Are atrocities committed reason to reject Christ?
by Kenny Chumbley
via Sentry Magazine, Vol. 20 No. 2, June 1994
Sentry Magazine, Vol. 20 No. 3, September 1994
Question:
How do we answer the atheist who cites the crimes and atrocities committed in the name of Christ as an argument against believing in Christ?
Answer:
We do not deny that a Christian can engage in criminal behavior. I Peter 4.15 acknowledges this possibility and warns against it.
Solzhenitsyn, in his Warning to the West, pointed out that under the rule of the Tsar just prior to the Russian revolution, “an average of seventeen persons a year were executed.” By contrast, the Spanish Inquisition at “the height of its murderous activity, executed perhaps ten persons a month.” But under the communists in Russia, in 1918 and 1919, the Cheka executed, without trial, more than a thousand persons a month [these figures taken from Cheka reports]. “In 1937-38, at the height of Stalin’s terror, if we divided the number of persons executed by the number of months, we get more than 40,000 persons shot per month.” Are the crimes of atheists an argument against atheism?
Kenneth Scott Latourette, in A History of Christianity, 1474, writes: “Wars have often been waged in the name of Christianity... Yet from no other source have there come as many and as strong movements to eliminate or regulate war and to ease the suffering brought by war.” Christianity “was the main impulse in the formulation of international law. But for it, the League of Nations and the United Nations would not have been. By its name and symbol, the most extensive organization ever created for the relief of the suffering caused by war, the Red Cross, bears witness to its Christian origin. The list might go on indefinitely.”
“Christianity for the first time made charity a rudimentary virtue, giving it the foremost place in the moral type, and in the exhortations of its teachers.” [W.E.H. Lecky (who was not a believer in revealed religion), History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne, 84].
"Hitler did what he did because of Christian teaching!” What part of Christ’s teaching was Hitler following: Blessed are the merciful? Turn the other cheek? Love your enemies? The weapons of our warfare are not carnal?
“What about God’s destruction of nations in the Old Testament?” If there is a God, could it be that He knows better than we when and how to deal with wicked nations? In regard to the nations whose destruction God ordered, note that He did not destroy them before their iniquity was full (Genesis 15:13-16); He was patient with them, waiting 400 years in the case of the Amorites; He gave them warnings and encouraged them to repent (e.g., Exodus 3-12, Jonah); and He spared them if they repented (Jonah 3:10). Consider also the depraved sins of the nations God punished: slavery (Exodus 1), infanticide (Exodus 1), child sacrifice (II Kings 17:17,31), merciless brutality (Nahum 1), etc.
