Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister
Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church
Christianity broke into a Greco-Roman world full of deities and gods with its belief of an unbridgeable gap between humanity and divinity. The gods didn’t care about humans, but they were formed by humans.
Aphrodite, the goddess of love, for instance, was considered in most places as a sexually driven being who caused grief in marriage and life. But she appeared elsewhere as a protector of cities and a protector of marriage within these cities.
Christians entered this world and surprised people by first saying there is but one God (capital “G”). They were accused of being atheists because it was obvious to everyone else there were many gods.
Then they made the stunning claim God cared about people. “The simple phrase ‘For God so loved the world . . .’ would have puzzled an educated pagan,” writes Rodney Stark in The Rise of Christianity. “And the notion that the gods care how we treat one another would be dismissed as patently absurd.”
But this understanding had a huge advantage because Christian teachings and faith helped make life meaningful—particularly during times of trauma. During epidemics, pagan priests and philosophers could find no meaning in or for them, and doctors fled the scene to save their own lives.
Dionysius (d 265), writing after an epidemic had ravaged the Empire for several years, noted while pagans were terrified, Christians greeted the epidemic as a “schooling and testing.” During these times, not only did Christianity explain what was happening (evil is found in our world in various forms) and comfort (God still cared about them and was with them in times of trouble), it provided something positive to do (care for those who were suffering).
Nothing’s changed.
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