Unimaginable by Jeremiah H. Johnston

What would the world be like if Christ had never come and the Christian church had never been create? New Testament scholar Jeremiah J. Johnston imagines it would be a bleak place. He describes why he thinks so in Unimaginable.

Johnston contrasts the Christian worldview, and its results, with cultures where non-Christian worldviews were dominant. The first of these is the pre-Christian era, especially Greek and Roman culture in the centuries shortly before and after the ministry of Jesus Christ. The second is the 20^th Century political regimes that opposed Christian mores if not religion altogether: Nazism, Fascism and Communism. Adolf Hitler and Bonito Mussolini imagined a return to a pre-Christian, pagan age of Aryan or Roman dominance. The Communists were opposed to any religion; the state operating on behalf of the workers was the dominant force. These movements in some ways were reversions to the morals that predated Christian influence.

The gods of Greece and Rome were immoral characters who had little concern for humanity. The Caesars, god-kings, were largely selfish and self-aggrandizing. In contrast, the Christian God proclaimed His love for people. He demonstrated his benevolence in Jesus, son of God and king of kings, who lived a humble life of service and sacrifice.

Life was cheap in ancient Greek and Roman culture. For instance, babies who were diseased or deformed, or simply girls, were often abandoned to die. In contrast, Christians believed that human life was inherently valuable.

Women were not considered equal to men in pre-Christian times. In contrast, women were present at the major events in Jesus’ ministry and were often acknowledged in the New Testament for their leadership in the early church.

Women were considered of little worth in the ancient world. In addition, slavery and racism were common in the in the Greek and Roman Empires. The superiority of some people was considered plain, and it was appropriate for them to dominate, control and enslave lesser people. Jesus taught that there was no meaningful difference between races (Jews or Greeks), free men and slaves, or the sexes.

There was not religious freedom in the Roman Empire. The Jews were tolerated because of the antiquity of their religion, but others were required to worship the major Roman gods and to acknowledge the divinity of Caesar. Christians were considered atheists for their refusal to acknowledge Roman gods.

Johnston describes an opening of the door in the late 19^th Century to anti-Christian ideas and morals. Philosophers and scientists of the time such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Friederich Nietzche and Sigmund Freud were committed to a materialistic view of the world. Humans were not special creations; they were simply sophisticate animals that arrived from the same undirected happenstance that brought for every other thing without purpose. Religion and morals were inventions of people, not revelations from a higher authority.

These influencers, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, challenged Christian morals. They opened the door to devaluing human life, devaluing women (Nietche was explicit about his belief that women were inferior to men), justifying racism with science along with subjugation of “lesser” races, and the elimination of religious freedom, or even individual freedom. The likes of Hitler, Mussolini and Josef Stalin put these ideas into practice, leading to impoverishment, oppression, and death for millions of people.

Some would lay a lot of suffering at the feet of Christianity. Johnston argues that Christianity has alleviated a lot of suffering and paganism and atheism have much greater sums of human misery on their accounts.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis

Better for All the World by Harry Bruinius

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

The Language of God by Francis S. Collins

Maus by Art Spiegelman

The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek

War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark

Johnston, Jeremiah H. Unimaginable: What Our World Would Be Like Without Christianity. Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2017.

Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel by Frances & Joseph Gies

Among many the Middle Ages, between the Classical period and the Renaissance, is still thought of as the Dark Ages.  In their book Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel, Frances and Joseph Gies summarize scholarship that shows that the Medieval period was one of commercial and technological advancement that welcomed invention and the dispersion of knowledge.

The authors present a history of technology beginning with the contributions of Greek and Roman civilization and culminating with European developments on the cusp of the Age of Discovery.  The period in between is sometimes called the Dark Ages because of the lack of documentary history, the loss of the centralizing influence of Roman Empire, and the loss of Greek texts and knowledge in much of Europe.  The Gieses attempt to debunk the notion that this time was “dark” in the sense of being backward, especially superstitious, and lacking in advancement in knowledge, commerce, science, and especially technology.

From a technological point of view, the Middle Ages didn’t inherit from the Greeks or Romans much more than they might have learned for more ancient civilizations.  The Greeks little esteemed the useful arts.  The Romans were very practical adopters of technology, and they certainly did things on a large scale, but their main contribution was size and organization.  Medieval Europe more fruitfully borrowed and built upon technology from China.  Ancient China had very advance technology in comparison to contemporary civilizations, and the spice trade aided the transmission of technology, in the form of both devices and ideas, from East to West.

I think some of the greatest advances in this period occurred in architecture and materials.  In architecture, builders began to move away from Roman circular arches to something more like true arches.  This, along with the flying buttress, another Medieval development, made a new architecture of more open and brighter spaces possible.

Materials greatly improved, too, especially iron.  Either directly or as an idea, iron-making technology moved from China to Europe.  The blast furnace gave Europeans the ability to make cast iron.  Though casting iron parts was in their grasp, the more significant issue was that a lot more iron could be made.  Iron tools and parts made a host of other technology practicable.

Technological changes led to cultural changes, too.  Improved applications of animal and water power to agriculture and food production led to a transition away from slavery to a serf-tenant system in which the people who worked the field had a right to portion of their production.  Agricultural surpluses led to the development of cities along with a decline of bound serfs rise of free tradesmen.  The development of manufacturing led to all kinds of trade and improvements in commercial practices including double-entry bookkeeping.

I think this book may be a good introduction to the history of technology for people seeking an entry point to the field.  It is neither too technical nor too academic in its style.  It covers a period of history that is not as well covered by other popular books.  It also acknowledges and summarizes the technology of the immediately preceding and succeeding ages, so it covers a very wide timeframe.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Ancient Engineers by L. Sprague de Camp 

The Science of Leonardo by Fritjof Capra

The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark

Gies, Frances, & Joseph Gies. Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages.  New York: HarperCollins, 1994.

Links related to Medieval science and technology

Grotesque mummy head reveals advanced medieval science

Google

Daniel

Daniel was a prophet during the Babylonian captivity. He was carried to Babylon as a youth and eventually rose to high office in the courts of Nebachudnezzar and other rulers.

When the Babylonians occupied Israel and Judah, they carried forcibly resettled the aristocratic, wealthy and others they deemed valuable. Daniel was among these. He was brought to Babylon and trained to serve in the court of the king.

Daniel rose to prominence early on. He had a passion to serve God. He showed this by asking to be fed a diet of vegetables rather that the food from the kings table. This was probably food from sacrifices to Babylonian gods (though it may have just not been kosher). He must have been persuasive, for he prevailed. Because he and his friends were very healthy on this diet, he gained a reputation for wisdom.

His reputation grew when God began to show him interpretations of Nebachudnezzar’s dreams. In one of these dreams, Daniel saw the rise and fall of empires from the Babylonians to the time of Christ (the Roman Empire with the Persian and Greek empires in between). Much of his prophecies deal with the kingdoms to come from his own time to the first coming of Christ and the fate of Israel in that time.

The most famous story of Daniel is his survival of a night in the lion’s den. He was cast into it as a form of capital punishment for his devotion to God. This book also contains the story of Daniel’s friends Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-Nego who were cast into the fire of a hot furnace for refusing to worship and idol, a statue in the image of Nebachunezzar. God brought them through unharmed.

Daniel is also mentioned in the book of Ezekiel.

Daniel. The Holy Bible. New King James Version. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1982.