Posted on 12/01/2019 4:12:38 AM PST by Kaslin
Until this year, the first 20 pages of “Witness” by Whittaker Chambers (Random House, 1952) comprised the most brilliant preface or foreword I’d ever read. Chambers, who had crossed over from Communism to Christianity, explained that Communism is “man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’” And gods play to win, as Chambers goes on to show during the next 788 pages, which are good but not as good as the beginning.
The first 17 pages of historian Tom Holland’s “Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World” (Basic, 2019) knock the start of “Witness” out of first place. Those pages beautifully tell the amazing story of how a culture that had esteemed only big winners began to care about (in worldly terms) big losers. If the familiar Gospels no longer move you to wonder and perhaps tears, read that preface.
Holland begins with a description of ancient Rome’s most dramatic gentrification project. A ditch just outside the ancient walls was littered with the carcasses of dead slaves. Roman builders cleaned it out and created Rome’s first heated swimming pool. Holland notes, “The marble fittings, the tinkling fountains, the perfumed flower beds: all were raised on the backs of the dead.”
Some of those slaves had suffered the most excruciating, contemptible death Rome could offer: crucifixion. To be hung naked, nailed to a cross, every breath an agony, helpless to beat away buzzards: “such a fate, Roman intellectuals agreed, was the worst imaginable.” But sometimes it seemed necessary, for “luxury and splendor such as Rome could boast were dependent, in the final reckoning, on keeping those who sustained it in their place.” Holland quotes politician/historian Tacitus: “We have slaves drawn from every corner of the world in our households?.? It is only by means of terror that we can hope to coerce such scum.”
Crucifixion as a deterrent needed to be public, with victims unavailingly crying for mercy, but “so foul was the carrion-reek of their disgrace that many felt tainted even by viewing a crucifixion.” Romans almost never described this ultimate penalty, but “four detailed accounts of the process by which a man might be sentenced to the cross, and then suffer his punishment, have survived from antiquity.” Remarkably, they all describe the same execution -- that of “a Jew by the name of Jesus?.?..resurrected into a new and glorious form.?.. By enduring the most agonizing fate imaginable, he had conquered death itself.”
Evangelicals understand this. Here’s what we often do not understand: “The utter strangeness of all this, for the vast majority of people in the Roman world, did not lie in the notion that a mortal might become divine.” Romans thought this had happened to Hercules, Romulus, Julius Caesar, and Caesar’s adopted son Augustus. Winners could gain divinity: They were victors because they had the power to torture their enemies, not to be tortured. Holland writes, “That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque.”
The societies that developed over the centuries, as more people came to worship a loser (by Roman standards), grew a different set of virtues alongside the old Roman ones of military toughness and tenacity. Anselm, a millennium after the wondrous crucifixion, described them as “patience in tribulation, offering the other cheek, praying for one’s enemies, loving those who hate us.”
Holland’s next 600 pages mix brilliance and some questionable judgments, but they continue to depict the power of Christianity in upsetting the powerful. Even those who turn against the theology have usually absorbed some of the fundamental ethic. For example, the Me Too movement did not emerge from churches, but Holland notes that in ancient Rome sexual predation was unquestionably “the perk of a very exclusive subsection of society: powerful men. Zeus, Apollo, Dionysus: All had been habitual rapists.”
Christianity changed all that in theory and sometimes in practice. Even those who hate Christ pay tribute to Him when they care for a few of the least of these -- and, someday, maybe more.
I view it a bit different.
If you look at the west, you see many accomplishments throughout the nations that were once called the “free industrialized west”. These are basically the G7 nations.
This occurred for only one main reason.
Christianity.
And it was not all christian nations.
It was not the Christians of Rome... they managed to screw up South and Central America.
It was not the Orthodox Christians of the east///// as they were always and still are under assault by the muslims.
But it was the Christians of Great Britain.
This occurred for many reasons foremost being avoiding oppression by their “overlords”. This prompted the creation of their Magna Carta at the height of their first cultural revolution and at the height of the “christian crusades”. This removed them from being serfs and slaves of the British “nobles”
This cornerstone document gave them their rights to own property. Once they could own property, they learned that they could buy and sell property.
As a result, ideas came next. Thus the birth of patents..... inventions AND the development of the sciences.
NO ONE else on the planet did this. No one use created the steps nor the cornerstones of infrastructure that the British Christians did.
These building blocks were modified as the Christians had some reformations, the most noticeable was that of luther.... which gave people their individualism. The concept of self determination occurred. Concepts of individualism, self actualization, self realization, self determination... thusly the formalization and birth of the entrepreneur /capitalist.
All of these reasons are what lead to the industrial revolution which no one else on the planet did. This is that put the GREAT into Great Britain. This is the root of the “civilized” world, the free industrialized west and, the G7.
Conversely no one else on the planet did this.
Not the Indians, not the Chinese, not the africans, not the world of islam.
None of the communalists, the tribalists, the marxists nor muslims could ever create this infrastructure,,,, thusly they are about 800 years behind the west in their development.
The greatest event that ever occurred was the incarnation of the ‘God-Man’, Jesus Christ. His birth, death and resurrection truly changed the world, one heart at a time.
I have read several Tom Holland books. They are all excellent. Holland is not a believer but acknowledges the key role Christianity played in the history of the Western world.
Great synopsis.
Thank you.
That perspective is exactly what the coalition of marxist-muslims and the BHO regime ARE trying to destroy. THAT is a part of their battle with The Donald, they want the continued masking of the corruption and the totalitarian state that BHO had installed.
Marxist-Muslim coalition?
Go read Carlos the Jackal for his opinion of how to bring down the west. He acknowledged that Marxism by itself could not bring down the west , nor could islam; but an alliance, a coalition of the two could. Obama was both a marxist and a muslim... and a lying radical at that.
Libya? Benghazi was all a part of that.
All Obama’s embedded marxists and muslims need to be weeded out....
The hijacking and destruction of America, the hub of western Christian man was well underway .... and many of its constituents are still fighting to maintain the nefarious obama agenda.
FUBO, FUHRC FUUN
Had Hillary won? All of this would have been swept under the carpet ..... inclusive of America
This was the root objective of the Obama administration. He ran jihad from 1600 Pennsylvania.
This takes us right into the UN and the EU.
Great posts. Thanks.
Liberty(right Rush?)/Freedom/Individuals/Christianity paid a heavy price to get into The Collectivist’s Cup. It battled down the backstretch but broke down in the far turn (they shoot horses don’t they?). Down the stretch it was Marx vs. Mohammed. At the wire it was Mohammed by a head.
Analysis of “Milestones” - Sayyid Qutb (VERY fascinating book if you have the time)
Qutb’s ideological consequence has been compared to that of Hitler and he has been deemed “as significant [to Islamism] as Lenin was to Communism.” The sweeping influence of Qutb’s work has earned him the designation of “[the radical Islamic] Karl Marx” and, unequivocally, “the Arab world’s first important theoretician of the Islamist cause.”
https://wakespace.lib.wfu.edu/bitstream/handle/10339/38576/SuarezMurias_wfu_0248M_10443.pdf
The most evil, deadly, deceitful type of individual who has ever existed on this planet.
Holland’s next 600 pages mix brilliance and some questionable judgments, but they continue to depict the power of Christianity in upsetting the powerful. Even those who turn against the theology have usually absorbed some of the fundamental ethic. For example, the Me Too movement did not emerge from churches, but Holland notes that in ancient Rome sexual predation was unquestionably “the perk of a very exclusive subsection of society: powerful men. Zeus, Apollo, Dionysus: All had been habitual rapists.”
Gordy Sondland, Harvey Weinstein. Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Clinton, Hunter Biden, etc., etc.
Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives. - Communist Manifesto pg 32
Even Karl Marx didn’t like these azzhats. He actually referred to this scumbag class as “socialist bourgeois”
These MOFOS are so EVIL, that even the COMMUNISTS DIDN’T LIKE THEM.
One word, taqiyya.
He knows it well.
Yep. His “charter of negative liberties” is akin to defensive jihad.
THESE CREEPS ARE EVIL.
I believe Holland wrote a book questioning/debunking the notion that Mohammed was founder of Islam. It’s all a sham.
Evangelicals understand this
So do Orthodox Christians:
Christ is Risen from the dead,
Trampling down Death by death
And upon those in the tombs
bestowing Life!
Orthodox Ping!
Save Thy people, O Lord,
and bless Thine inheritance.
Grant victory to Thy Church over her enemies,
and protect Thy people by Thy Holy Cross!
Actually the grand designs were Catholic and Anglican. Mostly along the banana from London to northern Italy, including the lowland countries and northern France.
Plus you have Catholic Bavaria leading industrialisation in Germany
BUMP!!!!
and that includes anglican, catholic AND Calvinists
But not only the blue banana -- the data you are basing on is from the 1500s onwards. Prior to that, the Eastern Orthodox area had accomplishments as well
Sorry, but the idea that it was purely Anglican is due to faulty and near sighted review. I'd suggest reading a wider analysis
I would suggest that your sources are the ones taking too much credit for the acts of the British Christians.
In my mind form follows function, function follows form.
No body else built the legal framework, the legal infrastructure or progress beyond what the brits did.
Brits created the Magna Carta, 150 years later, after they learned they could buy and sell their lands, they learned they could do the same with ideas.
Again, they were leaders in this too. Global leaders.
I am sure that advanced blue banana thinkers would have participated in the changing ideas of Britain as the Brits were using the ideas in their patents and patent registry.
I am sure of the that those advanced ideas would spread down the pathway to Romes doorstep as did the tax dollars from the outset... and they probably did not like the changes blowing their way.
I am also convinced that Rome had nothing to do with the Magna Carta of Britain, the patent and copyright laws of Britain, nor the building blocks leading into the industrial revolution of Great Britain. It was a process, a 800 year process. Given that, you do not see the achievements of Rome in her children of South America...
They too referred to the free industrialized west...as a removed, independent party, now catholic versus protestant. Given this, I would have to say that Catholicism was the barnacle on the progressive Anglicans hull.
All in all it was a Christina experience. NOT an Indian, Not an African, not a mooooooslim.... not a tribal/ communal experience as that is what they evolved from.
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