Christianity and the Making of the West
A historical investigation into how the Gospel changed ideas, behavior, institutions, law, and the civilization we now call the Western world.
What happens when a message about human dignity, moral obligation, mercy, freedom, and accountability before God enters a civilization and remains there for centuries?
Western civilization did not emerge from a single people, institution, philosophy, or historical moment.
Greek thought mattered. Rome mattered. Germanic custom mattered. political power, economics, law, invention, war, and human experience all mattered.
But Christianity entered that world with claims about God, human beings, moral responsibility, neighbor-love, mercy, freedom, and the value of the person that would prove deeply transformative.
Christianity did not transform the West because Christians always lived faithfully by Christian standards.
It transformed the West because the Gospel introduced a moral vision powerful enough to challenge inherited practices, rebuke Christian failure, generate reform, reshape law and custom, build institutions, and gradually transform an entire civilization.
We will not begin with the conclusion.
Each lesson asks you to examine the world Christianity entered, identify what the Gospel actually taught, and then follow those principles through history.
Establish the World Before
What institutions, practices, assumptions, and moral rules already existed?
Examine the Christian Claim
What did Scripture and early Christian teaching introduce, reinforce, challenge, or redefine?
Follow the Consequences
Did those ideas change conduct, institutions, law, reform movements, and eventually the culture itself?
Follow Christianity into the institutions of everyday life.
The course examines areas in which Christian principles encountered existing cultures and became forces of historical change.
What is a human being worth?
Trace Christian teaching about the person, dignity, moral responsibility, and the image of God.
What changed inside the household?
Examine marriage, fidelity, consent, sexual morality, women, family obligation, and reform.
What do we owe the vulnerable?
Follow Christian charity into care for the poor, the sick, widows, orphans, strangers, and eventually institutions of mercy.
Can one human being own another?
Examine the long conflict between Christian claims about human dignity and the persistent institution of slavery.
Alvin J. Schmidt’s How Christianity Changed the World provides the principal substantive backbone for this course.
We follow Schmidt’s major historical subjects and arguments while strengthening them with Scripture, primary sources, historical context, additional scholarship, and careful examination of competing causes.
The goal is neither to minimize Christianity’s influence nor to claim more than the evidence can carry.
One distinction will follow us throughout the course.
Christian teaching, Christian behavior, and historical consequence are not the same thing.
Christians frequently failed to live by the standards they professed. Those failures belong in the historical record.
But failure does not end the investigation.
We must also ask whether the Christian standard remained powerful enough to condemn that failure, inspire reform, reshape institutions, and alter the civilization over time.
Start with the world Christianity entered.
Before we can understand what Christianity changed, we need to see clearly what was already there — and identify the ideas that would eventually challenge it.
Begin Lesson 1