When the Oracles Fell Silent, Part 2
How Jesus Invented the Modern World
In Part 1, we joined an imagined online chat room where figures historical and present discussed how the arrival of Jesus Christ tolled both a funerary doom for antiquity and wedding bells for a new age for mankind. One question seems pressing however: How exactly did the message of the cross lead to the modern world we have today?
HOLLAND: The cross itself signifies the extent to which the Christian revolution transformed the values of the world. It gave dignity to the poor. It saw power in weakness and love. It esteemed patience in suffering, and forgiveness for offenders. Whether in Korea or in Tierra del Fuego, in Alaska or in New Zealand, the cross on which Jesus had been tortured to death has come to serve as the most globally recognised symbol of a god there has ever been. The psalmist told the truth:
DAVID: The enemy’s ruins are gone… their name is lost. But YHWH is enthroned for eternity.
ATHANASIUS: For the Lord touched all parts of creation, and freed and undeceived them all from every deceit.
PAUL: Having put off from Himself the principalities and the powers, He triumphed on the cross
ATHANASIUS: Now, everyone, everywhere may find the very Word of God. For thus man, enclosed on every side by the works of creation and everywhere-in heaven, in Hades, in men and on the earth, beholding the unfolded Godhead of the Word, is no longer deceived concerning God.
HART: Indeed Christianity was complicit in the death of antiquity and in the birth of modernity, not because it was an accomplice of the latter, but because it alone, in the history of the West, was a rejection of and alternative to nihilism’s despair, violence, and idolatry of power; as such, Christianity shattered the imposing and enchanting façade behind which nihilism once hid, and thereby, inadvertently, called it forth into the open.
MICHELI: On the cross of Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul proclaims to the Colossians, God disarmed the powers and ruling authorities, making a public spectacle of them and triumphing over them. The Powers no longer have dominion, Paul says in Romans. “Take heart,” Jesus says in John’s Gospel, “I have overcome the world.” The New Age, your salvation, the Kingdom and Reign of God are nearer to us now than when we first believed. As the Apostle Paul tells the Galatians, the incarnation of Jesus Christ is the dawning of “the fullness of time.”
For Peter (and for Paul), the Gospel is not that one day there will be a resurrection and things will be different. The Gospel is that Jesus Christ has been resurrected; therefore, things already are different.
Christians practice counter-intuitive forgiveness and enemy love and non-violent patience and compassion for the poor and the unborn not as a strategy to change the world. Rather, Christians forgive those who trespass against them, Christians love their enemies, Christians turn the other cheek, Christians fill the empty with good things, and welcome unexpected children in order to bear witness to the objective fact that through cross and resurrection our Lord has already changed the world.
HOLLAND: So, the wellspring of humanist values lies not in reason – not in evidence-based thinking – but in the past, and specifically in the story of how a cult inspired by the execution of an obscure criminal in a long-vanished empire emerged to become an unstoppable phenomenon.
The Irony of Modernity
HOLLAND: The irony here is that the greatest critics of Christianity have founded their own views on deeply Christian assumptions. The risen Christ cannot be eluded simply by refusing to believe in him. Even those who consider themselves most secular in our contemporary cultural moment are, in fact, Christian in their bones. Don’t be fooled, our atheists are Christian atheists.
[Author’s Note — It’s interesting that even the weak forms of paganism that have revived in recent generations seem to be no different, having only a superficial, revisionist’s resemblance to their ancient namesakes. To read the literature of even our Wiccans and our Satanists is to spot gospel ideals only trivially disguised.]
DE YOUNG: Nietzsche in particular had a profound understanding of the nature of Christian teaching and the way in which it had completely upended the preceding worldview of the classical world. He understood it and he hated it. Moreover, he foresaw the awful consequences that would come when Western culture finally decided to divest itself of Christian moral teaching and the worldview whose underpinnings it had already rejected at an intellectual level. Nietzsche was prophetic: these consequences were reaped in blood throughout the twentieth century and, should de-Christianization prove successful in the future, they can only continue and intensify.
[The good news, however, is that the de-Christianizers have not been that successful. Not at all.]
DE YOUNG: Yes, atheists attack the Scriptures and Christian history as immoral — by unwittingly comparing them to the standards of Christian morality. They do not do this to undermine the consistency of the Christian worldview from without, but because they cannot escape the morality seared within their own conscience developed over centuries of adaptation to Christ’s message.
[A rising tide lifts all boats.]
DE YOUNG: Right. Same-sex marriage advocates reject Christian teachings regarding the propriety of sexual relationships but firmly embrace a vision of loving monogamous marriage, itself the product of that same teaching.
Pro-choice activists argue for the right of women to control their own bodies, an individualist dignity that began with the Christian conviction that women, as well as men, are formed in the image of God and have equal value.
[Holland indicated that the very idea that women have a right of consent in sexual matters grew from the beginnings of Christian monasticism. The traditional culture in which women belonged to their fathers until given to a husband was transformed into one that allowed a woman to choose not only whom they would marry, but whether to be married at all. I wonder if that choice to remain chaste, if she so desired, in order to devote herself and her life to Christ did not ultimately lead to universal suffrage and the like?]
ZWARTZ: Very probable. It is a secularist myth that reason, empiricism, evidence, humanism and the like emerged in the Enlightenment fully formed like Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, and not only owe nothing to the preceding centuries but indeed are in contrast to them.
Take human rights. Rights are by no means self-evident or inalienable, as the U.S. Declaration of Independence states, and would have attracted contempt in pre-Christian societies such as ancient Rome or China.
Rights’ essential precondition is the Genesis teaching of Imago Dei — humans made in God’s image, and therefore endowed with dignity and worth. It led Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century to rail against slavery and abandoning unwanted infants on rubbish heaps, and was made explicit by 11th-century canon lawyer Gratian, who pronounced that everyone was equal in the sight of God. Anything in the legal system obstructing this idea had to go.
HOLLAND: This is something that earlier ages would have struggled to comprehend. Christianity’s arrival resulted in age-old presumptions beginning to be decisively overturned:
- that custom was the ultimate authority;
- that the great were owed a different justice from the humble;
- that inequality was something natural, to be taken for granted.
HART: Agreed. Innate human worth, residing in every individual of every class and culture, is the very late consequence of a revolution that erupted many centuries earlier, in the middle of a world that was anything but hospitable to it. And I am tempted to think that it began to emerge from darkness into full visibility, for the first time in our history, only in the tale of Peter’s tears.
Among the literate classes of late antiquity, to call attention to Peter’s grief would have seemed an aesthetic mistake; for Peter, as a rustic, could not possibly have been a worthy object of a well-bred man’s sympathy, nor could his sorrow possibly have possessed the sort of tragic dignity necessary to make it a suitable subject of either a poet or a historian. If a peasant’s weeping possessed any interest at all, it might be as an occasion for cruel mirth. Tragic dignity was the exclusive property of the nobly born. Yet Peter is a peasant from Galilee, a rural backwater in an obscure and barbarous colonial territory. This was not merely a lapse of good taste; it was an act of rebellion.
At least, as far as ancient Roman legal usage, one’s person was the status one held before the law. The original and primary meaning of the Latin word “persona” was “mask,” and may well originally have indicated the special distinction of belonging to one of those patrician families entitled to preserve and display wax funerary effigies of their ancestors. To “have a person” — habere personam — was to have a face before the eyes of the law, to possess the rights of a free and propertied citizen, to be entrusted to offer testimony on the strength of one’s own word, to be capable before a magistrate of appeal to higher authority. At the far opposite end of the social scale, however, was that far greater number of individuals who could be classed as “non habentes personas,” “not having persons” — not, as it were, having faces before the law or, for that matter, society.
The principal occupants of this category were, of course, slaves, who could call on no privileges or rights before the law, apart from a few meager protections, and were rarely even trusted to offer testimony before a court (apart from a judicious application of torture). As part of the peasantry of a subject people, Peter would have possessed scarcely any greater “countenance” in Roman eyes.
It is practically impossible for us today to appreciate the magnitude of the scandal that many pagans naturally felt at this bizarre prodigality. Early Christians being willing to grant full humanity to persons of every class and condition would not have seemed like the liberation of deep but hitherto unexpressed human longings, but as something monstrous and degenerate, threatening the very order of the world. A new “gospel” world, in which the grand cosmic architecture of prerogative and power was being superseded by a new and positively “anarchic” order. A world in which the glory of God can reveal itself in a crucified slave, and in which, therefore, we are forced to see the face of God in the faces of the world-forsaken.
ZWARTZ: Now Darwin, in contrast, pointed out how unnatural such a concept is in the light of evolution.
DARWIN: With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
The aid we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy… nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.
HART: We no longer laugh at “the man of sorrows” draped in a mock robe and pierced with a mock crown and jocosely hailed as a king by his persecutors. For us, this figure possesses a grandeur that would have been quite invisible to our more distant ancestors. It is not he who is absurd, but rather all those kings and emperors who preposterously celebrate their pedigrees, and who rejoice in their power to command and to kill, and who are therefore unaware that the pompous symbols of greatness in which they drape themselves are nothing more than rags and thorns.
Seen thus, Christ’s descent from the “form of God” into the “form of a slave” is not a paradox at all, but an altogether apt confirmation of the indwelling of the divine image in each soul.
[Once the world has been seen in this way, it can never again be unseen.]
ZWARTZ: In 1550 Bartolome de las Casas demanded justice for South American Indians, using the term derechos humanos — human rights. The genius of the authors of the U.S. Constitution two hundred years later was to garb in the robes of the Enlightenment the radical Protestantism that shaped the fledgling nation. Today, the insistence of the United Nations and others on the antiquity and broad acceptance of human rights is a fiction that they hope allows it to be a global rather than a mere Christian or Western understanding.
HOLLAND: Secularism really does depend on the care with which it covers its tracks.
DE YOUNG: Right, and in this sense the culture wars are an inter-Christian conflict between those who wish to maintain Christian tradition as a historic whole, and those who wish to sacrifice or transform some elements while retaining others intact. To be human in the modern world is to be Christian; to be Christian is to believe.
JESUS: I tell you, inasmuch as you [provided aid or refused help] to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.
HOLLAND: Whether in North Korea or in the command structures of jihadi terrorist cells, there are few so ideologically opposed to the West that they are not sometimes obliged to employ the international dating system. Whenever they do so, they are subliminally reminded of the claims made by Christianity about the birth of Jesus.
[That’s true. BC and AD remain, no matter what ideologically motivated acronyms might overlay them.]
HOLLAND: So, time itself has been Christianized. What’s more, its vast array of modern critics, from Spinoza in the 17th century to Marx in the 19th, never grasped how fundamentally their pens were propelled by the currents of the Christian heaven. For there is nothing quite so Christian as a summons to bring the world from darkness into light. To dream of a world transformed by a reformation, or an enlightenment, or a revolution is nothing exclusively modern. Rather, it is to dream as medieval visionaries dreamed: to dream in the manner of a Christian.
ZWARTZ: And that, for me, is perhaps the most compelling point about Christianity: that it defines even its opponents. Even as the woke generation condemns Christian history as oppressive, patriarchal, racist and all the other now-standard derelictions, the standards of justice and equality by which they judge these shortcomings remain ineradicably Christian.
[In terms of keeping an institutional religion intact, the gospel is pretty much the worst thing God could have contrived. It is so liberating, it constantly wreaks havoc on and renders obsolete the structures it inspires. Even the subcultures (a.k.a. denominations) that emerge in the Kingdom’s wake can barely keep up. The church of Jesus Christ keeps on keeping on. Keeps becoming. For the reason that Jesus continues to be maddeningly, gloriously alive.
In this sense, the church of Christ has been an emergent movement, not merely in the current post-evangelical moment, but from its inception; and Jesus’ people evergreen.]
CHESTERTON: The historic path of Christendom has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.
DE YOUNG: Anti-religious German philosopher Feuerbach dubbed Christianity “the religion for leaving religion behind,” and he was not exactly wrong. It was Jesus who gave the keys to the kingdom to revolutionaries who made it the very different place it is today.
[And if 1 Corinthians 13 teaches us anything, it is that love does not envy those keys. It is not jealous, no matter who receives the credit.]
PAUL: For the Anointed is proclaimed in every way — whether in pretense or in truth — and in this I am happy.
[And so, it is no wonder that few have recognized just how momentous the cross was, not for religion, but for the modern world and everything in it that is good, beautiful and true. It is an easy thing to take for granted.
But, something tells me that the same itinerant preacher — who two thousand years ago strictly warned both disciple and demon to tell no one about Himself after all — wouldn’t have it any other way.]
N E X T → When the Oracles Fell Silent: a Response to Critics
When the Oracles Fell Silent, Part 1 ← P R E V I O U S
