Glen Scrivener vs Bart Ehrman on the legacy of Christianity – a review

 I recently stumbled upon this intriguing debate about the moral legacy of Christianity on the ‘Unbelievable’ channel. Well-known atheist New Testament scholar (of Misquoting Jesus and How Jesus became God fame) locked horns with evangelist Glen Scrivener over the latter’s new book, The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality. 

I haven’t read Scrivener’s book, but the general thrust seems to be that contemporary Western liberals, including vociferously secular ones, owe their most cherished moral values to Christianity. Though modern ideas about human rights and dignity took many centuries to develop, they ultimately trace back to the Christian ‘transvaluation of values’, as Nietzsche called it, through which self-denying love came to replace power and dominance as the highest virtues. As such, the book builds on the work of historians arguing for similar theses, such as Rodney Stark (For the Glory of God) and Tom Holland (Dominion).

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the discussion. Scrivener and Ehrman are both highly engaging and intelligent speakers, who aren’t afraid to throw (intellectual) punches. Here are a few thoughts: 

1. Ehrman is a formidable debater, and did manage to stump his opponent a few times. His critique of Mark 10/Matthew 19, in which Christ praises the disciples for leaving their wives behind to follow him (in a world where women were entirely dependent on their husbands for provision and protection) proved a challenging rebuttal to Scrivener’s argument. It would also have been good to hear a defence of Christ’s teaching on divorce from the charge that it enables abusers. 

2. However, there were moments where Ehrman seemed less than wholly sincere. Take, for instance, his repeated assertion that in Christianity, a wife is her husband’s “property”, and thus that adultery is a kind of theft. As a biblical scholar, Ehrman is surely aware of passages like Ephesians 5, in which St Paul commands husbands to love their wives “as Christ loved the Church, and gave himself up for her”. It makes no sense to give up your life for a piece of property. Moreover, Christians have always believed that if a married man has sex with an unmarried woman, this counts as adultery, even though the woman isn’t anyone’s ‘property’, as Ehrman puts it. The wrongness of the act doesn’t consist in stealing anyone’s property, but in betraying one’s spouse. Again, Ehrman surely knows all of this, so why act as if he didn’t? Scrivener rightly confronted him with 1 Corinthians 7:4, and asked him whether any other ancient writer had ever made such a radical claim: 

 “Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does” 

Ehrman had little to say in response, other than to try and minimise the verse’s scope (unsuccessfully, in my view). 

 3. Scrivener’s point on Christianity “grabbing men by the testicles” through its stern imposition of absolute monogamy, making it impossible for men to treat women as mere sexual playthings to be collected or thrown away like used tissues at will, was largely dismissed. Ehrman simply railed against the evils of the patriarchy, and ignored the stringent limitations that Christian sexual ethics places on male power. 

 4. The section on poverty contained some very striking admissions on Ehrman’s part (45:40): 

 “In the Roman world, the Ancient World generally, the ideology was one of dominance…there were no ethical problems with someone dominating somebody, that was what they were supposed to do…there was no problem with destroying the village next door and killing all the men and enslaving all the women, there wasn’t an ethical problem with that…You can read through the moral discourses of Romans and Greeks, they don’t problematise that, and they don’t problematise slavery...So it was all domination. And Jesus preached service, and it was completely contrary to what the dominant paradigm was.” 

 Ehrman then discusses how the very idea of giving to the destitute would have sounded extremely bizarre to Ancient People (you would only really give to people in your socioeconomic class, or to fund gladiator games and the like). Along comes Christ, and a “paradigm shift” in moral thinking occurs: the highest way of being human is to be everyone else’s servant, even laying down your life for them, not to dominate the weak. Hence the rise of orphanages and hospitals, totally unheard of before, and the modern liberal conviction that the poor and the marginalised are worthy of dignity. 

 Coming from one of Christianity’s staunchest critics, this is high praise. Ehrman is to be commended for his intellectual honesty here. 

 5. Ehrman did temper his praise by noting that these ethical principles were not unique to Christ, deriving from Judaism and the Old Testament. In a sense, he is right of course. But does he really mean to tell us that Christ’s moral example and teaching don’t even extend or intensify these principles? That his shameful death on a cross, and the significance attributed to it by the early Church, did nothing to challenge a harsh honour culture that drew a sharp line between the respectable and the rejects, and which the Judaism of his day took entirely for granted? When St Paul speaks of the “scandal of the cross” as a “stumbling block” – that is, a terrible offense) to his fellow Jews – he is speaking from personal experience (1 Cor 1). I think I’ll take his word for it. 

 6. There was a brief exchange on the emergence of modern science. Ehrman was particularly disparaging of the thought that the scientific method rests on presuppositions which were historically derived from Christianity. He even insinuated that Scrivener hadn’t read any philosophy of science. Ironically, it is Ehrman who seemed out his depth here (I should know, having written a PhD thesis on the topic). As is well-known among philosophers of science, scientific investigation cannot proceed without making some basic assumptions about the universe : that it is governed by stable laws, that it is intelligible, and that it displays a kind of simplicity and mathematical elegance, to name only a few. Early Modern scientists routinely justified these assumptions on religious grounds, appealing to the supreme wisdom and goodness of the Spirit governing Nature. Ehrman seemed totally unaware of this – it would have been nice to press him on this point. 

7. At the end of the debate, moderator Justin Brierley asked what I believe to be the crucial question: does any of all this suggest that Christianity is true? Glen’s reply was superb. I won’t quote him in full, but here is what I took to be the most important line: 

“to treat others not according to survival of the fittest, but according to the sacrifice of the fittest for the survival of the weakest…as you start to do that, you’re getting in touch with something that is supernatural” 

 The kind of moral vision that confronts us in the pages of the Gospels and in the face of the crucified Christ isn’t simply ‘good’ or ‘correct’ or ‘clever’, it is sublime. It cuts to the heart of what it means to live a truly human life, in a way that nothing else does – not Aristotle, not Stoicism, not Confucius’ Analects, not even the Torah. Even Ehrman goes as far as to say that the Christian story is “the most powerful story that’s ever been told”. 

 A simple story that changes everything – isn’t this the kind of humble genius that would be the mark of a genuine revelation from God, if there were such a thing? If God had something to say to us, wouldn’t we expect it to be the most profound truth that we have ever heard, rather than shallow platitudes? Strangely enough, it is often non-Christians like Jordan Peterson and Luc Ferry who do a better job of drawing out the philosophical depth of biblical narratives. Scrivener is a clear exception to this rule. May more evangelists follow in his footsteps.