Truth Really Matters

Columbia Heights Benjamin and Sarah Lay, Quakers, sailed in 1718 to Barbados, an English colony. They stood out – both were hunchbacks and just four feet tall. Ben was forty-one and had worked as an accomplished glover, shepherd, and sailor. He was determined to follow Christ in every aspect of life. One day Sarah visited a friend and was shocked to see a naked African tied up outside the house, bleeding from a savage whipping, flies swarming his wounds.

He was a slave and a runaway. Despite Britain’s ‘Christian’ culture, the law despised the biblical injunction that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal 3:29) The event set the Lays on a crusade, confronting slave owners, opening their home and table to starving slaves, furiously denouncing the practice of slavery. They became unpopular and left Barbados in 1720.

Settling in Philadelphia, the Lays were distressed at the hypocrisy. William Penn, the city’s founder and enthusiast for ‘the Right of Liberty,’ had himself been a slave-owner. The Lays were appalled to find slave-markets in the City of Brotherly Love and whips and chains for sale in the shops. Benjamin’s continued activism got him banned from the local Quaker meeting hall, at the insistence of Quaker slave-owners. At an annual assembly he addressed his fellow Quakers, drawing out a concealed sword: The enslavement of Africans, he declared, was “as justifiable in the sight of the Almighty, who beholds and respects all nations and colours of men with an equal regard, as if you should thrust a sword through their hearts as I do through this book.”

At this he ran the sword through a hollowed-out Bible, which concealed a bladder full of blood-red pokeberry juice – it splattered everywhere. The crowd erupted in indignation and threw Benjamin out. But he’d made his point. In 1759 as he lay dying, he heard news that the Quaker assembly had voted to forbid Quakers from trading in slaves. Benjamin sighed, “I can now die in peace.”

I’ve drawn the anecdote above from Tom Holland’s 2019 book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Holland seeks to trace the threads of Christian influence over the last two millennia, especially those elements that endure to the present. He states his ambition “to explore how we in the West came to be what we are, and to think the way that we do.”

The book has been widely praised within the conservative evangelical community, but I have some cautionary notes. Holland is not a Christian, although he is sympathetic to the benefits a Christian worldview brings to life on Earth. He also sees ‘Christianity’ from the viewpoint of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox history. In particular he fails to distinguish between the biblical Gospel and the fruits of a genuine born again conversion, on the one hand, from the sacramental, ritual-driven religion of the Catholic perspective on the other.

Nevertheless, Holland’s historical work is well worth the read. I believe the theme of how the Christian faith underpins Western civilization is better and more succinctly explored in Glen Scrivener’s book, The Air We Breathe, which I reviewed in my essay of 11/1/2023. Check that out. Also, for a conservative, biblically-based history of Christianity over the last two thousand years, I recommend David Cloud’s History of the Churches.

So let’s discuss Holland’s Dominion. He asserts, right up front in the Preface, “To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions.” This assessment is independent of whether Jesus actually rose from the dead. The pervasiveness of the Christian worldview has established in minds and hearts such principles as “the workings of conscience are the surest determinants of good law,” that “Church and state exist as distinct entities,” and that “polygamy is unacceptable.” Such principles are core to public morality, despite an increasingly secular culture.

I’d point out that the “conscience” principle above implicitly assumes that man is a soul/spirit, in essence something beyond mere machine. An automaton has no conscience. Any Christian moral principle, indeed any moral principle, disavows evolution – axiomatically – and therefore leads one to a biblical history of our origins, not a materialistic fantasy.

Holland brilliantly observes how shocking the Christian message was at its birth. Identification with divinity was often claimed by kings and conquerors. A divine nature justified all manner of despotism and atrocities. But the Christian message was that God had entered into manhood and then been abused and crucified. In the Roman world the idea was grotesque, scandalous. The Jews, especially, were repelled by the claim that almighty God had condescended to take on a human body. That’s why Paul (in 1 Cor 1:23) calls the Gospel a “stumbling block” to the Jews and “foolishness” to the Greeks.

When I was a young Christian I wondered at such passages. Once I understood it, the Gospel made perfect sense to me; in fact, no other narrative or worldview is even in its class. But I grew up in 20th century America. 1st century Israel and the Roman Empire had difficulties with the idea of God suffering for man’s sins. “To abandon the cult of the Caesars was not merely to court danger, but to risk the very stitching that held together the patchwork society of the province’s cities.”

The Jews were particularly offended by Paul’s message that even the Gentiles could be the children of God; worse, that Jews who rejected the Messiahship of Christ would be cast out from God’s kingdom. Paul’s message and Paul’s God recognized no borders and no class divisions among human souls made in the image of God.

Holland notes that today over two billion people embrace the narrative. Holland, of course, does not distinguish within Christendom regarding saved vs. lost. (Most of Christendom has not been biblically born again.) Holland observes that historians “are not in the business of debating whether it is actually true. Instead, they study Christianity for what it can reveal, not about God, but about the affairs of humanity.” He admits that to consider the supernatural is to engage in apologetics, perhaps a reputable effort, but not ‘history.’ Sad. I’d hate to be one of those historians standing before the Great White Throne mentioned in Revelation chapter 20.

The author shares a personal anecdote. He remembers his shock as a boy in Sunday School when he saw in an illustrated children’s Bible a picture of Adam and Eve with a brachiosaur. “I was rock-solid certain no human being had ever seen a sauropod.” The teacher did not share Tom’s outrage about this ‘error.’ He began to doubt his childish faith. Tom’s obsession with dinosaurs connected to a fascination with ancient empires and he grew to enjoy the accounts of ancient pagan gods more than what he knew about God from the Bible. Eventually, though, he realized the brutal consequences in ancient societies that derived from pagan religions. He came to appreciate the profound benefits that the Christian faith delivered to civilization. Such realizations motivated him to write Dominion.

It’s interesting to me that Holland (to date) has missed salvation because of a very early acceptance of the evolutionary narrative. He recounts no personal effort whatsoever to explore whether there is any truth to the evolutionary fantasy. I pray he does explore it. The Genesis creation account will stand up to historical investigation. Evolution will not.

Holland observes that an understanding of worldview issues, along with the truth and the history of the Christian faith can make a huge difference in world affairs. The secular West embraces many Christian principles, thinking they are endemic to the nature of man. But fallen man historically is anti-Christian in disposition. German chancellor Angela Merkel opened up Germany, and all of Europe to Muslim immigration. She asserted that Islam belonged in Germany as much as Christianity, just another religion among many, believing that all should be compatible with a secular society under secular governance. But that distinction between church and state is a Christian concept. Islam integrates everything under Sharia. Muslims don’t believe in freedom of conscience – Islam is foundationally about submission to clerical authority. What could go wrong when you welcome multitudes of Muslims into Western nations? Europe is finding out.

Holland makes the case that the New Testament transformed sexual ethics. In 1 Corinthians 6 the Holy Spirit commands us to “flee fornication.” After all, the believer’s body is the very “temple of the Holy Ghost.” We’ve been bought with a price – the blood of the Savior – and we are to glorify God in both body and spirit. In 1 Corinthians 7 Paul frames sex as a gift only for within a marriage.

This was revolutionary for the Roman culture. A full-fledged Roman citizen’s body was sacrosanct, but not those of slaves or women. Holland: “In Rome, men no more hesitated to use slaves and prostitutes to relieve themselves of their sexual needs than they did to use the side of a road as a toilet.” The Bible and the Christian message today continues to call men and women to dignity, and rebuke those who treat sex as anything other than what God intended.

Charity for the poor has deep Christian roots, as seen in the life of Jesus and His admonition to his disciples. See Matthew 25:35 (etc.) and Galatians 2:10, for examples. Holland recounts the 4th century endeavors of two wealthy Roman brothers, Basil and Gregory, pastors in Caesarea and Nyssa, who devoted their lives to the poor. Gregory took Christ’s example and taught that dignity was for all and not excluded, as philosophers would have it, from the “stinking, toiling masses.” God’s love for the derelict and outcast demands our love for them, too.

Basil, who had studied medicine in Athens, built a hospital which welcomed even lepers, who were usually scorned in revulsion by everyone. But Basil welcomed them with a kiss and gave both refuge and care. When Basil saw a boy offered up in a slave market by his starving parents, he launched into a sermon against the rich: “The bread in your board belongs to the hungry; the cloak in your wardrobe to the naked; the shoes you let rot to the barefoot; the money in your vaults to the destitute.”

Gregory railed against the institution of slavery as an unpardonable offense against God. “Not all the universe would constitute an adequate payment for the soul of a mortal.” To own slaves was “to set one’s own power above God’s.” This was a minority view at that time, though.

Abandoning babies on the roadside or at the trash heap was common in the ancient world; some declared the practice to be a virtue – for the good of the state. Christians saw it differently. Macrina, sister to Basil and Gregory, would search out the trash heaps to rescue infants, who were often girls. She raised them as her own. She knew she was doing God’s work.

Holland finds some distinctions within Christendom, detailing some of the corruption in the Roman Catholic Church through the ages. Notably, he mentions the Waldensians, a group named after Waldes, a rich Lyons merchant who, in 1173, was inspired by Jesus’ teachings to sell all his possessions and preach the Gospel. Those that followed Waldes’ example were persecuted by the RCC for denying the primacy of the RCC priesthood. Christ alone was their bishop, they declared. Such dissidents resulted in a whole system of persecution with a new breed of an official: an inquisitor.

One notable inquisitor, Conrad, thought it intimidating to burn heretics alive. “So many heretics were burned throughout Germany that their number could not be comprehended.” He over-reached when he tried persecuting the nobility. A group of knights ambushed him on the road and cut him down. There was much rejoicing throughout Germany.

What Holland fails to recognize is that there is nothing Christian about the RCC. The Inquisition was damnable – a work of Satan aimed at vilifying anything associated with Christianity. It is obvious that Jesus and His disciples spread the Gospel via preaching, conversation, and persuasion . . . never coercion. Coercion is a Satanic ploy, not Christian.

Martin Luther, at first hoping to reform the RCC, became convinced that all of its papal pronouncements, along with Aquinas’ philosophy, must be cast down. Holland: “The whole structure needed to be condemned, demolished.” The RCC had not brought people to God; rather, it had seduced them into paganism and idolatry. Worst of all, and Luther got this right, the RCC system promised salvation through rituals, charity, mortifications of the flesh, pilgrimages, offerings, and priest-sanctioned sacraments, whereas Scripture assures us that salvation is a gift of God through faith in Jesus Christ. A gift – not a hopefully earned reward.

Princes and kings, inspired by Luther, redesigned the state so that it ceded no sovereignty to Rome. The world comprised two kingdoms: One was a sheepfold, in which individuals could open their hearts and receive grace directly from God. The other was overseen by those who guarded the sheep from dogs and robbers with clubs. “These two kingdoms must be sharply distinguished, and both be permitted to remain; the one to produce piety, the other to bring about external peace and prevent evil deeds; neither is sufficient in the world without the other.”

Jean Calvin has only a brief treatment in Holland’s work. The emphasis is on Calvin’s policy that welcomed refugees into Geneva. Even Jews benefited from the city’s charity. Although many residents resented the influx of outsiders, Calvin convinced them that demonstrating a godly society was their mission to the world. Calvin embraced the evangelistic opportunity. Refugees would be educated in the Reformed faith.

I’ll comment that the Christian charity of welcoming refugees has been perverted by Leftist practices in the West. Modern-day communists open the borders, uncontrollably, not at all seeking to demonstrate a godly society nor to evangelize into the Christian faith, but rather to undermine and disrupt free societies. The excuses for open-border policies sound ‘Christian,’ but their intent is destructive, both to the citizenry and to many of the desperate border-crossers who are abused along the way.

Holland mentions John Knox, a Calvin disciple who returned to Scotland, stirring up a zeal among the Scots to end their idolatry, specifically by rooting out Roman Catholic churches and their influence. Across the Channel, in 1572, thousands of Protestants were slaughtered in Paris and across France by Catholics on the feast-day of Saint Bartholomew. The low countries saw more deaths at the hands of Catholics than anywhere else. Doctrine, apparently, matters.

Queen Elizabeth’s version of Protestantism included much of the trappings of ‘popery,’ including well-to-do bishops and crucifixes everywhere. “What were all the titles of bishops if not mere vanities ‘drawn out of the Pope’s shop’?” The Puritans, who desired strong separation from the trappings of Rome, viewed the affectations of monarchy as emblems of tyranny. True authority should reside in the fellowship of the godly, led by its elected pastors and presbyters. Puritans saw their mission as “scraping away from the ark of Christianity all the accumulated barnacles and seaweed of human invention.”

These were the seeds of the American experiment. It was conservative Protestantism – really, a biblical perspective on governance, based on an understanding of man’s corruptibility and the need to balance and distribute power, that drove (ultimately) the tripartite and federal structure of American government.

The English Civil War (1600s) found opposing sides in disagreement about how God related to the people. King Charles I, typical of European monarchs, saw God’s power and authority flowing through the throne, establishing the basis and stability of the government. Presbyterians saw religion far more personally – biblically, each individual had his own relationship with God, and his own conscience led by the Holy Spirit. The two rival philosophies could not stand together.

When Oliver Cromwell, in 1653, was appointed Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, he was the first-ever Protestant head of state to defend liberty of conscience. His founding constitution declared, “Such as profess faith in God by Jesus Christ shall not be restrained from, but shall be protected in, the profession of the faith and the exercise of their religion.” This principle is clearly professed in the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

‘Organized religion,’ whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, was no friend to the Jews, however. Baruch Spinoza, a Jewish philosopher, was cursed and damned by his own synagogue in Amsterdam. Spinoza, in 1665, wrote a book in defense of religious liberty, although he was neither Jewish nor Christian in beliefs. He was a pantheist: God was “nothing other than the whole universe.” God did not exist beyond the laws of the cosmos; he was those laws. These laws made life deterministic. Destinies were preordained. In this, he agreed with Calvin.

I’ve written on this in several essays. See my essay, for example, linking Calvinism and atheism in the 2016 archive, December 1, 2016. Calvinism is simply determinism from above, whereas atheism / pantheism is determinism from below. Calvinists should be embarrassed to have the same philosophy as atheists, denying free will to God’s image-bearers.

Spinoza decided that the only way to undermine the authority of the Reformed Church was to attack its foundations, including the very existence of God and any divinity attached to Jesus of Nazareth. Spinoza believed that true enlightenment derives from reason. But this is nonsense within a materialistic worldview. What is reason but the random outputs of brain chemistry? In short, no soul = no reason.

Spinoza, although celebrated as the chief atheist of his age, assured Christians that much of their religion might be retained, despite there being no God and no actual resurrection of Jesus. In this he shared some sentiments with today’s Jordan Peterson, who apparently sees Christianity as a beneficial and useful myth for human flourishing, regardless of whether it is historically and metaphysically true.

Voltaire, perhaps the most famous atheist of the late 1700s, saw the practical benefits of religious tolerance when he lived in England. “If there were only one religion in England, there would be danger of tyranny; if there were two, they would cut each other’s throats; but there are thirty, and they live happily together in peace.”

What none of these secular analysts appreciate, including Tom Holland, is that any society where the dominant religion is biblical Christianity, practices religious freedom, not merely tolerance. Why? Because the truly born again Christian cares for the souls of the unbelievers around him. He knows he must persuade them of the Gospel’s veracity. He must show love, mercy, and grace to those who disagree. Any ‘Christian’ sect that mistreats those outside shows their underlying non-Christian character. Examples abound throughout history and today. During the Reformation period, if Roman Catholics had political power, they persecuted. As did Lutherans when they found themselves in power. Mormons, JWs, and Apostolic Lutherans have little love and occasional hostility for those outside their ilk. A valid test for true Christianity is found in the treatment of outsiders. Biblical admonitions include those in the Sermon on the Mount, also in 1 Corinthians 13, and 1 John.

Holland professes that the guiding principle of America’s founders was the book of Genesis – all are created equal because all are made in God’s image. Holland sees the genius of the Constitution’s authors is that they used the language of the Enlightenment to garb the conservative (biblical) Protestantism that common Americans saw as their inheritance. The spirit came from the meeting homes of Philadelphia . . . not from the salons of Paris.

Ben Franklin, no Christian himself wrote, “If Christian Preachers had continued to teach as Christ & his apostles did, without Salaries, and as the Quakers now do, I imagine Tests would never have existed.” Referring to tests of orthodoxy to enable citizenship and standing, it’s interesting that Franklin sees the biblical pattern for church practice far better than those in institutional churches. (See my ‘church’ essays in the Discipleship section of this site.)

Contrast the French Revolution. The Jacobins despised the Christian conviction that ultimate judgment was God’s prerogative, that Heaven or Hell as the destination for individual sinners depended solely on the individual’s relationship with God. Rather, they insisted that justice must triumph here and now. The Republic had to be made pure. The Jacobins were solely qualified to separate sheep from goats and deliver rewards and punishments.

Modern communists, leftists, Marxists – Democrats – follow eagerly in the path of the Jacobins.

The most (in)famous atheist of the late 1800s was certainly Friedrich Nietzsche. I see him as perhaps the most honest notable atheist. He loathed those who would cling to Christian morality while denying the existence of God: “Naivete – as if morality could survive when the God who sanctions it is missing!” Nietzsche despised the spectacle of the Cross, since it had persuaded the beautiful and brave, the rich and the powerful, “that it was their natural inferiors, the hungry and the humble, who deserved to inherit the earth.” He admired the Greeks because of their cruelty.

Nietzsche was Satan’s modern prophet, preaching the antithesis of the Christian message. He was willing to put the consequences of unbelief on the table for all to see. I’m glad he did! He made the choice clear; I believe that helps to trigger the conscience of the wishy-washy, so that some might actually repent and come to Christ.

Holland briefly mentions the richest and most popular atheist of the last generation . . . John Lennon. His single, “Imagine,” expressed the yearning for global peace, but with no Heaven, no Hell, a brotherhood of man, but with no God. Lennon’s idyllic wish for no possessions was startling in the hypocrisy of seeing him gad about his mansion on 72 acres. When Lennon was shot dead by a nutcase fan, he was treated like a martyr . . . a martyr to what is hard to say.

I’ve heard of megachurches singing “Imagine” like it’s a favorite hymn. I don’t think the Gospel has actually penetrated such churches or their pastors.

Holland cites a number of cultural events influenced by historic Christianity. The #MeToo movement was certainly in sync with biblical admonitions to flee fornication and to love (sexually) only your wife. This, despite no overt evidence of Christians actually being a part of the movement. The human body was not an object to be exploited – men were called to exercise control over their lusts just as the Puritans (or the Corinthians) were admonished. In effect, Holland argues, two thousand years of Christian morality spawned #MeToo, although its activist core would likely deny any connection.

Dominion is a lengthy read. Go for it, if you love history. If you’re a Christian you’ll be appalled at Holland’s balance, what he deems worthy of reporting along with the awesome breadth of relevant church history he neglects. So read Scrivener and Cloud and others, too. And be a part of today’s Christian influence on those around you – get some tracts out this week!

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com