The history of Christianity is the history of a divine intervention in history, and we cannot study it apart from the history of culture in the widest sense of the word. For the word of God was first revealed to the people of Israel and became embodied in a law and a society. Secondly, the word of God became Incarnate in a particular person at a particular moment of history, and thirdly, this process of human redemption was carried on in the life of the Church which was the new Israel–the universal community which was the bearer of divine revelation and the organ by which man participated in the new life of the Incarnate Word.
Thus Christianity has entered into the stream of human history and the process of human culture. It has become culturally creative, for it has changed human life and there is nothing in human thought and action which has not been subjected to its influence, while at the same time it has suffered from the limitations and vicissitudes that are inseparable from temporal existence.
From the article …
“…everyone is agreed that Christianity and Catholicism are momentous sociological and historical facts which have had a profound influence on human history…”
I think the historian Durant (?) had made the same point much earlier in stating that, in the study of Western history, one could argue for the Roman Catholic Church, or against the Roman Catholic Church, but one could not argue Western history without the Roman Catholic Church.