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Is there anyone who changed secular history more than Christ? Consider this: the followers of Jesus Christ introduced Gentiles to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Today, two out of five people in the world are Christians.

Likewise, where would civilization be today without Christian notions of compassion and solidarity? As atheists such as Bertrand Russell and Richard Rorty have noted, these ideas spring from the legacy of Christ. You do not have to be a Christian to appreciate parts of the legacy of Christ.

Five concepts worked out by Christian thinkers have especially affected modern ideas of politics and economics: human dignity, liberty and truth, conscience, and the notion of the person.

Human dignity: What is human dignity? The English word dignity is rooted in a Latin word meaning "worthy of esteem and honor, due a certain respect, of weighty importance." Both Aristotle and Plato held that most humans are by nature slavish and suitable only for slavery. Most do not have natures worthy of freedom. The Greeks used "dignity" for only the few, rather than for all human beings. By contrast, Christianity insisted that every single human is loved by the Creator, made in the Creator's image, and destined for eternal friendship and communion with him.

Among the figures of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant is probably the one who most clearly spoke to the concept of human dignity. He did so in the light of a categorical imperative that he discerned in the rational being, and he made famous this formulation of the principle of human dignity: "Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only."

It is not difficult to see in Kant's formula a statement in nonbiblical language of the essential humanistic aspect of Jewish and Christian teaching: "Thou shalt love they neighbor as thyself" (Lev. 19:18); "And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also" (1 John 4:21).

From the view of modern history, of course, it seems absurd to say that humans are not means but only ends. In the twentieth century, more than a hundred million in Europe alone died by violence, often in a way they could not have foreseen even in their worst nightmares. In the twentieth century, history has been a butcher's bench. In this century, the words human dignity have often sounded empty.

Liberty and truth: Jews and Christians explain human dignity by pointing to human liberty. For Christianity and Judaism, human liberty is an absolutely fundamental fact of God's revelation to humans.

Because the teaching of the Gospels is intended for Christians in every culture, political system, and time, Christian philosophers are first concerned with an understanding of the interior act of liberty—and only secondarily as a political and economic act.

Confronted with any proposition—of fact, principle, theory, or faith—humans may choose to give assent or to dissent. They are responsible for gathering the evidence necessary to make judgments wisely, for struggling to understand the necessary materials, and for disposing themselves to judge such evidence soberly, calmly, and dispassionately. When they declare a proposition to be true or false, they in effect assert what is true and real. When human beings reach a judgment, they reveal a great deal about themselves. They are, in effect, under judgment by reality itself, as mediated by the community of inquirers who seek the truth of things, and nothing but the truth.

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December 6 1999, Vol. 43, No. 14