“Most people in today’s world recognize as noble the ideas that we should love our enemies, that the strong should protect the weak, and that it is better to suffer evil than to do evil. People in the West treat such things as self-evident moral facts. Yet such values were certainly not self-evident to the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Vikings, Ottomans, Mongols, or Aztecs. The reason why most people today accept those ideals as axiomatic is that we are products of the Christian revolution. . . .
“For the Christian message is that all human beings reflect the image of God: God loved the world so much that he sent his only Son to save it, and the cross proves that true power is found in weakness, greatness is attained in service, revenge only begets greater evil, and all victims will be vindicated at God’s judgment seat. That is what has been wired into the moral compass of Western civilization.”
N. T. Wright & Michael F. Bird, Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Reflective, 2024, page 28
.Related posts:
Pastor Note #33 — Kindness and the Gospel in a Broken World
Pastor Note #104: Partisan Politics, the American Church, and the Kingdom of God
Pastor Note #142: Violence & Cruelty in America: Who Is My Neighbor?
Pastor Note #145: What Makes for the Blessed Life?
Pastor Note #93: Religious Liberty, Privileged Christianity, and the Art of the Dea
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