History of Christian thought on persecution and tolerance
[16]: 174, 175 On the other hand, Stroumsa argues that Tertullian knew co-existence meant competition, so he attempted to undermine the legitimacy of the pagan religions by comparing them to Christianity at the same time he advocated for tolerance from them.
[32]: 287 [33]: 19 According to Michele R. Salzman, fourth century Rome featured sociological, political, economic and religious competition, producing tensions and hostilities between various groups, but that Christians focused on heresy more than pagans.
[33]: 28, 29, 31 [37]: 20, 175 Also in the East, John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, who is best known for his brilliant oratory and his exegetical works on moral goodness and social responsibility, also wrote Discourses Against the Jews which is almost pure polemic, using replacement theology that is now known as supersessionism.
For decades, Donatists fomented protests and street violence, refused compromise, attacked random Catholics without warning, doing serious and unprovoked bodily harm such as beating people with clubs, cutting off their hands and feet, and gouging out eyes.
The empire responded to civil unrest with force, and in 408 in his Letter 93, Augustine began defending persecution of the Donatists by the imperial authorities saying that, "if the kings of this world could legislate against pagans and poisoners, they could do so against heretics as well.
[31]: 639 [31]: 640 Anti-paganism existed, but according to Rita Lizzi Testa, Michele Salzman, and Marianne Sághy who quote Alan Cameron: the idea of religious conflict as the cause of a swift demise of paganism is pure historiographical construction.
"[31]: 643 Having, in 423, been declared by the emperor Theodosius II not to exist, large bodies of polytheists all over the Roman empire were not murdered or converted under duress so much as they were simply left out of the histories the Christians wrote of themselves as victorious.
[29]: 119–121 Patrick Wormald indicates the Irish and English missionaries sent out to those territories that would become the Holy Roman Empire and then Germany, thought of the pagans on the continental mainland with "interest, sympathy and occasionally even admiration.
[29]: 125 According to Anna Sapir Abulafia, "Most scholars would agree that, with the marked exception of Visigothic Spain (in the seventh century), Jews in Latin Christendom lived relatively peacefully with their Christian neighbors through most of the Middle Ages.
"[4]: 4, 5 [94]: xviii Some of these developments, such as centralization and secularization, also took place within the church whose leaders bent Christian thought to aid the state in the production of new rhetoric, patterns, and procedures of exclusion and persecution.
[13]: 433 Although the debate over defining the Augustinianism of the High Middle Ages has been ongoing for three quarters of a century,[103]: 117 there is agreement that the Order of the Hermits of St. Augustine supported the development of church hierarchy and embraced concepts such as the primacy of the Pope and his perfection.
"[4]: 87 [94]: xviii The Fourth Lateran council reduced those penalties, and though Gregory IX (1145–1241) ordered the Dominicans to root out homosexuality from the territory that later became the nation of Germany, a century earlier, the kingdom of Jerusalem had spread a legal code ordaining death for "sodomites".
[56]: 209 [111]: 130 [94]: xvii Together, secular rulers and writers, along with Christian leadership and thought, created a new rhetoric of exclusion, legitimizing persecution based on new attitudes of stereotyping, stigmatization and even demonization of the accused.
[117]: 2 Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), pillar of European monasticism and powerful twelfth century preacher, provides a perfect example of a Christian thinker who was balancing on a precipice, preaching hateful images of Jews but sounding Scripture based admonitions that they must be protected despite their nature.
These interchanges attest to neighborly relations as Jews and Christians both struggled to fit the "other" into their sense of the demands of their respective faiths, and balance the human opponents who were facing them, with the traditions which they had inherited.
There is no consensus in the sources as to who instigated the trial against the Talmud, but in June 1239, Gregory IX (1237–1241) issued letters to various archbishops and kings across Europe in which he ordered them to seize all Jewish books and take them to the Dominicans for examination.
In the words of Hebrew University historian Ben-Zion Dinur, from 1244 on the state and the church would "consider the Jews to be a people with no religion (benei bli dat) who have no place in the Christian world.
"Otto of Friesing reports that Bernard of Clairvaux in 1146 silenced a wandering monk at Mainz who stirred up popular revolt by attacking the Jews, but as the people gained a measure of political power around 1300, they became one of Jewry's greatest enemies.
[108]: 248–250 [139] Some twenty years later, a story that historian Laurence W. Marvin calls apocryphal, arose about this event claiming the papal legate, Arnaud Amaury, the leader of the crusaders, was said to have responded: "Kill them all, let God sort them out."
It was completed in what Marvin refers to as "an increasingly murky moral atmosphere" since there was technically no longer any crusade, no dispensational rewards for fighting it, the papal legates exceeded their orders from the Pope, and the army occupied lands of nobles who were in the good graces of the church.
[146]: 12, 13 Jan Hus (1369–1415) accepted some of Wycliff's views and aligned with the Bohemian Reform movement which was also rooted in popular piety and owed much to the evangelical preachers of fourteenth century Prague.
The judges attempted to ameliorate the harshness of this sentence due to his age and frailty, but Pope John XXII countermanded them and delivered the friar to Inquisitor Jean de Beaune.
Christiansen writes that, from the days of Charlemagne, the free pagan people living around the Baltic Sea in northern Europe raided the countries that surrounded them: Denmark, Prussia, Germany and Poland.
Still, late medieval Christendom frequently ignored its mandates..."[42]: 396 [171]: 222 Political authorities of the day maintained order by keeping groups separated both legally and physically in what would be referred to in contemporary society as segregation.
Yet, after the Peasants War in Germany in 1524, Luther determined that lay authorities had an obligation to step in when sedition, peace, or the stability of society was part of the issue, thus he unintentionally echoed Augustine and Aquinas.
[175]: 439–440 In the early seventeenth century, Thomas Helwys was a principal formulator of that distinctively Baptist request: that the church and the state be kept separate in matters of law, so that individuals might have a freedom of religious conscience.
However, historian John Coffey's recent work emphasizes the contribution of a minority of radical Protestants who steadfastly sought toleration for heresy, blasphemy, Catholicism, non-Christian religions, and even atheism.
[193]: 96 On 7 December 1965 the Catholic Church's Vatican II council issued the decree "Dignitatis humanae" which dealt with the rights of the person and communities to social and civil liberty in religious matters.
"[195] On 12 March 2000, he prayed for forgiveness because "Christians have often denied the Gospel; yielding to a mentality of power, they have violated the rights of ethnic groups and peoples, and shown contempt for their cultures and religious traditions.
"[196] After World War II and the Holocaust, many Protestant theologians began to reassess Christian theology's negative attitudes towards the Jews, and as a result, felt compelled to reject the doctrine of supersessionism.
