How Christianity Invented Children

IMAGO DEI and Divine Revelation in Our Sense of Human Dignity

How Christianity Invented Children

This Article [click to read] by Pascal Emmanuel Gobry recalls how Christianity was instrumental in transforming culture long ago.

Christianity's invention of children — that is, its invention of the cultural idea of children as treasured human beings — was really an outgrowth of its most stupendous and revolutionary idea: the radical equality, and the infinite value, of every single human being as a beloved child of God. If the God who made heaven and Earth chose to reveal himself, not as an emperor, but as a slave punished on the cross, then no one could claim higher dignity than anyone else on the basis of earthly status. That was indeed a revolutionary idea, and it changed our culture so much that we no longer even recognize it." -- Pascal Emmanuel Gobry