2000 Years and No New God

Friedrich Nietzsche's aphoristic lament in his late work "The Antichrist" that it had been almost "two thousand years and no new god" glimpses an important anthropological effect of the Christian revelation. The word Nietzsche uses to characterize what he loathes most about the cultural effect of Christianity is the word pity. It isn’t pity; it is empathy for victims as victims that the Gospel awakens, and it is that empathy that has had a mounting effect on cultural life during the last “two thousand years”. In this presentation from 2002 Gil Bailie describes in broad overview of effects of the Gospel on cultures exposed to it using the interpretive lens of René Girard's mimetic theory.