Why the God-Man?
Most Christians – though far from all, in the current decay of education of all kinds, including religious education – know that the events we commemorate this week have had the most wide-ranging effects of anything that has happened in the entire history of the human race. And beyond, into the next world. Anyone, Christian or not, who looks back in time without a jaundiced eye, has to recognize that the Christian revolution has touched virtually everything. And that this has been a blessing as well as – not a curse, but an obstacle, in more recent times to appreciating just how great a change God-become-man introduced into the world.
Because when people assume they know the plot and the outcome of the Christian story, they take it for granted, as something that’s just the everyday background. They believe that it has existed always and everywhere. And that whatever is good in it has already been integrated into human life and doesn’t need particular attention any longer. Tom Holland, a “cultural Christian” and (probably, though he seems to be wavering) not a believer, traces this whole process in his remarkable book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Without Christ: no acknowledgment of human freedom or dignity, no transcendence of the merely political, no spread of Jewish monotheism (nor the Christian heresy we call Islam), no end to slavery, no respect towards women, ad infinitum.
By the end, Holland identifies so many things in our world with origins in Christianity that you almost want to pull him up short and ask, “Wait a minute, friend, aren’t there things we value that have come from outside the Christian tradition?”
