Have you ever wondered what Jesus meant when he told his disciples: “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these” (John 14:12)? Greater works than Jesus? At first blush, the claim seems extravagant, even impossible. And yet, history suggests that this prophecy has been—and continues to be—fulfilled in ways both surprising and profound.
As historian Tom Holland reminds us in Dominion, the very architecture of our moral imagination is inconceivable apart from Christianity. The values we now take for granted—human dignity, compassion for the weak, the demand for justice—are the fruit of the gospel’s slow but relentless leavening of civilization.
Consider education. The university itself was born from cathedral schools. Christians, convinced that all truth is God’s truth, studied law, medicine, philosophy, and theology side by side. Public schools and Sunday schools emerged from the conviction that every child should be able to read the Scriptures. Literacy itself—so often claimed by modernity—was watered first in Christian soil.
Consider medicine. In the 4th century, Basil of Caesarea founded what is often called the first hospital, a place of organized, charitable care for the sick and poor. Where the pagan world discarded its weak, Christians proclaimed: no one is beneath dignity, even as Christ bore our infirmities.
Consider society itself. Christians rescued exposed infants, fed widows, clothed the poor, and eventually built orphanages, food banks, and shelters. When slavery scarred nations, it was often Christians—Wilberforce in Britain, Douglass and Sojourner Truth in America—who rose to abolish it, insisting that every human being is stamped with the image of God.
Even the very language of human rights is a Christian innovation. Without the revolution of the gospel, the claim that the weak have inherent dignity would have seemed absurd in antiquity. When the fashionable sneer arises, “What has Christianity ever given us but oppression?”, just remember: the schools that taught you, the hospitals that healed you, the rights you now invoke are among the greater works Jesus promised.
Maranatha,
Jordy
