul's Charter of Christian Freedom:

That the cross is absolutely central means that the keeping of the law cannot be imposed on Gentile believers. The teachers Paul was opposing apparently did not grasp this. They were insisting that all converts must keep the whole law. The law was part of revealed Scripture and they saw it as binding on all. The law was at the heart of God's purpose, they thought, and this for Gentile believers as for Jews. Paul does not denigrate the law. It was divinely given and it was regarded as a great treasure by the Israelites in general, and Paul in particular. Paul sees it as very important. But it is not the way of salvation. To see the law as divinely given and as an incomparable guide to the way we should live out our salvation is one thing, but it is quite another to affirm that anyone's salvation hangs on the way he or she keeps the law. (p. 27)

These two books are excellent antidotes to those who today want to smuggle man's work and obedience into our salvation under the guise of "covenantal obedience" and other sundry postmodern theological inventions.

It was more than a year ago that Morris' The Cross in the New Testament took a place in my reading stack. Honestly, I have still not finished it, more out of laziness than anything else. But the third that I have read (covering Matthew, Mark and Luke) are a testament to solid biblical scholarship. His footnotes alone are worth the read, for they demonstrate his masterful handling of the vast body of theological literature on the topic. And still, the dominant theme of Christ's work and his identification with sinners is central:

The revolutionary thing in the practice of Jesus was his readiness to identify Himself with ordinary men. He did not take up a position anythig like that of the general run of religious leaders. He did not blame or despise men for failing to keep the traditions. He did not regard Himself as too holy to come into contact with them. He did not thank God that he was not like other men. Instead He sought them out. He talked with them. He dined with them. He made Himself one with them... He made Himself one with sinner because His mission concerned sinners, because He came to do for them that which was vitally necessary, but which they could not do for themselves. (pp. 90-92)

About the same time as I started reading The Cross in the New Testament, I also picked up his New Testament Theology. For good reason, this is a standard theological textbook in many evangelical seminaries. This is an excellent study of theology proper - the study of the person of God. And as Morris progresses through the New Testament, he shows how each biblical writer adds to our understand of who God is.

Morris, of course, is best known for his magnum opus, his NICNT commentary on the Gospel of John. The Gospel of John was a frequent stomping ground for Morris, and his lectures on John (some of which are available for free from SermonAudio) communicate his love for the topic. I hope to get to his commentary soon after finishing The Cross in the New Testament and the NICNT commentary on Hebrews by Bruce.

For me, the particular value of Morris' work has been for its clarity, accessibility, and focus on the work of Christ for us as the paramount message of the Gospel. Excepting The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, which does have some discussion on Greek terminology that might that might require some modest familiarity with the language, Morris writes without all of the flower and show that seems to be endemic with theological writers today. He is a "meat and potatoes" theologian. But it is rock solid. Even in his shorter devotional works, like The Cross of Christ, have meat enough to eat. His commentary on Galatians I cited above is an excellent example of what popular commentaries should be - engaging, informative and readable. Through his theological writings and his many years of teaching, Leon Morris has forged a lasting legacy worthy of the saying, "Though dead, he yet speaks". Blessed in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.

What I'm listening to: At the recommendation of Clay Biggs, I'm listening to Maurice Duruflé, Sacred Choral and Organ Works. I've only listened to the first disc of two thus far (which includes his Requiem, Op. 9), but this is great music to soothe the soul. Very passionate and an excellent blend of organ and voice. As always, this is a good call by Mr. Biggs.

Update #1: D.A. Carson has some remembrances of Morris at Reformation21.