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Explanation:
The statement attributed to Jesus "I come not to bring peace, but to bring a sword" has been interpreted by some as a call to arms for Christians. Mark Juergensmeyer argues that "despite its central tenets of love and peace, Christianity—like most traditions—has always had a violent side. The bloody history of the tradition has provided disturbing images and violent conflict is vividly portrayed in the Bible. This history and these biblical images have provided the raw material for theologically justifying the violence of contemporary Christian groups. For example, attacks on abortion clinics have been viewed not only as assaults on a practice that Christians regard as immoral, but also as skirmishes in a grand confrontation between forces of evil and good that has social and political implications. sometimes referred to as Spiritual warfare.
Higher law has been used to justify violence by Christians:(
Historically, according to René Girard, many Christians embraced violence when it became the state religion of the Roman Empire: "Beginning with Constantine, Christianity triumphed at the level of the state and soon began to cloak with its authority persecutions similar to those in which the early Christians were victims.^^
In 1095, at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II declared that some wars could be deemed as not only a bellum iustum ("just war" -.-), but could, in certain cases, rise to the level of a bellum sacrum (holy war):) Jill Claster, dean of New York University College of Arts and Science,[40] characterizes this as a "remarkable transformation in the ideology of war", shifting the justification of war from being not only "just" but "spiritually beneficial"D:Thomas Murphy[who?D: ] examined the Christian concept of Holy War, asking "how a culture formally dedicated to fulfilling the injunction to 'love thy neighbor as thyself' could move to a point where it sanctioned the use of violence against the alien both outside and inside society".[citation needed] The religious sanctioning of the concept of "holy war" was a turning point in Christian attitudes towards violence; "Pope Gregory VII made the Holy War possible by drastically altering the attitude of the church towards war... Hitherto a knight could obtain remission of sins only by giving up arms, but Urban invited him to gain forgiveness 'in and through the exercise of his martial skills'." A holy war was defined by the Roman Catholic Church as "war that is not only just, but justifying; that is, a war that confers positive spiritual merit on those who fight in it".
In the 12th century, Bernard of Clairvaux wrote: "'The knight of Christ may strike with confidence and die yet more confidently; for he serves Christ when he strikes, and saves himself when he falls When he inflicts death, it is to Christ's profit, and when he suffers death, it is his own gain.
The Roman Inquisition, during the second half of the 16th century, was responsible for prosecuting individuals accused of a wide array of crimes relating to religious doctrine or alternate religious doctrine or alternate religious beliefs. Out of 51,000 — 75,000 cases judged by the Inquisition in Italy after 1542, around 1,250 resulted in a death sentence Violence was ubiquitous in sixteenth and seventeenth- century Europe; its control and suppression are fundamental to the very idea of early modernity. It was during this period that violence was first perceived as a constant feature of the human condition and identified as a major social and political problem, inspiring writers, painters and philosophers to address the issue. Religious division exacerbated civil conflict, but contrary to what one might expect, this period also saw a reduction in interpersonal violence, the use of torture and capital punishment. This module investigates this apparent paradox, using violence to understand the tremendous social, political and religious upheavals of the age, while at the same time exploring the possibilities for peace, co-existence and civility hope this helped :)
