In a series of lectures begun at the end of the American Civil War, Hodge offered evidences for what he believed were incontrovertible proofs of Christianity’s social and cultural benefits to society. Hodge’s definition of Christian was ultimately somewhat sectarian, or at least Protestant. Hodge, however, went one step further than calling Christianity merely beneficial. Only Christianity offered a truly global civilization. Hodge proposed that some de-jure Christian societies were unevenly Christian and therefore Christian influence was less total than it might—or should—be. Christianity, said Hodge, “when entering very disproportionately into any community, has often been counteracted by opposing influences acting from without, and often adulterated by the intrusion of foreign elements; some philosophical, as the new Platonism of the early church, and tie Rationalism and Pantheism of the present day; some traditional and hierarchical, as the Catholicism of the Middle Ages.” The “sacred name” of Christianity had therefore “often been sacrilegiously ascribed to religious systems altogether alien to itself.”
The fact of socially and culturally ineffective syncretism, however, did not obscure Christianity’s very real effect on culture and society wherever it took root. Hodge wrote that “whenever the Christianity of the Bible is allowed free course, to that extent its influence has been wholly beneficial.” The influence of true biblical Christianity “has, as an unquestionable historical fact, availed to raise every race in the exact proportion of their Christianity to an otherwise never attained level of intellectual, moral and political advancement.” Comparing “ancient Greece and Rome with England or America; modern Spain, Italy and Austria with Scotland; the Waldenses with Rome of the Middle Ages; the Moravians with the Parisians; the Sandwich Islands and New Zealand with the gospel, with themselves before its advent, the conclusion is inevitable…” For Hodge, Christianity alone made an unambiguously good culture and society.
The Bible alone according to Hodge, “furnishes a world embracing civilization, which adapted to man as man re-connects in one system the scattered branches of the human family. Only under the light of the Christian scriptures “has ever been discovered among men (1), a rational natural theology, or (2), a true philosophy whether physical or psychological.” Under the Bible’s direct influence, “and under its reign alone, have (1), the masses of the people been raised, and general education diffused, (2)woman been respected and elevated to her true position and influence, and (3), generally religious and civil liberty realized upon a practical conservative basis.”
Hodge declared that “precisely in proportion” to the Bible’s influence “have the morals of every community, or generation, been more pure, and the active fruits of that holy love which is the basis of all morality more abundant; as witness the provision made for the relief of all suffering, and the elevation of all classes of the degraded.” No imposture, said Hodge, “could have accomplished such uniform good,” and no system, “merely human, could have achieved results so constant, so far-reaching and profound.”[1]
[1] A.A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter & Bros., 1866), 62.