What difference did Jesus make? (Goldingay on History.)

Fuller Old Testament scholar John Goldingay wrote (or at least published) a book last year called Do We Need the New Testament: Letting the Old Testament Speak for Itself.  By all accounts, the book is well-written and thoughtful.  I have not read more than a few paragraphs and some reviews, but I suspect I would agree with some of what Dr. Goldingay writes. 

Yesterday, Goldingay kindly sent me a copy of Chapter Two, Why Jesus is Important.  He did so because the radical anti-Christian Religious Studies professor at Iowa State, Hector Avalos, had posted some lines from that chapter, which seemed to concede a lot about Christian history that probably most Christians would not want conceded.  Avalos' point was that Christianity hasn't really done human society much good.  I wanted to see if Goldingay really thought that.  

Looking the passage in question over, it appears that indeed, Dr. Goldingay has overlooked some enormous, and enormously important, historical patterns.  I have noticed the same lacunae in high school history texts in both America and in China.  But it is troubling that a thoughtful, good-hearted senior professor at Fuller, where Ralph Winter once taught (who was deeply familiar with these facts) would remain unaware of the rich contributions of the Gospel to human civilization.  Or that he would approvingly cite so virulent a hater, and so unreliable a scholar, as Hector Avalos on the subject.  

I will quote relevant portions of the surrounding passage first, putting the portions that Avalos quotes in italics, enumerating points I intend to discuss below.  

Goldingay's Argument

"The most distinctive feature of the situation after Jesus came is that the Spirit drove people like Paul to traverse the world to tell the story of Jesus among other nations . . . 

"What difference did Jesus’ coming make to the world? It has been argued that “The Church has made more changes on earth for good than any other movements of force in history,” including the growth of hospitals,(1) universities (2), literacy and education (3), capitalism and free enterprise (4), representative government, separation of political powers, civil liberty (5), the abolition of slavery (6), modern science (7), the discovery of the Americas (8), the elevation of women (9), the civilizing of primitive cultures (10), and the setting of languages to writing (11).  It is easy to dispute this claim. The church resisted some of the developments just listed (12), some are not particularly Christian (13), and all were encouraged by humanistic forces and reflect Greek thinking as much as gospel thinking (14).10

[Footnote 10]: On slavery in particular (even when one allows for overstatement) Hector Avalos, Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011).”  

"One can alternatively do another thought experiment. Imagine we were still waiting for the

Messiah, that the first coming of Jesus has not yet happened.  How would things in the twenty-first century be different from what they are? In the twenty-first century world there is (among other things) much war, oppression, family dysfunction, marital unfaithfulness and divorce, sexual exploitation and sexual slavery, and economic slavery (16). It is difficult to claim that the world is in better shape than it was two thousand years ago. (17)  I am not clear that the coming of Jesus made much difference to these aspects of how the world is. That fact does not mean Jesus has failed to have the effect he said he would have. He said nothing about the world getting better in these ways (18). Indeed, he said they would continue the way they were and if anything get worse. Abolitionist Theodore Parker declared his faith that the arc of the moral universe “bends towards justice,” and Martin Luther King and Barack Obama have repeated his conviction. It’s sometimes possible to see evidence of that fact in the short term, but I am not clear that there is evidence to justify Parker’s faith when one looks at history more broadly. After all, freedom and civil rights did come to be granted, but first they had to be taken away, and fifty years after Martin Luther King matters look less encouraging to some African Americans than they did thirty or forty years ago. (19)

"The difference Jesus’ coming brought about is that there are billions of people in the world who acknowledge the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who would likely not otherwise have done so. This fact is in keeping with a New Testament emphasis. It is also the case that when these people die, they have a basis for knowing that they will rise from death on resurrection day, because Jesus’ death and resurrection initiated the bringing into being of a resurrected people to which they will belong. The result of Jesus’ coming was the preaching of the gospel to the world and the providing of the basis for a confident expectation of resurrection." (20)

I think this passage is mistaken, both historically and theologically.  I think the approach exhibited in these paragraphs does harm to the Christian witness and shows a lack of appreciation for the tens of thousands of Christian reformers, in the spirit of Christ, who have rocked this world to its foundations over the past two thousand years -- and apart from whom the world would in fact be a much darker place.  I think Christianity ("the Church" in the broad sense) has deeply inspired and brought about "changes for the good," probably more than any other institution, but certainly which ought not to be downplayed.   

It is only right, and filial that we give the saints who went before us proper honor, as the author of Hebrews does, in Hebrews 11.  Even the secular world would not, should not, dishonor say, the Confucian tradition as Dr. Goldingay does his own in these paragraphs.  

Not to mention unwittingly, and no doubt through the best motives, giving aid and comfort to some of Christianity's most virulent enemies, like John Loftus and Hector Avalos.  (Who never display a trace of such "fair-mindedness" in their own propaganda -- it is dirt on the Gospel, all day and every day.)  

Let us go through these twenty items, point by point.  

The Difference Jesus Makes

(1)  It has been argued that “The Church has made more changes on earth for good than any other movements of force in history,” including the growth of hospitals . . . 

Is it not a clear historical fact that devoted Christians have built thousands of hospitals on every continent, and developed the medical sciences resulting in the direct physical well-being of billions of people?  

One can hardly get away from Christian hospitals.  Never mind that the closest hospital in your American or French town is likely to be called "Providence" or "St. Lukes."  When I lived as a single man in Taiwan, I remember meeting dates in front of what seemed the most prominent local landmark: the MacKay Hospital, which continued the excellent work of the Canadian Presbyterian missionary, George MacKay, who set up clinics across the north of the island.  (Among other good works.)  That may be the leading medical institution in a country some 90% Buddhist, but it is far from the only Christian hospital.  Similarly, when I taught in Changsha, China, the school network I taught in was founded by the same people who founded the first medical school in the city, missionaries from Yale.  (Though the communists don't brag about those roots, aside from the word "Yale," of course.)  Similarly, Japan, India, Africa, and much of the rest of the world, are chock full of hospitals founded by Christians who took their savior's medical work seriously: I have met many of such missionary medical personal myself, including the much-beloved Paul and Margaret Brand.  

And this pattern goes back to the first centuries, and all through the Middle Ages. 

If Dr. Goldingay is unaware of that glorious, and often sacrificial, history, he should visit the Fuller School of World Mission, and listen to some stories.  

 (2 universities, 

The same is true of universities.  While admittedly in the 20th Century, secular humanists and communists largely took over the Christian work of founding universities (or gutting Christian colleges spiritually), the first were religious institutions, usually Christian.  Again, one can liberally furnish examples even from non-Christian countries.  Stark is good on the rise of universities during the Middle Ages, even among Nestorians in the Muslim world. Goldingay might also benefit from reading Vishal Mangalwadi.  But sources are numerous, because the facts are well-known and undeniable: almost all European and American universities before the Civil War were founded by Churches, and a remarkable number in Asia and Africa as well.  Any history of Christianity in China or Japan worth its salt will be liberally sprinkled with accounts of how such schools got started: in my wife's little city of Nagasaki, there were three or four universities with Christian roots.  

(3) literacy and education

For every university that missionaries founded, they generally started numerous primary and middle schools.  In one study of women who had attained higher education in a region in coastal China, something like 98% gained that education from church schools.  Even Joseph Stalin and Voltaire were educated by Christians, however unfortunate the use they put that education to.

My wife, as a Japanese Buddhist, went to Catholic schools as a girl.  Hundreds of millions of people around the world have done likewise.  

(4) capitalism and free enterprise 

Rodney Stark, following Max Weber, has made this case.  Perhaps they are wrong: I admit that this fact is less clear-cut or perhaps well-known to me than some of the others.  But at the least, such a case has been made, citing quite a bit of evidence.  

(5)  representative government, separation of political powers, civil liberty

Robert Woodberry has made the case for Christian influence on these institutions extremely effectively, in my view.  He argues that missions, especially Protestant missions, is the single most important variable in determining the growth of free civil institutions in countries around the world. 

(6) the abolition of slavery 

In The Truth Behind the New Atheism, I recount sitting in a seminar room in Merton College (I believe it was, or perhaps Corpus Christi), Oxford, with 30 or so other historians, who were discussing (among other things) the impact of evangelical Christianity on the abolitionist movement.  Not one questioned that the influence had been profound or decisive.  At the same time, not one expressed any personal Christian proclivities.

Six years ago, Hector Avalos attacked me, and some of the claims I made in those pages (not specifically about that meeting in Oxford, however) in a long and virulent Debunking Christianity article.  (He was mad at me for having debunked some of his own arguments.)  I then responded in two posts, first here, then here.  I do not think that in the course of our exchanges, the football moved down the field towards Avalos' goal, despite much heavy breathing on his part.

Avalos has since written a long book attempting (apparently) to debunk the claim that Christianity was responsible for ending slavery.  I have not read that book yet, partly because I haven't had the time or need so far, but also largely because I find Avalos' use of citations so unreliable.  Like Loftus' other ally, Richard Carrier, one almost suspect he seeks out obscure citations in the hopes that no one will discover how badly he has abused them.  (Though to be fair, he's not much more reliable when he cites more common texts, so perhaps this is more a case of confirmation bias than of intentional slipperiness.)  Other examples can be found in my series on his book on Christianity and violence.

This is, admittedly, an argument with an ad hominal warp to it.  "Avalos has a pattern of bogus citations, therefore his long arguments on slavery, which I have not had time to read and which attempt to overthrow or undermine truths accepted by most historians, pose a lower priority in my reading than other topics for the time being."

Personally, I don't think any amount of evidence can overthrow the facts as recognized by numerous scholars of the period, and not just at Oxford.  Avalos may find errors in Stark's well-known account in For the Glory of God, but given his record, and the facts as I know them (and describe them to some extent here), I'd put my money on Stark for the big picture.      

(7) modern science

Stark's For the Glory of God provides chapters on both slavery and the origins of modern science that provide good starting points for discussion.  (Though I know Avalos would challenge Stark on some details, and Stark's history is not infallible.  See my review of Loftus' The Christian Delusion for a response to Richard Carrier's essay, "Christianity and Science.")  James Hannam's God's Philosophers / The Genesis of Science offers a more thorough and less polemical account of the same history.  Charles Thaxton, Stephen Barr, Paul Davies, David Landes, and Oxford historian of science Allan Chapman are among those who have further demonstrated the intimate linkage between Medieval Christian theology and the rise of modern science.  I don't think there is good cause to dispute the general thesis, any longer.

(8) the discovery of the Americas

I am not sure Christians should want credit for this item, given how Columbus and his ship-mates treated the natives.  But Christianity did lend the Spanish a banner around which to rally, helping Iberians cast off 500 years of Muslim domination, and saving Europe from Muslim conquest. That's a great boon, I do believe.  Columbus sailed, and the last Muslim kingdom was conquered, in the same year, both under the sponsorship of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.  While Columbus' motives may be questioned (and I would have much to learn, here), the fact that Christianity played a crucial roll in allowing Europe to throw off their would-be conquerors, permitting the explosion of science, technology, and civilization that followed, is I think hard to dispute.

(9)  the elevation of women

That Christianity raised the status of women around the world, I have demonstrated on this site, beyond (I think) reasonable doubt.  Indeed, while hundreds of skeptical responses have been posted at Christ the Tao and elsewhere, none of my essential points has I think been robustly challenged.  Most responses have been more like these ones.  

(10) the civilizing of primitive cultures 

It is indisputable that the Gospel has often had this effect.  That was certainly true through the Middle Ages in Europe: see Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion, for an overview.  How else did the Vikings become peaceable Scandinavians?  For modern examples, some related first-hand, see the works of Don Richardson, and biographies or autobiographies of James Fraser, Eugene Morse, and Mary Slessor, to give just a few examples. Again, Goldingay might consider consulting the faculty at Fuller School of Intercultural Studies, or perhaps some of the doctoral dissertations that used to adorn the office there.  

(11) and the setting of languages to writing.  

This general claim, too, is impossible to knowledgeably deny.  Many European languages, beginning perhaps with Gothic, were indeed set to writing by Christians for evangelical motives.   At least portions of the Bible have been translated into at least 2,500 languages so far: I have held some of those Bibles, the first written book in a variety of languages, and met some who translate others.  If Dr. Goldingay is unfamiliar with these facts, he may also like to visit the US Center for World Missions on the other side of Colorado Avenue in Pasadena from Fuller.

It is easy to dispute this claim. 

It would be interesting to see someone who knows the facts, try.  At best one might challenge the comparative quality in which Goldingay frames the claim.  I suppose one might argue that the communists ultimately set more languages into writing, or founded more hospitals, while admitting that Christians inspired by the life of Jesus got the ball rolling.  But I am not sure that math would pencil out, and I've never seen such an argument attempted.

(12) The church resisted some of the developments just listed 

Who is "the Church?"  Given that "the Church" has included billions of people down through the centuries, this claim may be either true or false, depending on how you interpret it.  But that is neither here nor there.  People generally resist change to their core cultures.  It might therefore be true BOTH that most Christians were resistant to a given redemptive change (though one would have to cite evidence for that claim), AND that the Gospel provided the reformist spur that set billions of people free.

For instance, most American southerners resisted the abolition of slavery, obviously.  And most were "Christians" in some sense.  But it was in their strong self-interest to keep slaves, and a blow to their pride to meekly obey the North.  So the fact that they did resist abolition, in no way undermines the evident historical truths that abolition arose in a Christian society, and was led mostly by serious Christians for religious reasons.

(13) some are not particularly Christian 

I don't suppose discovering America is particularly Christian, true.  But that does not conflict with the thesis that "the Church" set into motion the events that resulted in that discovery.  

Most of these items are, I think, particularly Christian, though.  Jesus was a healer.  Jesus was an educator.  Jesus loved women in a healthy, redeeming manner.  Jesus told his disciples to make the world worshipers of the One Creator God, whose universe is discovered through science.  Since "Christian" means "Christ-like," it is by definition Christian to act like Christ.  

 (14) and all were encouraged by humanistic forces and reflect Greek thinking as much as gospel thinking

This seems, on the surface, to contradict (13).  If some of these movements were not "particularly Christian," then to say that they reflect Greek thinking "as much as gospel thinking" is to say they are also not particularly Greek.  

But perhaps that is a mere debater's point.  More importantly, I dispute Goldingay's historical point.  No, pre-Christian humanists were not generally inclined to liberate slaves or raise the status of women.  And they did not: Jesus and his followers did, around the world, as the articles and books cited above demonstrate. 

(15) [Footnote 10]: On slavery in particular (even when one allows for overstatement) Hector Avalos, Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011).” 

While this particular book may ultimately prove a model of careful scholarship, I wouldn't bet on it.  See my response to (6), above, and linked articles.   

(16) "One can alternatively do another thought experiment. Imagine we were still waiting for the Messiah, that the first coming of Jesus has not yet happened.  How would things in the twenty-first century be different from what they are? In the twenty-first century world there is (among other things) much war, oppression, family dysfunction, marital unfaithfulness and divorce, sexual exploitation and sexual slavery, and economic slavery. 

This strikes me as a very bold, and very wrong-headed, claim.  Before Christ, almost half the population of Athens were slaves.  What is it now, 0.2%?  If this article is correct, one in two hundred, not one in two, modern humans is something of a slave.  Shouldn't we distinguish between forest and shrubs?  Isn't it an improvement if we rid the world of 99% of something bad?  

Warfare is much less severe than it used to be, too.  Among some tribes in Amazonia or New Guinea, about a third of young men were killed in battle or in village rivalries.  That percentage went way down, after those tribes accepted the Gospel.  The same tamping down of violence seems to have occurred in Scandinavia, indeed in countries around the world.   War has not been abolished, of course - human nature remains what it was, and most people are not Christian.  But let us not pretend that things are just as they once were.  We do not do gladiator fights in Yankee Field, or set animals on slaves in Tiger Stadium, or cut out human hearts on the Washington Mall, or even sell slaves at the Mall of the Americas.  That's progress.


(17) It is difficult to claim that the world is in better shape than it was two thousand years ago. 

It certainly is not.  "Human society has become vastly more civil in the past 2000 years, thanks in large part to the Gospel of Jesus Christ."  There, I just did it.

And I have backed that up.  Slavery has shrunk to a tiny remnant of what it was.  Human sacrifice has been almost banished.  (Despite post-Christian revivals among the Nazis and Communists.)  No one builds pyramids and cuts out thousands of hearts, then feeds the meat to the waiting upper castes.  Lower castes in India are not totally free, but their condition is vastly improved.  The feet of women in China are no longer bound.  Women are no longer imprisoned in their homes in India.  (They are in some parts of the Muslim world, but that is only because the influence of Jesus has been checked.)

Hospitals and schools dot the countryside in almost every nation on earth.  Polygamy is engaged in by a small minority.

One could go on and on.  Did I mention medicine and technology?  Hot baths and medicine and sanitation and sewers?  Are we not communicating on the World Wide Web?  Men and women are still sinners.  But to deny social improvement (along with, in some cases, regression), and to get such a denial past editors at IVP, is pretty amazing.

 I am not clear that the coming of Jesus made much difference to these aspects of how the world is. 

Well I am clear about that.  

(18) That fact does not mean Jesus has failed to have the effect he said he would have. He said nothing about the world getting better in these ways. 

But God told Abraham, who had just offered up Isaac in a shadow of Jesus' redemptive death on the cross: "I will bless your seed, and through your seed I will bless all the nations of the world." 

And Jesus told his disciples to follow him, doing the things he did - which can only mean healing, bringing peace, teaching, feeding the hungry, casting out demons, saving the marginalized from oppression, redeeming sinners.  Shalom is a sign of the Gospel of Peace.  I am surprised that a Christian professor would seem to deny the visible reality of that sign, obscured as it often is (this is also part of the Gospel) by our sins.   

(19) Indeed, he said they would continue the way they were and if anything get worse. Abolitionist Theodore Parker declared his faith that the arc of the moral universe “bends towards justice,” and Martin Luther King and Barack Obama have repeated his conviction. It’s sometimes possible to see evidence of that fact in the short term, but I am not clear that there is evidence to justify Parker’s faith when one looks at history more broadly. After all, freedom and civil rights did come to be granted, but first they had to be taken away, and fifty years after Martin Luther King matters look less encouraging to some African Americans than they did thirty or forty years ago.

Subjective appeals to how some people see matters do not change the long-term historical facts.  2000 years ago, slavery was ordinary: now it is recognized as an abomination.  G. K. Chesterton predicted that it would be revived, and it has been, by the Nazis and Communists.  And other ills -- the breakdown in the family, which is the greatest problem in the African American and now European and Euro-American communities, and the source of other ills -- reflect a failure on our part to continue to live out the Gospel.  If we neglect the Gospel, all bets are off.  But on numerous levels -- Rene Girard is also worth reading on this -- the Gospel of Jesus continues to secretly control and inspire reform in every generation. 

(20) "The difference Jesus’ coming brought about is that there are billions of people in the world who acknowledge the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who would likely not otherwise have done so.  This fact is in keeping with a New Testament emphasis.  It is also the case that when these people die, they have a basis for knowing that they will rise from death on resurrection day, because Jesus’ death and resurrection initiated the bringing into being of a resurrected people to which they will belong.  The result of Jesus’ coming was the preaching of the gospel to the world and the providing of the basis for a confident expectation of resurrection." 

True, the New Testament does not simplistically promise us a rose garden, or if it does, only one with thorns that are numerous and painful.  Jesus promises his followers that they will be hated, persecuted, and even killed.  And those promises have often come true.

Neither human nature nor the plots of the Evil One have changed.  We saw in the 20th Century how evil could metastasize and assume forms that rival the Aztec pyramids for sheer evil, and on a far grander scale -- even in the country where Luther preached, indeed Luther himself was not guiltless in that evil, as Avalos rightly points out.

And yet Jesus told his disciples they were the "salt of the earth." Isn't salt supposed to bear some preserving or flavorful qualities?

Jesus also called his disciples the "light of the world."  Alexander Solzhenitsyn compared Christians in the Gulag to candles, casting light into the small sphere around them.  He himself received that light, converted to Christ, and went on to help inspire the overthrow of Soviet tyranny.  (With other followers of Christ, like Pope John Paul II: George Weigel tells part of the story in The Final Revolution.)  Isn't light something one can see?  Isn't that Jesus point -- that the Gospel would inspire good acts by Christians that would cause even non-Christians to stand up and take notice?

And haven't Jesus' words come true?  (So long as we do not help our enemies obscure the best that the Gospel does through Jesus' most faithful disciples!)

Jesus instructed his disciples to "Go into all the world, and preach the Gospel . . . teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you."  Shouldn't that teaching, which centered (Matthew also tells us) on "love God, love your neighbor as yourself" have some affect even on this world?  Isn't that what Jesus taught us would also be among the signs that would follow the impact of his ministry?

And are not the great things the followers of Jesus have indeed accomplished -- healing, teaching, reforming, creating civil society even new sciences -- worth glorifying God for?  Are they not also part of the witness we should bear to the world?  (As sincerely as we must also acknowledge our sins?)

It would be unfair to judge Dr. Goldingay's whole book by these few careless passages.  But they point to the need for Christians to make the historical case for the Gospel far more effectively than we have done so far -- not to paper over sins, but to tell an enormous and important story that the world refuses to relate, and often lies about, instead.