What is the most powerful idea in history?

What is the most important idea in the history of the human race?

What are the Christian beliefs that built Western culture? Part 1

What bothers me most about the citizens of the West is their lack of gratitude. Our culture was built on the foundation of Christian truth. Every blessing we enjoy is because Jesus Christ walked the earth, died an atoning death, rose from the dead, and launched the most powerful cultural force that has ever existed. We should be continually grateful to Christ for what He has done.

Christianity has spread and become the largest religion in the history of the world and it has spread the most powerful ideas in the history of mankind. In this and future videos I want to list and define those ideas so we can better appreciate them.

We start with the most important social, moral, and political idea in the history of mankind. Christianity introduced, spread, and promoted the doctrine of the image of God in man to the rest of the world. I repeat: it is the most important idea in the history of the human race. The idea came through direct revelation from Almighty God in the Jewish scriptures, but it was the Christian church that spread the idea throughout the world. It has only been believed by people exposed to the Bible’s teaching in Genesis 1:27. The idea has not been held in any other culture. What is it? Since every human being was formed in the image of God, all humans are of infinite worth and value in the sight of God. The implications are endless. Genesis 1:27 asserts that women were created in God’s image. This one phrase has produced the equal treatment of women in Western, Christian culture. Women in the West enjoy the best conditions of any women who have ever lived and it is because of this one idea introduced by the Bible.

John Gray is a British philosopher and an atheist. However, he recognizes that the most important values to people in the West come from this one teaching in the Bible. According to Gray, the defining ideas of modern liberal democracies are continuations of Christian doctrine. “The primacy of the individual is a secular translation of the belief that each human being is created by the Deity, which has an authority over them which transcends any worldly power. The egalitarian belief that [all] human beings have the same moral status reproduces the idea that all human beings are equal in the sight of God. Liberal universalism—the belief that generically human attributes are more important than particular cultural identities—reflects the idea that humankind is created in God's image.”

Gray, like many secular observers, knows that Christian culture has produced these ideas. They are not genetic or in any way inherent to the human value system. They have become dominant in our culture through the influence of the Christian church. They form the basis for the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.

All human rights initiatives owe their existence to this one Christian idea. All ministries of compassion—that every individual deserves love, care, respect, and medical attention is another result. So is compassion for the disabled, the ill, the aged, and the unborn. 

Democratic forms of government that practice universal suffrage are also assuming the truth of Genesis 1:27.

In Dominion, Tom Holland tells the interesting story of Julian the Apostate who became the Roman emperor in 361 A.D. Julian was chagrined that worship of the pagan gods had fallen off precipitously and he wanted to restore pagan worship. But in order to do that he had to match Christianity’s compassion for all mankind. What Julian failed to realize, was that the pagan gods cared nothing for the poor. Julian proposed combatting the new faith with aid for the poor of his own. However, “the young emperor, sincere as he was in his hatred of the Galilean teachings, and regretting their impact on all he held dear, was blind to the irony of his plan for combatting them: that it was itself irredeemably Christian.” In other words, Julian somehow failed to recognize that he was trying to restore paganism using Christian values.

                 He learned the iron law of charity. Compassion for the poor cannot be summoned out of nothing. The logic that summoned compassion out of the committed Christians of Julian’s day “derived from the very fundamentals of their faith.” There was no human existence so wretched that it did not bear witness to the image of God. And Julian’s program for reviving paganism would require, well, the abandonment of paganism.

Thanks for listening. In future videos I want to elaborate on the Christian, biblical values that built Western culture, the most powerful culture that has ever existed.

More: See also, Seven Ideas That Changed the World; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgscHBjbKv8

See my synopsis of Holland’s book, Dominion: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkHlTST983SrRLzY-1quBpEsd46bog7jA

John Gray on Western Culture: https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2023/november-web-only/john-gray-liberalism-new-leviathans.html