# Every Date You Write Is a Theological Argument

## The Strangest Number in the Room

My daughter came home with her history worksheet covered in the usual red ink. She'd written “AD 410” next to the sack of Rome by Alaric. The teacher had crossed out the AD and replaced it with CE, adding a gentle note: “more inclusive terminology.” The number stood unchanged; the event remained the same. Only the abbreviation shifted.

At first glance, this looks like a tiny adjustment. The year is the year. Rome fell when Rome fell. Yet the teacher's correction invites us to imagine history as a neutral space, a blank page where events simply happen without reference to what gives them meaning. This is the deeper issue: the year 410 carries a claim about the world—specifically, about when history began counting forward.

Every passport, every contract, every gravestone is stamped with a year that quietly announces: this many years since Jesus of Nazareth was born. The Chinese Communist Party uses it for international trade. North Korea adopts the same numbering when talking to the outside world, despite maintaining its own Juche calendar domestically. Atheist physicists and Buddhist monasteries alike write 2024 on their correspondence. None of us can opt out without ceasing to communicate with the rest of the planet.

## How a Monk with Bad Arithmetic Changed History

The monk who gave us this system was Dionysius Exiguus—Dennis the Humble, or more literally Dennis the Short. In the year 525 he was working in Rome, tasked with calculating future Easter dates. The existing method used Diocletian's reign as its starting point. Diocletian had persecuted Christians brutally, and Dionysius refused to let the church's calendar perpetuate that tyrant's memory. Instead, he anchored the count to the Incarnation: *Anno Domini*, the year of our Lord.

Dionysius's mathematics were almost certainly wrong. Most historians now date Jesus's birth between 6 BC and 4 BC,, based on Herod the Great's death and Luke's census records. Yet the Venerable Bede adopted the system for his *Ecclesiastical History* in 731, and through Bede it entered English consciousness. Charlemagne's administration formalised it across Europe. Trade routes, then empires, carried it around the globe. The world now operates on a calendar whose arithmetic is inaccurate, yet whose theological claim remains unmistakable.

## What BCE Actually Confesses

BCE and CE—Before Common Era and Common Era—began appearing in academic journals in the late nineteenth century and have become standard in most British and American school textbooks over the past thirty years. The intention is straightforward: to provide neutral language for a plural society.

But the era is only "common" because of the Christian event that established it. BCE/CE keeps the number while declining to name its origin. This is not neutrality; it is dependence masquerading as independence. Charles Taylor calls this a "subtraction story"—the assumption that secular space is simply what remains after we've removed religion. Taylor argues the secular is itself a particular achievement with its own philosophical commitments, not a blank surface. Nietzsche's madman in *The Gay Science* saw the same problem: you cannot remove the foundation while keeping the structures built upon it.

I am not saying pluralism is impossible, nor that schools ought to force Latin abbreviations on Hindu children. I am saying the language of neutrality is doing more work than it admits. Christians who adopt the shift without noticing aren't being persuaded; they're being outflanked.

## The Hermeneutic of False Neutrality

Every act of reading time is an act of interpretation. When we write 2024, we are choosing to read history as centred on a specific Jewish woman giving birth in an occupied province under Roman rule. The alternative abbreviations want us to think this reading can be setheld without acknowledging the Reader whose eyes make sense of the text.

This is the hermeneutic of false neutrality: assuming we can stand nowhere while observing everything. But we always stand somewhere. The secular calendar presents itself as a universal vantage point, yet it rests on a particular confession about the world's deepest realities. Better to name our position openly than pretend we have none.

## What the Anno Domini Claim Actually Is

AD is not cultural decoration. It is a theological statement: that history has a centre, that the eternal God took human flesh in Mary's womb, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and rose on the third day. This event is the hinge upon which the whole story turns.

Augustine, writing *City of God* in the aftermath of that same 410 sack of Rome, saw the Incarnation as what makes time readable as story rather than chaos. Paul's phrase "the fullness of time" in Galatians 4:4 suggests the centuries before Bethlehem were preparation. The date we write each day quietly reiterates: everything before leads to this; everything after flows from it.

## Why the Controversy Is the Point

Christianity stakes everything on a datable, locatable, public event: a Jewish man crucified outside Jerusalem around AD 30. Paul tells the Corinthians that if Christ has not been raised, our faith is futile. The claim is historical; the evidence is historical; the confession is historical.

A faith built on such a claim should expect its calendar to be controversial. When we soften the language, we aren't removing unnecessary offense—we're removing necessary witness. The offense isn't in the abbreviation; it's in the Man who was born, died, and rose again. Better to let the abbreviation point plainly to the scandal than to imply the scandal isn't there.

This does not mean the kingdom of God stands or falls on Latin letters. I am not urging letters to textbook editors. Christians using CE in peer-reviewed journals have not sold their birthright. But we ought to recognise what is happening when we adopt the softer language without noticing.

## Writing the Date as a Daily Practice

My daughter has decided to keep writing AD. She may see more red ink. She is eleven, and the choice costs her little. Over a lifetime, though, such small gestures accumulate—ten thousand daily confessions in ink and pixels.

Micah tells us what the Lord requires: to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. Walking humbly is not walking silently. It means carrying our convictions into ordinary life, including how we date birthday cards and tax forms. Every time we write the year, we choose how to tell the story we inhabit. The numbers will be the same either way. But the words beside them speak either gratitude or amnesia.