In the first part of our analysis of Jesus and Education we noticed the transforming power of Jesus’ teachings on education within the church. But in this second part we will discover that Jesus not only transformed education within the church, but ultimately the entire world. While institutions of higher learning existed in ancient Europe, Persia, China and India, and later in the Islamic world, universities as we know them today were an outgrowth of the cathedral schools in the High Middle Ages. From 1180 to 1210, the Universities of Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge were chartered along the lines of the universities that have been so central to our lives today. So the concept of today’s university (the free and critical study of everything that is knowable) is a Christian innovation. The earliest universities were founded on the principles of fostering the image of God, freedom of independent thought, and encouraging intellectual exploration and critical thinking. While these universities began with programs in Christian theology, canon law and the Greek classics, they laid the foundation of both the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution.

Some might question the influence of Jesus on the founding of these universities. So it may be helpful to review some historical artifacts that demonstrate the connection. The motto of Oxford University is: “The Lord is my Light.” This is associated on the Oxford crest with three crowns, representing the Trinity. Cambridge University was founded shortly after Oxford. Its motto is: “Here is Light and Sacred Draughts”. Cambridge produced such famous world-changing Christians as Isaac Newton, Sr Francis Bacon, John Milton, and John Harvard (more on him later). The development of universities was greatly supported by the invention of printing in 1456 by Johann Gutenberg. Up until then, most people saw a Bible only in church, if the church has a hand-written copy (many or most did not). Gutenberg was deeply motivated by the idea of putting the Bible in everyone’s hands, so the gospel of Jesus could penetrate deep into the heart of Europe. While it was Jesus that motivated universities and printing, the impact of these developments went far beyond religion.

The combination of freedom of thought, critical thinking and the availability of the Bible and other books made the Reformation possible. And what the Reformation did was to put the Bible at the very center of society. John Calvin believed that if everyone read the Bible, the Reformation would last. He also believed that if education were not grounded in the Bible, it would ultimately do more harm than good. Something to think about today. It was also in Protestant Europe after the Reformation that many educational innovations were developed. Martin Luther promoted education and literacy for all, without exceptions. Johann Sturm, a Lutheran layman, developed the idea of graded education. Friedrich Froebel, a Lutheran pastor, founded the idea of Kindergarten. Gallaudet expanded education to the deaf, and Braille to the blind. All of these individuals were committed Christians and were motivated by the teachings of Jesus and the gospel.

The earliest American universities also had Christian origins without exception. John Harvard, a graduate of Cambridge mentioned earlier and a pastor, founded Harvard University (1636), along with other Cambridge grads. It is no accident that the town where Harvard is located is called Cambridge, in honor of the Christian university that inspired the founding of Harvard. The spirit and motivation of the founders of Harvard is witnessed in the founding stone at the heart of Harvard Yard. There one can still read today: “After God had carried us safely to New England, and we had built our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God=s worship, and settled the civil government; one of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance learning, and perpetuate it to posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.” The motivation for Harvard’s founding was an educated Protestant ministry. In case that seems impossible today, not the Harvard motto which is found on the Harvard crest: ATruth for Christ and the Church.@ And at the center of Harvard Yard is the Memorial Church. Yale was founded by pastors. Princeton was founded Ato promote the Kingdom of the Great Redeemer.@ Today, the top ten universities in the world were all found by Christians. While one might dispute one or the other of these, the ten names need no introduction to most people: Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Cambridge, Oxford, Columbia, Berkeley, Chicago, Princeton, Yale. As we will see, a disproportionate percentage of the world’s scientific and medical advances arise out of these ten, all a part of the legacy of Jesus.

Universal public education in America was founded by the Puritans in early 1600s. Every town to provide free education for all children, so everyone can read the Bible. In fact, American public education was almost totally Christian until 1837. Secular public education, promoted by Horace Mann and later John Dewey, was a reaction to the Christian dominance of education up to that time. While public education has strongly supported the ideal of education and literacy for all, the increasing demand for charter schools in the United States indicates that Christian education is still considered the best by many. Interestingly, literacy in the United States was nearly 100% in the year 1900, before the full secularization of education was accomplished. Today it is more like 89-90%. Could the secularization of universal education be part of the problem? Without the motivation of reading God’s Word, literacy may not seem as critical asa it once did.

In light of that, Adventist education was founded to continue the American Protestant heritage of education for all grounded in the Bible. This has had profound impact around the world. Fernando and Ana Stahl, for example, revolutionized Peruvian society by providing the indigenous population with an Adventist education in the early decades of the Twentieth Century. In many countries today, SDA colleges and universities are considered the best in the country. One could perhaps say that Andrews and Loma Linda Universities are the Oxford and Cambridge of a new Christian university movement. It remains to be seen what the outcome of that movement will be around the world outside of Europe and North America.

Some scholars believe that if Jesus had never been born, literacy around the world might be 10-15%, much as it was in the ancient Greco-Roman world. It is possible that there would be no universities like the ones we have today, the seedbed of most of the scientific and technological advances in today’s world. If there were no universities as we know them today, there might be no scientific revolution and no revolution in health care such as we enjoy today. I would argue, on purely historical grounds, that Jesus is likely the most influential person who ever lived.

Our first historical account of the impact of Jesus on human history will explore the topic of education. In the Greco-Roman world (a term for the world of the Roman Empire in which Jesus was born, lived, died and rose again), education developed a number of elements that have influenced us today. But it was a fairly limited operation. For one thing, the ancient Greeks and Romans did not bother to educate girls. Their place was in the home where there would be no need for them to know philosophy, history, science or geopolitics (or so it was thought). Even with boys, it was only the sons of the elite that got an education. It is estimated that, at the most, only 10-15% of the population of the Empire could read. And the education offered by the Greeks and the Romans did not invite critical thinking, but focused more on memorization and conformity with previous opinions. Conformity and memorization are important values up to a point, but they would never have led to the advances in science, technology and health care that we enjoy today.

Then Jesus came. As a First-Century Jew He affirmed some fundamental teachings of the Old Testament that ran counter to the Greco-Roman standards and added some important wrinkles of His own. According to Genesis 1:27 all human beings, male and female, were created in the image of God. That implies high value and dignity for all human beings, who were designed in special ways to be like God and to continually grow into great knowledge of God and God’s creation. Jesus’ behavior toward the poor, the marginalized, and women was a living demonstration of His belief in that teaching. Deuteronomy 6:6-7 is also a foundation piece of Jewish education: “And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.” According to this passage, education is important and requires literacy. One must read the Bible in order to understand it. And it is important for all children all the time. But by Jesus’ day Jews, like their Gentile counterparts, were educating only male elites, which blunted the force of Moses’ teachings on education. They lost focus on the Mosaic mandate, Jesus came to restore and enhance it.

Jesus did not just come for Jews, for men, for elites, He came as the “Light of the world” (John 8:12) which “enlightens everyone” (John 1:9). The ideal education is one that has Jesus at the heart of it. He was both the greatest teacher and the greatest subject ever. And in case the “light of the world” concept was too subtle for His disciples, Jesus was explicit in Matthew 28:19-20: “Go and teach the whole world.” Education was for all nations. And it was for all people, including women. There is evidence in the gospels that Jesus had female disciples (Luke 8:1-3; 10:39-42; John 11:28). Jesus also taught that true education sets people free to reason and think critically (John 8:32). The Bible can be misunderstood (John 5:39-40), so it must be carefully studied. In contrast with the Greco-Roman world, Jesus encouraged people to think for themselves rather than simply conform their ideas to what has been taught before.

The impact of Jesus’ teaching and practice on the early church was dramatic. Acts 5:42 reports: “They did not cease teaching.” So Christian schools educated everybody from the first, including females and slaves. Literacy was a high value, so people could study the Scriptures for themselves. This phenomenon was revolutionary in the Greco-Roman world. After the first couple centuries, education was strongly located in monastic schools. But as Christianity went mainstream with Constantine, it was mandated that every major church or cathedral was expected to house a school. Wherever early Christian missionaries went, they introduced education for all classes of people in their own languages. So it is not surprising that Ulfilas (4th Century), the Christian missionary, created an alphabet for the Goth languages, so the Gothic peoples could become literate in the Bible. Cyril and Methodius (9th Century) did the same for the Slavic languages. In subtle ways, the teachings of Jesus transformed the world in very practical ways. Even today, the Wycliffe Bible translators are at the forefront of providing literacy to tribes that do not have written languages.

But as impactful as they were, the cathedral schools were still the equivalent of today’s K-12 education. As time went on, the need was felt to advance beyond the cathedral schools to create institutions of higher learning. By the year 1000, early developments in higher education were beginning to happen, particularly in the Benedictine monasteries. In the next blog, we will explore how Christian higher education ended up transforming the entire world.

When talking about the impact of Jesus we are not talking about a straight line. The world did not just magically change the moment Jesus arrived. Jesus introduced principles that fundamentally challenged the world of His day and gradually, over centuries, altered the way many human beings thought and lived, resulting in massive transformation of the existing order of things. This can be demonstrated in so many areas of human thought and action: Education, science and technology, health care, the value of human life, slavery, civil rights, religious liberty, even music, literature and the arts. Some call this the “mustard-seed principle.”

In Luke 13:18-19 Jesus said: “What is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it? It is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his garden, and it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.” The Kingdom of God was one of the analogies Jesus used to describe His mission in the world. In this passage He explains the analogy of the Kingdom with another analogy, the analogy of the mustard seed. His ministry was like the mustard seed, which is so small as to seem incapable of changing the world. But that tiny seed can grow into a tree-like bush, large enough for birds to make nest in its branches. The act of putting the seed into the ground does not immediately change the landscape. But given enough time and the right kind of environment, the resulting plant can make a major impact on the landscape.

To deepen the point on that same occasion, Jesus used a different analogy to illustrate the same basic principle: “And again he said, ‘To what shall I compare the kingdom of God? It is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, until it was all leavened.’” Luke 13:20-21. Jesus’ life and teachings were like leaven added to a dough of bread. There is no immediate visible difference between the leavened dough and the unleavened dough. But the leaven begins doing its work in the dough and over time, it rises and changes the outcome of both the dough and the baked bread that results. The impact of Jesus’ life and teachings cannot be fully assessed in terms of their immediate impact. One has to view a gradual, almost imperceptible transformation of the world over the course of human history.

Paul addresses the same issue in Romans 12:1-2: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” The gospel of Jesus Christ does not always have immediate, visible impact. It involves a gradual transformation of people and societies. It requires critical thought and application to achieve maximum impact. It may require deep commitment and sacrificial action on the part of many to achieve its impact on the world. It often requires going against the grain of prevailing orthodoxies.

The early Christians didn’t set out to change the world. They didn’t see overthrowing Rome as a major task. But the transformation of the world would happen gradually, as a by-product of changed lives. The influence of Jesus was and is not obvious in the world. But it ended up overturning the world of His time and has resulted more recently in massive transformation of the way human beings do things and experience life. I will be exploring several of these transformations in blogs to come. We will begin next time with the theme of education. Education is, perhaps, the greatest agent for transforming the world today. But the transforming power of education today is largely a by-product of Jesus’ life and teachings. Seem like an over-reach? Just stay tuned.

Anyone can draw up a moral code, the challenge is getting anyone to follow it without some sense of a divine standard. There are really only two options for developing a societal code of morals and ethics. You can follow an inspirational figure like Jesus or you can bow to some superior power who enforces its moral and ethical will on others. In the history of the human race, it appears that no one has been more inspirational than Jesus of Nazareth. Remove Him from the equation and His message becomes like a cut flower. Separated from its roots, it is still beautiful, but it won=t last long. The 20th Century showed us what the world would be like if Jesus had never been born. It also showed us what the universe would be like, if Satan were in charge. For all its horrors, the 20th Century is crucial evidence in the Great Controversy. God=s desire is for our good, He truly can be trusted. And the best evidence for that is Jesus’ impact on history.

I cannot prove to you, as a historian, that Jesus was God in human flesh. What I can say is that He was the most influential human being who ever lived. If you have committed your life to Him and He is real to you, you are not an idiot. If you have not committed your life to Him, you would be wise to consider it, it might be the smartest decision you=ll ever make.

But is the whole story of the Jesus of history really being told? Would the world really be better off if Jesus had never been born? A good historical researcher will not be limited by one side of the story, but will consider the whole body of evidence. Based on the whole body of evidence, I would argue that Jesus= life and teaching unleashed more innovation and positive outcomes than any other human being in all of history. Our very familiarity with Christianity as it is today can blind us to the revolutionary and transformative implications of Jesus= life and teachings.

In this series, I am not aiming to prove Jesus was God and that all should follow Him. History alone cannot do that. But I aim to show that purely as a human being, Jesus did more to influence subsequent history than any other person who ever lived. In the blog to follow, I hope to show that if Jesus had never been born, higher education as we know it would likely never have happened. And if higher education had never happened, the fruits of higher education, like science, technology and advanced health care, would likely not have happened either. I can’t wait to take you on this journey with me.

With the death of Christian faith in Europe in the Twentieth Century, we got a glimpse of what the whole world might be like had Jesus never been born. The Twentieth Century saw the rise of brutal totalitarian states like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Millions of people were confined to Soviet gulags or Nazi concentration camps. Millions of these were either shot, gassed, hanged or died of starvation and disease. The century also witnessed the return of abortion and infanticide, things that had largely been eliminated under Christian influence in the past. There were brutal wars in which tens of millions were killed. And all of this centered in the formerly Christian continent of Europe.

With the rise of relativity in physics and the uncertainty of quantum mechanics, people began to apply these ideas to the realm of morality and ethics. Albert Einstein, for one, would have none of it. For him, relativity applied to physics only, it had no implications for ethics and morality. But most people don’t think as deeply and consistently as Einstein. There was a natural tendency to think that relativity and quantum uncertainty pull the rug out from under the Christian moral compass, and open the way to a greater kind of freedom. But even a great atheist like Nietzsche was not fooled. He warned already in the Nineteenth Century: “The collapse of the religious impulse would leave a huge vacuum.” The history of the Twentieth Century told us how that vacuum was filled. It was filled with the kind of inhumanity toward others that most people thought had been eliminated from the human race through evolution, education and material progress.

During the 20th Century a horrific total of more than 170 million people were killed. Of this number at least 130 million were killed because of atheistic ideology. 15 million deaths can be attributed to the Nazis. 40 million deaths can be laid at the feet of Stalin and Soviet Russia. An even more horrific total of 70 plus million died at the hands of Maoist China. Additional millions were killed in Cambodia due to the Communistic ideology of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge. In these horrific slaughters we can see the first fruits of a post-Jesus world. In the words of David Bentley Hart: “The will to lead modern humanity onward into a post-religious promised land of liberty, justice, and equality has always been accompanied by a willingness to kill without measure.” This echos the words of Edmund Burke a couple of centuries earlier: “Human behavior needs restraint, the less within, the more is needed without.” I would suggest that whatever positives the 20th Century brought to the West were a legacy of Christian culture. The distinctive contribution of that century was unparalleled atrocities.

If these numbers do not trouble you in a world that contains nearly eight billion people, keep in mind that in the 2000 years of Christianity, with all of its horrors, the total number of people killed unjustly by Christian governments totals about 17 million maximum. The Inquisition is rightly criticized as an affront to human freedom and dignity, but its 30,000 victims pale in comparison with Auschwitz’s minimum of 1.1 million and possibly as high as two million. Consider also the great amount of criticism leveled against Christianity on account of the Salem Witch trials, which killed 20-25 people. Every one of those executions was a tragedy, but compared to Auschwitz, where technology allowed the killing of people on a mass scale, this was a relatively minor event in the history of humanity’s inhumanity of others.

Without God, moral relativism reigns. There is no solid foundation for ethical or moral thinking. When moral relativism takes hold of a society, human life becomes cheap. When you devalue God, you devalue human life. I understand that Napoleon once said he saw first hand what men without God look like during the French Revolution: “AOne does not govern such men, he shoots them down. They have descended to the level of beasts.@ The bottom line is: You become like the God you worship. If you worship actors, athletes and politicians, you become more and more like them. If you worship power, you become cruel and self-serving. If you worship wealth, you become greedy, and you lose compassion. If you worship self, you become your own worst image of yourself.