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# Every Date You Write Is a Theological Argument
## The Strangest Number in the Room
My daughter came home from school last week with her history homework marked up in red pen. She had written "AD 410" when describing Alaric's sack of Rome. Her teacher had crossed out "AD" and written "CE" above it, with a brief note in the margin: *more inclusive terminology*. The year stayed the same. The event stayed the same. Only the two letters changed.
I found myself sitting with that small correction for longer than seemed reasonable. It was, on the surface, a minor thing — a preference in academic style, the kind of thing that gets updated in textbooks every decade or so. But something about it kept pulling at me, and I think it was this: the correction assumed that removing a theological reference makes the date more neutral. I am not sure that is true. I am not even sure neutrality is what is happening.
Here is the strange thing about the year number my daughter wrote on her homework. It means "this many years since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth." That is what it has always meant. Every signed contract, every passport, every news headline, every gravestone with a year on it is carrying that claim around with it. 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 when communicating internationally. Atheist physicists use it. Buddhist monasteries use it. It is, by any measure, the most widely adopted dating system in human history, and its origin is a specific theological claim about a specific person.
The number itself is a theological argument. The only question is whether we are going to notice.
## How a Monk with Bad Arithmetic Changed History
Sometime in 525 AD, a Scythian monk named Dionysius Exiguus — the name translates roughly as "Dennis the Humble" or "Dennis the Short" — sat down in Rome to solve a fairly mundane administrative problem: calculating future dates for Easter. The task required a reference point, a year-zero from which to count. The existing system used the Diocletian era, anchored to the accession of the Roman emperor who had, not long before, presided over some of the worst persecution Christians had ever faced.
Dionysius refused to use it. His reasoning was straightforward and almost quietly defiant: he did not want to keep memorializing a tyrant who had killed his fellow believers. So he substituted a different anchor altogether — the Incarnation of Christ. He called it *Anno Domini*, "in the year of the Lord," and built his Easter tables from there.
The arithmetic, as it turned out, was probably wrong. Most scholars today place the birth of Jesus somewhere between 6 BC and 4 BC, drawing on Herod the Great's death date and the census records in Luke. Dionysius appears to have miscalculated. We have been living inside his mistake ever since.
And yet the idea spread. Bede used the Anno Domini system in his *Ecclesiastical History* in 731 AD. Charlemagne's administration adopted it. Gradually it became standard across Latin Christendom, and then, carried outward through European trade and empire, it spread across the globe. The calendar most of the world now uses to organize its affairs — business, diplomacy, history itself — traces back to a monk doing Easter calculations in sixth-century Rome.
What Dionysius did was not, in the moment, a grand theological statement. He was solving a practical problem and made a pastoral judgment about what his solution should honor. The scale of what followed was entirely beyond his imagining. Sometimes the most consequential choices are the small, principled ones made in the middle of ordinary work.
## What BCE Actually Confesses
BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era) have been standard in academic publishing since the late nineteenth century and are now the default in most British and American school textbooks. The reasoning given is straightforward: dating history by Christ's lordship excludes non-Christians, and a religiously plural society deserves neutral ground.
The problem is that the ground isn't neutral. The era is only "common" because of an event around the year 1 that reorganised the calendar so thoroughly that everyone,Hindu, Muslim, secular,now keeps time around it. BCE and CE acknowledge that shared structure while quietly removing the name of its cause. The numbers stay exactly where they were. The reason is edited out.
Nietzsche saw this kind of move clearly, even if he wouldn't have applied it here. In *The Gay Science*, his madman announces that God is dead,but the crowd can't grasp that removing God also removes the ground beneath things they still depend on. Cathedrals, moral vocabulary, a shared calendar: these persist, but without any acknowledged basis. Nietzsche's point wasn't triumphant. It was diagnostic. You cannot kill the root and expect the fruit to keep appearing indefinitely.
BCE/CE works the same way. It presents itself as a declaration of independence from Christian particularity, but it is actually a confession of dependence on it. The era is common precisely because it is Christian. Changing the label doesn't change the underlying structure,it just makes the structure harder to see and harder to discuss honestly.
For those of us who follow Christ, there's something worth sitting with here. We live in a culture that has inherited an enormous amount from the faith while growing increasingly reluctant to name the inheritance. That isn't a reason for triumphalism. But it is a reason to tell the story clearly, and to tell it with some confidence that it is, in fact, a story worth telling.
## The Hermeneutic of False Neutrality
Charles Taylor, in *A Secular Age*, calls this the "subtraction story",the assumption that secular space is simply what you get when religion is removed, like lifting a cloth to reveal the neutral surface underneath. Taylor's point is that no such surface exists. Secular space is itself a historical achievement, built on specific philosophical commitments, particular anthropologies, and contested narratives about what human beings are and where history is going. Remove a Christian frame and you do not arrive at nothing. You install a different frame, one with its own assumptions,and then, crucially, label that frame "common" so that nobody has to defend it.
The BCE/CE convention is a useful case in point. The shift from BC/AD presents itself as subtracting Christian particularity and leaving behind a neutral chronology anyone can use. But the replacement retains its entire meaning from the original. Year one is still year one because of the birth of Christ; the convention simply declines to say so. Taylor's word for this is apt: it is polite forgetting, not tolerance. The dependency is preserved while the acknowledgment is quietly dropped.
A few clarifications are worth making explicit here. None of this amounts to saying that secular people are secretly Christians, or that pluralism is a sham, or that teachers should be compelled to write AD against their own conscience. Those would be different arguments, and not ones being made.
The actual claim is narrower and more practical. When a teacher writes in the margin that BCE/CE is "more inclusive terminology," that note carries a substantive position,a claim about whose memory the calendar should encode, dressed up as good manners. Framing a contested choice as mere courtesy is how the language of neutrality works: it conceals the decision by making it sound like the absence of one.
We are not outmanoeuvred when we reject Christian framing. We are outmanoeuvred when we accept the replacement without noticing what we have conceded.
## What the Anno Domini Claim Actually Is
AD is a confession before it is a convention. What it confesses is this: history has a centre, and that centre is the incarnation , the eternal God taking on human flesh in a Jewish woman in an occupied province, living approximately thirty years, being executed, and rising on the third day. Everything before this event leans toward it; everything after leans away from it. The calendar is simply witnessing that orientation out loud.
Paul puts it plainly 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 , the fullness of time , is worth sitting with. It implies that the centuries before the incarnation were not merely background noise. They were something more like a pregnancy, a long preparation moving toward a specific birth. The incarnation, on this reading, was not an interruption of history but its purpose.
Augustine, writing *The City of God* in the aftermath of Rome's sack, worked out what this means for how we read history as a whole. He saw two cities running through every century , the earthly city ordered around love of self, the heavenly city ordered around love of God , mingled together, often indistinguishable, but oriented toward entirely different ends. What the incarnation gives us, on Augustine's account, is a fixed point that makes time readable. Without it, history is just a long sequence of empires rising and falling, impressive and then gone. With it, history becomes a directed story, moving somewhere, accountable to something beyond itself.
So when we write AD, we are doing something more than marking a year. We are measuring that year against a person. And the full claim embedded in the abbreviation is that this person is Lord , which is, of course, exactly what *Anno Domini* means: the year of the Lord.
This is why simply swapping AD for CE is a more interesting move than it first appears. The Common Era retains the same measurement while quietly refusing the person the measurement points to. Nietzsche, to his credit, recognised that this is an unstable position. You cannot keep the calendar and quietly drop the confession underneath it. The numbers still point somewhere, even if we have stopped saying where.
## Why the Controversy Is the Point
Some Christians find defending AD/BC embarrassing. It can feel sectarian, or like picking a culture war over trivialities when real injustices are waiting to be addressed. That instinct deserves a fair hearing. There are Christians who argue about calendars while ignoring the poor, and that is not following Jesus.
But the embarrassment is largely misplaced, and here is why. Christianity's central claim is not a set of timeless spiritual principles hovering above history. It is a claim about something that actually happened,a Jewish man crucified under Pontius Pilate, raised on the third day, at a specifiable tomb outside a specifiable city. The events are datable and locatable. They are public, not mystical. That specificity is not incidental to the faith; it is the faith.
Paul makes this plain in 1 Corinthians 15. If Christ has not been raised, he says, our faith is futile. We should take him at his word. The events either occurred around AD 30 or they did not. If they did not, the whole structure collapses,not just one doctrine among others, but everything. A faith grounded in that kind of historical claim should expect its calendar to be controversial. What it should not do is quietly collaborate in smoothing that controversy away.
There is a particular failure worth naming here. It presents itself as winsomeness,removing unnecessary offence, making the faith more accessible, meeting people where they are. But there is a difference between removing offence that is genuinely unnecessary and removing the points where the faith's real claims become visible enough to be noticed. The cross is offensive. The resurrection is offensive. The lordship of Christ is offensive. Adjusting an abbreviation does not redeem any of that offence. It only pushes it further from view, which serves no one.
We do not help people by making Christianity easier to ignore. The controversy embedded in AD and BC is not an embarrassment to manage. It is a small, quiet marker that something happened,and that it still matters what we say about it.
## Writing the Date as a Daily Practice
None of this is a call to protest. Writing "AD" instead of "CE" on a school worksheet is not going to bring down secular culture, and Christians who use CE in academic publishing are not betraying the faith. The kingdom of God does not hinge on Latin abbreviations.
What it does hinge on, in small and cumulative ways, is the habit of walking humbly with God,which Micah 6:8 places alongside doing justice and loving mercy as the core of what the Lord requires. Walking humbly is not the same as walking silently. It does not mean quietly erasing our convictions to make the surrounding culture more comfortable. It means carrying those convictions into ordinary life: how we work, how we spend, what we say, and yes, how we date a letter.
Writing "AD 2024" costs almost nothing. There is no social penalty most days, no professional risk in most contexts. It is a small, nearly invisible act. But ten thousand small acts across a lifetime are not small. They are a life. The early Christians who refused to let Caesar's vocabulary simply replace Christ's were not, for the most part, making dramatic gestures. They were doing ordinary things in an ordinary way, with a quiet consistency that accumulated into something recognizable. The humility is in the smallness of the gesture. The witness is in not abandoning it.
My eleven-year-old daughter has decided she will keep writing AD. Her teacher marked it wrong,red ink, the standard correction. She was not deterred. Her reasoning was straightforward: her calendar is older than the correction. The convention itself comes from a sixth-century monk named Dionysius Exiguus, who devised it partly out of a grievance against the Emperor Diocletian, and it has organized the years ever since. She knows the red ink may come back. She has accepted that.
I am not holding her up as a model of heroic resistance. She is doing something small. But she is doing it with her eyes open, and she has thought about why. That combination,ordinary practice, considered conviction,is closer to what faithful daily life looks like than most of us might expect.