# Every Date You Write Is a Theological Argument

## A Red Pen and a Small Correction

My daughter came home from school recently with her history homework marked up in red. She had written "AD 410"—the year Alaric and the Visigoths sacked Rome—and her teacher had crossed it out and written "CE 410" above it, with a note in the margin: "more inclusive terminology." The number was unchanged. The event was unchanged. Only the two-letter abbreviation had been corrected.

I want to take that small correction seriously, because I think it is doing more work than it appears to.

## The Most Successful Theological Claim in History

Here is a fact worth pausing on. Every signed contract, every passport, every gravestone, every news headline carries a year number that means "this many years since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth." The Chinese Communist Party uses this system for international business. North Korea maintains its own Juche calendar for domestic purposes but reverts to the global one the moment it needs to communicate internationally. Atheist physicists publish papers in it. Buddhist monasteries schedule their retreats by it. It is, without serious competition, the most universally adopted dating system in human history—and it is anchored to the birth of a first-century Jewish carpenter in Roman-occupied Palestine.

That is a remarkable situation. Before we discuss whether to change the abbreviation, we should at least acknowledge what the number itself is saying.

## The Man Who Refused to Honor a Tyrant

The system was created by a sixth-century Scythian monk named Dionysius Exiguus—roughly translatable as "Dennis the Humble" or, depending on your Latin, "Dennis the Short." In 525 AD, Dionysius was given the practical task of calculating future Easter dates. The existing method used the Diocletian era, counting years from the accession of Emperor Diocletian, who had overseen some of the most severe persecutions of Christians in Roman history.

Dionysius refused to keep counting from a tyrant's reign. Instead, he anchored the calendar to what he believed to be the year of the incarnation of Christ—*Anno Domini Nostri Jesu Christi*, "in the year of our Lord Jesus Christ," shortened to *Anno Domini*, AD. His arithmetic was almost certainly off. Contemporary scholars, working from Herod the Great's death date and the census records in Luke, place Jesus's birth somewhere between 6 BC and 4 BC, which means our calendar has a built-in error of several years. But the theological intention was clear: Dionysius wanted history to be counted from the moment God took on human flesh, not from the moment a persecutor took a throne.

The Venerable Bede used the Anno Domini system in his *Ecclesiastical History* in 731, which effectively established it across the English-speaking world. Charlemagne's administration adopted it for the Frankish empire. European trade and then European empire carried it across the globe. By the time atheist physicists and Communist governments were using it, they were inheriting a system that a humble monk had built as a theological statement.

## What "Common Era" Actually Does

BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era) have appeared in academic publishing since the late nineteenth century and have become standard in most British and American school textbooks over the past three decades. The stated rationale is straightforward: in a religiously plural society, public education should use religiously neutral language.

I understand the concern, and I want to be honest that Christians using CE in academic publishing have not sold their birthright. This is not a first-order issue. But there is a problem with the logic of neutrality that deserves attention.

The era is only "common" because of the Christian event at its origin. BCE/CE retains the number—the actual count of years from the birth of Jesus—while declining to name the cause of that count. It is, in a specific sense, a confession of dependence dressed as a declaration of independence. The foundation remains; only the acknowledgment of the foundation has been removed.

Charles Taylor, in *A Secular Age*, describes what he calls the "subtraction story"—the assumption that secular space is simply neutral space that appears when you strip away religion, like scraping paint off a wall to reveal the original surface. Taylor's argument is that secular space is not a neutral surface at all. It is itself a particular historical achievement, shaped by specific philosophical commitments, and it carries its own assumptions about what counts as knowledge, what counts as evidence, and what belongs in public discourse. Removing religious language from the calendar does not produce a blank, neutral system. It produces a system that implies the religious origin is either irrelevant or embarrassing,which is itself a substantive claim.

Nietzsche's madman in *The Gay Science* made a related point more dramatically. The madman announces that God is dead and then asks, almost in panic, whether we understand what we have done,whether we have any idea how to sustain the moral and conceptual structures we have built on theological foundations once those foundations are removed. You can carry on using the architecture for a while. But the instability is real, and pretending otherwise does not make it less so.

My daughter's teacher almost certainly did not intend any of this. She was applying a style guide, not making a philosophical argument. But the language of neutrality is doing more work than it admits, and Christians who adopt the shift without noticing are, as I would put it, outflanked rather than persuaded.

## What AD Actually Confesses

AD is not a cultural preference or a piece of Western imperialism. It is a theological confession: that history has a center, that the eternal God took on human flesh in a particular Jewish woman in a particular occupied province, was executed under a named Roman governor, and rose from the dead on the third day, and that this event is the hinge on which all of history turns.

Augustine wrote *The City of God* in the years following the sack of Rome in 410,the very event my daughter had dated. The empire was shaking, and many were asking whether the Christian God had failed to protect it. Augustine's answer was that they were asking the wrong question, because Rome was not the point. The incarnation is what makes it possible to read time as a story going somewhere, rather than as an endless confusion of rising and falling empires. Without the incarnation, history is, at best, a series of events. With it, history has a shape and a destination.

Paul, writing to the Galatians, says that God sent his Son "when the fullness of time had come" (Gal. 4:4). That phrase implies that the centuries before Bethlehem were not random,they were a kind of preparation, a long approach to a moment that the Creator of time had determined. The calendar Dionysius built is, in a small way, an expression of that conviction: that one particular birth in one particular year was not just another entry in the historical record but the event that gives the record its meaning.

## Why This Controversy Is Not Trivial

Christianity does not make its claims in the realm of the timeless and the abstract. It makes them in the realm of the datable and the locatable. A Jewish man was crucified under Pontius Pilate, outside Jerusalem, around AD 30. He rose from the dead. Paul tells the Corinthians that if Christ has not been raised, their faith is futile and they are still in their sins (1 Cor. 15:17). That is a claim staked entirely on a historical occurrence. The faith does not survive if you move it out of history and into the realm of spiritual metaphor.

A faith built on such a claim should expect its calendar to be controversial. The incarnation was controversial when it happened,it got Jesus killed,and it remains controversial now. The question for Christians is not how to make it less controversial but how to hold it faithfully in a culture that would prefer it to be a private matter.

There is a real and important distinction between removing unnecessary offense and removing necessary witness. Christians do not need to be aggressive or combative about the calendar. We do not need to write letters to textbook editors or treat CE as a sign of cultural collapse. The kingdom of God does not hinge on Latin abbreviations. But there is a difference between being gracious about a disagreement and not noticing that the disagreement is happening. When we quietly adopt the new terminology without reflection, we are not being more inclusive,we are simply conceding a point we may not have meant to concede.

## Walking Humbly, Not Walking Silently

Micah 6:8 calls us to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. Walking humbly is not the same as walking silently. It means carrying our convictions in ordinary life,including, in small ways, in how we date our letters.

There is something worth recovering in the idea that Christian faith shapes the texture of daily life, not just its major decisions. We notice it in the obvious places: how we spend Sunday, how we handle money, how we treat people who cannot repay us. But it also shows up in ten thousand smaller gestures over a lifetime,the kind of gestures that, taken together, form a person who is recognizably oriented toward God rather than away from him.

Writing AD is one of those gestures. It is almost invisible. No one will stop you on the street to ask about it. But it is a small, daily acknowledgment that the year you are living in has a name, and the name is not "common era",it is the year of our Lord. That is not triumphalism. It is just honesty about where the number comes from.

## My Daughter's Decision

My daughter is eleven. After we talked through some of this, she has decided she will keep writing AD. She knows she may get red ink on her homework again. She is not making a protest; she is just not pretending that the abbreviation is a neutral choice when it isn't.

I think she has understood something that is easy to miss: that the way we describe the world is never entirely separable from what we believe about it. The calendar is not a neutral grid onto which events are plotted. It is a claim about what kind of event is significant enough to anchor all the others.

Dionysius refused to count years from a persecutor's reign. He counted them from the incarnation instead. Fifteen centuries later, the whole world is still using his system,including those who have decided not to say so out loud. That is, depending on how you look at it, either the greatest irony in intellectual history or the most persistent testimony to the truth of what he believed.

The year, as I write this, is AD 2025. That is not a cultural convention. It is a confession.