Changing the World

Philippians 2:3-4 (ESV)
³  Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. ⁴  Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.

Recently, I fell into a discussion about how much a particular cult was doing for God.  As a result, I began to review the things I knew about Christian history and returned to a book my wife and I had read 10 years ago, How Christianity Changed the World, by Alvin Schmidt. Here are some of the points Schmidt makes.

While many atrocities have been done throughout history in the name of Christ, they were not done according to the teachings of Christ.  Most of the major beneficial changes in the history of the Western World have come through the actions and philosophy of Christians.

The Sanctity of Life

  In the ancient Roman world, life held little value.  The slaughter in the Coliseum claimed many thousands of lives in the name of free entertainment for the citizens.  One consequence of devaluing life was the Roman practice of throwing unwanted infants into the Tiber River to drown.  Beginning in the first century, Christians would rescue these children from certain death and raise them as their own.

Of course, today, we see Christians at the head of pro-life causes in the United States.  As with slavery, this is an evil against which desent people must stand.  Christians are at the forefront.

Slavery

     While slavery was practiced in both Old and New Testament times, the New Testament taught slaves were equal to their masters, that they would need to be treated as brothers and sisters in Christ.  It was legal, accepted, and even expected to kill a runaway slave. In the little New Testament book of Philemon, the slave master is asked to forgive his runaway slave, Onesimus, and accept him as a Christian brother.

     Many preachers in the American South before the Civil War taught slavery was God’s way, that the black man was born to serve the white man, and that the black man was inferior and good only for manual labor.  We often forget it was the Christians who created the Underground Railroad.  It was Christian activists who were the abolitionists.  It was the Christian abolitionists who helped form the Republican Party in order to fight slavery on a grander scale, to change the heart of a nation.

Later in American history, Reverend Martin Luther King fought segregation and bigotry in our land as a Christian principle.  King was a Christian and a lifelong Republican. Two things seldom mentioned today.

Healthcare

     Dionysius of Alexandria tells of a plague in that great city in 250 A.D., how the pagan Romans would turn from the sick, even from their close friends.  They would leave them in the road to die and treat their bodies with contempt letting them rot where they lay.  He describes how the Christians treated the sick: Very many of our brethren, while in their exceeding love and brotherly kindness, did not spare themselves, but kept by each other, and visited the sick without thought of their own peril, and ministered to them assiduously and treated them for their healing in Christ, died from time to time most joyfully…

     Once Christianity was legalized by Constantine in the early fourth century, Christians began to establish public health care facilities.  The Council of Nicea (325 A.D.) issued an edict that a hospice was to be established in every city that had a cathedral.  While the main purpose of these hospices was to nurse the sick, they also provided shelter for the poor and lodging for Christian pilgrims.  All this was based on the examples Jesus gave us of healing the sick and helping the poor and coming to the aid of strangers.

     Still more can be said of the changes to world history created by the ideas that we are to love our neighbors.  We’ll look at those in the next blog.