2160-ACE Journal (Content 2023)-ISSUU

The Good Life: CHRISTIANITY AND A MORAL VISION

ON CRATERS AND DEATHWORKS

Jack Carson

HUMAN RIGHTS AND CHRISTENDOM

Rebecca Munson

THE BIRTH OF MODERN WESTERN MORALS

Forrest Strickland AN INTERVIEW WITH ALISTER MCGRATH

14

JESUS IS LORD: HOW THE TWO-WORD GOSPEL DEFEATED THE ETHOS OF ROME

Bryan Litfin

36 SHAME AND SEXUAL FREEDOM: LEARNING THE LESSONS OF HISTORY

David Pensgard

43 PILGRIMS, ACTIVISTS, AND ARTISTS

Chris Hulshof

60

BOOK REVIEWS

8 On Craters and Deathworks

Jack Carson, Director of the Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

14 Jesus Is Lord: How the Two-Word Gospel Defeated the Ethos of Rome

Bryan Litfin, Professor of Bible & Theology, John W. Rawlings School of Divinity, Liberty University

20 Human Rights and Christendom

Rebecca Munson, Associate Professor and Department Chair, Helms School of Government, Liberty University

27 The Birth of Modern Western Morals

Forrest Strickland, Instructor of History, College of Arts & Sciences, Liberty University

32 An Interview with Alister McGrath

Alister McGrath, Emeritus Andreos Idreos, Professor of Science and Religion, Oxford University

Jack Carson, Director of the Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

36 Shame and Sexual Freedom: Learning the Lessons of History

David Pensgard, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, College of Arts & Sciences, Liberty University

43 Pilgrims, Activists, and Artists

Chris Hulshof, Associate Professor of Religion, John W. Rawlings School of Divinity, Liberty University

48 C.S. Lewis and the Moral Argument

Edward Martin, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, College of Arts & Sciences, Liberty University

53 Public Health and the Goodness of Christ

Benjamin K. Forrest, Professor and Administrative Chair, School of Health Sciences, Liberty University

BOOK REVIEWS

60 Disability and the Gospel: How God Uses Our Brokenness to Display His Grace

Elyse Pennington, Student Fellow, Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

61 A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918

Joseph Dennis, Student Fellow, Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

62 Herman Dooyeweerd: Christian Philosopher of State and Civil Society

Josh Hicks, Student Fellow, Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

63 Suffering Wisely and Well: The Grief of Job and the Grace of God

Chase Matthews, Student Fellow, Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

Training Champions for Christ since 1971

Editorial

Jack Carson Executive Director

Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement

John W. Rawlings School of Divinity, Liberty University

On Craters and Deathworks

“America is a Christian country,” one student loudly proclaimed. Another student, clearly agitated by this declaration, raised his hand immediately. This student quickly countered, “How can you say America is a Christian nation when abortion is legal? It seems like our country’s laws are pretty opposed to Christian values.” Not to be outdone, the original student responded with equal vigor, “Our nation was founded on Christian principles. It isn’t perfect, but neither are Christians.”

Some variation of this conversation occurs in my cultural engagement courses each semester. Our students are caught between conflicting accounts of Western culture’s moral fabric, oscillating rapidly between strong declarations about its Christian heritage and even more stringent declarations about its moral degeneracy. The paradoxical tension that our students intuitively feel when attempting to understand the Western world’s moral conscience is not simply a result of limited information. They have, instead, stumbled upon a deep tension in the task of modern Christian cultural engagement. In this editorial, we will look at the nature of this tension, exploring both “the crater of the Gospel”1 in our society and the “deathworks” that have weaponized these craters against Christianity’s claims to authority.2

The First World

The sociologist Philip Reiff divides the Western world into three distinct epochs — or “worlds.” These epochs are distinguished from one another by radically divergent authority structures — fate, faith, and fiction. The “First World” was committed to the authority of fate. The transcendent rulers of this first world ranged from “the complex rational world of ancient Athens to the enchanted mysticisms of aboriginal Australia.”3 The authorities of this First World could be described as “metadivine and often rooted in a mythical understanding of Nature, its gods myriad and its power primordial, capricious, and overwhelming.”4 Each version of the First World established “god-words” which carried with them a trace of transcendent authority.5 These “god-words” established the virtues and taboos of ancient cultures. For Sparta, pride and strength became god-words. For ancient Athens, wisdom itself was a god-word.

The First World was dominated by the concept of fate, where the relationship of the transcendent world to the mortal realm was one of manipulation and control. Human rituals were centered on convincing the divine realm to shift fate — a sacrifice to bring the rain, a cleansing to avoid punishment. Morality was

less about conforming to a way of life and more about “the regulation of passions by nonnegotiable taboos.”6 Breaking these taboos could bend fate against you or even anger a god.

Second-World Revolution

This world of fate was replaced by the Second World, which Reiff largely associates with monotheistic religions in general and the Judeo-Christian heritage in particular.

The leitmotif of our second culture/world is nothing miasmic or primordial, nothing metadivine and impersonal. In a word, faith, not fate, sounds the motif of our Second World. Faith is in and of that creator-character that once and forever revealed Himself in the familiar words from Exodus 3:14: "I am that I am." Faith means trust and obedience to the highest most absolute authority: the one and only God who acts in history uniquely by commandment and grace.7

The Second World rejected the god-words of the first world, taking aim at its idols and rituals. A key feature of the Second World's revolution was the indictment of all vestiges of First-World allegiance. It was not sufficient to affirm the second world’s God; every god of the First World must be renounced. Witchcraft, divination, and occult practices are anathema in the second world, specifically because they signal allegiance to the old structures of the First World’s fate authority. Instead of disconnected, primordial powers, the Second World’s transcendent authority is a personal God who is interested in the lives of humans. The taboos of the First World, then, were replaced with the moral indictments of the Second World — the Ten Commandments replacing the oracles of Delphi.

As Christianity gained prominence in the ancient world, it ushered in a series of societal changes through the transformation of “god-words.” The idea of “wisdom,” which Athenians so valued, was disconnected from the form of Athena and brought into submission to the revelation of the God of Israel. Strength was reformed around the image of the cross. The values of antiquity were overturned and redeemed by Christianity. Class distinctions, once transcendentally supported by the authority of fate, were called into question by faith in Christian revelation. Infanticide of the disabled or unwanted, practiced in many portions of antiquity, was shown to be unthinkable. The Christian God was interested in the moral actions of individuals, and no amount of ritualistic sacrifice could convince God to overlook sin.

Interlude: The Development of Craters

Christianity’s victory over the various ancient mythologies strongly shaped the moral sensibilities of modern culture. The legacy built by the Church over the past two millennia provided the foundational building blocks of Western liberal democracy.

In some ways we live among the ruins of this legacy: the foundations of early modern liberalism are still there, under the rubble; on top of them, we have created the flimsy, flashy construction of the late modern self and identity politics. We can't let this deformative individualism obscure the good, healthy, biblical affirmation of the individual that emerged in Christendom.8

Every society answers basic moral questions and balances competing moral claims. These questions are inherently religious and invoke answers that rely on concepts of meaning, significance, and authority:

Who am I? Do I matter? Do others matter? Does it matter how I treat them? Why does it matter how I treat them? Who has the right to answer these questions? What if I disagree with that answer?

The intuitive manner in which our modern Western society answers these questions is distinctly shaped by its Christian heritage. As the philosopher Oliver O’Donovan explains, even the most secular societies invoke transcendent categories in basic, everyday interactions: “The false self-consciousness of the would-be secular society lies in its determination to conceal the religious judgments that it has made.”9 Our modern society, even in extreme secular manifestations, is operating on borrowed religious capital when answering moral questions.

The citizens of the modern Western world all agree on certain moral positions — slavery is wrong, humans have rights, and the law should be applied equally to all people. These moral sensibilities have been ingrained in the fabric of society through the faithful and habitual lives of Christians over the past two millennia. As Christians create culture, they inevitably shape the form of that culture. The rationality of Christians begins to “rub off” on the culture, promoting a distinctly Christian view of the world. This form of influence is not predicated upon any sort of coercion; instead, it takes place through habitual and embodied actions. The explanations and justifications of Christians, moored as they are to the truths revealed in Scripture, offer a compelling and comprehensive way

to understand humans and their role in life. By simply being salt and light, the Church changed the moral fabric of Western culture over a prolonged timeframe. These “craters” operate at a pre-cognitive level; they are deep, subterraneous commitments. Oftentimes, moral sensibilities are assumed in everyday conversation and moral disagreements; they operate as the terrain of disagreement and are rarely the subject of disagreements themselves. People reason from these moral sensibilities to decide between competing moral positions. In this sense, we might call moral sensibilities something like “moral tastebuds.” They operate powerfully under the surface to shape what we assume to be rational, reasonable, and good. To put a particular point to it: A commitment to human flourishing is a moral sensibility; a stance on the rightness of a particular entitlement program operates as a moral position.

There are countless ways that Christianity has shaped the moral sensibilities of our world, but here are three key “craters” of the Gospel. First, the modern concept of freedom is derived from Christian ideals. Predictably enough, the foundation of our Second-World politics is the discovery of freedom, which in its modern form is a distinctly Christian contribution.10 O’Donovan explains that “God has done something which makes it impossible for us anymore to treat the authority of human society as final and opaque.”11 God’s Kingdom relativizes all other kingdoms. If Christians are responsible before God, any other responsibility they have must be secondary. This claim introduces a new social reality, one where each person has responsibility for managing their own life well. There is no monarch who can intercede for you, save that Monarch who intercedes for all. This religious commitment to individual responsibility undergirds our modern commitment to freedom.

A second key contribution is seen in the modern conception of restrained justice. While the justice of antiquity was often akin to revenge, the entirety of our modern judicial system has been shaped to guard against unbridled retribution. Our modern concept of justice requires balancing judgment with mercy. The punishment has to “fit” the crime. This too reverberates from Christian theological commitments. The end goal of discipline is repentance and restoration, and Christian thinkers and jurors shaped their own writing to “point” at this deeper version of justice. As O’Donovan explains, “When asked to say what that pointing might consist of, Christian thinkers could only reply that it involved the restraint of force to the minimum necessary. An imprecise answer, but

one which has had some profound effects on Western Civilization.”12 The modern drive for mercy is one of those “eternal valuations” that Fredrich Nietzsche blamed on Christianity.13

A third key moral sensibility inculcated by Christianity has been the affirmation of human equality. The modern commitment to equality is predicated on the assumption that all people have inherent dignity, and this assumption is suspiciously absent throughout most of human history. Only a doctrine like Christianity’s Imago Dei could support such a belief. Most societies have tied the worth of individuals to their competence, connections, or class. The Imago Dei, however, requires the worth of humans to be based on their inalienable standing before God. The baker and the senator are equal in worth, no matter their class or capabilities. O’Donovan explains how this development led to the eventual downfall of institutionalized slavery: “The distinctive Christian contribution … lies in the conviction that the Church itself was a society without master or slave within it, and that this society of equals was so palpably real that the merely legal and economic relations of master and slave had only a shadowy reality beside it.”14 This ontological commitment to radical equality within the society of the Church put existential pressure on the entire system of rationality that supported the institution of slavery.

These three moral sensibilities are part of a large set of instincts that Christianity has instilled in the Western liberal world. The concept that the government is morally responsible for acting rightly toward its people,15 the instinct that the government rules under the law and not as its own law,16 the legal-constitutional conception that the right to govern is founded on the consent of the governed,17 and the right of the populace to speak directly into the formation of law18 are all identified by O’Donovan as legacies of Christian presuppositions.

Deathworks and the Third World

The prevalence of Christian rationality in our modern society’s moral sensibilities is generally a boon in Christian public witness. However, Philip Rieff has demonstrated how it has also led to an unprecedented problem. While the First World was governed by the transcendent idea of fate and the Second was governed by faith, the Third World has rejected the conception of a transcendent moral order in its entirety — it has labeled the idea of authority as a “fiction.”

When Nietzsche famously declared that God was dead, he ushered in an era of uncertainty. Humans had, in the entirety of recorded history, referenced a transcendent

order to make sense of the world. Without that reference point, Nietzsche insisted that humankind operated as the true source of meaning. The process of creating narratives and counternarratives is what generates significance, unmoored from any real reference point.19 This assault on the idea of transcendent authority leaves behind only one transcendent idea — that transcendence itself is a fiction. All gestures toward transcendence are de facto power plays; all claims to some real basis for morality are oppressive.

Fiction, however, is formed out of disassembled reality. Every fictitious story uses words and ideas that are real, and the Third World operates the same way. It disassembles the First and Second World and reassembles them, in a never-ending series of recreations. The Third World’s transcendence is negation — the rejection of transcendent authority in its entirety. This leads to a world in constant moral turmoil. As Reiff explains, “Culture becomes a warring series of fragments, that series unified by no common motif and dominated best by self-legitimating elites that try to set up their own fiction of primordiality against other fictions that they think have already had too long a run in an otherwise meaningless history.”20 The Third World weaponizes the stories of the First and Second worlds to promote the idea that “nothing is true.”21 Pitting transcendent ideas against one another, the Third World attempts to desacralize the sacred. In other words, as Nietzsche envisioned it, the Third World institutes a revolving door of “anticultures,” where a parade of competing anti-theses rotate through the public consciousness at a rapid rate.22

And here enters the most powerful weapon in the Third World's arsenal of negation: the deathwork. To banish the Second World’s influence on modern moral sensibilities is not as easy as it was for the Second to banish the First’s authority. The Second had a transcendent order with which to supplant the First, but the Third has no transcendent order. Instead, the Third recreates accounts of morality using the broken pieces of First- and Secondworld orders in Frankenstein-like configurations. This leads to a world formed by what Michael Foucault called “the principle of reversal” and what Nietzsche termed the “transvaluation of values,” a world that is self-legitimating and self-creating.23

These deathworks operate by narrating a new story surrounding meaning and significance, and they do so by retooling the “craters” of the Gospel that Christianity has formed. This, in turn, creates chimeric positions in the moral landscape that contain both Christian truths and negations of those very truths. In the rampant debates on abortion, for example, the value of bodily autonomy — a Christian concept stemming from the value of

individuals — is pitted against the value of life — another fundamental Christian concept. Disconnected from the Christian story that organizes these values into a coherent system, the resulting clashes often seem like little more than Nietzschean narrating and counter-narrating. In discussions surrounding LGBTQ rights, the supremacy of love is pitted against the Christian sexual ethic. In debates around gun control, the value of peace and gentleness is pitted against natural obligations to defend one’s family.

This means, in practical terms, that our students will feel the intrinsic draw of Christian truths contained in the variety of competing moral positions. This can lead to confusion, frustration, and, ultimately, despair. Moral truths begin to look inaccessible and illusory, and the third world’s transcendent fiction takes hold. Simply teaching them to reject one set of positions is untenable; those positions contain fragments of Christian truth. Instead, faithful modern cultural engagement requires careful, diligent, and patient evaluation of the complex moral landscape of our world.

Recapturing a Vision of the Good

Careful analysis is necessary, but it is not sufficient for the task at hand. The weaponization of disconnected moral truths plays a central role in the Third World’s game. When moral truths are weaponized without reference to a transcendent order, they begin to operate as tools for power plays. If our moral sensibilities are subsumed into the cultural battles of the day, they take on the role prescribed by the Third World. This, in turn, simply lends credibility to the authority of “fiction.”

Instead, the Church in our late-modern world must remember the transcendent order behind our moral sensibilities. Our prophetic witness cannot be formed out of disconnected “natural” moral truths; prophetic witness in our late-modern age needs to be of a distinctly Christian nature and in constant reference to the transcendent order revealed in Scripture. Christian moral positions are not free-floating pieces of disconnected argumentation. Instead, Christian morality is irrevocably tied to the person, work, and revelation of Jesus Christ. Our theology provides the rationality that orders our morality, and giving up on the distinctive nature of our theological commitments in favor of functional wins in culture will ultimately undermine the very foundation of those moral commitments.

To Train Champions for Christ who are prepared for this complex world, we do not need to teach them how to argue against every iteration of the fictitious Third World. Instead, we need to teach them about the

revelation of Christianity and how it informs the moral commitments we proclaim; in other words, we need to clearly articulate a vision of “the good life,” centered on the person and work of Jesus Christ. This is easier said than done. There is a real temptation to respond in outrage to every iteration of the Third World zeitgeist. After all, if Reiff is right, the Third World is committed to the authority of fiction, and it can feel gratifying to attack the absurdity of its latest positions. However, as soon as one iteration of the Third World is defeated, another will inevitably arise. If Christian cultural engagement is framed in reaction to this hydra of fiction, our stance will be shaped by what we are against rather than what we are for, and our witness to “the good life” will be lost in the heat of never-ending outrage.

1James Smith, Awaiting the King.

2Philip Rieff, My Life among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority, Sacred Order/Social Order, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006).

3Reiff, XXI.

4Reiff, XXI.

5Rieff, 5.

6Reiff, XXI.

7Rieff, 5.

8Smith, 110.

9Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 247.

10O’Donovan, 252.

11O’Donovan, 253.

12O’Donovan, 260.

13Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: The Philosophy Classic, Capstone Classics (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2020), 113.

14O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations, 265.

15O’Donovan, 231.

16O’Donovan, 233.

17O’Donovan, 240.

18O’Donovan, 240-241.

19Ron Dart, “Myth, Memoricide, and Jordan Peterson,” in Myth and Meaning in Jordan Peterson: A Christian Perspective, ed. Ron Dart (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2020), 53.

20Rieff, My Life among the Deathworks, 26.

21Rieff, 27.

22Rieff, 42.

23Rieff, XXIV.

Dr. Bryan M. Litfin Professor of Bible & Theology

John W. Rawlings School of Divinity

JESUS IS LORD: HOW THE TWO-WORD GOSPEL DEFEATED THE ETHOS OF ROME

The foundational myth of ancient Rome recounts how the city’s founders, the twins Romulus and Remus, were cast away as orphans yet survived because a shewolf suckled them. The image of the lupa (female wolf) became an enduring symbol of Rome. In particular, the wolf was sacred to Mars, the red-blooded god of war. The people of that ancient city, which grew into a republic and then an empire, were deeply lupine: intelligent, cooperative, and noble, yet also savage, ravenous, and dominant. The disciplined Roman legions, like innumerable, invincible wolfpacks, kept expanding their territory until the whole Mediterranean basin lay under their sway. The Roman worldview perceived everything outside itself as either prey or threat. Violence toward them both — impulsive, swift, and ruthless — was Rome’s inborn instinct.

And then along came the puppy of Christianity.

Yes, a puppy. An insignificant new religion, cute in a juvenile way but hardly a threat to the wolf’s dominance. The puppy stumbled and bumbled underfoot, sometimes giggled at, sometimes cursed, but most often ignored. It poked its nose here and there, trying to figure out its place in the wolf’s expansive domain. Nobody paid it much attention. It was too small to matter.

But then the puppy began to grow, its limbs lengthening, its frame filling out. Soon it could no longer be ignored by the wolf, which started to snap at its new competitor, at times biting hard. Blood was spilled, yet the adolescent dog didn’t run away. It kept confronting the wolf, protecting its own flock and even reclaiming some lupine territory as its own. Eventually, the sheepdog grew larger and stronger than the wolf: a noble Great Pyrenees, brave and steadfast, swathed in white wool like the lambs it guarded. Awed by this majestic beast, the wolf cowered, lost its will to fight, and shrank back into the darkness from which it had come.

How did this happen? How were the wolfish values of the empire — an insatiable hunger for conquest and ceaseless expansive violence — defeated by the Christian ethic of love and mercy? The answer: through the tireless work of the ancient church fathers — the pastors and teachers of Christianity’s first five centuries. If you haven’t met them yet, it’s time you did.

Getting to Know the Church Fathers

Church history, of course, didn’t end with chapter 28 of the Book of Acts. Nor did it duck its head and go underground until it resurfaced in 1517 when Martin Luther tacked the 95 Theses on the door of a German church.

Rather, church history continued marching ahead from the first century into the second, then the third, the fourth, the fifth ... and all the way to the twenty-first. The figures of those first five centuries are called the church fathers, defining what historians refer to as the “patristic” era (pater is Latin for father). Of course, there were many great Christian mothers as well, but we use the term “fathers” as a catchall term for the earliest phase of church history when foundational figures sired a long lineage of believers to come.

Who were these church fathers and mothers? Some of them are familiar names: Augustine of Hippo and Athanasius of Alexandria. Others are more obscure: Irenaeus, Tertullian, Macrina, John Chrysostom, Melania the Elder, and Basil of Caesarea. Several of the great ones died as martyrs, like Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, and Perpetua. Others were longlived churchmen, monks, and bishops. Many were outstanding scholars with brilliant minds: Origen, Jerome, Marcella of Rome. A few were even prominent Christian statesmen, such as Ambrose of Milan.

Despite their many differences — their social stations, ethnicities, countries of origin, outlooks, and final ends — they all had one thing in common: they stood

united against pagan Rome and what it had to offer. Sure, the fathers of the patristic age could ransack Greco-Roman literature for its valuable tidbits, discovering usable truths that could be redeployed for God like the Israelites of the Exodus reforged Egyptian gold for tabernacle service. Not everything produced by a wicked culture is wicked itself. Even pagan soil is impregnated with seeds of the Logos. The fathers believed those should be nurtured into life.

Yet at the core of their beliefs, the ancient Christians held that the worldview of Rome stood in stark contrast to their own. The two systems were diametrically opposed. The Roman moral vision was to invade, conquer, subjugate, tax, and move on to the next ripe picking. But when the Spirit of Christ came to the empire, it lost its urge to dominate — so much so that Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire laid the blame for the fall upon the wimpy shoulders of the Christians and their pie-in-the-sky concerns.

But was this really a “fall”? Only if the domineering violence of Rome is valorized as worthy of perpetuation. Perhaps we can instead describe what happened as a moral and ethical transformation, an interior renovation of a culture’s heart that led to wholesale societal changes. An ethic of agape — selfless love for the human race — entered a society where it was absent before. And it did this, not by introducing a gospel message, but by switching which gospel was being preached.

What Is a “Gospel”?

We think of the Gospel as a religious thing. It’s a very “Christiany” word, isn’t it? Every pastor talks about it. Every church wants to embody it. Every blogger defines it. Every missionary proclaims it. The Gospel is at the heart of Christianity. Surely this is a biblical word, right?

Yes, it is. But before it was Christian, the word had a life of its own.

The Greek word euangelion — Latinized as evangelion, Anglicized as the evangel — has it roots in war and conquest. Long before Jesus Christ walked this earth, Greek and Roman people were proclaiming the gospel of victory. Literally, this word combines the prefix for “good” (eu-) with the word for a “message” or “announcement” (angelia). Thus it means “good news,” or specifically, the public proclamation of your king’s victory after a battle and the establishment of his new kingdom to replace the defeated one.

Did you know that one of the world’s first evangelists wasn’t a Christian but the great Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus? At the end of his life, he erected an inscription across the empire (basically, he commissioned billboard advertisements everywhere) which touted his many victories and achievements. This massive propaganda piece, totaling 4,000 words in English translation, was known as the Res Gestae, which means “Things Accomplished.” Such proclamation of mighty deeds was a gospel message. In fact, another famous inscription from 9 B.C. says, “the birthday of the god Augustus was the beginning of the good tidings (euangelion) for the world.”

All of this serves as the background to the Christian appropriation of the word “gospel.” The earliest believers also had a message of good news. It wasn’t simply a description of personal salvation, a means by which individual people could “get saved” by their decision of faith. The gospel doesn’t start with a personal problem and then provide a strategy for its rectification.

Rather, like any gospel announcement in the ancient world, it starts with a proclamation of royal victory over a defeated regime. And right along with this proclamation — inherent within it, in fact — is a demand for all hearers to offer willing subjection to the new king. Those who resist the victor will find his

message to be bad news. However, those who embrace him will hear good tidings and begin to flourish. Only then will their sins be forgiven by grace. Only then will they begin to be saved, enduring to the end to gain a share of the victor’s crown. But the present decision that the hearer must make isn’t the primary substance of the gospel. Nor are its future ramifications. What comes first in a true gospel proclamation is an announcement of a finished work in the past: the Things Accomplished by the Lord who has won the battle.

The Ancient Church’s Two-Word Gospel

Though we tend to complicate the Gospel, it’s actually very simple. The ancient Christians (including the apostles, but also the generations afterward) confessed it in only two words: Kurios Iesous, “Jesus is Lord.”

This was no light thing to say, no mere slogan of polite respect. To be a “lord” (kurios in Greek, dominus in Latin) was a big deal in the Roman Empire. Why? Because the basic affirmation of imperial homage — indeed, of emperor worship — was “Caesar is Lord.”

To be a loyal citizen of Rome and all it represented required hailing Caesar as the supreme ruler of all.

But early Christianity turned that lordship acclamation on its head, giving allegiance not to a man who became a god but to God who became a man. The apostle Paul

wrote, “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9). This twoword Gospel could be confessed only when the Spirit Himself gave utterance (1 Corinthians 12:3). Although one king seemed to rule, the new Christian truth revealed that another one — the true King — actually reigned supreme.

What was the meaning of this two-word Gospel?

It wasn’t simply a confession that Jesus had died on Calvary to save us from our sins. The church fathers knew that the death of Jesus didn’t save anyone. In itself, the cross is empty of power. The shed blood of Christ, at the moment when it dripped from His brow, His hands, His feet, and His side, accomplished absolutely nothing for our salvation.

Does that sound shocking? Perhaps it does. I understand that. Even so, it is true. Don’t take my word for it. Take the words of inspired Scripture: “[I]f Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17). Do you see? The cross alone isn’t what saves us. The cross is the bad news that the Savior has been wickedly slaughtered by the Romans. It is a cause for the devil’s rejoicing. But when the deadly cross is overcome by the empty tomb — aha! Now the saving power of God has been revealed! Only then do we receive “His incomparably

great power for us who believe.” This is exactly the power that “He exerted when He raised Christ from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come” (Ephesians 1:19-20). No longer is “Caesar” the lordly name to be invoked by humankind. Why not? Because of the two-word Gospel: Kurios Iesous Forever and always, Jesus is Lord.

Witnesses in Blood

Did the ancient Christians of the patristic age understand this? I think we could say they understood it better than anyone ever has. And I use the word “understand” in the deepest possible sense. The early Christians had internalized the two-word Gospel so much that they were willing to die for it. Their bold confession, of course, ran afoul of emperor worship. In those days, it was a capital crime to impugn the emperor’s majesty. That is why the age of the church fathers was often an age of martyrdom.

Consider, for example, the story of Polycarp, the second-century bishop of Smyrna, one of the Seven Churches of Revelation. Polycarp was arrested during an imperial pogrom against the Christians. “What’s the matter?” the judge asked him. “What harm is

there in saying ‘Caesar is Lord’ as you make a little sacrifice and do what’s required? It’s the only way to save your life!”

But Polycarp knew what he believed and drew a firm line in the sand. Hauled before the judge in Smyrna’s amphitheater, he was ordered to swear loyalty to Caesar.

“If you think I’m going to do what you’re asking and swear to Caesar’s demon, you’re mistaken,” Polycarp replied. “But since you keep pretending not to know who I am, hear me declare boldly: I am a Christian!”

The elderly martyr also declared about Christ, “For eighty-six years, I have been His servant, and He has done me no wrong. How could I now blaspheme my King who saved me?”1

“My King who saved me” — the Risen Christ, not the emperor in Rome.

Upon that regal yet illegal confession, Polycarp was hauled to the stake for burning. The soldiers also stabbed him with a dagger, a vicious and fatal wound. The noble martyr’s blood gushed into the sand of the arena while his soul ascended to the skies for his heavenly reward — a reward bestowed from the hand of the true cosmic Lord.

Patristic Presence and the Defeat of Rome

In the end, the Roman wolf wasn’t defeated by a bloody dogfight. The stalwart sheepdog didn’t need to leap at his enemy with his ears laid back and his fangs bared. He didn’t growl and bark and engage in physical combat. That just wasn’t his way.

Instead, the ancient Christian sheepdogs — the forefathers and foremothers of our faith — defeated the ferocious, rapacious, voracious worldview of Rome through their steadfast presence and their unwillingness to be dislodged by adversity or even death. At first, they endured persecution, sometimes to the point of shedding blood. Even in the face of danger, they kept worshiping God, strengthening their churches, and doing apologetics against the pagan gods.

Then, when one of the emperors, Constantine by name, decided to convert to their faith, the Christians rose to the task of counseling him in statecraft and catechizing him in sound doctrine. Admittedly, the temptation accompanying that strategy was to become wolfish. As the ancient proverb says, “If you run with wolves, you will learn how to howl.” That’s not a good

thing. The Church doesn’t need to howl. Legitimate critiques can be made of how the Church erred during this era.

Nevertheless, contrary to popular perception, the main story of the post-Constantinian church wasn’t one of capitulation but of transformation. The ancient church fathers didn’t abandon ship after the emperor converted. They had spent far too much of their blood, sweat, and tears to let that happen. The ship of faith continued to sail along its same trajectory, now running before the cultural winds instead of beating windward. It was a welcome change, one that allowed tremendous cultural transformation to occur.

And thus, in time, pagan Rome became Christendom. For all its flaws, that Christianized society raised a torch of love and mercy whose brightness the world had never seen. The Western moral vision produced by Christianity gave humanity its greatest gift: individual rights rooted in the dignity of every person. This couldn’t have happened without the first Christian generations summoning the courage to challenge the wolf, defang it, and send it slinking away so the lambs of God could flourish in the green pastures of the Lord.

1 Bryan M. Litfin, Early Christian Martyr Stories: An Evangelical Introduction with New Translations (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014), 60.

Faculty Publication

Rebecca Munson, Ph.D. Associate Professor & Department Chair School of Government, Liberty University

Human Rights and Christendom

Rooted in the premise that each individual human has unique dignity, equal worth, and divinely ordained purpose, Christendom’s picture of human rights enjoys widespread popularity and acclaim. Christianity’s “standard of beauty” for rights prevailed over that of its Greco-Roman rivals, rivals that ascribed rights to duty and social status. Routine exploitations of slaves and the poor were widely accepted in classical conceptions of morality, even as some Roman jurists noted how slavery was an issue where natural law collided with the laws of nations.

There are many reasons why Christendom’s picture of rights won out over its historical rivals. The first is its natural allure. Equality, perhaps the most unique component of the modern, Western human rights project, resonates with the conscience and divinely imprinted senses of right and wrong on the human heart.

Today, the equality and individualism responsible for the allure of modern human rights are under attack, from both within and outside the Western world.

Subjectivity & Human Rights

Internal challenges center around the subjectivity associated with human rights. Subjective rights often implicate a “me-first” individualism and moral relativism, and this has led to dramatic expansions in the definition of what constitutes a human right. Westerners are now under the illusion that individual preferences have no effect on the collective health of a society and human rights have become a stage for contemporary culture wars.

The very individualism and equality that Christians once cherished as exceptional and meaningful contributions to the concept of rights are now the same elements to blame for subjective rights. This is why some Christian thinkers lambast theologians as “naïve in their facile appropriation of ‘rights talk,’” appropriations which allowed human rights to become embedded into the Christian social conscience.1

Incredibly, some religious scholars go so far as to suggest that political rights as a whole are a doomed project, one which cannot be biblically substantiated. The underlying fear is that rubber-stamping modern human rights means capitulation to a set of liberal values incompatible with moral teachings and religious institutions. However, the existence of a multifaceted philosophical debate over moral justifications for rights does not negate the reality that the Bible speaks to individual rights. Think, for example, of the laborer receiving his due wage. And, of course, that famous commandment against stealing.

Christians can and should take much of the credit for human rights. Their doctrine elevates the lowly and gives dignity to the oppressed. Prior to Christendom, even the most sophisticated societies, such as the Romans, had no problem with practices like coerced prostitution so long as the prostitute was part of a low societal group. It was not until classical conceptions of justice and morality gave way to Christian conceptions that we see prostitution portrayed as a sin, a fundamentally wrong violation of human dignity.2 Theodosius II, a Christian emperor, endorsed a new law in A.D. 428 to ban coercion in the sex industry. This law, considered a turning point in Western sexual ethics, introduced the concept of sin to the masses.3 The morality of human behavior was no longer predicated on what society viewed as appropriate. It was reframed as a matter decided in light of what God viewed as appropriate.4 These and other radical Christian ideas about the value of individuals slowly transposed into European law, starting under imperial Rome and throughout the Middle Ages.

Political Power & Human Rights

This leads to another reason why Christendom’s ideas about rights triumphed access to political power. Ambiguous concepts of rights, attractive and true as they might ring, are hard to exercise until they become political.

Consider, for example, how the evangelical awakening of the 18th century was followed by numerous humanitarian acts of the British parliament, including the prohibition of slavery and laws that forbade children from working in factories. As Protestant Welsh minister Martyn Lloyd-Jones put it, “Once men are right with God, they get right with one another.”5 But notice that it took acts of Parliament to ensure good ideas translated into actual protections for the vulnerable.

Likewise, when it comes to international human rights, attractive ideas are by no means solely responsible for the sprawling legal architecture that buttresses the modern human rights project. Powerful countries have been willing to use their military and economic weight to back up human rights commitments.

Modern human rights are the product of a complex interplay between good ideas and the right applications of political, military, and economic power. This can be seen clearly by tracing the rise of the abolitionist movement.

The Protestant Reformations can be given disproportionate credit for the idea that slavery needed to end. Even though the Bible does not condemn slavery as an institution, there is repeated focus on the duty of the Christian to defend the oppressed. Still, it took quite some time for abolitionist calls to emerge. In his homily on the book of Ecclesiastes, the fourth-century Cappadocian Father Gregory of Nyssa was the first to say that the institution of slavery was sinful, basing his argument on the idea that Christ actively identified with slaves when He died by crucifixion the slave’s death. However, it was not until the 18th and 19th centuries that church leaders began to seriously question the institution of slavery itself.6 Acclaimed historian Tom Holland, whose contributions are highlighted elsewhere in this volume, suggests the emergence of the idea that the Christian God wanted slavery to be abolished was due to the confluence of two circumstances.7 The first was the Protestant Reformation, which supported Christians reading Scriptures for themselves without a Catholic intermediary. New interpretations of Scripture fostered the idea that slavery was morally wrong.

Holland argues the second reason the abolitionist idea took hold is that in the Caribbean and North America, slavery had become both industrialized and racialized. Britain had become highly adept at extracting raw materials and slaves, which they often treated with

astonishing cruelty.8 Mortality rates on plantations were skyrocketing, and the sheer horror of abuses was becoming difficult to explain away. The concurrent racialization of slavery made it even more difficult to claim that slavery was biblical.9

The Quakers, followed by evangelical Episcopalians and other Protestants, launched what we in the 21st century might call an advocacy campaign. The Quaker-inspired 1787 British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade began petitioning Parliament. Under the leadership of William Wilberforce, abolitionists finally saw the fruits of their labor in 1806 when the Foreign Slave Trade Act flew through the British House of Commons.10 In the House of Lords, the bill faced more challenges, but eventually, the noisy and persistent abolitionists succeeded. Their righteous clamor even put slavery on the agenda for parliamentary elections in 1806.

Changes in Britain’s material circumstances had paved the way for abolitionist ideas to gain political traction. The French Revolution, which had recently ended in 1799, reduced British competition in the West Indies. The French had also recently lost control over sugar plantations in Haiti. These developments eased concerns over how abolition could impact Britain's commercial interests. In 1807, a new bill finally banned British participation in the slave trade. Another bill came in 1833 which abolished slavery in Britain altogether.

By the end of the Napoleonic wars, Holland contends the French foreign secretary negotiating in Vienna had no choice but to demand that the slave trade be abolished.11

At this juncture, Catholic countries were also compelled to become abolitionists. International laws started to emerge prohibiting the transatlantic slave trade, laws which gave the British navy the latitude to unilaterally seize the slave ships of other Atlantic powers. The British and French even forced the Ottoman Empire to start regulating their slave trade.12 Like any human rights campaign, abolitionist advocacy turned potent when it landed on the agenda of a powerful country, one with the military and economic might needed to compel other countries to accept new formulations of appropriate, civil, and just behavior.

For centuries, Christianity has shaped secular impulses toward justice. However, missionaries did not end the transatlantic slave trade. It was the Royal Navy. Today, it is not advocacy groups or Christian missionaries doing the most to eradicate modern slavery. It is the U.S. Department of State, which harnesses America’s economic strength to impose economic sanctions on countries that fail to meet their commitments to combat human trafficking.

Well-intended individuals and advocacy groups are not directly responsible for the Kuhn-esque, episodic progress that peppers the history of human rights. Progress is due to political revolutions, religious revivals, the agendas of imperial powers, the outcomes of major wars, and eras of great power competition (such as the Cold War).13 It was bloody political revolutions which rendered expansions in political rights in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was a victory in the Second World War which gave the Allies the authority required to design an international system that codified Christian ideas about human dignity into international laws enforced by strong powers. The failure of communism, as historian Samuel Moyn points out, opened up the space for a new utopia after previous utopias failed.14

Ideas have power, so it is critical that popular ideas are good ideas. But ideas have their limits. Economic and military power mattered greatly when it came to embedding the West’s moral vision into practice. While it is not through military and economic strength alone that the Western consensus on human rights has solidified, strength has certainly helped. This is the part many Christians are squeamish to acknowledge.

Human Rights in a Pluralist World

Critics of human rights are correct that today’s expansive interpretations of human rights fail to align with the religious doctrines that helped found them. Consider, for example, how freedom of religion is now used as a banner to justify barbaric practices of widespread female genital mutilation in certain countries. Or how Christian concepts of free will and bodily autonomy are used to justify abortions.

Enlightenment-era thinking, with its focus on natural law and natural rights, is often blamed for subjective rights. But, subjective rights were not the exclusive invention of the Enlightenment. More broadly, it is difficult to scrupulously argue that the Enlightenment even signifies a true break from religion.

Ample space exists for another interpretation, one that acknowledges a great deal of continuity between Christian and Enlightenment thinking. Witte and Latterell, for example, suggest that attaching subjective rights to the Enlightenment cannot accommodate the realities of how the modern liberal formulation of rights was anticipated by the Romans, visible in medieval canon law, and acknowledged by 16th- and 17th-century Protestant reformers.15 Their point is that today’s expansive interpretations of rights were anticipated. Subjective interpretations of rights are not a departure from the

Christian roots of human rights. They are the product of the continuity across Christian and Enlightenment thinking.

Going one step further, an embrace of Tom Holland’s thesis in Dominion leaves space to argue that the Enlightenment itself was a product of Christianity.16 In other words, liberalism is Christian in its origins. It is a particular, pluralist manifestation of Christian ideas. Lumping in critiques of human rights as part of a failure of liberalism thus becomes a narrow-minded line of critique. A rejection of Holland’s thesis would leave us in a far messier world, both historically and philosophically.

One way to see both the philosophical tensions and historical continuity in modern human rights is by looking at the articles that comprise the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR). Because the UNDHR is widely regarded as the crown jewel of 150 years of striving after rights, historians have tended to focus on the 1940s when they try to describe the emergence of human rights. Encompassing a strange mixture of principles, some of the UNDHR’s articles bolster conservative political stances while others advance progressive causes. Article 1 hearkens to Christian doctrine, declaring how humans are not just “born free and equal in dignity” but also “endowed with reason and a conscience,” meaning they “should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”17 However, the language in the preamble mimics the Enlightenmentinspired, liberal language found in the opening lines of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. Protestant influence in the UNDHR is perhaps most visible in Article 18, where “everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.”18 Yet in Article 22, we see overt assertions of economic, social, and cultural rights, the kinds of rights conservatives today challenge as contradictory to biblical principles of limited government.19

Social rights, which Franklin D. Roosevelt cemented both internationally and domestically under the Atlantic Charter and UNDHR,20 were understood at the time to be important for preventing another Great Depression, the kind of domestic economic woes blamed for the rise of Hitler. Many people in the 1940s believed that avoiding another Great Depression would mean avoiding another Hitler. World peace was tied to individual economic and social rights.

New receptivity to social and economic rights birthed expansions in the kinds of rights people conceived of as fundamental, expansions that gained momentum during the 1960s civil rights movements. The glamour

associated with modern human rights came in the 1970s.21 In the 18th and 19th centuries, rights had been attached to revolutionary nationalism. Bold chartings of social and economic rights in the UNDHR show how the 20th century took rights much further. Even though conservatives tend to now view the UNDHR with suspicion, it is still widely considered the cornerstone of the Western consensus on human rights and is littered with language that hearkens to religious doctrines.

Christians can and should take credit for the ideas of individualism, equality, and human dignity that define modern human rights. The Protestant Reformation broke the unity of Western Christendom and carved a path for the liberal ideas that freed millions from serfdom and sparked steep declines in extreme poverty across the globe. Victims had no respect in the cruel worlds of antiquity. Their voice in politics today is due to the impact of Christianity on the Western world’s moral vision. All Christians can regard human rights as a net gain for civilization, and yet, they should not be surprised when rights are interpreted in ways that grind against religious doctrine.

People of all persuasions must now navigate the practical and political manifestations of competing religious and liberal interpretations of rights. When tensions manifest in concrete contexts, the way to resolve them is to address them on a case-by-case basis. Attempts to resolve tensions in more abstract ways entail expansions in governance, expansions which either endanger principles of limited government or encourage reversion to antiquated authority structures. The political left is pinning its hopes on new forms of authority with its reliance on “experts” and bureaucrats to create societal stability. Simultaneously, the right is panting for reversion to old, theocratic forms of authority, the very types of authority structures that Protestants purposefully broke away from to find the freedom to worship God as they saw fit.

Both of these undemocratic reactions promise stability. In reality, each devalues the individual by assuming people need the government to tell them how to make choices that complement the common good. Undemocratic responses to clashing interpretations of rights risk not just the entirety of the human rights project but also the entirety of the experiment of liberalism. Neither is something that should be risked at such a pluralist moment in politics, especially when serious external challenges to human rights loom, namely, China’s aggressive bids to implant its dangerous collectivist definition of human rights into high politics.

1Joan O’Donovan, “Rights, Law and Political Community: A Theological and Historical Perspective,” Transformation 20 (Jan. 2003), 31. O’Donovan argues theologians adopted human rights based on “a consensus about the unproblematic nature of the move from human dignity to human rights,” 31.

2Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Harvard University Press, 2013).

3The passage of this same law is also a key historical moment in the development of Christian concepts of free will. See Harper 80-133.

4Harper, 7-8.

5Martin Lloyd Jones, “The Message of the Bible Today.” Sermon on Exodus 20:1-26 delivered Nov. 27, 1955. https://www.mljtrust.org/ sermons/old-testament/the-message-of-the-bible-today/.

6Kimberly Flint-Hamilton, “Gregory of Nyssa and the Culture of Oppression,” Christian Reflection: A Series in Faith and Ethics, 2010: 2636. Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University.

7Tom Holland, interview with Michael Jones, “What if Christianity Never Existed? With Historian Tom Holland,” Inspiring Philosophy, podcast audio, April 21, 2023, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ inspiring-philosophy/id1683977797?i=1000610161979.

8Ibid.

9Ibid.

10Interestingly, this bill was initially framed as a national security measure, which helped inoculate it from proslavery arguments. See Jenny Martinez, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 22.

11Holland, interview with Michael Jones.

12Holland goes so far as to argue that what follows from this is a Protestantization of Islam. He also discusses how Protestantism imposed abolitionist narratives on Catholicism.

13Samuel Moyn offers a thorough treatment of these developments in The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010).

14Ibid.

15John Witte Jr. and Justin J. Latterell. “Christianity and Human Rights: Past Contributions and Future Challenges,” Journal of Law and Religion 30.3 (2015): 353-385.

16Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic Books, 2019).

17“Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Documents, United Nations, Article 1, http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-humanrights/.

18Ibid, Article 18.

19Ibid, Article 22.

20See Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights, (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005): 14-46.

21Few international agreements can boast genuine influence on the nature of international relations apart from the Treaty of Westphalia.

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The Birth of Modern Western Morals

What explains the astounding shift in morality — in the definition of goodness — that occurred between the culture of the Spartans, who considered the weak to be unworthy of life, to the modern Western world? Despite many secular arguments that Christianity has been (and perhaps even remains) only a hurdle that must be overcome for progress to be made, several historians and political thinkers over the past decade accomplished the laudable task of reminding us that without Christianity, the world we live in would be far bleaker. Larry Siedentop, for example, detailed how the rise of Christianity in the West reshaped institutions and legal codes, creating modern Western liberalism, in which each person is seen as having fundamental human rights, as opposed to the “might is right” of nonChristian kingdoms.1 A similar argument came from Brian Tierney in 1997, who made clear that the idea of individual rights emerged from church lawyers, not from secular Enlightenment thinkers.2 John Witte Jr. has ably demonstrated how the teachings of John Calvin were applied to political questions throughout early-modern Europe and led to the rise of Western constitutionalism.3 Similar studies have shown how to care for the least of these (orphans, widows, and the destitute), scientific studies, and many other values we cherish today, most of which are taken for granted, emerged due to the influence of Christianity.

How did Christianity, a religion grounded upon the unjust execution of a Jewish carpenter, come to shape entire civilizations’ understandings of morality and virtue? Humanly speaking, few would have expected a religion based on Jesus’ crucifixion to have a revolutionary effect, let alone inform ethical frameworks to such an extent that the impact of Christianity would grow to shape Western moral assumptions to such a degree that it becomes intuitive.

The Christian Revolution

Tom Holland sought to answer the question, “How do we explain the moral shift that takes place from antiquity to today?” in his 2019 book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Holland’s answer is simple,

and he demonstrates it through a series of twenty-one episodes in Western history, starting with an analysis of Athens in 479 B.C. and Jerusalem in 63 B.C. to set the stage for how Christianity would dramatically reshape the moral assumptions of the world.

Holland is a fascinating author. After completing his undergraduate education at Cambridge University, he began his doctoral studies at Oxford. He quickly grew frustrated with higher education, especially the monastic poverty that often accompanies it. He pursued a career as a writer and in broadcast, both radio and then television. He is a successful writer of influential historical documentaries, and he co-hosts The Rest Is History, a highly popular history podcast. He is the author of many award-winning historical books on antiquity, not to mention a 2015 translation of Herodotus’ The Histories

And yet, neither his academic acumen nor his cultural significance as a popular educator of history are the ultimate reason, for me at least, why Holland’s work as the author of Dominion is fascinating. For Holland, Dominion is not a mere academic exercise that seeks to understand the past disconnected from the author’s own interests. Holland acknowledges this is a deeply personal study. He was raised around Christian teaching, but as a child, he had serious doubts about Christianity.

In a 2016 article in The New Statesmen, Holland recounted how as a child in Sunday School he could not reconcile Christian teaching with scientific evidence.4 He was naturally curious about ancient civilizations. Even reading the Bible became an exercise in understanding the ancient civilizations who often feature as enemies of God’s people: Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Romans. He became enamored by the gods of Greece and Rome, who seemed far more compelling than the God of Israel.

Nevertheless, Holland eventually became haunted by the morality of the ancient world and was struck by

how different it was from our modern understanding of goodness.

The longer I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, the more alien and unsettling I came to find it. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practiced a peculiarly murderous form of eugenics, and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognized as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that I came to find shocking, but the lack of a sense that the poor or the weak might have any intrinsic value. As such, the founding conviction of the Enlightenment — that it owed nothing to the faith into which most of its greatest figures had been born — increasingly came to seem to me unsustainable.

In the three centuries after Christ’s death, countless Christians were faithful in the ordinary task of sharing the good news of the crucified King with family, friends, and neighbors, so much so that Christianity eventually overwhelmed much of the Roman Empire, with a Roman emperor, Constantine, taking up the mantle of being the first Christian emperor. Monarchies, in the wake of the fall of Rome, took up Christian imagery to legitimize their reigns.

A Winding Path

Few things demonstrate Holland’s main thesis more than how modern observers have come to understand the conquests of the Americas by European powers. It ought not be surprising when fallen, sinful people act in a way that is exploitative, including those who do so under the banner of the Cross. But, Holland notes, what ought to be astounding is the way we take for granted our modern moral compass. By what standard is it wrong to subjugate those who are weaker than you? Many societies viewed it as a moral necessity to conquer their weaker neighbors. But Holland argues that Christianity has, over time, brought about a marked shift in the moral framework of the world. In an interview with Dan Carlin, Holland explains “... when the Spaniards conquered Mexico, of course there is a sense of triumph — the idea that God has given them this world, and it redounds to the glory of Spain, and it is something to celebrate. But there is a nagging sense that what they’re doing is offensive to God.”5 For many modern people, including Christians who are sobered by the inconsistencies and hypocrisies in Christianity’s history, it can be tempting to distance ourselves from the Christians of the past.

While the treatment of the native peoples in the Americas is a glaring example of Christian hypocrisy, it is crucial to remember that our moral condemnation of the European monarchies is itself predicated on Christian moral claims. Christians may have a checkered history, but Christian theology has operated strongly to shape Christians and non-Christians alike. For example, Bartolomé de las Casas (1474–1566), a Spanish conqueror who helped develop mining and agriculture in Hispaniola, became a priest in 1514 and eventually came to the conclusion that Spain’s actions in the New World denied the image of God in native peoples.6 He was, through Christian reasoning, formative in arguing against the mistreatment of native peoples.6

Similarly, it was Christians like William Wilberforce and John Newton who passionately and forcefully argued that it is an affront to the image of God in another person to take them as a slave. Christians have been at the forefront of the fight against abortion, seeking to protect the least of these, for the last fifty years.

The Christian understanding of “doing unto others as you would have them do to you” and caring for the least of these has been so imbibed by the Western moral mind, argues Holland, that we now use Christian moral categories to consider the goodness of acts done by those in the past who often professed to be Christians.

Looking Forward

Can the understanding of goodness that emerged from centuries of Christian influence, an understanding which even now marks much of the 21st century West, remain, despite the erosion of that Christian influence? Holland ends Dominion with a similar question.

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?7

A host of philosophers and political thinkers have asked the very same question, from Nietschze to Charles Taylor. Many have concluded that Christian values will inevitably die off if Christianity wanes. Some in the secular West are actively seeking to divorce themselves from the authority of a Creator

God who has particular demands on each individual’s life, and this divorce will inevitably erode the moral sources that undergird our modern sensibilities. Moral commitments like loving one’s neighbor and caring for the helpless are not self-sustaining. They rely on the ontological commitments that Christianity provides. Taylor, in his landmark work, A Secular Age, argued pointedly that the values the West cherishes will not survive after the erosion of Christianity.8

For modern Christian readers, therefore, Dominion is a charge to remember what has distinguished Christianity from the non-Christian religions of the Ancient World. There are great doctrines that must be defended — the Trinity, penal substitutionary atonement, and so on. But we must not forget that those doctrinal claims must be joined together with brotherly love. Christ himself said that the clearest demonstration to the watching world is abundant and self-sacrificial love toward fellow Christians (John 13:35). A striking reality demonstrated throughout Dominion is just how unexpected so much of the history of Christianity is. It is full of seemingly unexpected twists and turns over its two-thousandyear history. Consider just a few episodes. Few would

have expected a pious medieval monk (Martin Luther) to launch, inadvertently I might add, a revolution within the Western Church, sparking additional cataclysms of warfare and political unrest — or, a teacher of rhetoric to have a life-altering encounter with Romans 13:13-14, “Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” — let alone that he (Augustine) would go on to be a bishop and eventually become one of the most influential post-apostolic theologians. Or consider how a sixteen-year-old Briton (Patrick of Ireland) was captured and sold into slavery in Ireland, escaped back home to Britain, and then only six years later returned to Ireland as a missionary, leading to the conversion of countless Celts from the darkness of paganism and helping to shape Irish culture for a millennia-and-a-half.

Consider even Christ’s closest followers. They remained convinced throughout Christ’s earthly ministry that He was going to usher in a political kingdom, and they despised His own prophecies of His coming death. When He was arrested, they scattered. No one would have expected any kind of religious movement to last long

if it was substantially built on these twelve, let alone to have any measurable influence throughout the decades to come. Perhaps the most unexpected twist in the history of the Church is that the religion of the Crucified King, which esteems suffering and self-sacrifice eventually, reshaped the world. As heirs of this legacy, we have a duty to continue shaping the moral consciousness of our world through a faithful, prophetic witness.

Holland’s Dominion is a compelling narrative and a page-turner in the truest sense. But it is also the best kind of history: it not only tells the story of the past in a thought-provoking and careful way, but it also demonstrates how that past has led to the modern day. While Holland is no apologist for the church and, as of this essay, remains agnostic, he is clearly sympathetic to the claims of virtue and goodness that have marked out the Church. For us today, it ought to spur us on to love and good works.

1Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014).

2Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150–1625 (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1997).

3John Witte Jr. The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

4Tom Holland, “Why I was Wrong about Christianity,” The New Statesmen, Sept. 14, 2016, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/ religion/2016/09/tom-holland-why-i-was-wrong-about-christianity.

5Dan Carlin, Tom Holland, and Dominic Sandbrook, “Hollandansandbrook” Hardcore History: Addendum (July 27, 2022).

6Holland, Dominion, 308–309.

7Holland, Dominion, 540.

8Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).

AN INTERVIEW WITH ALISTER MCGRATH ABOUT PASTORAL APOLOGETICS

Jack Carson, the director of the Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, recently sat down with Alister McGrath for an interview about ecclesial apologetics. What is the role of apologetics in the Church? How should pastors think about their role in the apologetic enterprise? These topics and more are explored in the interview below.

Alister McGrath initially studied natural science at Oxford, taking a doctorate in molecular biophysics under the supervision of Professor Sir George Radda. He later switched to studying theology. He was Oxford’s Professor of Historical Theology from 1999 to 2008. He then moved to King’s College London as Professor of Theology, Ministry, and Education before returning to Oxford as Idreos Professor in 2014. He also served as Gresham Professor of Divinity, a position established in 1597, from 2015-18. He retired in Sept. 2022.

Christian Apologetics: An Introduction

Christian Apologetics is a compact yet comprehensive introduction to the theological discipline devoted to the intellectual defense of the truth of the Christian religion. Assuming no previous knowledge of Christian apologetics, this student-friendly textbook clearly explains the major theoretical and practical aspects of the tradition while exploring its core themes, historical development, and current debates.

personally. And that’s a really important point because the great thing about a local church is that the pastor knows the congregation.

Carson: Hello, Dr. McGrath, thanks for joining us today. I am excited to talk a bit about apologetics and the local church. To kick us off, why does apologetics matter for churches? Why should pastors who are stressed and overwhelmed with their weekly routine care about apologetics?

McGrath: The local church is the primary site for good apologetics. What I mean by that is people come to church to worship, but they also come with questions. They come with their own questions — things they’re not quite sure about. Maybe they’ve come to faith with unresolved questions, or maybe they are bringing questions from their friends. They’re looking for answers from someone who knows them

Pastors know the levels of engagement and the ways of speaking that are going to connect with their audience. They can tailor a message that works for that local church. Sure, big national apologetics conferences are great, but they are no replacement for regular Sunday-bySunday engagement with questions that people are really asking. Pastors can regularly work apologetic themes into their sermons, and they can resource people without having to lecture them. Of course, you can also have local study days in your church if you want to. What I want to emphasize is that apologetics is both a science and an art, and the local church allows you to develop the art of apologetics. The pastor certainly provides information, but he also models the disposition of an apologist.

Alister McGrath

Carson: At least part of what I heard you saying is that the local church pastor is able to connect with the heart in a way that is incarnational. There seems to be something important about the pastor's role as a shepherd through seasons of doubt, not just as a lecturer.

McGrath: I think that's a very important point, and I think it’s well worth developing this because the kind of apologetics we’re really talking about in a local church is relational:

“I know these people and I want to help them and I can figure out how to do it because I’ve worked with them. I know the language they speak. I know the concerns they have. I want to be able to walk with them as they journey through these difficulties, and I want to try and give them ways of thinking which will really help them cope with their doubts.”

And it’s not as if I’m just saying:

“Hey, read this book and go away. Don’t bother me anymore.”

It’s rather about the incarnational move:

“Here’s what I found helpful. Here’s what I think can help you get through this season of doubt or difficulty. It has helped me.”

I really must emphasize this point. The individual church, the local church, your church, are critically important. It supplements what is going on elsewhere. Pastors have a vital role to play in the task of apologetics.

Carson: What are some of the pressing apologetic issues that pastors should pay attention to as they begin to reflect on what their congregation may ask them or may begin to experience as they go through life?

McGrath: Well, I think that’s a very good question, and let me just begin to tease out some of the things that we might think about here. I would suggest to pastors that they should reflect on the difficulties they’ve experienced and what they have found helpful in dealing with those personally. This is partly because those same tools may help a congregation, but this also allows the pastor to, in effect, say, “Look, I’ve been through these seasons of doubt as well. I was able to find hope and answers, and you can as well.”

I think it’s important for pastors to feel that they can own up to any difficulties they’ve had and explain how they’ve been able to deal with these. It makes them much

more human and much more approachable. But what are these questions people will be asking? Let me just mention two.

First, I think, is a difficulty we found here in the United Kingdom, and I know you’re finding it in the United States as well. We might loosely use the word “deconstruction” to describe this phenomenon. What I mean by “deconstruction” is something along these lines: people who, in a way, come to church for a long time and then end up wondering, “Well, what exactly is my faith all about? I’m not sure anymore.” They need help to reconnect with God, to revitalize their faith. There’s a lot you can say to really help people get back on track. That’s a concern I know many people have.

But for a lot of people, it’ll just be meeting the ordinary, everyday questions that they are asked in the shopping mall. People will say, “Hey, look, you’re a Christian, you guys go to church. I’ve often wondered, how on earth does believing in God make any difference in your life?” What the pastor-apologist needs to be able to do is encourage his congregants to put themselves into the perspective of people who are thinking about faith and ask, “How can we help people move on to the next step?” It doesn’t mean answering all their questions. It means giving them something to take away. This means they might return and say, “Hey, I’d like to talk more about that.”

Carson: It seems like over the past 100 years, we’ve outsourced apologetics to the academy entirely. We’ve pushed apologetics off into the lecture halls where “professional Christian thinkers” can answer all the hard questions. And I wonder if this has made apologetics feel like an intellectually intensive task for many pastors. What would you say to a pastor who just feels intellectually unprepared to help their congregant who's dealing with deconstruction or dealing with the problem of evil?

McGrath: Pastors may well find their congregants are reading books or watching videos, and those are great sources of reflection. But it is vitally important that pastors provide what they can uniquely offer. Pastors can speak at the level of the heart.

What worries me as I look at many apologetic books is that they are prepared at an academic and intellectual level. And that’s great, but that's not where everyone is. In fact, it’s only where a few people are.

What we’ve really got to do is take Blaise Pascal very, very seriously. He talks about the heart having reasons of its own, reasons that the mind doesn’t really know about. In other words, Pascal emphasized the importance of love, relationality, and hope in apologetics. And I want to say you don’t really get those themes talked about in many apologetic conferences. Pastors can offer a vision of apologetics that works in many ways and at many levels. What I want to say to pastors is, look, find your level, find your place, there’s somewhere you need to be. So, it’s a question of how you find that place. And you know, almost certainly, it’s going to be your local church where you can do something really special.

Carson: It gets me excited every time I hear someone talk about Pascal and the logic of the heart. What would you share with a group of pastors to help them think through engaging the “logic of the heart” with their congregants?

McGrath: I would share that I was once an atheist who became a Christian and then discovered I could do apologetics, and so can you as well! Christianity gives us this wonderful, rich, big picture of reality, which speaks to the mind and the heart and the imagination, and which, you know, doesn’t just answer academic questions. It gives us a vision, an excitement about life that enables us to go out there and talk about the way in which Christianity transforms people. I want pastors to know that we can find our own distinct calling as apologists. What I hope for them to have is encouragement and for them to know, “You can do something wonderful …” because, remember, apologetics is not about intellectual engagement. It’s rather about allowing God to use you to help others discover their gifts and use them. You’ll never leave God out of apologetics. We depend on divine grace right from the word “go.” And I don’t see many apologetics textbooks talking about the importance of grace in apologetics. So what I would hope to do really is just excite pastors, to encourage them, and to make them go away saying, “Hey, we can do something. This is great.”

Carson: If you had someone in your local church who was going through a season of doubt, and maybe it wasn't even a very articulate doubt, they just were really struggling to find the motivation to believe in the Gospel. They felt every day that they woke up with a haunting of doubt. If you had just less than five minutes to encourage that person and give them a little bit of hope, what would you say to help them work through that season of doubt?

McGrath: If I had time, I want to get to know them and just get a sense of what the issues are, and I want to encourage them. But here’s what I think I would say. First of all, I’d want to say, “Look, we’ve all been there.” I mean, in one sense, I became an apologist because I had my own doubts, and I thought, “I’ve got to find answers to these questions,” and I found them. The answers are there. And I was then able to use these to speak to others who doubted. And more importantly, to speak beyond the church, to a wider culture, and say, “Here is why Christianity is so wonderful.”

So, you know, doubt might be about a growing pain in faith, or it might be about, you know, you haven’t yet fully discovered its richness. Maybe there’s an invitation to explore your faith more fully, perhaps in conversation with others. But here’s a point I’d want to make to anybody going through a time of doubt: Have you ever thought that many atheists do the same?

They begin to realize, “Hey, we can’t prove our atheism. We have to trust it’s right.” And Richard Dawkins had an experience when debating with Rowan Williams, who was then Archbishop of Canterbury at Oxford back in 2012. He just suddenly realized, “I can’t prove that there is no God. It’s a faith.” And you know, so atheists doubt things as well. It’s important to realize that doubt is not limited to Christians. If you are an atheist who believes there is no God, you cannot prove that, and you don’t know you’re right. You’re going to have doubts. So see the bigger picture here.

But I think that the main thing I want to say, and I hope this is appropriate, I hope it will be helpful, is to say that one of the things I find really helpful to think about is this, “Here am I. I’m just an ordinary human being. I’ve got limited intelligence. How on earth can I make complete sense of everything? I can’t.” There are things that I can’t fully understand. But I trust. I trust in a God who loves me. I trust in a God who redeems me. And even if I can’t get my head around absolutely everything, I can still see there’s something there, something wonderful that excites and transforms.

Carson: Dr. McGrath, thank you for joining us for this interview, and thank you for your continued apologetic ministry.

The Augustine Way: Retrieving a Vision for the Church’s Apologetic Witness

Dr. Mark Allen

Creating the Canon: Composition, Controversy, and the Authority of the New Testament

Dr. Benjamin Laird

Surprised by Doubt: How Disillusionment Can Invite Us into a Deeper Faith

Joshua Chatraw and Jack Carson

Jesus and Disability: A Guide to Creating an Inclusive Church

Dr. Chris Hulshof

David Pensgard Assistant Professor of Philosophy Liberty University

SHAME AND SEXUAL FREEDOM: LEARNING THE LESSONS OF HISTORY

The sexual mores of our present culture are changing quickly, dramatically, and to many, frighteningly. Yet, many of the people we encounter in our everyday lives, and nearly everyone we see in the media, accept or even approve of these changes. As new sexual attitudes and practices appear suddenly and are affirmed as both normal and good, we might also notice that unsolicited assistance is provided to anyone who has trouble accepting these new attitudes.

Recently, help of this kind has been provided by historian Kyle Harper in his book From Shame to Sin 1 This historical investigation uncovers many relevant ancient texts to grant us a never-before-seen picture of sexual attitudes and practices in Late Antiquity, a time when the pagan Roman culture was being transformed by the early Christian Church. In Harper’s words, it was in the early fifth century that Christianity placed “a vice grip on public sexual culture.”2 The author and likely most of his readers cannot help but draw comparisons between this ancient transformation of sexual practices and the rapid changes occurring today. This time, however, the transition is happening in reverse. Society is prying itself out of the Christian “vice grip.”

Harper’s study has much to recommend in it, and we will benefit from engaging with it. At the start, however, we must not fail to notice that it is not just a study of the past; it has an agenda for the present. It works to affirm and protect today’s new beliefs about sex and marriage.

Presentism: A Fallacy of Historiography

Harper is worth reading. He has added value simply by reminding us of a relevant historical transition in sexual practices and attitudes; he has brought several neglected texts to new light. In its specifics, Harper’s examination penetrates deeply and gives other historians a good starting point for further investigation. Harper’s book is thus useful and, in many aspects, well done. However, there are also

aspects of Harper’s project that go astray. He has committed some serious blunders, and he keeps us from taking adequate precautions as we plunge blindly back into beliefs and practices that may hold dire consequences. Foremost among these problems is the explicit, unexamined presupposition that these old (and now new) sexual mores are good, and that the traditional and Christian alternatives are oppressive and wrong. He thus commits the error known as Presentism.

In the field of history, Presentism occurs when the present overshadows the past. It is properly known as a fallacy in historiography, the fallacy of nunc pro tunc, or “now over then.” In the places where Harper abets the contemporary secular consensus about sexual mores to side with ancient Rome over and against early Christianity, he expresses little more than unexamined bias. Rather than a window to the past, this approach only mirrors contemporary Postmodern preconceptions.

Why Manipulate the Narrative?

In the larger contest for control of worldviews, there is a battle for control of history. Our understanding of what has come before is a major share of the context we use to understand the present. The past is perhaps the most important part of the context in which we develop our worldviews. If we believe falsehoods about the past, this reduces the degree to which our beliefs correspond to reality. We therefore must be extremely careful with the past.

Those skeptics who believe there is no truth, and no history, or who believe that the past must serve the agendas of the present, approach research with the transformative metatheoretic research paradigm. This aligns with the generally leftist worldview.3 Scholars with this orientation are much less interested in any objective truth to be found in historical analysis and are much more interested in transforming worldviews by controlling the narrative. This approach has a

rich pedigree. As one of its foremost representatives, Paul Ricoeur argues that imagination is the aperture through which the world is interpreted — this applies to traditional as well as scientific, political, and philosophical conceptions — thus, to control the narrative is to determine and change the world in which we believe that we live.4 It is a means of manipulation.

This is the philosophical background for Harper’s historiography. If Harper only assumes this ideology and nowhere defends its presuppositions, then we must look to its origins to understand. Though Ricoeur does not claim objectivity, he tells us that his standpoint enjoys a unique claim to legitimacy, being based on freedom. It is a “tradition of emancipation rather than ... recollection. Critique [Ricoeur’s position] is also a tradition. I would say that it plunges into the most impressive tradition, that of liberating acts, of the Exodus and the Resurrection.”5 This comes from a Continental school of thought called Critical Hermeneutics. In its defense, Ricoeur declares a privileged viewpoint for himself. His view is the “most impressive tradition, that of liberating acts.”6 Because it is a skeptical philosophy, Ricoeur does not argue that his position is objectively true or correct. He argues instead that it is impressive.

As impressive as it may be, this does not eliminate the dialectic/pragmatic self-contradiction that hounds all forms of skepticism.7 This, in effect, is a claim to privileged access to the very thing being denied: truth. Ricoeur leans on philosophers like Immanuel Kant who suggest that knowledge is attainable without certainty or fixity8 — that we only need to achieve a regulative version of objectivity. This is objectivity without access to the object, knowledge

without certainty, and truth without correspondence.9 Philosophers like Ricoeur reject traditional approaches to understanding and thinking — it is not just history — casting them as fictions out of which we must seek our exodus, for the sake of freedom. Consequently, it is no surprise that Harper feels perfectly justified in assuming the legitimacy of his commitment to sexual freedom.10

Such historians are drawn to the historiographic fallacy of Presentism. Yet, for thinkers in Continental schools of philosophy, it is no fallacy at all. It is the condition of the very possibility of getting the next best thing to objectivity. Presentism has become for this postmodern tradition a legitimate principle of historical analysis. On this view, it is thus permissible and even morally imperative to impose the ethics of today’s sexual autonomy onto the past. The past is manipulated into being the supporting context for today. Such historians reappropriate the narrative, for political and philosophical ends, in order to persuade.

Efforts to create alternatives to correspondence can cause practical problems in the real world. If our beliefs do not correspond to reality, then they obscure reality. The danger is obvious: in the sage words of Santayana, “Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness ... when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”11 When we encounter historians who do this on purpose, wisdom points us to another well-worn but invaluable adage: don’t believe everything you read 12 It is wise to read Harper’s analysis of sexual attitudes in Late Antiquity with this caveat securely in place. Harper’s Shame has the veneer of academic authority; it is rigorous and detailed; it delves into neglected ancient texts in ways that seem genuinely insightful and useful. Nonetheless, part of the story is being left out, a very important

part: consequences. This casts pre-Christian Roman sexual mores in a rosier hue than they should be. The comparison with the present then leads his readers to be more accepting of changes today, which seems to be the underlying agenda of the book.

Harper’s Account of the Change in Ancient Roman Culture

Certainly, Harper is correct that we now find ourselves at the tail end of a reversal, a true benefit of his exposé. When Christianity gained influence over the Roman culture, it both fostered and enforced Christian attitudes about sex and marriage, the very things now reverting.13 Harper gives evidence throughout his book that attitudes about sex changed dramatically. As the Christian Middle Ages took form, the posture of Western Civilization on sex, marriage, adultery, fornication, rape of slaves, various forms of homosexuality, and even bestiality were changed in short order. Public attitudes toward sex and marriage came into line with the dictates of Christianity. Sexual freedoms were replaced with duties.14

Harper thinks this change was forced on the populace, that few in the fifth century were really convinced that sexual restraint was morally good. Yet, it seems implausible to conclude that the entire society was so effectively restrained without genuine conviction. More likely, this change was motivated by a sincere pursuit of righteousness and the good fruit it bears. This applies both to the citizen and the governor, the laity and the clergy. This likelihood explains much of Harper’s evidence because these two factors are not incompatible. It was not only a grass-roots change accepted individually on the basis of a new faith, but both civil and ecclesiastical forces played prominent roles in teaching and enforcing the new outlook.15 If it is possibly a genuine change in attitudes, in citizens and leaders alike, then it is a bifurcation to assume that if legal and moral rules were enforced, citizens must have been in opposition. Harper here exposes another presupposition, that enforcement is always oppression.16 Consequently, this transition in classical Rome was much more likely to be a willing abandonment of the selfish pursuit of sexual freedom and faithful submission to a divine command, the intractable residue of rebels notwithstanding.

Harper’s Pejorative Descriptors

Harper characterizes the classical transition as a “hostile takeover”17 that used force to temper the natural and healthy sexual urges of the population. He cites a few pieces of ancient literature and law, but his case is very weak. Are we really meant to think that there is no ancient literature expressing the genuine conviction

that Christianity is correct and that obedience leads to both righteousness and happiness? It is quite the opposite; the majority of ancient Christian literature does this. It is unfortunate that Harper takes no caution to distance himself from the contemporary perspective. He everywhere assumes the correctness of today’s secular consensus about sexual freedom. Rather than a respectable episode of self-restraint and obedience, this “earthquake in human morality”18 and the Christians who recommended it are continuously described with pejoratives. To sum up the tone of his descriptors, Harper casts the emerging Christian morality as oppressive, abusive, and intolerant. He uses words and phrases such as “hostile,”19 “repressive,”20 “radical,”21 “prudery,”22 and “violent.”23 The Church used preaching as a weapon that was “wielded.”24 He describes opposition to homosexuality as “religious homophobia,”25 which invokes the accusation of psychological pathology as a rhetorical weapon. Adding violence to pathology, he writes that the homiletic literature of the time was “strewn” with “vituperative attack[s]”26 on homosexuals. This was “violent repression of same-sex love.”27

The only acceptable perspective for appraising this transformation of sexual attitudes, the book strongly suggests, is that it was immoral violence committed as a crime by Christian leaders, an abuse of civic and clerical power and that the average citizen was being forced to do something unnatural. The reader cannot help but infer that the changes occurring today, changes which take us in many ways back to the pre-Christian mindset, are corrective of a religious tyranny over sexual freedom that was endured for too long.

Exceptions: Where Harper Rejects Pagan Rome

We must be careful at this point; Harper’s analysis is neither a wholesale rejection of Christian conclusions nor a complete acceptance of old Rome. As he represents the contemporary secular consensus, he expresses abhorrence for slavery and rape, and especially their combination. Yet, these conclusions, shared with Christianity, are reached for completely distinct reasons between the two worldviews, and Harper gives no credit to Christianity for getting the right answer.

Harper also laments that, in ancient pre-Christian Rome, there were sexual taboos and very little feminism. A wife was still to be faithful to her husband, though a husband need not be faithful to his wife. Sex with slaves was accepted, though not celebrated. Sex between men and young boys was

likewise accepted, but only in the “active role,” never the passive. Such pederasty was cautiously celebrated in certain ways through erotic literature and household art. Harper describes some literature that encouraged men in early adulthood to explore and woo young boys before settling down to a heterosexual marriage. Boys were thus the prey that men could choose to exploit. And while this was seen as disastrous to the boy’s reputation, it was acceptable for the older man. And finally, Harper also disapproves of the ways that class distinctions produced double standards in the sexual mores of the culture. High-born men were allowed more freedom than those who were low-born; slaves were sexual property.28

Harper certainly does not condone these things; they run counter to the feminism and anti-classism that he endorses. However, he is strangely forgiving of pederasty, which he strongly encourages us to infer through his chosen descriptors and his criticisms of the penalties that the Christian Emperor Justinian enacted.29 He barely falls short of celebrating pederasty himself when he describes penalties against pederasts as a “violent repression of same-sex love.”30

These facts, though part of a thorough historical analysis, are not his focus and they serve to cloud his agenda, namely, that ancient Rome did not stifle sexual freedom as much as the Christian Middle Ages did. Yet, he includes these points along with a mitigating factor. He appears to view such transitions in sexual mores in a developmental or evolutionary way. In this light, though Rome was not as evolved as we are today, he intimates, it was eclipsed by a prolonged period of unfortunate backwardness, viewing Christianity as a regrettable devolution.

A Look at Ethics: Two Distinct Moral Foundations

Sex is the context, but the more fundamental question concerns ethical foundations. As such, we see the transformation from pre-Christian to Christian mores as one that takes the culture from a Consequentialist Egoism to a Deontological Divine Command Ethic. A Consequentialist looks to consequences to determine if something is right or wrong.32 Egoism is a subcategory of Consequentialism. The Egoist determines morality individually; something is good if it is good for “me” and bad if it is bad for “me.” It can be hidden by technical and acclamatory terminology, but Egoism is selfishness: me first. The Egoist puts himself before others, including God. The Christian alternative puts God first, others second, and the individual last. This is a titanic contrast.

Egoism can take various forms. For the pre-Christian Romans, Egoism looked to reputation and status in society rather than to autonomy. Sexual mores were constructed out of the selfish desire to maintain pride in both position and the strength to maintain virtue. The strong could control their urges, leading to higher status. By comparison, contemporary Egoists like Ricoeur look to autonomy as the most valuable consequence. What unites these two forms of Egoism is that they advocate for selfishness.

It thus seems paradoxical that Harper’s Consequentialism did not motivate him to look more carefully at consequences. His focus on sexual freedom appears to have overwhelmed any consideration of how changes in sexual norms (the causes) may have led to differences in happiness (the effect). But if the consequences of following rules and performing actions actually make them right or wrong, as it does in Consequentialist theories of ethics, one would expect this to be a prominent factor in Harper’s evaluation of the position. Why then does Harper neglect consequences?

We saw in Ricoeur’s Critical Hermeneutics that human autonomy (freedom, liberation, emancipation) was considered the single most important thing, and thus the foundational principle. Other goods are consequently sacrificed for freedom in any ethical application of this philosophy. So, under the Egoist commitment to sexual freedom, all other consequences become less important, so much so, that consideration of them may even be omitted. So, it does not matter if the consequences are negative as long as there is autonomy. It is then possible to defend the normalization of divorce, abortion, neglect of children, adultery, fornication, homosexuality, pederasty, and bestiality without consideration of consequences purely on the basis of sexual autonomy as the greater good. Egoism is a synonym for selfishness. If one accepts selfishness as a basis for ethics and elevates freedom above all other consequences, then selfish acts that harm the self and society in other ways can appear noble, even righteous: to thine own self be true. The Egoist then “bravely” endures the other consequences for the sake of the incomparable value of sexual autonomy.

As we compare the two approaches to sexual ethics, serving self vs. serving God, perhaps they are best analyzed historically under the guiding principle that changes in behavior will also cause changes in consequences. If we return to old behaviors, we will likely see a return to the original consequences. We find therefore that any lessons to be learned from history in this ancient and relevant episode can be exploited by noting not only the sexual practices that are being

reversed now but also the changes in consequences that were seen in the first transition. Indeed, one of the ancient motivations to turn to Christianity recommended in the Epistle to Diognetus was that “disobedience kills”33 and that “iniquity ... had been made perfectly manifest that punishment and death were expected as its recompense.”34 This summary of consequences is mentioned by the apologist only after noting that Christians are very different from others; they do not “cast away their offspring. They have their meals in common but not their wives ... they live not after the flesh.”35 This makes plain that the consequences of sexual sin were noteworthy at the time; the Christian distinctiveness regarding sexual behavior and marital fidelity were not only stark, but they were also cited as evidence of Christianity’s superiority.

If we do not avoid inconvenient data,36 we can predict that what was gained and lost will now be lost and gained. It should be uncontroversial to expect, nor is it properly avoidable, that any return to previous attitudes and practices about sex and family will likely see a return to original consequences. Though important, the societal burden of pre-Christian sexual attitudes is overlooked by Harper. Except for a few brief comments, he does not consider whether the Roman culture of sexual permissiveness led to disruptions in marriages and family relationships, nor does he acknowledge sexual diseases. He does not examine the generational effect of raising children in this environment. And most important of all, the benefits of faithful, monogamous marriage go mostly unnoticed.

All the same, such a benefit cannot be enjoyed by those who fall prey to a parti pris. It is thus a great misfortune that Harper holds us back from achieving an unabridged analysis. He gives a one-sided portrayal of Christian sexual culture that casts it as little more than oppression. Harper makes Christian sexual dogma into a deceptively vulnerable straw man.

This adds weight to the idea that the ancient transition is being mirrored today. Attention to consequences motivated the acceptance of Christian sexual mores in the fifth century, and inattention to consequences is now an enabling factor in its rejection. The price to be paid for this oversight is likely to be a shock when infidelity in marriage brings more misery than joy; sadness when marriage ends in contentious divorce and abandonment; disillusionment and loneliness when marriage is avoided altogether. The effects that sexual attitudes and practices have on society are far-reaching. This is because marriage, family structure, and child-rearing are fundamental to any culture. Thus, there are aspects of sexual conduct that

must be considered urgently. Mistakes in appreciating these things will likely ambush those who are not historically aware. Sexually transmitted diseases are not merely a medical problem; their occurrence need not be a surprise. And we must not neglect to comprehend how compounded generational consequences occur when we change how we raise our children.

Final Words

Much can be learned from Harper’s Shame. It shines a new light on a very important transition that occurred fifteen centuries ago. He correctly tells us that this transition, though ancient, is still quite relevant. He has given us an opportunity to be reminded at a critical time that when great social changes occur and are later reversed, it follows that previous patterns of practice and belief, together with their consequences, will likely return to their starting places. Christian historians should see this as an invitation to reexamine this ancient transition with great care.

The picture Harper sketches is misleading because it is selectively incomplete. Rather than being objective, he mischaracterizes his opponent and overlooks the consequences. His reflections are a part of the social and sexual mores that are displacing Christian sexuality today. In that sense, his project is a “deathwork” in the vein that Jack Carson’s editorial introduces. Yet, where his conclusions overlap with those of Christianity (rape, slavery, etc.), he admits no familiarity. Though Christianity introduced these shared values to Western Culture, he attacks their Christian foundations. Since Harper’s account is onesided, the need to hear from the other side becomes paramount. Since Harper omits consequences, they must now be made explicit.

We should also keep in mind that this is not just about knowledge and its benefits; there is also a cultural and apologetic task that presents itself, namely, to point out and oppose slanted analyses that serve to lead society into dangerous convictions. Our society can avoid the surprise of unexpected consequences if we can help it to learn from history without bias — a call to Christian historians to complete Harper’s project, to discover and defend the true lessons of history.

1Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

2Ibid., 3.

3I.e., a Progressive political philosophy influenced by Continental schools of Philosophy, most notably Critical Theory, Critical Hermeneutics, Deconstruction, etc., which are fundamentally influenced by the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche.

4Paul Ricoeur, “The Language of Faith,” The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1978), 223-232. See also Ricoeur, “Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation,” in Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. Lewis Mudge (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1980). On politics and worldviews, see, Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, translated by Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), see esp. pp. 281-285; 287-299.

5Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, 298-299. Ricoeur equivocates on the terms “exodus” and “resurrection.” He reappropriates these terms: defining “exodus” as a flight from traditional authorities that had previously controlled the narrative; and defining “resurrection” as an emergence from the grave of tradition.

6Ibid.

7Vittorio Hösle, Objective Idealism, Ethics, and Politics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 13, 20-23, 25-34. Hösle contrasts the usual and familiar analytic/semantic contradiction with the dialectic/pragmatic contradiction. The latter is the kind that is most efficiently explained by speaking the following phrase aloud: “I am not speaking right now,” a contradiction between what a statement means and what it is. Skepticisms like Ricoeur’s make claims while denying that any claim can be true.

8Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 228-230, 326.

9For a Christian Response to the Kantian/Modern intrusion of Dualism, see John Douglas Morrison, Has God Said: Scripture, The Word of God, and the Crisis of Theological Authority (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2006), 39-44.

10Despite this, many scholars are beginning to see movement toward the “post-secular.” This is a rethinking of the presuppositions expressed in this section. For details and focused articles on the fading influence of specific Continental thinkers, see Phillip Blond, ed., Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology (New York; London: Routledge, 1998).

11George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Or, The Phases of Human Progress, vol. 1, ch. 12 (London: Constable, 1905).

12Cf., “The first to plead his case seems right, Until another comes and examines him.” Prv 18:17 NASB95.

13Harper, 158. “The reign of Justinian marks a terminal point where sin and salvation, rather than shame and reputation, have come to form the dominant axis of public regulation.” It is with this thematic sentence that we see that the mirror image of this ancient transition is happening now — shame and reputation are now the primary agents of the reversal. For shame, we have a new terminology, e.g., “cancel culture.”

14The relation between freedoms and duties is pivotal to understanding the essential character of Modern political philosophy. Whether God-given, or in some other way, innate, freedoms and rights can often be translated into duties and vice versa — my right to property is your duty not to steal it. Yet, something significant is changed when the perspective of duty is traded for the perspective of autonomy. This is most clear in considerations of sexual morality. The

sexual autonomy that Harper presupposes, praises, and promotes is based on the idea that no God, no religion, and no clerical authority can legitimately command sexual practice. The fundamental question is therefore: who has authority to make rules about sex?

15According to Harper, the society was pulled kicking and screaming, as it were, into Christianity’s restrictive sexual mores (p. 14), and it is certainly plausible that some individuals did not like the new rules and restrictions on their sexual freedom; thus, these rules were sometimes abandoned in private. Harper gives some evidence of this from a few pieces of popular literature (p. 238), and he cites a number of sexual laws (pp. 155, 158). However, it is not plausible that an entire civilization could be so effectively restrained if the majority was not convinced of the new worldview. What we know about psychology and governance forces us to conclude that Harper’s evidence is support only for the conclusion that most, but certainly not all, were individually convinced that the Christian views on sex were not only more righteous but safer.

16This further betrays Harper’s allegiance to thinkers like Nietzsche, Foucault, and Ricoeur.

17Ibid., 14.

18Ibid., 18.

19Ibid., 14.

20Ibid., 15.

21Ibid., 135.

22Ibid., 137.

23Ibid., 139.

24Ibid., 138.

25Ibid., 142.

26Ibid., 15.

27Ibid., 157.

28This is a summary of Harper’s first chapter: “The Moralities of Sex in the Roman Empire,” 19-79.

29Ibid., 156. A Justinian law: those caught in pederasty had their penises removed; this punishment often killed the criminal. The author assumes that pederasty probably continued, despite the laws.

30Ibid., 157.

31Much of today’s Continentally inspired Political Philosophy and Ethics derives its developmental/evolutionary suppositions from Karl Marx’s philosophy, which extends biological evolution to the evolution of societies in political and economic senses.

32Consequentialism is a class of meta-ethical theories that views consequences as the fundamental origin of right and wrong. On such a view, if the consequences are pleasurable, then the rule or act is good, but if the consequences are painful, then the rule or act is immoral. No higher authority is invoked.

33Epistle to Diognetus 12.2, in The Apostolic Fathers, translated by J.B. Lightfoot (New York, Macmillan: 1891). The manuscript dates from the second century. Some give authorship to Justyn Martyr. However, this is contested.

34Ibid., 9.2.

35Ibid., 5.6-5.8.

36This phrase is a synonym for the fallacy known as “cherry picking.” By giving a one-sided account, and by ignoring information that harms his case, he is committing this fallacy.

Dr. Chris Hulshof, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Religion John W. Rawlings School of Divinity, Liberty University

PILGRIMS, ACTIVISTS, AND ARTISTS

In his 2014 book Vanishing Grace, Philip Yancey writes on the state of grace within the Church. More specifically, he is concerned that the important message of grace is missing from the words and actions of those who profess to be followers of Jesus and members of His Church. Yancey’s concern is that rather than being people who communicate and extend God’s grace, Christians are often ones whose message is one of condemnation for misbehavior. He maintains that to the culture around the Church “we’re perceived more as guilt dispensers than as grace dispensers.”1 Thus, in our culture, the good news does not appear to sound good anymore. This leads him to ponder the question, “Can the good news, once spoiled, ever sound good again?”2 How can the Church become grace dispensers once again? Yancey suggests that there are three models that can lead the way: pilgrim, activist, and artist.

The pilgrim is someone described as “a fellow traveler on the spiritual journey, not a professional guide.”3 Christian pilgrims are those who acknowledge their lostness and their desire for help in finding the way.4 Thus the pilgrim is one whose life is marked by honesty rather than a sense of arrival or superiority. When they meet someone who is not a believer, they do not see that person as an enemy to be defeated or an argument to win. A pilgrim sees uncommitted individuals “not as opponents but as seekers who are still looking.”5 These Christians are those who dispense grace “as humble pilgrims, not as haughty power brokers.”6

Drawing from the work of Miroslav Volf, Yancey argues that activists are those who “concentrate on living out our beliefs, progressing from hand to heart to head. Practical acts of mercy (extending a hand) will express our love (the heart), which in turn may attract others to the source of that love (head beliefs).” According to Yancey, “a skeptical world judges the truth of what we say by the proof of how we live. Today’s activists may be the best evangelists.”7 These activist-evangelists choose to dispense grace

first by their actions in the community around them. These practical acts of mercy flow out of a grace-filled and loving heart. Then, because of the hand-heart connection, the questions of reason and rationale may follow suit. This positions the activist to communicate the truth of Christ crucified for them and for the world.

The final model Yancey proposes is that of an artist. His description of an artist is drawn from Catholic novelist Walker Percy who writes, “[In art] you are telling the reader or the listener or the viewer something he already knows but which he doesn’t quite know that he knows so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition.”8 Yancey asserts that “in modern times, and especially for post-Christians, the creative arts may be the most compelling path to faith. Communicating at a more subtle level, they cut through defenses and awaken thirst.”9 Artists can communicate the truth of the human condition and the way in which God’s grace meets that condition in a subtle and sometimes subversive manner. Their efforts point the thirsty in the direction of the living water and then deftly lead them to that well.

Yancey argues that each of these models has value if the Church is to become a dispenser of grace once again. If that is the case, can we review the Church, past and present, to find examples of where a pilgrim, an activist, and an artist have influentially shaped how Christians responded to the disability community? I believe so. In fact, I think if we look at the examples provided for us by Henri Nouwen, Tim Tebow, and Joni Eareckson Tada, we will have a better understanding of what it looks like to be pilgrims, activists, and artists.

The Pilgrim: Henri Nouwen

Henri Nouwen was a Dutch-born Catholic priest, professor, psychologist, and writer. His academic instruction included both psychology and pastoral

theology. He taught at Notre Dame, Yale Divinity School, and Harvard Divinity School.10 However, it is his work at L’Arche Daybreak that is most significant for those interested in disabilities and disability ministry. L’Arche Daybreak is a community of people who have intellectual disabilities in Richmond Hill, Ontario. Nouwen was called there as a pastor in 1986. He would continue to work and serve in L’Arche Daybreak until his death in 1996.

In the last year of his life, Nouwen wrote Adam: God’s Beloved. Adam, a dear friend of Nouwen’s, was a severely handicapped adult living in the L’Arche community. In this book — the final one Nouwen would write while he was alive — he found a new way to tell God’s story of Jesus. In the process of telling Adam’s story and telling Jesus’ story, Nouwen would sketch out the story of every human being. In this last work, Nouwen shows how every human being is both broken and yet beloved. We are cherished people who live in a world charged with the mystery of God’s overwhelming love.11

Nouwen’s theology can be described as a theology of the heart, and this theology is never more on display than in Adam: God’s Beloved. As a pilgrim and fellow traveler, Nouwen does two things in this book that help us along the way. First, he reminds us of the significance of being over doing. He writes,

Unfortunately, there is a very loud, consistent, and powerful message coming to us from our world that leads us to believe that we must prove our belovedness by how we look, by what we have, and what we can accomplish. We become preoccupied with “making it” in this life, and we are very slow to grasp the liberating truth of our origins and our finality. We need to hear the message announced and see the message embodied over and over again. Only then do we find the courage to claim it and to live from it.12

In Adam, Nouwen saw this belovedness. He saw an individual who was incapable of making it by the world’s standards. Yet, he was not only known by God but beloved by God. God’s love for Adam was not conditioned on his achievements or accomplishments. Adam was simply God’s beloved. For Nouwen, his day-to-day interactions with Adam reminded him that just as Adam was God’s beloved, so was he as well.

Second, as a fellow traveler and pilgrim, Nouwen helps us see the mutuality in caring for and loving those who are disabled. Often when we get involved in the

disability ministry, we do so out of the ambition to advocate, to help, to speak for those who are disabled. We want to assist them with what they are unable to navigate on their own. Yet, Nouwen shows us that this is a one-sided view of disability ministry. If we would pay close attention to what is happening in and through disability ministry, we would see that God is using the life of the individual with a disability to shape, grow, and transform us as well. Nouwen expresses the transformation this way,

I was going through the deep human struggle to believe in my belovedness even when I had nothing to be proud of. Yes, I had a life at the university with its prestige, but this life gave me satisfaction and even brought me admiration. Yes, I was considered a good, even a noble person because I was helping the poor! But now that the last crutch had been taken away, I was challenged to believe that even when I had nothing to show for myself, I was still God’s beloved son.”13

Nouwen goes on to express that as he was caring for Adam, he realized how he was slowly becoming like Adam or the ways he was already like Adam. Adam was ministering to him just as he was ministering to Adam. Whether Adam recognized it or not, the care Nouwen was extending to Adam, Adam was also extending to him. What does it look like to be a pilgrim, a fellow traveler when it comes to disability concerns? I would suggest that Henri Nouwen invites us to walk with him and see what it looks like to both dispense and receive grace along the way.

The Activist: Tim Tebow

Activism is an idea that many Christians either shy away from or see as problematic. This is primarily because of the way that our culture has hijacked what it means to be an activist. The activism that gets the most attention is activism rooted in a mob mentality that results in violence and vitriol and very few answers. Its response is to fill streets rather than propose and develop solutions. Church history is filled with a better kind of activism. However, one does not need to reach deep into the annals of the Church’s past to see what this looks like. We only need to go back as far as 2010.

Tim Tebow drew the attention of the American public in 2007 as the Heisman trophy-winning quarterback for the University of Florida. His John 3:16 eye black and his consistent vocal testimony to his faith in Jesus

Christ galvanized even those who had a passing interest in football and athletics. While some would singularly focus on his athletic ability, most could not help but interject their thoughts on his outgoing faith.

It was this outgoing faith in action that caused Tebow to launch the Tim Tebow Foundation in 2010. This foundation is focused on four main areas of care: Antihuman trafficking and child exploitation, profound medical needs, orphan care and prevention, and special needs ministry. It is through Tim’s work with the last focus area, special needs ministry, that most are familiar with. More specifically, it is the “Night to Shine” event, an unforgettable prom night experience, centered on God’s love, for people with special needs ages 14 and older, that has reached 56 different countries. Each year on the Friday before Valentine’s Day, tens of thousands of people with special needs all over the world are celebrated as royalty — the way God sees them every day.14

In a Night to Shine event, the Tim Tebow Foundation partners with a local church so that individuals with a disability might be able to have the high school prom they never got to experience. The event then becomes the catalyst for the church to come alongside those with a disability for more than just one night. Night to Shine creates the opportunity for accessibility and inclusion for a local church.

However, this is only one area where the Tim Tebow Foundation is at work in the special needs ministry. The Foundation also hosts “Shine On” (which is designed to establish community and celebration beyond just one night of the year), special needs resource centers, and Rising Light Ridge (a barrier-free ministry campus in the Pocono Mountains).

Taken as a whole, the Tim Tebow Foundation stands as a counter-culture view of activism — needs are identified, solutions are enacted, and hope is experienced. This is the kind of hand-to-heart-to-head activism that Scripture supports and indeed encourages followers of Christ to take part in. This is what grace-dispensing activism looks like.

The Artist: Joni Eareckson Tada

My first encounter with Joni was not through an event where she was a speaker or through the biography of her life — it was through her artwork. The picture I was looking at was painted by a quadriplegic, I was told. I was intrigued and had to know more. It was her artwork

that led me to her biography and then eventually to hearing her speak at a chapel one morning at Liberty University.

Today, when most hear the name Joni Eareckson Tada, they think of her disability ministry — Joni and Friends. However, the roots of that ministry sprung out of her creativity and artwork. Joni learned early on to compensate for her handicaps. Being naturally creative, she learned to draw and paint holding her utensils with her teeth. She began selling her artwork, and the endeavor was a great success. There was a real demand for her work. She kept herself very busy with her artwork and gained for herself a degree of independence. She was also able to share Christ’s love in her drawings. She always signed her paintings “PTL” which stood for “Praise the Lord.” “Her high-detail fine art paintings and prints are sought-after and collected.”16

Her artwork set the stage for further ministry. Joni accepted invitations to speak around the country. A book and a movie soon followed. “In 1979 she founded Joni and Friends to provide Christ-centered ministry to special-needs families, a wheelchair and the Gospel message to those struggling with isolation around the world, and disability training for churches.”17

Her artwork created a platform that opened many more opportunities. Each of these opportunities afforded Joni the ability to proclaim the Gospel to those who might never have walked into a church or opened a Bible. Today, this proclamation is much more than just three letters under a signature at the bottom of a painting.

These three models for disability, inclusion, and gracedispensing witness — the pilgrim, the activist, and the artist — demonstrate ways that the Church can once again become dispensers of the good news. But, even more than that, these three models are not so exclusive that they would rule out those who are disabled. Indeed, the pilgrim, the activist, and the artist highlight just how inclusive the Kingdom of God truly is. It is the kind of Kingdom where ability is not a requirement for entrance, and neither is disability a cause for exclusion. A church that models this kind of disability inclusion is the kind of church that functions as a Kingdom witness to the community they are called to serve.

1Philip Yancey, Vanishing Grace: Bringing Good News to a Deeply Divided World, Kindle ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2014), 28.

2Ibid., 27.

3Ibid., 95.

4Ibid., 263.

5Ibid., 27.

6Ibid., 262.

7Ibid., 114.

8Ibid., 267.

9Ibid., 132.

10https://henrinouwen.org/about/.

11https://henrinouwen.org/read/adam-gods-beloved/.

12Henri Nouwen, Adam: God’s Beloved, (Ossining, NY: Orbis Books, 2012), 37.

13Ibid., 79.

14https://timtebowfoundation.org/ministries/special-needs-ministry.

15https://historyswomen.com/history-in-the-making/joni-earecksontada/.

16https://www.joniandfriends.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/jonisbiography.pdf.

17https://www.joniandfriends.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/jonisbiography.pdf.

Edward Martin, Ph.D. Professor Interdisciplinary Studies, Liberty University

C.S. LEWIS AND THE MORAL ARGUMENT

Perhaps the most important Christian apologist of the 20th century was C.S. Lewis, 1898-1963. An Oxford professor of literature for 30 years and then a Cambridge chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature for 9 years, 1954-1963, Lewis’ apologetic methodology has often been described as “classical apologetics.” When he had a chance to present the Gospel to virtually all of post-Christian England, he took a two-step approach.

First, he argued that is it very reasonable to believe in a “Someone” behind the Moral Law of which we humans have a deep and personal knowledge. In addition to knowing about this moral law, we all intuitively sense we have broken that moral law. Christians call this breaking of the moral law “sin.”

Second, Lewis would argue that God did not leave us in our sin — He revealed Himself in the still, quiet voice of moral realism and then certified the reality of moral value and obligations through the revelation of Himself to be one among us — the historical person Jesus of Nazareth, who was identical to God. Lewis did not frame every argument to get someone to fully believe in Theism, much less Christian Theism. Rather, Lewis often uses a sort of “disjunctive” (either-or) strategy we can learn from as we engage our culture with the Gospel.

Suppose that one wants to argue that Christianity is true. Lewis’ approach is to first ask: what are the viable worldviews that have any chance of being true, according to our best-going, best-evidenced bases of knowledge? Lewis’ answer in the 1940s was that there were three possibilities to consider: the religious view (Theism); the materialist view (naturalism); or, the pantheistic view (something like Hinduism).

Lewis had personal experience with these various worldviews. Between the ages of 13 and 31, Lewis was an atheist. In his spiritual autobiography, Lewis claims that he was a Berkeleyian idealist at one point and later mentions he was a “Hegelian” pantheist. In

his essay “De Futilitate,” Lewis writes about our viable worldview options:

The corresponding process whereby, having admitted that reality in the last resort must be moral, we attempt to explain evil, is the history of theology. Into that theological inquiry I do not propose to go at present. If any of you thinks of pursuing it, I would risk giving him one piece of advice. I think he can save himself time by confining his attention to two systems — Hinduism and Christianity. I believe these are the two serious options for an adult mind. Materialism is a philosophy for boys.1

So, even though his arguments seem to be negative in nature (that is, showing which worldview cannot possibly be true considering what we know), there is a positive case that emerges. If the three worldview options mentioned above constitute the range of acceptable options and one argued the following, it would clearly constitute a positive argument for Theism:

1. If there is some transcendent fact that we know for sure, then any worldview that only believed in this (non-Transcendent) world would be explanatorily inadequate and thus false.

2. There are some transcendent facts that we know for sure. For example, we have knowledge of transcendent moral values and duties. We all live with a commitment to the existence of real goods and real evils.

3. Thus, Materialism is false since it is inadequate in explaining our experience with reality.

4. If Theism has the best resources to survive the worldview elimination process, then Theism is the best explanation of the phenomena under study.

5. Theism has the best resources to understand reality because the properties “good” and “evil” are identified as necessarily distinct (As opposed to, say, Hinduism. In most Eastern religions, all properties meld into the One and in fact are identical).

6. Thus, Theism is the best explanation of the phenomena under study.

Lewis’ Disjunctive Syllogism looks like this:

1. Either Theism, Hinduism, or Materialism is true.

2. It’s not the case that Hinduism or Materialism is true.

3. Thus, Theism is true.

Lewis as a Classical Apologetic

It's reasonable to detect the two steps of Classical Apologetics in Lewis’ presentation of the moral argument in Mere Christianity. After he has presented his argument and defended it against initial objections, Lewis quips:

We have not yet got as far as the God of any religion, still less the God of that particular religion called Christianity. We have only got as far as a Somebody or a Someone behind the Moral Law. We are not taking anything from the Bible or the Churches, we are trying to see what we can find out about this Somebody on our own steam.2

By “on our own steam,” Lewis means trying to find out some positive facts about God without relying on special revelation. We can know some about God and His attributes through our natural intellect alone. Lewis’ conclusion?

And I want to make it quite clear that what we find out on our own steam is something that gives us a shock. We have two bits of evidence about this Somebody [that accounts for and stands behind the Moral Law]. One is the universe that He has made. If we used that as our only clue, then I think we should have to conclude that He was a great artist (for the universe is a very beautiful place), but also that He is quite merciless and no friend to man (for the universe is a very dangerous and terrifying place). The other bit of evidence is that Moral Law which He has put into our minds. And this is a better bit of evidence than the other because it is inside information.2

In Mere Christianity, Lewis answered our leading question, above, by saying, in effect: Let me share with you something that is unmistakable for humans. Lewis did not want to miss his audience by any sort of too-exulted form of argumentation that would only make sense to the academician; he needed to say something that most would grasp. We all get “good” and “evil” as real features of personal life. So, Lewis chose the moral argument as his means of preparing the soil for the Gospel.

In short, the moral argument finds its “trace of the transcendent” in a non-material standard of right and wrong.

Lewis says, in effect, as did David Hume, that all of us know and feel the tug of a real moral law of objective right and wrong within our very beings. However, as Hume said, we cannot derive an “ought” (that’s the inner tug we know and feel, that one “ought” to act in a certain precise fashion) from an “is.” That is, when we sense an “ought,” (e.g., that we ought to obey the Moral Law, or that we ought not to betray our closest allies, friends, tribe, and family members), that “ought” is not a conclusion we can derive. No: it is an unproved premise that we must argue from — not to. When answering what British people should do now that “we are no longer Christians,” Lewis writes:

You are deceived in thinking that the morality of your father was based on Christianity. On the contrary, Christianity presupposed it. That morality stands exactly where it did; its basis has not been withdrawn for, in a sense, it never had a basis. The ultimate ethical injunctions have always been premises, never conclusions. Kant was perfectly right on that point at least: the imperative is categorical. Unless the ethical is assumed from the outset, no argument will bring you to it.3

Earlier in the same essay, Lewis even goes so far as to argue that “the idea … that Christianity brought a new ethical code into the world is a grave error. If it had done so, then we should have to conclude that all who first preached it wholly misunderstood their own message: for all of them, its Founder, His precursor, His apostles, came demanding repentance and offering forgiveness, a demand and an offer both meaningless except on the assumption of a moral law already known and already broken.”4

Now that I have given a backdrop against which to better understand Lewis’s moral argument, here is a summary of his famous moral argument found in Mere Christianity:

1. If the Moral Law exists universally in humans, and all of our behavior indicates that we understand its objective demand but break it, then the source for this Moral Law must be transcendent (not identical to the universe).

2. The Moral Law exists universally in humans, and all of our behavior indicates that we understand its objective demand but break it.

3. Thus, the source of this Moral Law must be transcendent (not identical to the universe).

Lewis chose the moral argument because humans have “inside information” about the knowledge and feelings of moral commendation and condemnation. Our own expectations related to how others should treat us betray that we are aware of a standard of “Fair Play” or of a “Law of Right and Wrong” that we did not create and which we thus discover and not invent. It “confronts us,”though if we had our way, we would gladly dismiss it at will. This standard is immaterial in nature, for it is “inside” us, inside our consciousness, in the form of something we “ought” to do. Hinduism cannot make ultimate distinctions, so the difference between “good” and “evil” is lost in that view, which indicates a false view.

Lewis, throughout his moral argument, gives the argument found in Romans chapters 1-7 without calling attention to this fact. In Romans, Paul argues that the Law is such that if anyone follows it with complete success, God will grant that person eternal life. Consider Romans 2:6-8: “God ‘will repay each person according to what they have done.’ To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor, and immortality, He will give eternal life. But for those who are self-seeking and who reject the truth and follow evil, there will be wrath and anger.”

But are there any who seek glory, honor, and immortality? No — for Paul says, “For all have sinned and fallen short of [that] glory of God” (3:23). But, the “wages of sin is death” (6:23), and so Paul comes to ask: “Who will save me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin” (7:24-5).

Lewis concludes his argument: “These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.”5

How do we know that we find a moral law within ourselves that acts as a standard of right and wrong behavior? Lewis says that when we quarrel (and everyone does and sees this activity in others), we do not just fight, but we actually show that we think we are in line with the Moral Law, as a standard of fair play or moral

behavior, and the other person is in the wrong. After all, why would we excuse our bad behavior and make excuses if the moral law were merely convention and man-made? Who would care? No, once again, Lewis draws on Paul, who says:

Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them. (Romans 2:14-15 NIV)

This is significant because Lewis’ talking of making excuses for oneself is very much akin to Paul’s talk of “their thoughts sometimes accusing them and … even defending them.” So, in short, we each have unmistakable knowledge of the “Moral Law” or the “Standard of Right and Wrong.” For we have all had moral experience, such as that of being treated unjustly or of appealing to a standard of fair play (e.g., when we say, “That's not fair!” or “Don't cut in line; we've waited our turn; now wait yours!”). We expect others to conform to this standard in their treatment of us, but we seem much more open to bending the Law to excuse our own imperfect treatment of others. Lewis writes,

But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining “It’s not fair” before you can say Jack Robinson.6

Lewis’ hallmark contributions to the Moral Argument are significant and their effects are acknowledged by many. It is refreshing to know that when given a chance to address his own nation about the superiority of Christianity to Nazi ethics, ultimately, in a culture (World War II Britain) that no longer widely acknowledged God, Lewis could cleverly find a way to share the truth in love and allow the brilliance of the Scriptures to shine through to the English people, once again — in this case, without being told that this truth is (at least largely) from the Bible. Lewis wisely appealed to the universal experience of such things as moral knowledge and an objective standard of right and wrong to leverage the possibility that Christianity just might still be able to “begin to speak to us.”

1 Anne Bradstreet, “The Author to Her Book,” accessed November 10, 2021, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43697/the-author-toher-book.

2 A.O. Scott, Better Living Through Criticism (New York: Penguin Random House, 2016), 10.

1C.S. Lewis, “De Futilitate,” in Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1967), 71.

2C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 37, in Book One, sec. 5, “We Have Cause to be Uneasy.”

3C.S. Lewis, “On Ethics,” in Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing House, 1967), 55-6.

4Ibid., 46.

5C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 21.

6Mere Christianity, 19.

WHAT GOD HAS TO SAY ABOUT

Annual Conference on Theology and Culture

Co-sponsored by Liberty University Student Activities CENTER for APOLOGETICS & CULTURAL ENGAGEMENT

Every Square Inch With Sam Allberry APRIL 18-19, 2024

Faculty Contribution

Benjamin K. Forrest, Ed.D. Professor and Administrative Chair School of Health Sciences, Liberty University

PUBLIC HEALTH AND THE GOODNESS OF CHRIST: THE RISE OF COMPASSIONATE HEALTHCARE IN THE ANCIENT CHURCH

“Who is my neighbor?” On the surface this is a simple question; yet when it comes to healthcare, its implications can be costly.1 For many in the ancient church, the answer to this question gave impetus for a type of compassion and care that cost life itself.2 Their willingness to tend ailing neighbors reflected Jesus’ inverted teaching that believers should love even those whom they do not look like, live like, or act like. Such people are our neighbors, and wherever we live, we will find those who need the love of Christ — not simply in an abstract way, but a love manifested in our regular, tangible interactions.

A deeper understanding of the early church’s engagement in public healthcare (even before public health had become a social concern) provides a useful apologetic for the goodness of Christ. This essay will explore how a particular group of early Christians applied their Lord’s admonition to love their neighbors in a concrete way. Of course, examining ancient history becomes most profitable when our eyes move from the past to the present. Thus, this essay will conclude with some brief remarks about how we, today, can actualize the command to “love thy neighbor” (Mark 12:31).

Public Health in Greco-Roman Context

Public healthcare did not exist in the classical world. Gary Ferngren has explained that “before the advent of Christianity ... there was no concept of the responsibility of public officials to prevent disease or to treat those who suffered from it.”3 The Roman Empire did not imagine itself as responsible for helping people live healthy lives. The primary role of government was to keep the peace internally and expand the empire’s borders externally. The imperial bureaucracy enforced strict and sometimes brutal laws that fostered a stable society and maintained the pax Romana, the “Roman peace.” Of course,

healthcare existed in nascent forms during antiquity, but the “responsibility for health was regarded as a private, not a public, concern.”4 Just like any other product or service, individuals could purchase the time and attention of healthcare professionals if they could afford it. Those who couldn’t afford a doctor’s fees suffered along as best they could. Early and preventable deaths were accepted as a normal part of life. Such indifference to human suffering stemmed from the assumption that some people were worth more than others — often much more. No one believed in the innate equality of individuals. Rights and personal worth were not ontological; instead, they were “defined judicially, and they depended on membership in a society (a family, kinship group, or state) that granted them. Those who lay outside (e.g., foreigners, slaves, foundlings) had no claim to inherent rights.”5

The citizens of antiquity had little hope for substantial improvement in public health practices. Curing the ailments of the downtrodden masses would have seemed like bailing the ocean with a teacup. “[T]he feeling that little could be done on a public level to end widespread disease or to care for the ill — underlay the inactivity of public officials and their failure to undertake strenuous measures.”6 The government could barely maintain civic peace and the steady flow of taxes, much less expand the public’s well-being when it came to medicine and healthcare. “Even in time of plague, no public services were maintained by municipalities to bury the dead, who were thrown out onto the streets.”7 Everyone took this governmental — indeed, societal — hopelessness for granted.

But even if this fatalistic disinterest was accepted as the status quo, was it moral? Did it deserve to be questioned, criticized, or even — dare we imagine

it — rectified? Rome didn’t think so, but the early Christians certainly did. And that was in great part because Jesus had introduced a very different ethic from the one that prevailed in paganism. What were these differing beliefs that led to such divergent ethical practices? In Greco-Roman paganism, everyone was born into the state cult. It lay quietly yet ubiquitously in the background of public life, requiring no special commitment, no conversion, no rites of entrance or initiation. To be a member of society was to belong to the religion of the gods. But Christianity required a conscious and sometimes dangerous decision to convert, which led to a strong sense of community, identity, and direction. Conversely, because pagan identity had little ability to “generate belonging” it was unable to inculcate a culture of ameliorating the woes of neighbors. For Christians, a sense of communal belonging was exactly what Christianity generated. To be a Christian was to have experienced divine love, and thus to be obligated to share this love with others — within and without the community of believers. The early churches had a pervasive ethic of self-sacrifice that ran counter to the “me-first” values of Greco-Roman culture. Their ethic of selfless love played out in dramatic fashion during the third century A.D. when a terrible plague swept the empire. At this perilous moment, Christians introduced public healthcare for the first time in the Greco-Roman world.

The Plague of Cyprian

The third-century plague that gripped the Roman world has come to be called the Plague of Cyprian because of its most notable adversary, Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage who coordinated a Christian response to rampant disease. The origin of this scourge is debated.9 Regardless of whether it came up from Egypt10 or down from the Gothic invasion,11 the actual experience of those who lived and died during the plague deserves our consideration. Cyprian’s biographer describes a scene of terror and carnage, along with the cruel indifference that always accompanies a widespread fear of death. He writes:

Afterwards there broke out a dreadful plague, and excessive destruction of a hateful disease invaded every house in succession of the trembling populace, carrying off day by day with abrupt attack numberless people, every one from his own house. All were shuddering, fleeing, shunning the contagion, impiously exposing their own friends, as if with the exclusion of the person who was sure

to die of the plague, one could exclude death itself also. There lay about the meanwhile, over the whole city, no longer bodies, but the carcasses [sic] of many. ... No one regarded anything besides his cruel gains. No one trembled at the remembrance of a similar event. No one did to another what he himself wished to experience.12

This vivid description points to the natural state of humanity apart from an ethic that would demand otherwise: the ruthless preservation of one’s own life, regardless of the cost.

Several things stand out in this eyewitness account from Cyprian’s biographer. The plague was thoroughly destructive without regard to socioeconomic status, religion, or locale. The onset of symptoms as well as death came rapidly. One modern scholar’s research makes the case that the plague was likely a viral hemorrhagic fever, based on the description of the discharges that stemmed from the eyes, throat, and bowels.13 Another scholar estimates that at its height, 5,000 people per day were dying.14 At the height of this pestilential chaos, terrified citizens despised, fled from, and shunned anyone who might be a vector of disease. Even so, death found its victims. The number of dead overwhelmed the city to such an extent that corpses piled up in the streets. Carthage became a ghost town as the sick died and the living abandoned the unfortunates to their gruesome fates.

For Bishop Cyprian, such callous indifference to the plight of the sick was to be expected from the pagans. However, a very different ethic was demanded by Jesus. The merciful Lord of the Christians had instructed His followers that “mortality or plague was not to be feared” and “diseases are common to the virtuous and vicious.” Since all things are in the hands of God, the devout Christian “ought to acknowledge himself as one who, placed in the heavenly camp, already hopes for divine things, so that we may have no trembling at the storms and whirlwinds of the world, and no disturbance, since the Lord had foretold that these would come.”15 This heavenly perspective delivered the Christian from earthly fear and manifested Christ’s godly love as a balm not just for those who had something beneficial to offer but even to those who presented a challenge, a danger, or maybe even the specter of death itself.

Christian Love of Neighbor

When Jesus was asked by the religious leaders, “Who is my neighbor?” He answered by recounting the story of

the Good Samaritan, a societal outcast who cared for an invalid when no one else would bother (Luke 10:25-37). Implied in this illustrative tale was that the Samaritan was a good neighbor, far more so than the priest or the Levite, both of whom were entrusted with the Law and thus called to exemplify the holiness of Yahweh (Leviticus 11:44). Clearly, God’s holiness demanded loving one’s neighbor (Leviticus 19:9-18). But whether for the sake of their schedule, convenience, or security, the two holy hypocrites walked past the invalid without offering the love that Yahweh desired. In contrast, Jesus presented his listeners with a startling example of incarnational neighborliness in the form of the Samaritan.

The ancient Christians found a chance to demonstrate this Good Samaritan-style love in action when the plague of Cyprian struck the Roman Empire. The fearsome disease afflicted not only Cyprian’s Carthage but also the Egyptian city of Alexandria further along the African coast. There, the local bishop, Dionysius, recorded how the church responded:

Most of our brethren were unsparing in their exceeding love and brotherly kindness. They held fast to each other and visited the sick fearlessly, and ministered to them continually, serving them in Christ. And they died with them most joyfully, taking the affliction of others, and drawing the sickness from their neighbors to themselves, and willingly receiving their pains. And many who cared for the sick and gave strength to others died themselves having transferred to themselves their death. … Truly the best of our brethren departed from life in this manner, including some presbyters and deacons and those of the people who had the highest reputation; so that this form of death, through the great piety and strong faith it exhibited, seemed to lack nothing of martyrdom (22.7.7-8).16

Cyprian similarly records that the Christians were,

... unsparing of themselves and clave to one another, visiting the sick without a thought as to the danger, assiduously ministering to them, tending them in Christ, and so most gladly departed this life along with them; being infected with the disease from others, drawing upon themselves the sickness from their neighbors, and willingly taking over their pains. And many, when they had cared for and restored to health others, died themselves, thus transferring their death to themselves.

Such self-sacrificing charity was not equaled by the pagans — for nothing socially or theologically compelled them to such love. Cyprian recorded that,

The conduct of the heathen was the exact opposite. Even those who were in the first stages of the disease they thrust away, and fled from their dearest. They would even cast them in the roads half-dead, and treat the unburied corpses as vile refuse, in their attempts to avoid the spreading and contagion of the death plague; a thing which, for all their devices, it was not easy for them to escape.17

Why was there such a disparity in response? The answer, at its core, is religious: each community, the Christian and the pagan, had a different view of divine things, and thus a different view of why human beings mattered and how they were to be treated. Paganism did not see humans as imbued with innate dignity. But for the Christians, all people in some way reflected the nature of God Himself. In theological parlance, this is known as the imago Dei or the image of God

God’s Presence on Earth

Paganism exalted the gods at people’s expense. Against the panoply of deities in the Greco-Roman world, human beings counted for very little. Humans existed merely to appease the gods: to mollify them by favors or by making propitiation through sacrifice. People, therefore, were viewed as ancillary or supplemental to the meaning of the cosmos. The gods were transcendent and had varying degrees of concern for life on Earth. They intervened capriciously and occasionally, sometimes to give people what they supposedly deserved. Paganism often viewed life as karmic; the good received good in turn, while evildoers received the suffering that they justly deserved.

From Genesis to the third century to the present day, the Judeo-Christian worldview has consistently countered this viewpoint. Humanity has been made with intrinsic value because we were created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26-28). In other words, God was instantiated on Earth by human persons, not by manmade idols. The concept of the imago Dei continued forward not only in Jewish thought but into Christian theology as well. Here, “life possessed intrinsic value by virtue of its divine endowment.” The nature of Yahweh “was represented not by pictorial images but by the human race.”18 In the Judeo-Christian worldview, instead of carvings

of bronze, stone, or wood standing as images of the heavenly gods, people represented God’s presence on Earth. As they went through their lives creating beauty, making goodness, and spreading life, they propagated the aroma of God who desired to fill the universe with His glory (Genesis 1:28, 12:1-3; 1 Corinthians 3:16).

Historian Gary Ferngren offers four ethical consequences of the imago Dei that are well worth considering. They are:

1. The imago Dei provided an impetus for charity and philanthropy because it circumvented the self-centeredness that was central to the Roman worldview. For Christians, concern for others is “rooted in the nature of God. Just as God loved humans, so they were expected to respond to the divine love by extending love to a brother, who bore the image of God (John 13:34-35).”19

2. Because humans were created as image bearers, each human is intrinsically valuable — so much so that God created a path of redemption for humanity in Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection.20

3. Because Christ became incarnate, taking on the form of flesh, the particularities of humanity — including personas and personalities — have a redeemed value within a Christian worldview.21

4. Lastly, the imago Dei redefined the outcasts of society. For the first time in history, the poor, the diseased, the lepers, and even those with pandemic diseases “had true worth because they bore the face of Christ.”22

The Seeds of Suffering, the Fruit of Life

The noted sociologist Rodney Stark, in his trenchant analysis of the rise of Christianity, explored the role that epidemics played in the spread of the Jesus movement throughout the Western world. Three key theses underpin Stark’s argument. His first contention is that the religious worldview of Greco-Roman society contained little explanatory power for understanding epidemics. Conversely, Stark says, “Christianity offered a much more satisfactory account of why these terrible times had fallen upon humanity, and it projected a hopeful, even enthusiastic, portrait of the future.”23

Second, because of Jesus’ charge for Christians to maintain hope in the midst of suffering, even during disasters, “Christians were better able to cope, and this resulted in substantially higher rates of survival. This

meant that in the aftermath of each epidemic, Christians made up a larger percentage of the population even without new converts.”24

Stark’s third thesis is perhaps his most intriguing. Stark makes the case that Christianity advanced during this time because of the way Christians navigated the disease and provided palliative care for the sick.25 In light of the pagans’ indifference or revulsion toward the sick,

the superior rates of survival of Christian social networks would have provided pagans with a much greater probability of replacing their lost attachments with new ones to Christians. In this way, very substantial numbers of pagans would have been shifted from mainly pagan to mainly Christian social networks. In any era, such a shifting of social networks will result in religious conversions.26

Stark’s point is that Christian belief and practice resulted in a much higher rate of survival for the Christian community. This increased survival rate would keep Christian social bonds strong while the corresponding practices in pagan families and communities resulted in weakened social bonds. “Alien to paganism was the notion that because God loves humanity, Christians cannot please God unless they love one another. Indeed, as God demonstrates His love through sacrifice, humans must demonstrate their love through sacrifice on behalf of one another.”27 Even among the pagans who had survived the plague, many had fled the city, as noted by Cyprian, which further disrupted social bonds. Because of this sociological development, Christians comprised a substantially larger proportion of citizens in Carthage relative to pagans.

As the city (and the empire) rebounded from the plague’s devastation, people began to forge new friendships and social networks. This transformational period gave Christians the opportunity to serve their neighbors and invite the survivors into a communal group of friends.28 Stark further argues that this transformation of social networks is not a strange phenomenon in history. Often, cultural crises lead to an evolution of existing religious beliefs or the adoption of an altogether new faith.29 Stark applies the term “revitalization movement” to these newly adopted faiths since they reinvigorate cultures during moments of crisis.30 Though the early Christians demonstrated care and concern for the physical wellbeing of their neighbors, “even more important … than these material benefits was the sense of belonging which the Christian community could give.”31

What is noteworthy for our purposes is how the ancient Church’s incarnational sacrifice and compassion during the time of suffering planted Gospel seeds that ultimately bore the fruit of friendship and the transformation of faith. This sacrificial service introduced something new to the world of public health. As Ferngren puts it,

With the introduction of the Christian emphasis on compassion as an essential motive, one can speak of something new in medical ethics — an element that cannot be said to have represented an ideal in pre-Christian medicine. Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan became the model of Christian agape. Compassion — not merely duty to the art — became the motivating ideal of the Christian physician.32

Thus, we discover that public health became a pathway for the Gospel. Christians ministered to the needy

not as a mechanism for church growth but out of an authentic love of neighbor flowing from the compassion of the Great Physician, who insisted that this type of love must mark his followers.

Living Out the Goodness of Christ

The example modeled by the early church can demonstrate to modern believers how to display the goodness of Christ through neighborly love, service, and action. Christians during the time of Cyprian responded to their context of unexpected disease, a context they likely would have preferred to avoid. Nevertheless, they responded by maintaining a faithful presence during challenging times. During the era of Cyprian’s epidemic, people lived uncertain lives filled with the potential for death. Yet hidden within that danger lay an incredible opportunity for Christian witness. If Stark is correct, when the danger had passed, the Church

discovered that its steadfastness had opened up new social networks. Through the believers’ risky efforts at offering compassionate public healthcare, they invited survivors of the crisis into meaningful friendships, and ultimately into the knowledge of Christ Himself. In the same way, let us move into our society with risky compassion, knowing that this is likely the best way to declare our Savior’s goodness not only to the church but to our neighbors as well.

1I want to thank Bryan Litfin for his editorial insights and suggestions for this article.

2Eusebius of Caesarea, “The Church History of Eusebius,” in Eusebius: Church History, Life of Constantine the Great, and Oration in Praise of Constantine, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, vol. 1, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1890), 307.

3Gary B. Ferngren, Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 116.

4Ibid., 116.

5Ibid., 95.

6Ibid., 117.

7Ibid., 132.

8Ibid., 206.

9For differences on provenance see Kyle Harper, “Pandemics and Passages to Late Antiquity: Rethinking the Plague of C. 249-270 described by Cyprian,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 28 (2015), 223-260, and Sabine R. Huebner, “The ‘Plague of Cyprian’: A Revised View of the Origin and Spread of a 3rd-c. CE Pandemic,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 34 (2021), 151-174.

10Harper, “Pandemics and Passages to Late Antiquity.

11Huebner, “The Plague of Cyprian,” 152-156.

12Pontius of Carthage, “The Life and Passion of Cyprian, Bishop and Martyr,” in Fathers of the Third Century: Hippolytus, Cyprian, Novatian, Appendix, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, trans. Robert Ernest Wallis, vol. 5, The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1886), 270.

13Kyle Harper, “Another eyewitness to the plague described by Cyprian, with notes on the ‘Persecution of Decius,’” Journal of Roman Archaeology 29 (2016), 474-475.

14Stark, The Rise of Christianity, 77.

15Cyprian of Carthage, “On the Mortality,” in Fathers of the Third Century: Hippolytus, Cyprian, Novatian, Appendix, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, trans. Robert Ernest Wallis, vol. 5, The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1886), 469.

16Eusebius of Caesarea, “The Church History of Eusebius,” in Eusebius: Church History, Life of Constantine the Great, and Oration in Praise of Constantine, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, vol. 1, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1890), 307.

17Eusebius, 7.22.7, in The Ecclesiastical History and 2: English Translation, ed. T.E. Page et al., trans. Kirsopp Lake and J.E.L. Oulton, vol. 2, The Loeb Classical Library (London; New York; Cambridge, MA: William Heinemann; G.P. Putnam’s Sons; Harvard University Press, 1926–32), 185–189.

18Ferngren, Medicine and Health Care, 97-98.

19Ibid., 99.

20Ibid., 100.

21Ibid., 101.

22Ibid., 103.

23Stark, The Rise of Christianity, 74.

24Ibid., 74-75.

25Ferngren says, “The emphasis on caring more than on curing constituted the chief ministry of the early Christian community to the sick, although the boundary was always blurred, and there was much overlap. Christians sought, however, to fulfill the words of Jesus, “I was sick and you took care of me (Mathew 25:36),” Medicine and Health Care, 145.

26Stark, The Rise of Christianity, 75.

27Ibid., 86, italics original.

28A practical theology relating to this idea comes from Sam Chan’s book, How to Talk about Jesus (Zondervan, 2020). In it, he makes a case similar to what Stark observes. Social networks encourage social norming. When nonChristian friends are invited into a social network of Christians, there tends to be an averaging that happens. His argument then is that the best way to invite people to Jesus is to invite them into your social networks/friendships and eventually what happens is that loving Christians manifest the love of Christ to such a degree that it is an invitation to non-believers to look at Jesus with new eyes and consider his offer of love and then redemption.

29Stark, The Rise of Christianity, 78.

30Ibid., 78.

31Ferngren, Medicine and Health Care, 139.

32Ibid., 111.

Equipping the Church to Engage the World

FALL 2024

Book Reviews

Elyse Penton Student Fellow

Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

Throughout history, disabled individuals have suffered on the margins of church and society. They have often been segregated from church communities due to inaccessible locations and inaccessible people. Through either hostility or ignorance, the Christian Church has put barriers between themselves and disabled individuals. In Disability and the Gospel, Michael S. Beates expounds on the struggles and stories of what he refers to as the “disability community,” challenging those who have marginalized the disability community in society or their churches.

First, Beates tracks how God interacts with those who are directly affected by disability throughout Scripture. In the first chapter, he looks at the testimony of the Old Testament and notes how God is portrayed as both the “ultimate source and ultimate solution” (32) to disability. God is completely sovereign over His creation despite its brokenness, and as a result, the stories of disabled individuals find fulfillment in the Gospel. In the Gospels, Jesus frequently interacts with and affirms the dignity of disabled individuals. Beates highlights the Holy Spirit’s work through disabled individuals in the New Testament and how literature from different eras views the disability community.

Lastly, Beates takes a look at contemporary voices concerning disability in both secular and Christian cultures. In a variety of ways, secular society has begun to question the sanctity of life in the public sphere. Consequently, it has adopted a posture towards individuals with disabilities that is borderline utilitarian. This mindset is dangerous since it has been the rationale for mass genocides throughout world history. Indeed, the Nazi party used “non-contributor” language to justify violent action against the Jewish people. Today, this language may lead to encouraging euthanasia and abortion. Beates directly combats this school of thought by arguing that human life means far more than being a “normal” homo sapien. There is value to all human life, regardless of which mold it comes in.

While acknowledging parts of the Christian Church’s problematic history with the disability community, Beates outlines how a proper understanding of the Imago Dei provides insight into how church leaders can love the disability community well. Throughout the book, Beates challenges Christians to educate themselves on the issues within the disability community and to play an active role in welcoming those with disabilities into the church by making it a more accessible place.

Disability and the Gospel paints an insightful picture of how God, in all aspects of His nature, sees and values those with disabilities. Beates successfully shines a light on the dangerous path that secular society is going down, a path that could eventually lead to the elimination of disabled individuals. Furthermore, Beates dives into how ancient and modern societies have viewed the disability community, shining a light on the centuries of societal struggles this community has faced. In closing, Beates provides some first steps on how the church can step up and fulfill the biblical mandate to “invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” to the great banquet (Luke 14:13). He gives tangible advice to pastors, Christian leaders, and believers at large on how to fulfill the needs of the disability community. As Christians, our hearts should break knowing that Sunday services are some of the most segregated times in America for the disability community. The Church needs to do better. And through the process that Beates has outlined in Disability and the Gospel, there is hope for tomorrow’s kingdom.

Michael Beates, Disability and the Gospel: How God Uses Our Brokenness to Display His Grace. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012). 192 pages.

Book Reviews

Joseph Dennis Student Fellow

Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

Can any light be found amid the darkness of war? It kills without mercy, tears apart families, and leaves little room for virtue. When millions of soldiers lay dead in Europe following the Great War, one could hardly blame the intellectuals of the day for having a bleak outlook on humanity’s future. However, not everyone shared this perspective. A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War by Joseph Loconte examines the works of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, who fought against the tide of their peers and found virtue through their brothers in arms and the hand of God, who turned the evils of the Great War into good.

Loconte begins the book by laying out some of the philosophical and cultural leanings of the West leading up to the Great War. Drawing from the idea of the “myth of progress,” Loconte traces what led the West to believe that society was climbing upward to social perfection. Against this cultural current, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis used literature and fantasy to reshape the post-war narrative toward hope rather than despair. By creating fantasy worlds where the heroes overcome fear and emerge victorious over evil, Tolkien and Lewis’ works helped to renew optimism for the future following the war.

A theme of the Great War that made its way into the works of Tolkien and Lewis following the conflict was that of heroism. Both authors saw the bravery of the men around them who fought honorably for their countries and fellow soldiers, even in the face of horrific violence. For Tolkien, “The character of the hobbit was a reflection of the ordinary soldier, steadfast in his duties while suffering in that dreary ‘hole in the ground,’ the front-line trench” (75). The conflicts in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe demonstrate Lewis’ understanding of war as a “heroic quest” (170). For these authors, honor and chivalry were destined to prevail.

Tolkien’s and Lewis’ novels also reflect the value of their rich friendships. Loconte highlights the name of The Fellowship of the Ring: “Before it is complete — and after facing many terrors and setbacks — [the characters] are transformed into a fellowship of the noblest kind” (171). In closing, Loconte highlights the apologetic elements of Tolkien’s and Lewis’ novels. Their fantasy series feature kingly figures who offer hope for the ultimate triumph of good over evil. For Tolkien, Aragorn exemplifies many of the same traits Tolkien saw in the best of those in the Great War. For Lewis, Aslan is an unmistakable Christ figure. Ultimately, Tolkien and Lewis offer more hopeful themes than their contemporaries following the war and subtly point their readers to the reason for their hope: Christ.

A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War conveys piercing insights about Tolkien and Lewis’s novels for new readers and avid fans alike. For those who cherish their stories, Loconte enhances the experience by revealing how the authors translated their war experiences into their writing. At the same time, for newcomers, Loconte shows how the authors shone a bright light amid the darkness of wartime by creating narrative masterpieces that influenced generations. Additionally, for those facing times of despair or suffering, the book offers encouragement that anyone — even ordinary, hard-working people — can overcome difficulty and persevere. “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning” (Psalm 30:5). J.R.R. Tolkien’s and C.S. Lewis’ responses to the Great War teach that there is apologetics in suffering. The answer to adversity weaved throughout their stories will ring true for all eternity: Christ is Lord.

Joseph Loconte, A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-18 (Nashville, TN: Nelson Books, 2015). 235 pp.

Book Reviews

Josh Hicks Student Fellow

Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

In today’s charged political climate, many Christians find themselves lost in the divisiveness of government policy and party politics. With nowhere firm to plant their feet, Christians struggle to engage in politics effectively. Herman Dooyeweerd, a contemporary of Abraham Kuyper, developed Kuyper's system of sphere sovereignty into a rich philosophical and political framework that Christians can use to engage with secular politics. Jonathan Chaplin's biography outlines Dooyeweerd's philosophy of state and civil society, a philosophy that enables Christians to remain firm in their beliefs while interacting with contemporary political thought.

The book begins by providing context for Dooyeweerd's political thought. Specifically, Chaplin unpacks Dooyeweerd's concept of “normative institutional pluralism,” which he defines as “the presence of multiple kinds of mutually distinct social institutions whose integrity and autonomy it is a primary role of the state to safeguard and support” (25). Chaplin then continues to unfold Dooyeweerd's political philosophy. He begins with Dooyeweerd’s understanding of the “modal diversity” of reality. Amid the complexity of reality there exist structures that are “marked by a plurality of ontologically grounded, irreducible dimensions:” for example, the numeric, the “biotic,” and the economic (79). Dooyeweerd identifies fifteen such categories and unpacks their relationship to the structure of society and social pluralism. Lastly, Dooyeweerd concludes by talking about the identity of the state as “a differentiated, organized, public-legal community, marked by a juridically qualified structural principle” (294). Ultimately, Dooyeweerd concludes that the state’s primary role is to promote public justice, and he fleshes out the details of that role in many helpful ways.

Jonathan Chaplin’s biography of Dooyeweerd provides a framework that kingdom citizens can utilize to stand firm amid their secular world. In a pluralistic society, Christians and seculars alike may view Christian values as irrelevant to, or imposing on, contemporary political issues. However, in Dooyeweerd’s view of politics and society, every institution is involved in ruling and taking dominion over different modal dimensions of creation. Not only does this give the Church a say in society, but it also allows others’ voices to be heard, enabling Christians to engage in politics while respecting the views of others. Chaplin expounds on Dooyeweerd’s philosophy of politics in a clear and logical manner, helping the reader to see the value of his approach to political engagement. Though contemporary political tensions run rampant and there seems to be little hope for resolution, Dooyeweerd’s philosophy cuts through the tension, offers tools to mend the Christian-secular divide, and provides hope for better political engagement.

Jonathan Chaplin, Herman Dooyeweerd: Christian Philosopher of State and Civil Society (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016). 464 pages.

Book Reviews

Chase Matthews Student Fellow

Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

As followers of Christ, we are called to bring comfort to those who suffer. Yet we often attempt to do this in the wrong ways. We are quick to throw out nice-sounding platitudes as if we are offering insightful wisdom, when in fact we are doing the opposite. In Suffering Wisely & Well, Eric Ortlund explores the topic of suffering through the account of Job, offering Christians insight into how to suffer well themselves and to comfort family members, friends, or church communities who do.

Ortlund begins by distinguishing the reasons behind why suffering occurs. From the start of the book, Job is described as being in right standing with God. Therefore, Job is not suffering as a means of spiritual correction, which clashes with traditional understandings of suffering. Yet Ortlund states that it is “only in a Job-like ordeal [that] we experience the all-sufficiency of God Himself as a reality, not a theory” (58). In contrast to Job’s exemplary faith, Job's friends display spiritual immaturity, speaking from a place of fearful ignorance. As the discourse unravels, they project their own fears onto Job, never considering the possibility that Job simply loves God for who God is, not what He provides. In contrast, Job recognizes his place before God as one of humble gratitude, as should we.

Moreover, Job’s forty-two long chapters force the reader to wait patiently alongside Job for a response from God. This is the wisdom of the Book of Job. While it may be difficult to sit silently in the ashes with God’s children while they are suffering, our silence can be tremendously impactful. Perhaps the only other encouragement Christians can provide to tend gently to the wounds of any sufferer is an understanding of God’s intimate relationship with both the sufferer and the suffering itself. The same God who allowed Job to suffer is the same God who understands his pain greater than anyone else.

Ortlund illuminates how God provides Job with something far greater than mere consolation: He gives Job restoration. God restores Job using rhetorical questions, each revealing another layer of who God is and how in tune He is with not just Job’s suffering but all suffering. Using the detailed imagery of the Behemoth and Leviathan, God contrasts the chaotic powers of the world with Himself: “Leviathan looks at spears and swords like straw (41:26), but God looks at Leviathan like straw” (159). Through this new and greater understanding Job has of God, Job finds peace. Nothing less than God Himself could restore Job, and nothing less can restore any of God’s suffering servants today.

Suffering Wisely and Well is a great tool for seasoned followers of Christ. Mature believers who are enduring suffering would find this book a fresh reminder that God is present in the midst of their pain. For scholars in the fields of pastoral leadership, biblical studies, or apologetics, Eric Ortlund constructs a robust framework to better navigate conversations around suffering and to comfort those who mourn. Moreover, church staff, including pastors, deacons, and elders, would find this work helpful to help walk with those in desert seasons. Suffering Wisely and Well offers powerful insights to better enable us to stand with those who suffer as we are reminded of God’s sovereignty and response to all cosmic evil.

Eric Ortlund, Suffering Wisely and Well: The Grief of Job and the Grace of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022). 192 pp.

Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement Editorial BOard

“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt should lose its taste, how can it be made salty? It’s no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.

You are the light of the world. A city situated on a hill cannot be hidden. No one lights a lamp and puts it under a basket, but rather on a lampstand, and it gives light for all who are in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”

Matthew 5:13-16

Coming Jan. 2025

Vol. 9, no 1.

Faith and the Academy: Engaging Culture with Grace and Truth

“The Resurrection and the Life: Reflections on an Empty Tomb”