A Call to Arms!

Imagine that you are a young man in the Middle Ages and you hear the following words in a sermon: 

We must not give sleep to our eyes or drowsiness to your lids, the sleep of negligence or the drowsiness of sluggishness and idleness, or rest in our life-times, until we find and recover for the Lord the place, where the Lord lived bodily as in his fatherland, and a dwelling place of the God of Jacob, where the Lord fought against the devil and defeated him.¹

A little later on, you hear in the same sermon, 

For the nation and kingdom that will not serve you will perish and the nations will be destroyed by depravation; this means that those will be abandoned by God who do not want to serve Jerusalem and come to its aid and defend it against the enemies.²

What young man, hearing these words, would not answer the call of the church to take up arms and regain for Christian pilgrims access to the Holy Land? Who would not take up the Crusader’s Cross and fight against all the injustices of the Muslims? Who would refuse to battle for the defense and protection of Christian pilgrims who wished to walk where God Himself had walked?

Although there is misunderstanding today regarding the nature of and motives behind the Crusades, they were waged for just reasons and they were fought for God.

What we today call a crusade could be described as a war answering God’s command, authorized by a legitimate authority, the pope, who…identified the war’s object and offered to those who undertook it full remission of the penalties of confessed sins and a package of related temporal privileges.³

 Thus, the Crusades truly were a Holy War. The Crusaders fought because God willed it. 

After hearing the Crusades preached, it was not without good reason or without merit that so many men marched under the banner of the cross.

When that time came, foretold to his faithful by the Lord Jesus, especially in the Gospel, in which he says: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me,” there was a great awakening in all the regions of Gaul, so that anyone, with a pure heart and spirit, who diligently sought to follow the Lord and would carry the cross after Him, did not tarry but in all haste sought out the road to the Holy Sepulcher.⁴

We are all called to fight for Christ, regardless of the time or place in which we live. Whether our battles are both physical and spiritual or are purely spiritual, we are all called to join the Crusade to win back the world for God. United under the visible and invisible heads of the church, we are called to march as far as necessary and to fight as long as needed until the Kingdom of Christ is established throughout the world. This is our Holy War and we will fight it for the same reasons that the Crusaders left their homes and risked their lives long ago: “Deus lo volt!” that is, “God wills it!”⁵

Images used:

First Image: "MELLIN(1850) p2.068 KORSFARARE.jpg," 1850, https://commons.wikimedia.org.

Second Image: Nafsadh, "Jerusalem Cross.svg," https://commons.wikimedia.org.

¹ Christoph T. Maier, Crusade Propaganda and Ideology: Model Sermons for the Preaching of the Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 85.

² Maier, Crusade Propaganda and Ideology, 89.

³ Christopher Tyerman, The Crusades: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 14.

⁴ Nirmal Dass, The Deeds of the Franks and Other Jerusalem-Bound Pilgrims: The Earliest Chronicle of the First Crusade (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011), 25.

⁵ Tyerman, The Crusades, 12.