Recently I saw a person on Facebook arguing that Christianity’s main contribution to Western culture was to make people feel guilty, whilst trying to force a rigid morality on them. And in some ways you can understand why a person would say that. Often the church has failed to be clear with its message of hope in the gospel and given people the impression that the main message of the Bible is “be a good moral person”. That’s not it. The main message of the Bible is we need to be reconciled to God through Jesus Christ in order to find the kind of life and hope God intended for humanity.
However, the claim that Christianity hasn’t made many good positive contributions to society at large is manifestly erroneous. This is especially true with regard to our Western concern for the poor and the downtrodden. Scholar Edwin Judge makes the following observation:
“In the classical world of Greece and Rome it was regarded as philosophically illogical and positively immoral to focus one’s care and attention on the weak and poor of society. And now everyone in the West thinks the opposite. Christianity turned the world upside down!”
growing deeper 