B.C. not P.C.
Here's an interesting story about the use of the terms B.C. and A.D. and an apparent change in policy by the NSW Department of Education.
Kel Richards raised this issue back in September 2000, in Briefing #261. Here's the text of his short article:
In the city of Rome, in the year that we would now call AD 532, a Greek monk named Dionysius Exiguus was commissioned to coordinate the calendar of the church. Up until that time, the Roman calendar had been used.
According to his calculations, Jesus was born in the Roman year 754, and this he called the Year One. (His calculations were probably out by about four years, but that's immaterial for what follows.) The period of time before Year One was labelled as BC (‘Before Christ’), but the corresponding label for all the later years is ‘AD’ not ‘AC’.
The thing to notice here is that there is no such expression as ‘AC’—‘After Christ’ because there is no period that is ‘after Christ’. Jesus Christ came, lived, taught, died, came back from the dead, and ascended into heaven—but his life, his authority, his rule, has never ended.
From this follows a small suggestion: every time you write the date add the letters “AD;’ either after or before the numbers.
On your letters, emails, cheques, in your diary—anywhere and everywhere you use a date that includes the year, add the letters AD.
This may sound like an odd suggestion, but there is a reason. Since ‘AD’ stands for Anno Domini (‘in the year of Our Lord’) every time you use AD you are saying that Jesus Christ is the Lord of history. It's a small, simple way of confessing to the Lordship of Jesus.
This may not strike you as important, but the enemies of Jesus know exactly how important it is. They are trying to change the way we label our years. They have adopted a new system, and are trying to persuade the world to switch to their new system.
In their new system, BC is replaced by BCE, and AD is by CE. The letters ‘CE’ stand for ‘common era’, while ‘BCE’ stand for ‘before the common era’. You can see what they want to do—banish Jesus, and his Lordship, from our years.
They say that all this BC and AD stuff is not politically correct—that it's offensive to all the Buddhists, and Hindus, and Muslims and the rest. Non-Christians, so we are told, don't want their years to be labelled with the Lordship of Jesus, so we have to stop.
Well, I think we should refuse to stop. And we should advertise the fact that we confess Jesus to be the Lord of history, the Lord of time, and (indeed) the Lord of all, by writing those letters AD every time we write the year.
You can see now why this, at first glance, trivial thing is worth doing.
We need a little campaign on this. We need to tell our friends who are believers to do the same thing. We need to encourage the members of our church or our Bible study group to do it as well.
Do it. Encourage your friends to do it. Let's start a movement.