Yesterday I had a couple of people over to my house, along with two grandchildren. We were setting up a Christmas tree, having some hot chocolate, and generally having some Advent fun. Well, some questions started coming my way. One of them was whether the Orthodox Church had ever engaged in sin as serious as the current Roman Catholic paedophile scandal. Sadly, my answer was, “yes.” If you look at both Russian and Eastern European history, you can find pogroms against the Jews on more than one occasion. What is a pogrom?
A pogrom is a form of violent riot, a mob attack, either approved or condoned by government or military authorities, directed against a particular group, whether ethnic, religious, or other, and characterized by killings and destruction of their homes and properties, businesses, and religious centers. The term usually carries connotation of spontaneous hatred of majority population against certain (usually ethnic) minority, which they see as dangerous and harming the interests of majority. The term was originally used to denote extensive violence against Jews in the Russian Empire and a series of anti-German pogroms in Russia in 1915. Pogroms often affect members of middlemen minorities. This can, in extreme cases, result in genocide, such as that of Armenians or Jews.
Mind you, it was not just the Orthodox that engaged in pogroms. Listed below is a very partial list of some of the medieval pogroms, and includes a very well known Protestant figure:
Massive violent attacks against Jews date back at least to the Crusades such as the Pogrom of 1096 in France and Germany (the first to be officially recorded), as well as the massacres of Jews at London and York in 1189–1190
During the Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain, beginning in the 9th century, Islamic Spain was more tolerant towards Jews. The 11th century, however, saw several Muslim pogroms against Jews; those that occurred in Cordoba in 1011 and in Granada in 1066. In the 1066 Granada massacre, a Muslim mob crucified the Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and massacred about 4,000 Jews[10] In 1033 about 6,000 Jews were killed in Fez, Morocco by Muslim mobs. Mobs in Fez murdered thousands of Jews, leaving only 11 alive, in 1465.
In 1348, because of the hysteria surrounding the Black Plague, Jews were massacred in Chillon, Basle, Stuttgart, Ulm, Speyer, Dresden, Strasbourg, and Mainz. By 1351, 60 major and 150 smaller Jewish communities had been destroyed. A large number of the surviving Jews fled to Poland, which was very welcoming to Jews at the time.
In 1543, Martin Luther wrote On the Jews and Their Lies, a treatise in which he advocated harsh persecution of the Jewish people, up to what are now called pogroms. He advocated that their synagogues and schools be set on fire, their prayer books destroyed, rabbis forbidden to preach, homes razed, and property and money confiscated.
Jews, Poles, and Catholics were massacred during the Khmelnytsky Uprising of Ukrainian Cossacks in retaliation for Polish colonialism in 1648–1654, and during the Koliyivshchyna in 1768-1769.
Needless to say, my questioners were quite shocked. You see, they had expected that the Church would be spotless. But, it is not and has never been. Sadly, the strong Anabaptist emphasis in this country has given us a type of blindness towards what both Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Apostles said about what would happen in the future of the Church. And, frankly, it has given us a type of blindness as to what is actually written in the New Testament about the reality of the Church here on Earth, even when the Twelve Apostles were still alive. The Anabaptist theology of the Pure Church has led to both splits and to a failure to understand what the prophesized reality of the Church would be.
What do I mean by prophesized? Well, let me point out just a few instances. Our Lord Jesus Christ gave the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares as a warning of what the Church would really be like in the future. Saint Paul warned the Ephesians that after his leaving to go to Jerusalem that many wolves would arise from among them. Saint John said in his epistle that there would be many anti-Christs who would rise up in the Church. In spite of all those warnings, in spite of the clear teaching that the Church would not be a pure gathering of believers, but would always be under the most severe of attacks and subject to various traitors and sinners within her, yet somehow many American Christians fail to believe the warnings and still hold to the idea that the Church is a nearly pure group of believers gathered out from the world rather than being an army under severe and constant attack.
Let’s look at some of the Scriptures.
===MORE TO COME===
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