On the inversion of values - Part 1
I have committed a crime and here is my confession: I have outsourced my convictions to the wit of a persuasive historian. I have allowed myself to believe, almost by default, that my faith is the secret architect of the modern West. I fell for the witty, persuasive testimony of Tom Holland - a man who isn’t even “on my side” of the aisle, which only made his evidence in Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind1 feel more damningly true.
It is for this crime I must now put my bias on the witness stand and let the prosecuting counsel cross-examine my supposed claim to the inversion of values. The trial will play out in a 4 part series. We will start with the Wrecking Ball of the early Church striking the Roman Standard. We will then weigh the Trinity of Rejections from Nietzsche, the Jews, and the skeptics who saw this revolution as a catastrophe or a theft. In the third part, we will investigate our modern Universal values and finally conclude with a reflection of my own bias: am I seeing a revolution because it’s there, or because I need it to be there to justify my own faith?
In this part, I will establish the “world as it was” - the solid, legalistic, and brutal reality of Roman power. Then, I will introduce the Wrecking Ball of the New Testament as a radical disruption of that order.
The court is now in order
1.1 The Roman Standard
To understand the extent of the damage caused by the Wrecking Ball, we must first look, nay, step into the architecture of the city it would fracture. I must warn you that I am no qualified Ancient Rome tour guide and should you decide to embark on this journey with me, you do so willingly, of a sound mind, and will bear your own liabilities should we not make it out alive.
We are set on a humid afternoon in the 1st Century AD, specifically in the Subura2 district.
We walk past a triumphal arch: a billboard of stone commemorating a recent campaign in Germania - its victories measured in land seized, enemies slaughtered, and populations enslaved. A Senator passes in a bleached-white toga; his dignitas - that aura of rank and prestige - is so palpable that guards physically clear the street before him, shoving the poor aside to preserve his passage.
Nearby, a household slave moves quietly through the crowd. To the Roman legal mind, this person is not a neighbour but a res - a thing. Their body is an instrument of labour and use, governed not by personal rights but by the will of their owner. Roman law does not recognise an inherent bodily integrity here; whatever protections exist flow downward from the master’s discretion, not upward from the slave’s humanity. Even when later Emperors would eventually curb the worst excesses of a master’s power, these were regulations of property maintenance, not recognitions of a person.
At the city gates, we encounter a row of crosses. To the Roman passerby, this is not a religious site. It is a public warning. Crucifixion is reserved for slaves, rebels, and the disobedient - designed not merely to kill, but to erase honour, to reduce the victim to a lesson.3 In this world, the cross does not signal tragedy; it signals failure on the part of the crucified and victory for Rome. And then, just to our left, a rumour moves through the crowd: a small group claiming that the man executed on one such cross was not merely innocent but the creator of the universe itself. The air here is stifling; let us retreat to a clearer vantage point.
Roman life was structured around real virtues: courage, restraint, loyalty, and duty. Philosophical traditions such as Stoicism prized self-control and clemency, and many masters exercised paternal care toward those beneath them. What mattered, however, was not the absence of virtue, but its distribution. Honour followed rank. Moral weight did not attach itself equally. To a Roman, this was not unfair; it was the natural shape of things. Justice was the habit of giving to each his due - but in Rome, a Senator’s due was reverence, while a slave’s due was utility.
The cross at the city gates was not a tragedy; it was merely a sorting machine. It signalled that the man hanging there had no status, no dignitas and therefore no claim on your compassion. Rome justifies not feeling sorry for the man on the cross; it is the social norm. To say the Romans were wicked or morally corrupt would be overly simplistic and beg the question: immoral through what lens? Rome was morally coherent within its own framework of status and power, rather than just “evil”.
1.2 The Wrecking Ball — Scandal of the Cross
If the Roman Standard was a pyramid of status, the New Testament arrived not as a new floor, but as a leveler. This Wrecking Ball did not swing from a vacuum; it was tethered to a long, heavy chain of Jewish pre-history. Centuries before the 1st Century, the Jews had established a radical counter-standard: Imago Dei - the conviction that every human being, from the king to the beggar, is created in the image of the one God.4 While Rome looked to the Emperor for divinity, the Torah looked to the widow and the stranger; they were, quite literally, the Imago Dei.
However, the Jewish Standard was just an opening act for a bigger show, a light they kept largely within the house of Israel and tied to the particularity of the Law. There were other chains too: the Stoic philosophers who spoke of a cosmopolitan world and the Roman roads that provided the infrastructure for a globalized state. But while the Stoics offered a cold, rational equality based on shared reason, the New Testament offered a scandalous, sacrificial equality based on shared love.
The Wrecking Ball moment occurred when St. Paul took this Jewish theological bomb, stripped it of its national casing, and hurled it into the Roman social pyramid. When he claimed there was “neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free”5, he wasn’t just preaching tolerance; he was effecting a social detonation. For a Roman Senator, Paul was deleting the social order. The world was a ladder of “being” to the Romans. A slave wasn’t a person in a bad spot; they were an instrumentum vocale - a talking tool.6 They were the human shovels that made the Empire work. There was no more equality between a Senator and a slave than there is between a driver and a car. Paul was committing an act of social arson, inadvertently telling the Senator that his entire life - his status, his wealth, his power - is a lie!
The first cracks appeared in the social crime of the Good Samaritan.7 In a world built on pietas - rigid duty to your tribe - the scandal wasn’t just that people passed the victim by. The scandal was that the Samaritan stopped. By helping a national enemy, he broke the rules of ancient loyalty. He treated a stranger as a neighbour simply because of a shared humanity, ignoring the ranks and rivalries that held the Roman world together.
But the final, fatal blow was the Cross - a blasphemy that neither the Jewish nor Roman world could digest.
To the Jews, the Cross was a theological stumbling block. Their Law signalled that anyone hung on a tree was cursed. By worshipping a crucified man, Paul wasn’t just preaching; he was claiming the Cursed One was actually the Holy One. He took the exclusive God of Israel and leaked Him to the unclean world, ending the monopoly of the Jewish tribe.
To the Romans, the Cross was a sorting machine designed to erase the dignity of the lowest of the low. Stoics like Seneca could admire a man who died with restraint8, but Stoicism could never worship a loser. The Christian claim was that the Creator of the universe had been tortured to death on a device reserved for slaves.
This was moral sabotage! In the Roman imagination, divinity and the Good were always found at the site of victory - in the strength of the Legion, the wealth of the Senator, and the health of the citizen. Christianity did the unthinkable: it moved the location of the sacred to the site of power’s most brutalized victim.
By claiming that the Creator of the universe was the man dying in public shame on a Roman cross, it stripped the Winner of his divine right to rule. If the man being crushed by the State is actually the Holy One, then the Senator’s status is a lie and the world’s hierarchy is a hallucination. In that collision of Jewish Law and Roman might, the Individual was born - a person whose value was no longer a variable of their rank but a constant of their Imago Dei.9
It is easy to look back at the Roman standard from the comfort of the 21st century and call it cruel. But why is that our default setting? To the modern mind, whether religious or not, the idea that the weak have a claim to our compassion feels like a self-evident truth, the reflex to side with the slave over the Senator, the victim over the victor, is the proof of the Wrecking Ball’s work. We are so stained by this inversion that we can no longer see the world through Roman eyes even if we try.10
I have presented my first piece of evidence: the Wrecking Ball had swung. It had taken a Jewish idea of the sacred individual and turned it into a universal claim that respected no borders - neither Roman rank nor Jewish nationhood. But is this history, or am I just a biased witness? The Prosecution are waiting to cross-examine this revolution.
In the second part of this trial, we will see that this Inversion wasn’t celebrated by everyone as a liberation. To the Jews, it was a stumbling block. To the skeptics like A.C. Grayling11, it was a theft of logic. And to Nietzsche12, it was the moment the world began to rot, a revolt of the weak. Bring on the cross-examination!
The court is adjourned
Footnotes
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Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (London: Little, Brown, 2019). ↩
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The Subura is used here as a heuristic setting. While not representative of elite Roman life, it foregrounds the social realities: slavery, patronage, overcrowding - within which early Christian communities emerged. ↩
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Cicero, Against Verres 2.5.66. Cicero famously described crucifixion as “the most cruel and disgusting penalty” (crudelissimum taeterrimumque supplicium), arguing that the very word “cross” should be far removed from the thoughts, eyes, and ears of a Roman citizen. ↩
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Genesis 1:27 (ESV). This text serves as the foundation for the “counter-standard” of inherent human value. ↩
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Galatians 3:28 (ESV). ↩
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Varro, De Re Rustica 1.17.1. Varro categorized tools into three types: genus vocale (speaking tools, i.e., slaves), semivocale (voicing tools, i.e., cattle), and mutum (dumb tools, i.e., wagons). ↩
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Luke 10:25-37. ↩
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Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 101. ↩
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See Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 47, for the Stoic parallel. ↩
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Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (2014). ↩
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A.C. Grayling, The God Argument (2013). ↩
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Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ (1895). ↩