This is the Baymaw Podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co-host Brent Billings. Today we examine one of the darkest chapters in the history of Christ's Kingdom.

Alright, remember that we got a little presentation for you? Probably just another one, I believe today.

One slide worth of timeline for you to look at. Remember all the disclaimers we always have about putting pins in the perfect places. We're not striving for perfection.

Alright, here we go. Left our last conversation in our last episode with the world of Christendom having been rocked to its core.

With the departure of the Eastern Church, the danger is that it would raise a whole new sense of papal rejection.

I say papal, what do I mean? Brent, the Pope, the Pope essentially. That's a be sure hand. It's bigger than that, but the papacy in general, the whole papal system.

Yeah, there's a new sense of papal rejection. If folks can just tell the Pope, no, what does that mean? Can't just tell the Pope, no?

I don't mean that in a derogatory way. I mean, this is a real crisis, historically speaking.

The idea is that the Pope was the direct disciple descendant of the apostles.

Appostalk succession. Mouthpiece of God vocationally, absolutely.

Well, as a saying goes, nothing brings people together like a common enemy.

To be fair, I'm not going to wait into this spicy conversation surrounding the crusades and present myself as a historian or an expert here in this field.

I know talking about this period of history can be incredibly charged emotionally and it should be.

I know some historical reconstructionists have attempted to put a positive spin, quote unquote, positive spin on the crusades and what the intentions were behind them.

I will be attempting no such explanation. For me, this chapter of Christian history is dark and marked with all sorts of problems, which most of us has simply been able to keep out of sight and out of mind.

We are talking about something that happened about a thousand years ago. It is easy to set aside.

We don't have a reason to think about it. Absolutely. A very practical level, that's absolutely correct.

On a very, on another level, we did slaughter millions of people. So it should be a portion of, you know, in Jesus' name, we should probably not forget those things.

It does come up quite often.

Absolutely. As far as events in history go, it is brought up disproportionately more often than almost anything else.

Sure. So it is something that we should wrestle with and be able to think about critically.

Absolutely. I can remember the chapter in Blue Like Jazz, a book by Donald Miller, where we put it in the show notes down there.

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