Ehrman has been teasing this book for over a year and I was like, "no, please; I like Bart the Historian, not Bart the Ethicist. The first is knowledgeable and funny, the latter I don't care to ever meet," but here we are. I did not read his book yet, but I'm grateful that you did.
May I translate your review into Spanish on my Substack, Pablo's Translations?
At a time when we are finding our society pulling back from leftist dominance of the institutions, a substantial portion of the population is shifting rightward and are (mistakenly) attributing all the good things we used to laud about the (classically) liberal order in the west as somehow due to Christianity. We need more voices like yours set the record straight. Ehrman is a knowledgeable scholar on the history of Christianity but he too misses the truly transformative ideas of modernity.
I always go back to this: if Christianity had so much to do with “modernism”, why did it take them 1500+ years of total dominance of Europe to figure this out? Christianity may have some useful ideas in it for supporting things like legal rights (the idea of the value of each soul to God for example), but it was only a renewed focus on humanism and reason that lead people to start looking for ways to interpret Christianity in these particular ways.
Thank you. That was an excellent read.
Ehrman has been teasing this book for over a year and I was like, "no, please; I like Bart the Historian, not Bart the Ethicist. The first is knowledgeable and funny, the latter I don't care to ever meet," but here we are. I did not read his book yet, but I'm grateful that you did.
May I translate your review into Spanish on my Substack, Pablo's Translations?
Yes, you may translate it. Thank you for the kind words.
At a time when we are finding our society pulling back from leftist dominance of the institutions, a substantial portion of the population is shifting rightward and are (mistakenly) attributing all the good things we used to laud about the (classically) liberal order in the west as somehow due to Christianity. We need more voices like yours set the record straight. Ehrman is a knowledgeable scholar on the history of Christianity but he too misses the truly transformative ideas of modernity.
I always go back to this: if Christianity had so much to do with “modernism”, why did it take them 1500+ years of total dominance of Europe to figure this out? Christianity may have some useful ideas in it for supporting things like legal rights (the idea of the value of each soul to God for example), but it was only a renewed focus on humanism and reason that lead people to start looking for ways to interpret Christianity in these particular ways.