When zeal drew the sword

The great upheaval of the Reformation did not end in the clean light of recovered truth. It spilled, over the next century and more, into blood. Catholics and Protestants who confessed the same Lord took up arms against one another, and in His name. There were massacres, sieges, towns put to the sword over the right way to worship Him; and at the end, a Thirty Years' War that left whole regions of Europe ruined and starving. This is the darkest face of disorientation, and it must be named without flinching and without excuse. When the old order breaks and the new bearings have not yet come, fear and conviction can curdle together into something monstrous, and zeal reaches for the literal sword. The bitter irony is that the church already had its instructions. In the garden, when Peter drew steel to defend Him, Jesus said to put it back; those who take the sword die by it. James had asked plainly where the wars among us come from. The church's worst hours are simply the hours it forgot both, and called the forgetting faithfulness.

It is tempting to read these wars as a horror safely sealed in the past, the failure of other, fiercer people. They are not. The same curdling can happen in you, on a smaller and quieter scale, whenever fear and certainty fuse and the impulse rises to attack, to wound, to win the argument at any cost to the person across from you. The wars of religion are a sobering mirror, and the disorientation in your own life can hand you the same sword. Conviction is not the problem; the gospel is full of it. The problem is conviction that has stopped loving, that has decided the cause of God can be served by the weapons of the flesh. It cannot. When your own zeal starts reaching for a blade, even a blade made only of words, the word of Christ to Peter is the word to you: put it back in its place. Truth that you defend by cruelty is no longer the truth you set out to defend; somewhere in the swing of the sword it became something else, and took your soul with it.