Let’s just get this out of the way. Yes, as a Christian, I’m biased. I put more effort into following the teachings of Jesus and conforming my life to the way he lived than anything else I do. So, of course, I think Jesus is peerless and Christianity has had an unrivaled and positive effect on the world.
But I’m of the view that biases are not all bad. It certainly doesn’t make sense to say that, given a bias towards a belief, one cannot defend that belief in a rational way. We’d only be able to defend the views that we don’t believe and this makes no sense at all. I also want, for example, my doctor to be really biased towards his medical research. I don’t want him to come in to the exam room with a completely open mind! Every once and a while a doctor can be limited by his or her bias, and that’s of course the worry with a bias. But, on the whole, to have a bias is not necessarily bad. Likewise, I have a bias towards Jesus, it doesn’t follow that I don’t take him to be peerless and the movement he started to be good in a rational way.
So here are a few of the ways I think this is true.
First, I think that Jesus is peerless in the way in which he affected the course of human history. In one sense, this point is easily established given the fact that Christianity is the largest religion on the planet and has been for some time. In terms of sheer numbers, this seems to already establish the greatness of Jesus’s impact. This is especially extraordinary given that the large majority of Christian traditions require conversion. That is, unlike Islam and other hereditary religions, one is not born into the Christian faith, but must choose, even if born to Christian parents, to convert to Christianity. I and many of my friends and colleagues pray regularly that each of our children will come to Christ. I also know many Christians whose children have never made this decision, or made this decision when they were young, but later decided otherwise. And though this is deeply disappointing and remains a matter of prayer, they are not ostracized from the family. They are loved and accepted in virtue of who they are not for their religious commitment. This isn’t to say there are not social pressures in Christian families for children to sign on, but, on the whole and unlike many other religions, Christians recognize the need for each individual to make their own decision and they may walk away if they so choose.
But this only establishes the great impact of Christianity. It doesn’t establish that Christianity is good. I’d like to suggest that when we consider the impact of the Roman Empire in its Christian phase and what gives way to Christian Europe, and Christianity in the new world, the impact is inestimably good.
Now let’s get this out of the way as well. There’s no doubt there was a lot of corruption and injustice along the way. There has been and is A LOT of darkness and immorality that has been and is done in the name of Christ. I think we, as Christians, need to own this fact. However, if I had the space, I would argue that these injustices never map on to the life of Jesus. That is, when Christians or the church have done terrible things, they were (and are) acting profoundly unchristian. When I myself don’t live up to acceptable moral standards, I also am not exemplifying the life of Christ. But that will have to be a topic for a later post.
Even though there are these stains, I wish to argue that the impact of the movement started by and grounded in the teachings of Jesus and the other biblical writers has been overwhelming positive. In fact, most of what people would laud as the virtues of our society came to be only because of the Christian worldview. I’m not saying there is no way in which these virtues of our society could have came about. But, in a wide variety of cases, these goods came from Christianity. Moreover it seems especially clear that these are easily grounded in the Christian worldview as a natural fit. This of course why many of these things came about as Christian movements.
I realize the bigness of these claims, but that’s my pitch.
Here is a sampling.
Literacy
The Christian church has made tremendous efforts towards worldwide literacy. Wherever the church has gone (especially in protestant missionary efforts), so goes literacy. It is hard to quantify the global value of literacy. Christians have of course been motivated for people to understand Scripture, but have very often seen literacy as a value per se. Indeed, there are a variety of times and places in which the Christian pastor has functioned as the primary school teacher educating the youth in all aspects of education for some town or village.
Medicine
Prior to the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire, the diseased and sick were largely despised and sent away. The early church saw itself as living out the gospel by caring for, at great risks to themselves, these outcasts. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, these efforts at caring for the sick are given expression in a much wider way. The later advent of modern medicine and medical education comes out of Christian Europe and continues to this day. It is so very common that hospitals and medical clinics all over the world—including places ravaged by poverty where they can’t afford to pay anything—were started by Christians who, again, saw themselves as living out the gospel by caring for the sick.
Science
To be clear, it was the early Greeks (before Christianity comes on the scene) who began to wonder about the skies and attempt incredible feats. Aristotle systematizes many of the sciences. So it is not like Christians invent science and of course one need not be a Christian to do good science. However, there are worldviews that do not easily make sense of the scientific enterprise. Whenever a worldview comes to think of the cosmos as unintelligible, then science grinds to a halt. This happened a few times with the Greeks (e.g., the Sophists who earned the ire of Socrates and Plato) and it took Plato and Aristotle to reset the world as broadly intelligible in the Greek mind. Given the Christian view of the world as God’s intelligently designed work of art and humans as caretakers of the world, it is no wonder that the scientific revolution comes out of Christian Europe. The idea motivating many scientists was a desire for knowing the creator by discovering facts about his world.
Universal Human Rights
It is very common today to believe that all humans have rights—indeed even unalienable rights. It doesn’t matter their station in life or what they look like. Each and every human deserves life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness/property ownership. But why think this is true? Though this seems obvious to us, it is kind of a radical thought when you think about it. Why should all humans deserve life on, say, naturalism? The mosquito doesn’t have this right. Not even the higher animals have this right for most of us. But this is today taken as absolutely fundamental to a society. And if we trace this belief back to its roots, we will find the biblical teaching that all humans are created in the image of God and therefore have a kind of dignity and sanctity. What other worldview (other than a Judeo-Christian view) has held to this idea without being inspired by the Judeo-Christian view?
Again, Christians have at times lived in a radically inconsistent way with this idea. Christians in America owned slaves and even used the Bible to argue for this position. In fact, my own denominational tradition (Southern Baptist) was on the wrong side of that issue at the time. Again, it can be shown that these Christians were acting profoundly unchristian (and had terrible exegesis in their use of Scripture on this point) in treating other humans as no more significant than farm equipment. But what is often missed in this discussion is that the drive for the abolition of slavery was also one grounded in Christian values and led mostly by Christians. In other words, it is not the case that the Christian position in the era was pro-American slavery. It was a battle of Christian values and the infinitely more Christian position of treating everyone equally (thankfully) won the day no matter their skin color, position in life, and country of origin.
Culture
Christians have also made colossal contributions in art, literature, philosophy, music, etc. There is no way to be a specialist in any of these areas and not run into a robust Christian contribution. This contribution has waned significantly in the last century or so. But a life of expressing aesthetically can be driven in large part by a God of aesthetic beauty. This is a very natural fit. A life of creating beauty and artful expression is at home in Christianity and this can be seen as demonstrable in history of the arts.
Now this isn’t meant as bragging and I’m really trying to not overstate here. My point is simply that these massively important aspects of our world come naturally (both historically and conceptually) out of a Christian worldview.
It is the life and teaching of a Jewish rabbi from Nazareth who started a worldwide movement that has impacted the world in immeasurable ways.