Christianity is the system of religious truth based upon the belief that Jesus of Nazareth was the expected Messiah, or Christ, and that in him all the hopes and prophecies of Israel concerning the future have been fulfilled. While comprising creeds which differ widely from one another in doctrine and in practice, Christianity as a whole rests upon the belief in the God of Israel and in the Hebrew Scriptures as the word of God; but it claims that these Scriptures, which it calls the Old Testament, receive their true meaning and interpretation from the New Testament, taken to be the written testimonies of the Apostles that Jesus appeared as the end and fulfilment of all Hebrew prophecy. It furthermore claims that Jesus, its Christ, was and is a son of God in a higher and an essentially different sense than any other human being, sharing in His divine nature, a cosmic principle destined to counteract the principle of evil embodied in Satan; that, therefore, the death of the crucified Christ was designed by God to be the means of atonement for the sin inherited by the human race through the fall of Adam, the first man; and, consequently, that without belief in Jesus, in whom the Old Testament sacrifice is typified, there is no salvation. Finally, Christianity, as a world-power, claims that it represents the highest form of civilization, inasmuch as, having made its appearance when the nations of antiquity had run their course and mankind longed for a higher and deeper religious life, it regenerated the human race while uniting Hebrew and Greek to become the heir to both; and because it has since become the ruling power of history, influencing the life of all nations and races to such an extent that all other creeds and systems of thought must recede and pale before it.