It’s refreshing to read a new book by
an accomplished historian whose reputation is regarded by many in the academic
world change his mind about something as significant as the impact that
Christianity has had on the building of Western Civilization. The following is
from Marvin Olasky. Olasky, a
former Communist and now the Editor-in-Chief of World Magazine, had
this to say about Tom Holland’s new book Dominion: How the Christian
Revolution Remade the World (The American edition :
Until
this year, the first 20 pages of Witness by Whittaker Chambers
(Random House, 1952) comprised the most brilliant preface or foreword I’d ever
read. Chambers, who had crossed over from Communism to Christianity, explained
that Communism is “man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the
first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil:
‘Ye shall be as gods.’” And gods play to win, as Chambers goes on to show
during the next 788 pages, which are good but not as good as the beginning.
The first 17 pages of historian
Tom Holland’s Dominion: How the Christian
Revolution Remade the World (Basic, 2019) knock the start
of Witness out of first place. Those pages beautifully tell
the amazing story of how a culture that had esteemed only big winners began to
care about (in worldly terms) big losers. If the familiar Gospels no longer
move you to wonder and perhaps tears, read that preface.
Olasky
knows something about reevaluating history and his chosen ideology. “In 1976 he
earned his Ph.D. in American Culture at the University of
Michigan. He became an atheist in adolescence and
a Marxist in college, ultimately joining the Communist Party USA
in 1972. He married and divorced during this period and by his own admission
broke every one of the ten commandments except the one against murder. He left
the Communist Party late in 1973 and in 1976 became a Christian after reading
the New Testament and a number of Christian authors.”
Tom
Holland doesn’t seem to be as radical as Tom Holland, but after decades of
historical study, he changed his mind about the impact that Christianity has
had on our world. Holland grew up in a Christian environment but became
disillusioned with much of what was being taught by Christians about
Christianity was offering. His questions about Christianity went unanswered by
those who should have always been ready to make a defense to everyone who asked
them to “give an account for the hope that is in [them], yet with gentleness
and reverence” (1 Pet. 3:15).
The
following is taken from the final pages of Dominion’s Preface:
Yet
over the course of the past two decades, my perspective has changed. When I
came to write my first works of history, I chose as my themes the two periods
that had always most stirred and moved me as a child: the Persian invasions of
Greece in the last decades of the Roman Republic. Years that I spent writing
these twin studies of the classical world, living intimately in the company of
Leonidas and of Julius Caesar, of the hoplites who had died at Thermopylae and
of the Legionnaires who had crossed the Rubicon, only confirmed me in my
fascination: for Sparta and Rome, even when subjected to the minutest
historical inquiry, retained their glamour as apex predators. They continue to
stock my imaginings as they had always done: like a great white shark, like a
tiger, like a tyrannosaurs. Yet giant carnivores, however wondrous, are by
their nature terrifying. The more years I spent immersed in the study of
classical antiquity, so the more alien I increasingly found it. The values of
Leonida, whose people had practiced a particularly 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 is
reported to have killed a million Gauls, and enslaved a million more. It was
not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me, but the complete lack
of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic
value. Why did I find this disturbing? Because, in my morals and ethics, I was
not a Spartan or a Roman at all. That my belief in God had faded over the
course of my teenage years did not mean that I ceased to be a Christian.
For
Millennium and more, the civilization into which I had been born was
christendom. Assumptions that I had that I had grown up with — about how society
should properly be organized, and the principles that it should uphold — were
not bread of classical antiquity, still less of human nature, but very
distinctly of that civilization’s Christian past. So profound has been the
impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilization that it has
come to be hidden from view it is the incomplete revolutions which are
remembered; the fate of those which triumph is to be taken for granted.
The ambition of Dominion is
to trace the course of what one Christian, writing in the 3rd century AD,
termed the ‘flood-tide of Christ’; how the belief that the Son of the one God
of the Jews had been tortured to death on a cross came to be so enduringly and
widely held that today most of us in the West are dull to just how scandalous
it originally was. This book explores what it was that made Christianity so
subversive and disruptive; how completely it came to saturate the mindset of
Latin Christendom and why, in a West that is often doubtful of religion’s
claims, so many of its instincts remain — for good and ill — thoroughly
Christian.
It is — to coin a phrase— the greatest story ever told.
The
following books are also helpful:
·
Vishal Mangalwadi, The Book That Made Your World: How
the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization (Thomas Nelson).
·
Vishal Mangalwadi, This Book Changed Everything: The
Bible’s Amazing Impact on Our World (Sought After Media).
·
James Hannam, The Genesis of Science: How
the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution (Regnery).
·
Daniel L. Dreisbach, Reading the Bible With the Founding
Fathers (Oxford).
·
D. James Kennedy and Jerry Newcombe, What If Jesus Had
Never Been Born (Thomas Nelson).
·
Alvin J. Schmidt, How Christianity Changed the World (Harper
Collins).
