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# Every Date You Write Is a Theological Argument
My daughter's history homework came back with a red-pen correction last week. She had written 'AD 410' — the year Alaric sacked Rome — and her teacher had changed it to 'CE 410', with a note: 'more inclusive terminology'. I found myself staring at that correction longer than I should have. The teacher meant well. But something had been quietly erased, and I wanted to work out what.
I am not, I should say at once, the sort of father who fires off emails to schools about culture-war flashpoints. The teacher is excellent, my daughter likes her, and I have no intention of dying on the hill of a Latin abbreviation. What interested me, sitting at the kitchen table with the marked-up page, was the strangeness of the gesture itself. The number had not changed. The event had not changed. Alaric still sacked Rome on the same morning, regardless of which two letters trailed behind the figure. So what, exactly, had been corrected?
## The Strangest Number in the Room
Consider how odd the situation actually is. As I write this, banks in Tokyo and Frankfurt and São Paulo are stamping transactions with a year number anchored to the birth of an obscure first-century rabbi from a Roman backwater. Atheist physicists date their papers by it. Buddhist monasteries print calendars that quietly accommodate it. The Chinese Communist Party, having tried various alternatives over the decades, currently uses it for international business. North Korea has its own Juche calendar but reverts to the global one whenever it wants the rest of the planet to read what it has written.
This is not a small thing. It is, when you look at it directly, one of the more peculiar facts about modern civilisation. Every signed contract, every passport, every gravestone, every news headline carries a number whose meaning is: this many years since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. The whole planet, for purposes of commerce and law and history, has agreed to count from one person.
You can call that coincidence, or imperial residue, or path dependency. Christians have always called it something else. Paul, writing to the Galatians, says that "when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son." The phrase suggests a tilt in the structure of history itself, a point around which the rest pivots. Whether or not you find that claim plausible, the calendar is what it is. The number on my daughter's homework was a small monument to it.
## How a Monk with Bad Arithmetic Changed History
The system has an inventor, and he is worth knowing about. His name was Dionysius Exiguus — Dennis the Humble, or Dennis the Short, depending on how you want to translate it — and he was a sixth-century Scythian monk working in Rome. In 525 he was asked to calculate the dates of future Easters. The reigning method, the Diocletian era, counted years from the accession of the Emperor Diocletian, who had presided over one of the bloodiest persecutions of Christians in the early church.
Dionysius found this intolerable. As he put it himself, he did not want to perpetuate the memory of a tyrant who had murdered his brothers and sisters in the faith. So he started counting from a different event: the incarnation of Christ. Anno Domini — in the year of the Lord. The numbering was a quiet protest, a refusal to let imperial chronology dictate Christian memory.
The irony, which church historians cheerfully concede, is that Dionysius probably got the arithmetic wrong. Most contemporary scholars place the birth of Jesus somewhere between 6 BC and 4 BC, based on Herod the Great's death date and the census records mentioned in Luke. Which means, technically, that Jesus was born before Christ — an absurdity that has amused generations of theology students.
It took centuries for the Anno Domini system to spread. Bede used it in his Ecclesiastical History in 731 and effectively naturalised it for the English-speaking world. Charlemagne's bureaucrats picked it up. By the high medieval period it was the standard reckoning across Latin Christendom, and by the modern era it had been carried, along with European trade and empire, to every continent. The monk who wanted to avoid honouring a persecutor accidentally gave the world its dating system.
What I find moving about the story is its smallness. Dionysius was not making a grand theological argument. He was doing administrative work, calculating Easters, and he made a quiet choice about whose name should be on the year. The largest things sometimes grow out of the smallest gestures.
## What BCE Actually Confesses
Now to the substitution. BCE and CE — Before Common Era and Common Era — have been creeping through academic publishing since the late nineteenth century and have become standard in most British and American school textbooks over the past three decades. The argument for them is straightforward and not unreasonable: in a religiously plural society, dating the world by the lordship of Christ excludes those who do not share that confession. Common Era is offered as neutral ground.
The trouble is the word 'common'. Common to whom? Common in what sense? The era is only common because, somewhere around the year we now call 1, a particular thing happened in a particular place, and that event so reorganised the calendar that everyone — Hindu, Muslim, secular, indifferent — now keeps time around it. To call this the Common Era is to acknowledge the fact of Christian centrality while declining to name its cause. The number stays. The reason gets quietly euthanised.
Nietzsche saw this kind of move coming. In The Gay Science he writes about the madman in the marketplace announcing that God is dead, and the crowd cannot grasp what has actually happened — that they have, in killing God, also killed the ground of everything they still rely on. "How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?" Nietzsche understood that you cannot simply remove the Christian foundation of a civilisation and expect the building to stand undisturbed. The cathedrals remain, the moral vocabulary remains, the calendar remains. What goes is the willingness to say out loud what they are for.
BCE/CE is, in this sense, a wonderfully Nietzschean artefact. It is a confession of dependence dressed up as a declaration of independence. The era is common precisely because it is Christian. The label changes; the architecture does not.
## The Hermeneutic of False Neutrality
There is a deeper move underneath all this, and Charles Taylor diagnosed it brilliantly in A Secular Age. He calls it the 'subtraction story' , the assumption that secularity is what you get when you take away religion, the way you get a clean kitchen when you remove the dirt. On this view, secular space is neutral space, and Christian language is an additive, an overlay, a particularity imposed on what would otherwise be common ground.
Taylor argues this is precisely wrong. There is no neutral kitchen. The space we now call secular is not the absence of religion but a particular historical achievement, shaped by specific philosophical commitments, specific anthropologies, specific stories about what human beings are and what time is for. To remove the Christian frame is not to reveal a blank surface underneath. It is to install a different frame , one with its own contestable assumptions , and to call it 'common' so that no one has to defend it.
The BCE/CE shift is a small but pure example. It pretends to subtract a Christian particularity and leave behind a neutral chronology. What it actually does is install a new convention that depends on the old one for its meaning, then refuse to discuss the dependency. This is not tolerance. It is a kind of polite forgetting.
I want to be careful here. I am not arguing that secular people are secretly Christians, or that pluralism is a sham, or that schools should be forced to use AD against the conscience of teachers. I am arguing that the language of neutrality is doing more work than it admits. When my daughter's teacher wrote 'more inclusive terminology' in the margin, she was making a substantive claim about whose memory the calendar should carry, dressed in the vocabulary of mere good manners. Christians who go along with the shift without noticing what they are conceding have, I think, been outflanked rather than persuaded.
## What the Anno Domini Claim Actually Is
It helps to be clear about what AD is actually saying. It is not a cultural preference, like calling crisps crisps instead of chips. It is a confession. The shape of the confession is something like this: history is not cyclical, not random, not a meaningless succession of empires and decays. History has a centre. The centre is the moment when the eternal God, without ceasing to be God, took on human flesh in a particular Jewish woman in a particular occupied province and walked around for thirty-odd years before being executed and, on the third day, rising. That event is the hinge. Everything before it leans towards it; everything after it leans away from it; and the calendar bears witness to the leaning.
Augustine, in The City of God , written in the wreckage of the same sack of Rome my daughter was studying , made this his central theme. He saw two cities running through history: the earthly city ordered around the love of self, the heavenly city ordered around the love of God. The cities are mingled in every century, indistinguishable to the naked eye, but they are oriented towards different ends. For Augustine, the incarnation is what makes it possible to read time at all. Without that fixed point, the past is a confusion of rising and falling empires; with it, history becomes a story going somewhere.
Paul puts it more compactly in Galatians 4:4: "When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law." That phrase , fullness of time , is doing enormous work. It implies that time itself was ripening, that the centuries before Bethlehem were a kind of pregnancy, and that what happened then was not an interruption of history but its purpose. The calendar, in this frame, is not arbitrary. It is the world counting from its own meaning.
This is what the abbreviation AD is, when you unfold it. Two letters carrying the freight of the incarnation. To write it is to say, even very quietly, that the year you are dating is measured against a person, and that the person is Lord. To replace it with CE is to retain the measurement and refuse the person , which, as Nietzsche saw, is a stranger and more unstable position than the people who do it generally realise.
## Why the Controversy Is the Point
Some Christians find this whole discussion embarrassing. They worry that defending AD/BC is sectarian, pedantic, the kind of thing that confirms every secular suspicion about Christians being culture warriors over trivialities. Why pick a fight about Latin abbreviations when there are real injustices in the world, real poverty, real cruelty? I sympathise with this instinct more than I sometimes let on. There is a kind of Christian who would rather argue about calendars than feed the hungry, and that Christian is not following Jesus.
But I think the embarrassment is mostly misplaced, and here is why. A faith whose central claim is a datable, locatable, public event , a Jewish man crucified under Pontius Pilate, raised on the third day in a specifiable tomb outside a specifiable city , cannot in principle be smoothed out into a calendar-neutral spirituality. Christianity is not a set of timeless truths floating above history. It is a claim about something that happened in history, at a particular hour, witnessed by particular people. The whole thing is staked on the dating.
This is what Paul means in 1 Corinthians 15 when he says that if Christ has not been raised, our faith is futile. He is not being rhetorical. He is saying: this thing either happened in the year we now call somewhere around AD 30, or it did not, and if it did not, the whole structure collapses. A faith built on that kind of claim should expect its calendar to be controversial. It should not be surprised when the world tries to file off the rough edges of its dating system. It should certainly not collaborate in the filing.
There is a doctrinal cowardice that hides behind the language of being winsome. We tell ourselves we are removing unnecessary offence; in fact we are removing necessary witness. The cross is offensive. The resurrection is offensive. The lordship of Christ over Caesar, over time, over my daughter's history homework, is offensive. None of that offence is going to be redeemed by changing the abbreviation. The abbreviation is just the place where the offence becomes visible enough to be noticed and edited out.
## Writing the Date as a Daily Practice
I want to be careful, in closing, not to turn this into a battle cry. I am not asking anyone to write angry letters to the editors of textbooks. I am not asking my daughter's teacher to repent in sackcloth. I am not arguing that Christians who use CE in academic publishing have sold their birthright. The kingdom of God does not, in the end, hinge on Latin abbreviations.
What I am arguing is something quieter. The way we write a date is a small, daily, almost invisible practice. It costs nothing. No one will lose a job or a friendship over it. But over a lifetime, ten thousand small confessions add up to something. When I write AD 2024 on a letter, I am saying , in a way that hardly anyone will notice, including possibly the recipient , that the year I am living in is measured from the Lord. It is the kind of ordinary witness that the early Christians excelled at: not heroic, not theatrical, just a refusal to let the vocabulary of Caesar quietly replace the vocabulary of Christ.
Micah 6:8 tells us what the Lord requires: to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. Walking humbly is not the same as walking silently. It does not mean filing down our convictions until they fit invisibly into the surrounding furniture. It means carrying what we believe in the ordinary texture of our lives , in how we work, how we spend, how we speak, and yes, how we date our letters. The humility is in the smallness of the gesture. The witness is in the fact that we do not abandon it.
My daughter, for what it is worth, has decided to keep writing AD. She is eleven and she likes the idea that her calendar is older than her teacher's correction, and that a sixth-century monk with a grudge against Diocletian is the reason she gets to write what she writes. I told her she might get red ink again. She shrugged. There are worse things, she pointed out, than being on the side of Dennis the Humble.
I find I cannot argue with that.