There is something that the vast majority of people in the world take for granted: the modern world. Not only the most obvious things like science, medicine, and technology, or the infinite number of conveniences and blessings we enjoy every day, but things like universal education, universities, hospitals, human rights, equality, caring for the weak and the poor, in other words, all the things that make the modern world, well, modern! It seems that very few people bother to stop and wonder where all these things come from, and why they exist. This doesn’t surprise us because we live in the most ahistorical generation ever to have lived. The modern obsession with progress, itself a Christian concept, leaves little room for the critical importance of learning about the past. But the modern world is a miracle that itself only exists because of another miracle, a man 2000 years ago who died on a Roman cross, was buried three days, and rose from the dead, Jesus of Nazareth. The most consequential figure in all of history, his life, death, and resurrection, in a typically modern cliche, changed everything. Why and how did it do that?
I recently finished a fascinating book by British historian Tom Holland called Dominion. While he was raised as a Christian, as he grew up his faith became increasingly less compelling to him. As a scholar devoted to the study of the ancient world, he was enamored of the cultures spawned by Greek and Roman thought. Over the years, however, the Christian assumptions unwittingly inculcated into him by his upbringing began to make him increasingly uncomfortable with the reality of life in the ancient world. In the preface of the book he speaks to the conclusion he came to over time:
In was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slighted intrinsic value. Why did I find this disturbing? Because, in my morals and ethics, I was not a Spartan or a Roman at all. That my belief in God had faded over the course of my teenage years did not mean that I had ceased to be a Christian. For a millennium and more, the civilization into which I had been born was Christendom. Assumptions that I had grown up with—about how a society should properly be organized, and the principles that it should uphold—were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of “human nature”, but very distinctively of that civilization’s Christian past. So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilization that it has come to be hidden from view.
This is refreshing, to say the least, in light of the uncritical publicity given the “new atheists” who claimed that religion, especially Christianity, in the subtitle of a best-selling book by Christopher Hitchens, “poisons everything.” In fact, many of the very condemnations they make couldn’t be made without Christianity’s influence in Western culture!
We have two choices, and two choices only, when we come to the claims of Christianity: either they are true, or they are lies. The claims are so sweeping, so absolute, so exclusive, that there can be no waffling. There can be no cherry picking because Jesus doesn’t leave us that option. The ultimate question of existence was put by Jesus to his disciples, and then throughout the ages to each of us: “Who do you say that I am?” He answered that question the only way it can be answered: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
The reason Christianity transformed the world, turned it upside down and inside out, is because it is true. Lies do not do such things. Critics claim it’s all a myth and fairy tales, stories made up by ancient religious people who didn’t know any better. Such skeptics have obviously never seriously read the text of the history of redemption we find in our Bibles, or studied ancient history, or human nature. All of it points to something that would have been impossible to make up. That’s an argument to make at much more length at another time in another context, but the facile claims of the skeptics flies in the face of a force so powerful it remade the world. Mere ideas, let alone those that are not true, just don’t do that.
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