The Christian God

“Genesis gave us a God who created us in his image, who invited us to address him with our most intimate concerns, who chatted with us as we stood, not as we prostrated ourselves on the ground. This is all a very big deal. You know who agreed with me on this? Millions of Pagans in the Ancient World.

Jesus died the most ignominious death the Romans could concoct. His low-class, ethnically marginal followers had to meet in secret, in underground tombs — the catacombs. They were killed off in diabolical ways: dipped in tar, burned, used as torches to light parties; wrapped in animal skins and then killed by dogs. Three hundred years after Jesus’s death, Christianity was the dominant religion of the Mediterranean world. Rabbi Shaye J. D. Cohen, the Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy at Harvard University, said that explaining the rise of Christianity is ‘a monumental historical problem . . . historians have been trying to understand what it was exactly that pushed Christianity to the top. I can’t fully answer that question myself.’

Celsus, an Ancient Greek critic of Christianity, said that it was a religion of women, children, and slaves. Guess what, Celsus. There were a lot of woman and children and slaves in the Ancient World. Your Paganism did not serve them. Christianity did. Thecla was an Ancient Pagan woman who chose Christianity because through it she could become a full human being, as good as anyone else. In Paganism, she was a daughter and would soon be a wife. Alexander, a nobleman, wanted to buy her. She fought him off. He had her thrown to the lions. A lioness protected her. It’s a great story.

My favorite story comes from the Venerable Bede. He offers an account of how Anglo-Saxon warriors converted in the seventh century. King Edwin and his men were debating accepting Christianity. A chief compared human life to the flight of a sparrow in winter through a banquet hall.

[Man’s life] seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter’s day with your thegns and counselors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside, the storms of winter rain or snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. Even so, man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing. Therefore, if this new teaching has brought any more certain knowledge, it seems only right that we should follow it.

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Our God, the Judeo-Christian God, takes our hand and bids us to rise up. He loves us so much he wants to see our face, and he wants us to see his. He wants us to feel in our bodies his love for us when we pray. His love for us elevates us — literally and metaphorically. We achieve what we achieve because we have been invited to rise and stand and look God in the face.

Even as we do so, we feel humility. We know that we are not God, but we are loved by God. So when we re-enter everyday life, in our interactions with others, we try to do what God did for us. We look others in the face. We elevate others, even if we recognize that they aren’t as smart as we or as rich as we. That’s humility.”

~Danusha Goska