“What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds on earth. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds can perch in its shade.”
On holiday this summer I read Glen Scrivener’s book The Air We Breathe. He shows how our (Western) culture is far more influenced by the life, teaching and work of Jesus Christ than we realise.
Starting with a sketch of “the night before Christmas” – a classical world which put low value on equality or human rights – he shows how our contemporary ideas of equality, compassion, consent, enlightenment, freedom and progress did not come to us naturally, but from the Bible.
For example, the famous line in the US Declaration of Independence, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, is historically far from self-evident. Ancient religions and cultures taught no such thing. Such an assumption stems only from the Bible’s teaching that all people are made in the image of God. Or, to take another example, if we’re merely the product of a random and brutal evolutionary history, or the horrors of ancient creation myths, why show compassion? Again, this comes from Jesus Christ, “compassion incarnate”.
Scrivener’s book is one of a genre written recently, including Tom Holland’s Dominion and Vishal Mangalwadi’s The Book That Made Your World (the latter written by an Indian intellectual who sees the impact of the Bible on the West from afar). It seems we are discovering that the Bible has shaped our culture far more than we recognise. And it is not just culture: science, too, owes much of its flourishing to Biblical assumptions.
In a sense, here is the spreading influence, from tiny beginnings, of the world-changing work and teaching of our Lord Jesus – as in His parable of the mustard seed.
If you don’t have time for the book, I recommend watching Glen’s Keswick Lecture, which gives a preview of these themes and how recognising them can help us in conversations with friends.
