All religions require worship and service to a certain deity. This is completely logical, and according to the religious idea, the Roman emperors, the Egyptian pharaohs, the Babylonian kings demanded to be worshiped as gods, they self-deified themselves. However, in Christianity, the opposite is true. The King of kings and Lord of lords (1 Tim. 6:15) wants love, not sacrifice, believes in man (in his potential for deification), becomes a friend to human (John 15:14) and “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Matt. 20:28; Mark 10:45). Christ proclaims the anti-religious teaching that God and the supreme authority in general, and His disciples too, should be like servants, and “the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11). Thus, Christianity is, in fact, in every point opposite to other religions.

While religion is a socio-cultural phenomenon, in Christianity God looks at the heart, addresses the depths of the personality of each person individually. Sometimes He asks provocative questions or even gives provocative commandments to see the response of a person’s soul. For example, when Christ said to Judas, “Do quickly what you are going to do” (John 13:27), he did not want to push Judas to betrayal, but on the contrary, he wanted his conscience to awaken in him. And when Jesus said to the twelve apostles, “Do you also wish to go away?” (John 6:67) he certainly did not push them away. Does God look wherever the heart of a human bows, for good or for evil?

In the Old Testament, many religious ordinances were given. For example, about the Sabbath or the fact that harlots should be stoned. But Christ did not condemn the harlot whom they wanted to stone (John 8:11) and often provocatively violated the Sabbath in front of Jewish religious leaders. They were indignant at him, and he was at them, saying, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” (Mark 3:4) God, as it were, provokes people: will you fulfill a religious commandment if it will lead to evil, or will you break a religious commandment if it will lead to good? Perhaps, the Old Testament commandment to destroy seven nations in the land of Canaan was just as provocative: do you want to become executioners?

Thus, it can be sayed that Christianity is a paradox that is above religion and transfigurate religion. And if one tries to explain Christianity rationally, logically, its meaning, so to speak, for atheists, then its most basic core, its essence, its paradoxicality will inevitably be lost. It is logically inexplicable. Myths and legends of different peoples, no matter how fantastic they are, in any case contain traces of human psychology, elements of human logic. In Christianity, at its core, this is not the case. It is impossible to invent it. In it, at every point, there is a paradox and a contradiction to human common sense. Even the chosen apostles did not understand it at first. The former persecutor of Christians, the apostle Paul, labored more than them in the preaching of Christianity. And this is also a paradox.

After the second century, Christianity began to divide, split into orthodox and heterodox. But both of them began to lose (not in theory, but in practice) the Christian paradoxicality. Of what the paradoxicality? When the ruler is like a servant, when Christians have everything (property) in common and they seem to have one heart and one soul (Acts 4:32) and love for one another (John 13:35), not a human for the sabbath (or the tradition of the elders), but sabbath for a human (Mark 2:27), etc.