A massive shift: The Fourth Crusade and A Generous Orthodoxy

“16 May 1204 marked a defining moment in medieval history – a seismic change in the accepted world order. For more than eight centuries successive Byzantine emperors had dominated an enormous and sophisticated empire, but this had been swept aside by the armies of the Fourth Crusade – the holy warriors of the Catholic Church.”

So writes Jonathan Phillips in The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople, which tells the fascinating story of the battle that marked the collapse of a religious and cultural empire. The Byzantine Empire had been the centre of high Christian civilization since the 4th century, while the Dark Ages and barbarian hordes ruled the Roman west.

In the Fourth Crusade the barbaric west overran the cultured east, and Christendom would never be the same. The Christian west would emerge from the Dark Ages, the Christian east would fade into obscurity, and Constantinople would eventually become the seat of power for the Islamic Ottoman Empire.

Although the Fourth Crusade marked its death knell, the collapse of the Byzantine Empire was less the result of crusading armies than its own moral and theological decadence and inability to adapt to the emerging power of the west. The wealth, fortifications and natural barriers that had protected eastern Christianity for eight centuries had also produced complacency and arrogance. Its time was over.

Sometimes books come together in unusual combinations and for me the story of the Fourth Crusade came on the heels of Brian McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy. McLaren makes the point that modern Christianity too is in the middle of a massive shift in the succession of five grand epochs – the prehistoric, ancient, medieval, modern and postmodern. We are, he claims, in the transition between the modern and the postmodern. Because of this shift the traditional church is dying and a new, missional, generous church is emerging.

Just as the Catholic warriors easily identified the weaknesses of the collapsing empire, McLaren catalogues the sweeping failures of “modern” Christianity. The system is “sick with consumerism, greed, fear, violence, and a misplaced faith (in the power of the Economy and the State and its Weapons).” Thus defined by McLaren, modern orthodoxy is indeed a collapsing system unable to adapt to the challenges of the world in which we live.

McLaren’s message? It’s time to change teams. Abandon the old orthodoxy and its failing structures and join the newly-emerging army of God. A Generous Orthodoxy is his attempt to define what this newly-emerging Christianity should be.

Are we indeed at the juncture of epochs? One consistent pattern of history is that there is always a healthy crop of self-proclaimed prophets declaring the end of the age. Humanity has an insatiable appetite for prognostication.

The reality, however, is that the shifting of epochs is rarely visible to those living in the age. Historians and futurists don’t use the same rules. Should the Lord tarry, the centuries to come will give the time and the perspective to answer this question.

A more important question, however, than whether we are at the juncture of a new epoch, or whether we are labelled modern or postmodern, Catholic or Byzantine, traditional or emergent, is whether a better way is being offered. Few would argue that greed, fear and violence should be the marks of Christianity, but something as varied as modern Christianity makes for an easy target.

The Catholic armies camped at the massive and ancient walls of Constantinople saw a culture that was prideful, idolatrous, divisive, weak and abusive. They were sure they were offering a better way. But was it a better way?

With eight centuries of hindsight and for all the weakness and depravity of Byzantine Christianity, few would argue that something better had arrived. It is far easier to dismantle and pillage than it is to create. Constantinople was soon a smoking ruin, its cathedrals stripped of anything mobile and marketable.

McLaren makes notable critiques of modern Christianity but underlying his A Generous Orthodoxy is a deep conviction that history is progressive. The key element in the shift from modernity to postmodernity is the collapse of the “conceptual cathedrals of proposition and argument.” This allows a poetic, mystical Christianity to emerge. This will, if we let it, allow a biblical, evangelical, missional, incarnational, green, charismatic and even Anabaptist church to emerge.

It’s quite a promise. Sin, in this orthodoxy, is a “counter-emergent virus” that resists history’s progression.

The assumption that history is progressive is not self-evident however, and those who read the story of the Fourth Crusade cannot let that assumption stand unchallenged.

James Toews is pastor of Neighbourhood Church, Nanaimo, B.C.