How Christianity Created Modern Moral Assumptions about the Value of the Vulnerable
Nathan Guy on the origins of our moral world
Several recent books have made the case that the life-valuing ethics of the modern world don’t—indeed, can’t—originate in secular ideals. They represent borrowings from a Christian heritage. You can take a look at Glen Scrivener’s The Air We Breathe as well as Dominion by Tom Holland for an extended argument in this direction. A recent article at The Gospel Coalition has stated the argument more concisely. Nathan Guy writes,
The ancient world was a dangerous place to be born. The infant mortality rate, writes Robin Lane Fox, was “almost inconceivably high.” In fact, writes Everett Ferguson, it’s “the dominant fact about children in the ancient world.” Child sacrifice could be found in pagan Samaritan rituals. Abortion was often attempted.
In ancient Rome, a common practice involved “setting out” unwanted children—due gender discrimination, fear of omens, the child’s deformity, or simply a desire to lessen a family’s financial burden. Many died from exposure, and those who survived often became slaves. Exposure was practiced in several countries and across the economic spectrum. An Egyptian papyrus dating to 1 BC gave this advice: “If by chance you bear a child, if it is a boy, let it be, if it is a girl, expose it.”
But then Jesus entered into the place of hatred and spite, teaching and practicing a different way, forever increasing the value of children. People brought little children to Jesus, and he welcomed them with open arms, telling his followers the key to faith is to be more like a little child (Matt. 18:3–4; 19:14).
Christians took notice. A second-century letter announced that Christians “marry, as do all [others]; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring.”
On his conversion to Christianity in 312, the emperor Constantine enacted laws credited with discouraging newborn exposure and encouraging the rescue of abandoned infants; 62 years later, under another Christian emperor, Valentinian I, child exposure was legally prohibited. Believers from the first few centuries viewed the protection of orphans as a Christian duty, raising them in their homes and, later, using church buildings or monasteries as shelters and schools (James 1:27).
Read the rest of the article here: “Jesus Made Your Moral World (Even If You’re an Atheist)”