Class One: Intro on Christ’s Transformation of History

Class One: Intro on Christ’s Transformation of History

Please find here a fine review of the book Christianity on Trial: Arguments Against Anti-Religious Bigotry.  The book itself is in the Williamson County Library, and still available for purchase with booksellers.

Christianity on Trial_ Arguments Against Anti-Religious Bigotry (click to read)

What follows is a quote from theologian David Bentley Hart whose book, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (Yale, 2009) provides a strong case for the naming of our class.

Hart speaks of “how enormous a transformation of thought, sensibility, culture, morality, and spiritual imagination Christianity constituted in the age of pagan Rome;  the liberation it offered from fatalism, cosmic despair, and the terror of occult agencies; the immense dignity it conferred upon the human person; its subversion of the cruelest aspects of pagan society; its (alas, only partial) demystification of political power; its ability to create moral community where none had existed before; and its elevation of active charity above all other virtues.

Stated in its most elementary and most buoyantly positive form, my argument is, first or all, that among all the many great transitions that have marked the evolution of Western civilization, whether, convulsive or gradual, political or philosophical, social or scientific, material or spiritual, there has been only one–the triumph of Christianity–that can be called in the fullest sense a “revolution”: a truly massive and epochal revision of humanity’s prevailing vision of reality, so pervasive in its influence and so vast in its consequences as actually to have created a new conception of the world, of history, of human nature, of time, and of the moral good.  To my mind, I should add, it was an event immeasurably more impressive in its cultural creativity and more ennobling in its moral power than any other movement of spirit, will, imagination, aspiration, or accomplishment in the history of the West.”  (from the “Introduction,” p. xi.)

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