Summary
John Stackhouse asks what took Christians so long to come round to obviously good ideas.
Transcript
The long, chequered, and regrettable history of Christians coming to moral views like the equality of people of different races, the equality of men and women – the excruciatingly long time it took for us to come to our senses about these things might speak to some kind of inherent weakness in Christianity. It’s supposed to make you better, and it doesn’t seem to do a very good job.
But no other religion or philosophy has done better, and most of them have done worse. So from a Christian point of view, this is to be explained not by the weakness of Christianity, but by the strength of sin. By the power of evil, and by something we tend not to want to think about in the West, and that is the very deep derangement in us as individuals and as cultures that has been caused by sin. We could say, look how long it took for these obviously good ideas to penetrate our skulls and to change our hearts.
