Christianizing the Germans, Militarizing the Church (Book Notes: Fighting For Christendom)

The Christianization of a culture is not a one-way street. Christianity started out as a Jewish sect, but when Rome was Christianized, Christianity absorbed quite a bit from Roman culture, changing it extensively. Most people familiar with Christian history are aware of this, but less common is the awareness of how much Christianity changed due to the Christianization of German tribes.

In Fighting For Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades, Christopher Tyerman writes:

War occupied a central place in the culture as well as politics of the Germanic successor states to the Roman Empire from the fifth century. The great German historian of the origins of the crusading mentality, Carl Erdmann, argued that for the new rulers of the west war provided ‘a form of moral action, a higher type of life than peace’. Heavily engaged in converting these warlords, the Christian Church necessarily had to recognize their values, not least because, with the collapse of the Roman civil institutions, economic and social order revolved around the fiscal and human organization of plunder, tribute, and dependent bands of warriors held together by kinship and lordship.

Notice how pragmatic Christian leaders had to be — and ultimately accepted being. It certainly would have been preferable for them to get German warlords to give up their warrior values, but that simply wasn’t an option if Christianization was to occur. They were faced with a stark choice: not Christianize or compromise on the nature of Christianity, allowing (or even helping) aspects of warrior culture to be incorporated into Christian doctrine.

Christian leaders went with the latter and were ultimately successful at Christianizing the Germanic tribes — but at a price:

Their Gods were tribal deliverers of earthly victory and reward. It has been said that the early medieval army, the exercitus, assumed a role as the pivotal public institution in and through wish operated justice, patronage, political discipline, diplomacy, and ceremonies of communal identity, usually with the imprimatur of religion, pagan or Christian.

The effect of the conversion of these Germanic peoples worked in two directions: the Christianizing of their warrior ethic and the militarizing of the church. [...]

In the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon “Dream of the Rood,” Christ is depicted as ‘the young warrior’, ‘the Lord of Victories’; death on the cross as a battle, with heaven as a sort of Valhalla. A ninth-century Old German poetic version of the Gospel story shows Christ as a lord of men, ‘a generous mead-giver’, his disciples a war band traveling in worships, Peter ‘the mighty noble swordsman’. While fiercely resisted by many academics and monks, this militarized mentality received the powerful confirmation of events.

Jesus as a young warrior, Heaven as Valhalla, the disciples as a war band... I wonder how much the earliest Christians would have recognized this sort of Christianity. Indeed, would they have even accepted it as a valid form of Christianity in the first place? Perhaps not, but this doesn't mean that it wasn't a valid form — it was valid for the Germanic warrior tribes of the era and was the only sort of Christianity they were likely to have adopted.

It is disconcerting, and perhaps not entirely coincidental, that one of the few other instances when Christianity became more militant and violent also occurred in Germany. In the early 20th century, German theologians developed a "war theology," according to which God acted in human history through nation-states and the German nation was a special instrument of God. Developments like this are part of what allowed Adolf Hitler and the Nazis so appealing to so many Christians in Germany.

 

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