Unimaginable - Review

What would the world be like if Christianity never existed or if it ever ceased to exist? This is a question Jeremiah Johnston seeks to answer in his book Unimaginable. Some might say the idea of counterfactuals (alternative history) is pointless and even impossible to know. But Johnston argues that looking at what the world was like before Christianity and looking at parts of the world where there is little evidence of Christianity can help us draw some conclusions about a world without Christianity.

Unimaginable is divided into three parts. I. The World Before Christianity II. The World Without Christianity and III. The World With Christianity. It's not hard to look at the world around us and see that many cultures which were previously defined as Christian are becoming more and more secular. Johnston makes the point that even though people are more educated today than they've ever been, we don't learn from history and what Christianity has done for the world.

He works through what the world was like before Jesus walked on the earth and we can see the hardships many suffered and the atrocities men committed against each other. Then he focuses on the dangers of more modern ideas (think Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, etc) and the horrors these ideas brought on mankind (Hitler, Mussolini, etc). These ideas are utterly counter-Christian and the consequences were devastating. In the last section, Johnston looks at the good Christianity has done in the world. When people are valued as created in the image of God, the world transforms.

Johnston did a wonderful job of gathering information. Sometimes it was even overwhelming. He obviously did his homework. He makes it easy to see the good Christianity has done over the last 2000 years, and it's not hard to imagine how much worse off we'd be if it hadn't been a prominent force in the world. He even makes it personal in the last chapter so you can see the impact of Christianity on your own life.

I had two main issues with his arguments. The first issue is that he ignores or glosses over some of the horrible things people have done in the name of Jesus. I think his argument would be that those weren't actual Christians and they would have committed those horrors in some other name if Christianity wasn't around. I agree with that, but I also don't think you can simply ignore things like the Crusades and those who justified slavery with Scripture.

The second issue is, I think, inherent in arguing counterfactuals. And that's knowing the difference between causation and correlation. Some of the good that has come from Christianity that he mentioned most likely was caused, at least in part, by something else entirely. The biggest example I saw was that students who attended private Christian schools were more successful. While I'm sure faith in schools makes a huge difference, studies have shown that high socioeconomic status and parental involvement play a large part of the success of students. These things are more common for those who can afford private school, but they are not always a result of Christianity (especially the wealth). There are just too many factors in some of these examples for them to be clear cut.

Overall, I thought Unimaginable was very well done. Some of the information was new to me, but a lot of it was just a good reminder of what I already knew. And the more we know about history, the better decisions we can make in the future.


I received this book for free from Bethany House in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

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