Who is the “us”?

From Schaff, Volume V (not quoted exactly but excerpted).

The system for the repression and extermination of heresy came to a peak during the Inquisition which is probably the most revolting specta­cle in the history of civi­lized Europe (Schaff was not alive to see Hitler’s atroci­ties).  Some of the punishments or­dered were:  breaking the victim on the wheel, burning in caldrons of oil, quar­tering with horses, and skinning the victim alive.

The Inquisition was completely a papal institu­tion, be­ginning with Innocent III and not ending with Boniface VIII.  The example had been set earlier in history when Constantine banished the Arians and burned their books after the Council of Nicaea; Theodosius the Great fixed death as the punishment for heresy around 340; the Priscil­lianists were exe­cuted in 385.  After 1150, the death penalty was ad­vocated by coun­cils, popes insisted upon it and Thomas Aquinas defended it .

The Inquisition had three phases:  1.  Persecution of doctrinal heretics up to the year 1480.  2.  Perse­cution of witches in the four­teenth and fifteenth cen­turies.  3.  The organization of the Spanish In­quisition in 1480.

The twelfth century saw the onslaught of the Inquisi­tion.  The vic­tims of the Inquisitors lost all rights.  A citi­zen of the United States can­not imagine the total loss of rights as experienced by all during this pe­riod in history.  They were assumed guilty without justifiable cause to be under suspicion.  Im­prisonment for years, without being charged of any crime was common.  Torture was experi­enced to force confessions where no crime had been com­mited.  If the victim failed to supply a self confession by weakening under the pressure of torture, he was tortured to obtain information concerning other heretics that were known to him.  Supposing the in­quisitor was not satisfied with the confession, the pris­oner was returned to the dark­ness of their cell until additional torture was inflicted.The inquisitor was appointed by the sovereign leader of the realm and could be disciplined or removed by the same.  However, the realm was controlled by the church and had to answer to the pope for unsatisfactory de­cisions made.  This made the inquisitor a law of his own right, basically having to answer to no one for his actions or be­havior. [1]

Concerning the torture experienced, I have read of people that were subjected to equipment that  would  strip the skin completely off their bodies, yet leaving them alive.  No consideration was given to the fact that the victim was a man, woman, pregnant woman or young adoles­cent.

Victims were frequently roasted in their own blood, over a slow fire, so they would suffer the maximum pain.  In the latter half of the seventeenth cen­tury, the steel torture chair was designed to wring shrieking agony, from ev­ery nerve in the victim’s body.  It was fitted with manacles for the feet and hands, a helmet studded with screws to pierce the ear drums, rupture the nose and crush the chin, a gag with rack action that drew the tongue forward until it tore loose from the mouth, and thumb screws and screw-forceps for rip­ping out finger and toe nails.  [2]

Other means of torture :

When the Inquisitors wanted to get faster action, they made the imprison­ment incredibly harsh.  Chains and starvation in a stifling hole quickly brought confes­sions from reluc­tant lips… the implements of the tor­ture chamber:  the rack, burning coals and the strappado . 

The rack was a triangular frame, on which the prisoner was stretched and bound so that he could not move.  At­tached to his arms and legs were cords con­nected with a windlass, which when turned dislocated the joints of the wrists and ankles. 

In his History of the Inquisition, the French his­torian Jacques Marsol­lier describes the use of fire to extract con­fessions of guilt.  After a good fire was started, he relates, the victim was stretched out on the ground, his feet mana­cled , and turned toward the flame.  Fat, grease or some other com­bustible was rubbed upon them so that they would be severely burned….

The strappado or vertical rack was equally painful. The hands of the prisoner were tied behind this back and he was raised by a rope attached to a pulley or windlass to the top of the gallows, or to the ceiling of the torture chamber.  He was then let fall with a jerk to within a few inches of the floor.  The torturers would repeat this several times.  Some­times they tied weights to the victim’s feet to increase the shock of the fall and piercing agony of the victim. [3]

The following quotations describe the numbers of fatali­ties during the In­quisition.

The number of victims, as stated by Llorente, the popular historian of the Inquisition, is positively ap­palling.  He af­firms that during the sixteen years of Torquemada’s tenure of office (1483-1498) nearly 9000 were condemned to the flames, 6500 were burned in effigy, and more that 90,000 were sub­jected to the various penalties, besides a still larger who were reconciled; “a term which must not be misunder­stood by the reader to signify anything like a pardon or amnesty, but only the commutation of a capital sentence for inferior penalties, as fines, civil incapacity, very gener­ally total confiscation of property, and not unfrequently [sic] imprisonment for life” (Prescott, Ferd. and Isab. i, 253 comp also 267).  His successor, Diego Deza, in eight years (1499-1506), according to the same writer, put above 1600 to a simi­lar death.  Under the third general inquisitor, Fran­cis Ximenes de Cisneros (1507-17), 2536 per­sons were killed, 1368 were burned in effigy, and 47,263 were pun­ished in other ways (Llorente, iv, 252).  [4]

In Spain, the main object of the Inquisition was the Jews. 

In tracing the history of the Jewish people in the Middle Ages, the Crusades form a distinct epoch amid these cen­turies of darkness and turmoil.  If the Jew had hitherto suf­fered at the hand of the Christian, and had been gradually re­duced in social privilege, he was now grossly abused in the name of the re­ligion of him who taught, “Love thy neigh­bor as thyself.”  Undertaken to bring about a union of the Christians of the world–“that ideal of a Christian com­monwealth which forms the centre of the polemical and re­ligious life of the Middle Ages”–the crusading movement was inaugurated by a wholesale massacre and persecu­tion first of the Jew, and afterwards of the Mussul­man…..A wholesale slaughter of the “enemies of Christianity” was inaugu­rated.  Treves, Metz, Cologne, Mentz, Worms, Spires, Strasburg, and other cities, were deluged with the blood of the “unbelievers.”  The word Hep (said to be the initials of Hierosolyma est perdita, Jerusalem is taken) throughout all the cities of the empire became the signal for massacre, and if a insensate monk sounded it along the streets, it threw the rabble into parox­ysms of murderous rage.  The choice of death or con­version was given to the Jews, but few were found willing to purchase their life by that form of perjury.  Rather than subject their offspring to conversion and such Christian train­ing, father, presented their breast to the sword after putting their children to death, and wives and virgins sought refuge from the brutality of the soldiers by throwing themselves into the river with stones fastened to their bodies.  (Comp. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [Harpers edit.], v, 554.)  Not less than 17,000 were supposed to have perished in the German empire during these persecutions;yet those who survived clung to the land that had given them birth, and suffered from pil­lage and maltreatment until they were ex­pelled by force….The “Black Death”  in particular, occa­sioned a great and widespread persecution (1348-1350).  p. 909

They were murdered and burned by thousands, and many even sought death amidst the conflagrations of their syna­gogues.  From Switzerland to Silesia the land was drenched with innocent blood, and even the interference of the em­peror and the pope long proved insufficient to put an end to the atrocities that were perpetrated…..In France….The Jews were also forbid­den to hold social intercourse with their Christian neighbors, and the murderer of a Jew, if he were a Christian, went unpunished.  Need we wonder, then, that when, in the following century, a religious epi­demic, known as the Rising of the Shepherds, seized the common people in Languedoc and the central re­gions of France (A.D. 1321), they indulged in horri­ble massacres of the detested race; so horrible, indeed, that in one place, Verdun, on the Garonne, the Jews, in the madness of their agony, threw down their chil­dren to the Chris­tian mob from the tower in which they were gathered, hoping, but in vain, to appease the dæmoniacal fury of their assailants.  “One shud­ders to read of what followed; in whole provinces ev­ery Jew was burned.  At Chi­non a deep ditch was dug, an enormous pile raised, and 160 of both sexes burned together!Yet Chris­tianity never produced more reso­lute martyrs; as they sprang into the place of torment, they sang hymns as though they were going to a wedding;”….At last, 1594, they were indef­initely banished from France, and the sentence rigidly exe­cuted (see Schmidt, Gesch. Frandreichs, i, 504 sq.)…..In Spain and Portugal, indeed, the days of prosperity to the Jews lingered longest…..The world, which before seemed to have made a kind of tacit agreement to allow them time to regain wealth that might be plundered, and blood that might be poured out like water, now seemed to have entered into a conspiracy as extensive to drain the treasures and the life of this devoted race.  Kingdom after kingdom, and people after people, fol­lowed the dreadful example, and strove to peal the knell of the descendants of Is­rael; till at length, what we blush to call Christianity, with Inquisition in its train, cleared the fair and smil­ing provinces of Spain of industri­ous part of its pop­ulation, and brought a self-inflicted curse of barren­ness upon the benighted land (Milman, Hist. of Jews, iii; comp. Prescott, Fer. and Is­abella, pt. i, ch. vii; Jost, Gesch. d. Israeliten, vi, 75, 110, 184, 216, 290; Da Costa, Israel and the Gentiles, p. 221).  p.910.

…..The first important danger that threatened them was in 1218, when a multitude of foreign knights and soldiers gathered together at Toledo prepara­tory to a crusade against the Moors.  The campaign was to be opened, as had been done in Germany, by a general massacre of the Jews; but, by the intervention of Alphonso IX, surnamed the Good, the attempt was in a great measure defeated, and the Jews continued to prosper, after similar attempt made by the Cortes of Madrid had failed, until the middle of the 14th cen­tury.  By this time the general hatred against the Jews had spread alarmingly in all countries of Europe, as we have already had occa­sion to see, in consequence of the terror which the black death caused throughout that portion of the globe.  They were now also in Spain con­fined to particular quarter of cities in which there resides, and attempts were made for their conver­sion.  In 1250 an institution had even been erected for the express purpose of training men to carry on successfully controversies with the Jews, and, if possi­ble, to bring about their conversion.  But very different re­sults followed the bloody persecutions which were actually and successfully inaugurated against at Seville in 1391, 1392.  These were the outbursts of priestly and popular vio­lence, and had no sooner commenced in that city than Cordova, Toledo, Valencia, Catalonia, and the island of Ma­jorca fol­lowed in its train;  immense numbers were mur­dered, and wholesale theft was perpetrated by the reli­gious rabble.  Escape was possible only through flight to other countries, or by accepting baptism at the point of the sword, and the number of such enforced con­verts to Chris­tianity is reckoned at no less that 200,000.  If the persecu­tions in Germany, England, France, and else where had severely tried the Jewish race, these persecutions in Spain completely extin­guished all hope of further joy, for they hit, so to speak, the very core of the Jewish heart, and form a sad turning-point in the history of the Jews, and the 15th of March, 1391, forms a memorable day not only for the Jew, not only for the Spaniard, but for all the world; it was the seed from which germinated that monster called the In­quisition (Gratz, Gesch. d. Juden, viii, 61 sq.).  Daily now the condition of this people, even in the Spanish peninsula, grew worse and worse, until it fairly beggars description.  A.D. 1412-1414 they had to endure another bloody persecu­tion throughout the peninsula, and by the middle of the 15th century we read of nothing but persecution, violent conversion, massacre, and the tortures of the Inquisi­tion.  “Thousands were burned alive. ‘In one year 280 were burned in Seville alone.’  Sometimes the popes, and even the no­bles, shuddered at the fiendish zeal of the inquisitors, and tried to mit­igate it, but in vain.  At length the final hour of horror came.  In A.D. 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella issued and edict for the expulsion, within four months, of all who refused to become Christians, with the strict inhibition to take neither gold nor sil­ver out of the country.  The Jews offered an enormous sum for its revocation, and for a mo­ment the sovereigns hesitated; but Torquemada, the Do­minican inquisi­tor-general, dared to compare his royal mas­ter and mistress to Judas; they shrank from the awful accu­sation; and ruin of the most industrious, the most thriving, the most peaceable, and the most learned of their subjects–and consequently of Spain herself –be­came irremediable.”  This is perhaps the grandest and most melancholy hour in their modern history. [This ency­clopedia was first published in 1867, before the slaughter of Jews by Hitler] It is con­sidered by them­selves as great a calamity as the destruction of Jerusalem.  300,000 (some even give the numbers at 650,000 or 800,000) resolve to abandon the country, which a residence of seven centuries had made almost a second Judæa to them.  The incidents that marked their depar­ture are heart-rending.  Almost every land was shut against them.  Some, however ventured into France, others into Italy, Turkey, and Mo­rocco, in the last of which countries they suffered the most fright­ful priva­tions.  Of the 80,000 who obtained an en­trance into Portugal on payment of eight gold pennies a head, but only for eight months, to enable them to ob­tain means of departure to other countries, many lin­gered after the expiration of the ap­pointed time, and the poorer were sold as slaves.  In A.D. 1495, king Emanuel commanded them to quit his territories, but at the same time is­sued a secret order that all Jewish children under 14 years of age should be torn from their mother, retained in Portugal, and brought up as Christians.  Agony drove the Jewish mothers into madness, they destroyed their children with their own hands, and threw them into wells and rivers to prevent them from falling into the hands of their persecu­tors.  Neither were the miseries of those who em­braced Christianity, but who, for the most part, secretly ad­hered to their old faith (Onssim, Anussim–“yielding to vio­lence, forced ones”) less dreadful.  It was not until the 17th century that persecution ceased.  (Chambers, s.v.). [5]

To imagine or hope for justice during this period of history would be a fantasy, for there was little to be found.  The widespread persecu­tion was not overly concerned with justice, only eradication of heresy as determined by the in­quisitor.  If a desire is possessed to see the Godly men and scholars that were persecuted and executed for deviating from the doctrine of the church, one should become famil­iarized with the suf­ferings of Joan of Arc who was burned for witchcraft; Galileo threat­ened with death for discover­ing the rotation of the earth around the sun;  Nicholas Burton for being a successful English merchant found in Spain; John Wycliffe, the church reformer; John Huss, who was tricked and lied to by the Pope resulting in being burned at the stake for pro­moting godly behavior on the part of priests; Girolamo Savonarola hung by the neck and also burned for challenging the authority of the pope and encouraging the priests to live godly lives.

Michael Servetus, who discovered pulmonary circulation and was burned at the stake after  by John Calvin for believing Jesus was God in flesh; William Tyndale for translating scrip­ture for the common man….etc. etc. 

The final phase of the Inquisition to be discussed is the execution of individuals accused of being witches as described in the fol­lowing quota­tion.

The Witch Hunt Mania.

The trials for witchcraft in England were most numer­ous in the seven­teenth century, but the absence of judicial torture doubtless made the trials proportion­ately less nu­merous than they were on the continent.

 The methods employed by Matthew Hopkins, one of the most noted witch hunters, however, were not far re­moved from actual torture.  His prac­tice was to prick any bodily ex­crescence on the accused, which was be­lieved to be an extra pap for suckling imps. Such parts, in insensible, were thought to prove the accused was a witch.  Another technique was to com­pel the suspect to roam about all night, since only when at rest could a witch summon her familiars who would frighten her accusers away [emphasis mine].  

The last trial for witchery in England took place in 1712, when Jane Wenham was convicted but not executed.  In Scotland witch trials were held only after the Reforma­tion, and the last official burning took place there in 1727.  One of the last cases in Ger­many was that of Johannes Hu­nius, the burgomaster of Bamberg in Bavaria.  He was pricked with a knife, possibly one with a retractable point, and did not feel it.  This was presumptive evi­dence of guilt.  Under the unbearable pain of torture, he confessed to devil­ish acts, called out the name of neighbors seen at witches’ sabbath, and was burned alive in 1628.

English settlers in colonial America carried with them the belief in witchery.  After a lengthy witch trial at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, as a conse­quence of charges by a group of teen-age girls, more that thirty persons were con­victed of witchcraft, some after tor­ture [emphasis mine].  One of the executed men re­ceived the unusual punishment of being crushed to death between heavily weighted planks.

A Vast Holocaust.

Writing in the symposium, Witchcraft:  Confes­sions and Accusations, Norman Cohn describes the multitude put to death during the war on witchcraft in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a “vast holocaust” and adds, “Nobody knows how many peo­ple perished at the stake dur­ing those two centuries, but responsible estimates vary from 200,000 to a mil­lion.”  The Encyclopedia Britannica reports:  ”  The victims of the witchcraft trial have been vari­ously estimated to number from the hundreds of thou­sands to the millions.”

Lea observes: “Protestant and Catholic rivalled each other in the madness of the hour.  Witches were burned no longer in ones or twos, but in scores and hundreds.  A bishop of Geneva is said to have burned five hundred within three months, a bishop of Bam­burg six hundred, a bishop of Wurzburg nine hundred.  Eight hundred were condemned ap­parently in one body by the Sen­ate of Savoy….”  [6]

One may ask, “What is the point of documenting all this bloodshed and human suffering?”  The point is as follows: This is the church that the twenti­eth century church received its heritage from.  How do you think today’s orthodox church became orthodox?  They killed everyone and anyone that disagreed with them or anyone that refused to submit to their com­plete authority.  The killings mentioned above were not ordered on the grounds of Biblical disagreements or moral standards; it was a pure unadulterated power struggle with a total rejection for Biblical, moral, or hu­mane principles.  It does not matter if the instiga­tors be­lieved they were acting in God’s interest; they lost sight of the only commandment that Jesus left us with concerning our actions in relation to our brother-LOVE.

There is a saying, “Might makes right,” which proved to be true in this case.  This is the church that formed the doctrine that all mankind is supposed to live by because historical orthodox Christianity de­mands it.  After the year 385, the Church lost its per­spective.The early post-apostolic Church fathers had a desire for the truth; the church leaders strayed from the truth when the Word of God was inter­preted and com­promised as a result of the in­fluence of philosophy.  They continued in their error with the entrance of the anathema clause onto the stage of re­ligious politics.  The ultimate error came with the whole­sale slaughter of millions of innocent peo­ple…all by the orthodox church.

Therefore, I repeat  my conclusion that the ortho­dox Christian church is orthodox in reference to its historical longevity and not its Biblical founda­tion.  Biblically speaking the historic orthodox church is less orthodox than some of the cults that they con­demn.

[1] Henry Charles Lea, The Inquisition of the Middle Ages  (© 1963 Eyre & Spottiswoode (Publishers) Ltd.),  pp.153-183.

[2] John O’Brien, Ph.D., LL.D., University of Notre Dame, The Inquisition  (© 1973 MacMillan Publishing Co. Inc.) Back  Cover.

[3]  O’Brien, p. 44.

[4] McClintock and Strong, Volume IV, pp. 602, 603.

[5] McClintock and Strong, Volume IV, pp. 909-911.

[6] O’Brien, pp. 124, 125.