Greg is probably on the road somewhere and has no idea how Aaron and I have hijacked the blog with poetry. I will dull his shock slightly by trying to answer the question from his last post: what has theology (I assume he means Christian) done for humanity? Before I answer the question though, surely no one is naive enough to think that science is an unmixed “gift” to humanity. What about Chernobyl, Love Canal, and eugenics?

My initial brief answer to Greg’s question is that Christian theology brought to human civilization a heretofore unknown concern for the weak and helpless. In current terms: the victims. Sparta threw its weak and “deformed” children over the cliff, and other civilizations have been doing the same things in various ways through the centuries. The Judeo-Christian theology of man in God’s image results in a very different view of the human person and how she or he may be treated. Both testaments of scripture witness God’s concern for the weak and poor sometimes over and against the strong.

It is ironic that secularists at times view Christians poorly because they feel we do not have enough concern for the “victims” of our cultures. They feel we have been co-opted or have deliberately perpetuated violence against the helpness around the world. What they don’t realize is that their concern for the helpless does not come from Darwin, Nietzsche, Einstein, etc. — it comes from Christianity. They have “radicalized” it and claim that it is a self-evident truth. It is not. It is Christian, and it needs to be reclaimed as such.

Most of what I said comes from a thought provoking book entitled I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by Rene Girard. It’s very interesting but dense.

Posted in Culture, Theology & Doctrine |