What if Jesus Had Never Been Born by D. James Kennedy (Part 2)

The Elevation of Human Dignity 

Children - We forget that in the ancient world, child sacrifice was fairly commonplace. Rome is held up as the great place of learning, but it was also a place of rampant infanticide. Some children were offered up to gods, some children were killed because they were deformed and/or female. I won't get into the various methods of child abandonment and killing here.

When Jesus came he elevated the value of children, teaching that the kingdom of God belongs to such as them. His Gospel led to James saying that "pure and faultless religion is to take care of widows and orphans." Foundling homes, orphanages, and nursery homes were started in this time. Abortion, abandonment, and infanticide began to disappear in the time of the early church. These practices helped create a foundation in Western civilization for an ethic of human life. Even today, the front lines of the pro-life fight for valuing babies is full of Christians.

What if Jesus Had Never Been Born by D. James Kennedy (Part 1)

The first chapter summarizes the contributions of Christianity to the world, which will be proven in the rest of the book. The list that D. James Kennedy compiled speaks for itself so here is most of that list:

• Hospitals, which essentially began in the Middle Ages.
• Universities.
• Literacy and education for the masses.
• Capitalism.
• Representative government.
• The separation of political powers.
• Civil liberties.
• The abolition of slavery, both in antiquity and in modern times.
• Modern science.
• The discovery of the New World by Columbus.
• The elevation of women.
• Benevolence and charity; the Good Samaritan ethic.
• Higher standards of justice.
• The elevation of the common man.
• The condemnation of adultery and other sexual perversion.
• High regard for human life.
• The codifying and setting to writing of many of the world's languages.
• The civilizing of many barbarian cultures.
• Greater development of art and music.
• The countless changed lives transformed from liabilities into assets to society because of the gospel.
• The eternal salvation of countless souls.

Simplifying the Mere Christianity of C.S. Lewis (Part 9: The Final Part)

"We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed.

If you think of a debt, there is plenty of point in a person who has some assets paying it on behalf of someone who has not. Or if you take "paying the penalty," not in the sense of being punished, but in the more general sense of "standing the racket" or "footing the bill," then, of course, it is a matter of common experience that, when one person has got himself into a hole, the trouble of getting him out usually falls on a kind friend." -C.S. Lewis

This will conclude the series, because this is the culmination of his reasoning. It left him believing in the work of Jesus Christ as the Son of God. It left him as not an atheist, not a deist, but a Christian. I have left out his downplaying of the mechanism of the atonement as not being very important. I think him being a part of the Church of England had a negative impact on his understanding here. What I put up above is true, and I think shows that Lewis had it right, but he just didn't understand how important it was to have that right. So we conclude without forgetting that the best men are men at best.