WHY OUR VALUES DEPEND UPON CHRISTIANITY

Tom Holland found himself in a dilemma. A popular historian, he had written several books on the classical world of Persia, Greece and Rome. Gradually he came to see that the values of that world were not his own. He was unsettled by the callousness and complete lack of sense that the poor and weak might have the lightest intrinsic value. He was disturbed to find that in his morals and ethics he was not a Spartan or Roman at all. While his belief in God had faded over the years he still considered himself a Christian. That was because he was the inheritor of Christian civilization. Jesus, the Son of God, who was tortured to death on a cross transformed the mindset of the non-Christian world. He set out to explore what it was that made Christianity so subversive and disruptive in the Western world. In DOMINION: THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND, he illustrates his thesis with vignettes from two thousand years of history. He covers a great deal of ground and European history in the process.

Christianity changed the values of Europe from brutal paganism to concern for the victims of oppression and power. He concludes that “the retreat of Christian belief does not seem to imply any necessary retreat of Christian values. Quite the contrary. Even in Europe – a continent with churches far emptier than those in the United States – the trace elements of Christianity continued to infuse people’s morals and presumptions so utterly that many failed even to detect their presence.” The secular, free thinking, atheistic creeds have their statements of beliefs and the freedom to propagate them because Christianity has won them that freedom. Human rights and the value of the dignity of every human being is based upon being created in the image of God, otherwise it is a myth that is based upon fantasy.

 “It was not truth that science offered moralists, but a mirror. Racists identified with racist values; liberals with liberal values. The primary dogma of humanism – ‘that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature based on understanding and a concern for others’ – found no more corroboration in science than did the dogma of the Nazis that anyone not fit for life should be exterminated….Humanism derives ultimately from claims made in the Bible: that humans are made in God’s image; that his Son died equally for everyone; that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. Repeatedly, like a great earthquake, Christianity has sent reverberations across the world…. If secular humanism derives not from reason or from science, but from the distinctive course of Christianity’s evolution – a course that, in the opinion of growing numbers in Europe and America, has left God dead – then how are its values anything more than the shadow of a corpse? What are the foundations of its morality, if not a myth?….To be a Christian is to believe that God became man, and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has every suffered. That is why the cross, that ancient symbol of torture, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. It is the audacity of it – the audacity  of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe – that serves to explain, more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilization to which is gave birth. Today, the power of this strangeness remains as alive as it has every been. It is manifest in the great surge of conversions that has swept Africa and Asia over the past century; in the conversions of millions upon millions that the breath of the Spirit, like a living fire, still blows upon the world; and in Europe and North America, in the assumptions of many more millions who would never think to describe themselves as Christians. All are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross.”

The concerns of today’s politics and culture: justice, fairness, concern for the weak and needy, protection for the vulnerable, equality and non-discrimination are all derived from Christianity and its divine underpinnings. Without it these values are purely optional and ephemeral.