It is one of the great tragedies of our time that Christians
are taught to be ashamed of our past. Anyone who has taken a course in Western
history in the last seventy years is undoubtedly aware of the long list of
atrocities that are laid at the feet of Christianity, while the list of its
victories is short (if it exists at all). Evangelicals have tried to deflect
this phenomenon by pointing the finger at certain denominations (mainly Catholicism)
or at Denominationalism in general—a maneuver that is neither fair, accurate, nor
true—but have largely failed to avoid condemnation. We all drown beneath the
onslaught of historical crimes: crusades, witch-burnings, subjugation of native
peoples, human slavery, the list goes on. Of course, no one points out the hypocrisy
of these accusations (For instance, on what basis can the secular world tell us
that killing in the name of God is barbaric—which it is—while killing in the
name of a government is perfectly moral?), nor do they acknowledge their inaccuracies
(witch-burnings, subjugation, and slavery occurred almost exclusively in times
and places that the Church had lost
its former political power). All we are told is that the Christian past is shameful, and
we must either change our faith or abandon it.
I am not going to argue that there is no shame in our past—after
all, regardless of how Christianity may or may not have contributed to the atrocities
I have mentioned, the mere fact that they happened at all in a society in which
Christianity had so much influence is shameful. The problem is not that we feel
guilty about the bad things that have happened, but that we are largely
ignorant of how Christianity has fundamentally changed our world for the
better. We are so ignorant of this fact that it has affected our theology;
nowadays we consider the Kingdom of Heaven to be located almost exclusively in
the end of time because we cannot see the true impact of Christ on the whole
fabric of our world. It’s reached the point where most of us would have a hard
time justifying the claim that Christianity has made the world better; we
essentially deny the power of the Gospel by accepting that Christianity will
not make the world better until Jesus returns. It is true, only the second coming
will make our world perfect, but it is simply not true to say that Christianity
has not improved the world we live in to a dramatic degree.
The problem is that Christianity has been a part of Western
society for so long that we can no longer tell how much of who we are came from
the influence of Jesus Christ. So many things we take for granted, even the
secular world, are actually a result of the influence of the Gospel. We must
start, then, by looking at what the world was like before it was revolutionized
by the Gospel, so that we can see just how revolutionary it was.
Good and Evil in the Pagan World
Just so that I won’t appear biased, I am going to use a non-Christian
source to describe what morality looked like in the Pagan world. Friedrich
Nietzsche was a virulent anti-Christian atheist; he hated Christianity for the
way it had, in his view, corrupted the morality of the world. Nietzsche
describes Pagan morality this way:
What is good? – All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is bad? – All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? – The feeling that power increases – that a resistance is overcome.[1]
The man could grow a mustache...
In the Pagan world, power was considered good. It is good to
be the most powerful, the strongest, the most popular, the winner. It was bad
to be powerless, weak, unpopular, a loser. The word for this kind of morality
is nobility: the nobles represent all
that is good and virtuous, while the peasants represented all that was base and
evil and unworthy. This assumption was so deeply held in the pagan world that
Roman judges would not allow slaves to testify in court unless they had been
tortured first, as a matter of course, because slaves simply could not be
trusted.
You can see the difference in this culture by looking at the
heroes of the Ancient world: look at the heroes of The Iliad and The Odyssey,
all noble men performing valiant deeds. These heroes are drastically different
from the main characters of the Gospel, all common men and all (with one
exception) deeply flawed. Most Pagans, in fact, would have been confused by the
Gospels. Take, for instance, the story of Peter denying Christ. These days we
see Peter as a tragic character; we sympathize with him when he weeps over
betraying Jesus. This would not have made sense to the Pagans. After all, as
David Bentley Hart points out,
Peter, as a rustic, could not possibly have been a worthy object of a well-bred man's sympathy, nor could his grief possibly have possessed the sort of tragic dignity necessary to make it worthy of anyone's notice.[2]
The Pagan world, by and large, did not care about the poor,
the weak, the sick, the suffering, etc. Those people were failures, unworthy,
worthless, useless, certainly not worthy of the concern of the nobles. This is
the morality of the world.
Good and Evil in the Kingdom
The roots of Christian morality go back to the Old
Testament, but they really begin when a man stood on a hilltop in Judea and
told his followers,
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn… Blessed are the meek… Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness… Blessed are the merciful… the pure in heart… the peacemakers…. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:3-10, ESV)
The Sermon on the Mount was nothing short of a revolution, a
declaration of war on the world’s values. Jesus’ beatitudes turned morality on
its head: bad became good and good became evil. We have a hard time
understanding just how amazing the message of Christ was at that time, but at the
time it was beyond radical, and the world had never seen anything like it. This
is why the Romans reacted so harshly against Christianity: because it violated
everything they stood for. To the Romans, Christianity was evil. Hart describes
the reaction of one of their leaders:
In his treatise Against the Galilaeans, Julian complained that the Christians had from the earliest days swelled their ranks with the most vicious, disreputable, and contemptible of persons, while offering only baptism as a remedy for their vileness, as if mere water could cleanse the soul.[3]
Understand, these
critics were not mistaken. By their standards, the churches were filled
with the absolute worst kind of filth: the poor, slaves, women, etc., people
about whom the pagan world did not care. The Church took in losers of every
kind and told them they were valuable—and that was a message the Romans could
not abide.
The Impact of the Gospel
Perhaps now you can begin to see the scope of how
Christianity has changed society: it is only because of the Gospel that people
today care about the oppressed. When Jesus taught his Sermon on the Mount, he
began a movement that is responsible for the invention of hospitals, orphanages,
almshouses, hostels; the movement that made charity and compassion into virtues;
the movement that inspired abolitionism and the Civil Rights movement. Even morally-neutral
ideas like democracy sprang from the idea that the powerless deserve a voice.
All of this is a result of the message of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Now, let me be very clear: this is not the extent of the Kingdom
of Heaven. Jesus came to do more than change our social values: he came to
redeem sinners and transform lives, and that is the ultimate power of the
Gospel. You see, the secular world can hold onto values like charity and
compassion because they learned them from the Church; but in the world’s hands
those values are misunderstood and misused. What the world cannot offer us is a
reason for being charitable and
compassionate, which is why the world is so bad at following through on them.
As Christians we know the reason: we know that Jesus Christ
founded a new kingdom when he was raised from the dead. We know that Jesus
redeemed us of our sins and sanctified us so that we can truly love each other
and care about even the weakest of people. The world justifies its values by
pointing inward at itself: we care about the poor and weak because I am entitled to it as a human being with
rights. Even when the world tries to be charitable, it turns into
selfishness. The Church justifies its values by pointing up to the risen
Christ, who showed love for the lowest of people by dying on the Cross. We love
others because Christ has taught us that every human being has value, no matter
whether the world calls us worthless.
So we return to the question: has Christianity made the
world better? The answer is, Yes, by the grace of God and the power of Christ.
It is only because of him that we care about the poor and the outcast. Before
Christ, and without him, our values are entirely selfish and abusive. And on
that basis we offer the world a choice: where do you want to live? In a world
that values power, that glorifies the wealthy and popular simply because they
are wealthy and popular? Or in the Kingdom of Heaven, where each person has
true value, not because they are entitled to it, but because they are a
cherished creation of a loving God? And that Kingdom, which gives every person
value, which has totally revolutionized (if not yet perfected) society, is a
history we can be proud of.
Let me leave you with this quote, which I find to be an encouraging reminder of how we can see the impact of Christ in everyday situations that we take for granted. The Kingdom is all around us, affecting us in ways we don't always recognize:
“An ordinary street scene, such as an ambulance stopping all traffic because one wounded man must be transported, is the result of the coming of the Kingdom.”[4]
Comments
Post a Comment