Wherever one looks, whatever one considers, Ecclesiastes 9:11 — which describes the cyclical nature of human events, that “there is nothing new under the sun” — returns to haunt.
Such were my reflections while recently rereading the following excerpt from Eusebius of Caesarea’s (263-339 AD) important history of Christianity’s first three centuries:
Like dazzling lights the churches were now shining all over the world, and to the limits of the human race faith in our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ was at its peak, when the demon who hates the good, sworn enemy of truth and inveterate foe of man’s salvation, turned all his weapons against the Church. In earlier days he had attacked her with persecutions from without [under Emperor Nero and others]; but now that he was debarred from this, he resorted to unscrupulous impostors as instruments of spiritual corruption and ministers of destruction, and employed new tactics, contriving by every possible means that impostors and cheats, by cloaking themselves with the same name as our religion, should at one and the same time bring to the abyss of destruction every believer they could entrap, and by their own actions and endeavors turn those ignorant of the Faith away from the path that leads to the message of salvation [4.7].
Eusebius was referring to the status of Christianity during the reign of Roman Emperor Hadrian (117-138) and well into the second century AD.
What is striking about this passage is how well the double-pronged attack it describes — external physical persecution (under Nero) and internal spiritual subversion (under Hadrian) — conforms to the rest of Christianity’s two thousand-year-old history, and is especially applicable today.
The logic of this “satanic” approach appears to be as follows:
Where possible to possess non-Christians to physically persecute and slaughter Christians, that becomes the preferred method because it’s more direct. Where it is not possible, the next best thing is to infiltrate and subvert Christians’ belief system so that they, in essence, choose death themselves.
The most obvious and paradigmatic example of physical persecution is that referenced by Eusebius: pagan Rome’s savage persecution of Christians, which erupted from the time of the Apostles in the first century under Nero and sporadically continued till the rise of Constantine the Great, who outlawed religious persecution in the fourth century (specifically with the Edict of Milan, 313 AD).
But the physical persecution of Christians continued for well over a millennium following Eusebius’s death in the fourth century. And its new standard bearer — who, if not necessarily surpassing the quality of Rome’s persecution, has certainly far surpassed its quantity — was and remains Islam.
Writing around 1220 AD — nearly a millennium after Eusebius’s times — Jacques of Vitry, bishop of Acre, described Christianity as “besieged on all sides by enemies.” And these enemies were also, on the one hand, physical and obvious (Muslims) and on the other, spiritual and subversive (false Christians):
Saracens and pagans undermine the peace of Christendom, tyrants and evil Christians attack the liberty of the Church, and false brothers undermine love.
For Jacques and most Christians of the time, the answer was to fight fire with fire — or sword with sword, spirit with spirit:
Against the violence of the pagans and Saracens it [the Church] uses the physical sword [hence the Crusades]. Against tyrants and false brothers it uses a spiritual sword…. Since the Church has two swords, which the Lord said “is enough” [Luke 22:38], one is to be exercised in a spiritual sense by the prelates, the other by princes and military Christians.
As foretold by Ecclesiastes, nothing has changed. If the same double-pronged attack first described by Eusebius was still evident nine centuries later, when Jacques was writing, today — a full eight centuries after Jacques — it is worse than ever. Indeed, Satan’s double-edged sword runs red with Christian blood — both physically and spiritually — more so now than at any other time in history.
The primary difference is that today’s Christians, especially in the West, are utterly clueless about this — and that itself is a reflection of the success of their spiritual undermining. By and large they are unaware both of the physical persecution that 365 million of their brethren are experiencing at this very moment outside the Western world, and especially under Islam, and even more so of the spiritual subversion to which they themselves have succumbed. It has so desensitized and blinded them to reality that they are like well-fed and well-entertained sitting ducks — primed for the great slaughter to come.
As such, surely it is high time that both swords of Christianity are unsheathed.