Reply #3: "Christianity originally challenged the system of Roman power." [View All]

[phasma ex machina]

The Roman legions had enslaved much of the known world, and their power seemed invincible. Yet Christianity identified with the slaves, with those who had been subjected to torture and crucifixion. Our God, the Christians proclaimed, had become incarnate in a human being, a Jew, who died on the cross, and transcended all that pain through resurrection to a higher realm. The real power, then, was not in the hands of those who defiled the earth with their instruments of oppression, but rather with human beings who stayed faithful to a higher spiritual truth.

Christian spirituality was a renewal of the original spiritual vision of human beings as connected to each other through love, and as loved by the universe - in short, a return to the deepest spiritual aspirations of the human race, which had originally been articulated in the Jewish Torah. No wonder it spread like wildfire, winning to its midst those whose experience with religion lacked this sense of outrage at injustice and hope for a world more consistent with our fundamental spiritual being. - Spirit Matters