The Christian Revolution

Turning the World Upside Down

When all is said and done, the pagan critics of the early church were right to see the new faith as an essentially subversive movement.  In fact, they may have been somewhat more perspicacious in this regard than the Christians themselves.  Christianity may never have been a revolution in a political sense: it was no a convulsive, ciolent, or intentionally provocative faction that had some "other vision" of political power to recommend; but neither, for that reason, was the change it brought about something merely local, transient, and finite. 

The Christian vision of reality was nothing less--to use the words of Nietzsche--a "transvaluation of all values," a complete revision on the moral and conceptual categories by which human beings were to understand themselves and one another and their places within the world.  It was--again to us Nietzsche's words, but without his sneer--a "slave revolt "from above," if such a thing could be imagined; fir it had been accomplished by a savior who had, as Paul said in his Epistle to the Philippians, willingly exchanged the "form of God" for the "form of a slave," and had thereby overthrown the powers that reigned on high. 
[David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: the Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 171.]