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 20th 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 19th 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.
