On the New Race, Conceived Before Time

In 1 Peter, Pater calls Christians a chosen race and in Galatians Paul writes that there is neither Jew nor Greek... for [Christians] are all one in Christ Jesus (1Pet 2:9;Gal 3:28). The author of The Socalled Letter to Diognetus (SCLD) calls Christianity a new race of people because the world had never seen a man like Jesus nor a movement like Christianity (Richardson 213). The novelty of Christianity took the world by storm as many people tried to make sense of Jesus. Among the many worldviews of the second century, one can be confident in the teachings of the apostles because while they where new, they where also a fulfilment of thousands of years of Jewish history. One of the biggest stumbling blocks to a true faith back then and now is the incarnation of Christ. How and why would God Himself choose to become flesh? Many of the Gnostic teachers taught that Jesus could was not fully human and fully God. For, in the Gnostic school of thought, matter [is] a deterioration of spirit, and the whole universe a depravation of the Deity (newadvent.org). For God to make himself man would be an insult to his very nature. While the idea of the incarnation was new, the idea was in the Jewish scriptures from the beginning. In Genesis 3, God promises that the offspring of women would ultimately crush the head of the serpent, the origin of sin, and in Genesis 15, the LORD made a covenant with Abram. Abram did not make a covenant with God. It was the Lord who would be faithful and fulfil his covenant and not Abram. This means that the one who would bring an end to sin in this would be born of women and would be God himself. This is the teaching of the Apostles that Jesus was fully man and fully God. It started with Thomas confession of Jesus in John, My Lord and my God, continued further in Pauls writings when he writes that Jesus was God, manifested in the flesh and continues even further in Justin Martyrs Dialogue with Trypho, when Justin called Jesus the Lord of Hosts ( John 20:28;1 Tim 3:16; Justin Ch. XXXVI). Because these arguments of the Apostles had their roots in the Old Testament, one can be more confident of these new ideas. But what was more impressive than these new ideas such as the incarnation and the trinity, was the composition of the Christian movement as well as the behavior and conviction of the Christian movements. For, in SCLD, the author writes that Christians, live in their own countries, but only as aliens. They have a share in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners (Richardson 217). Christianity and its Orthodox teachings have its roots in the Old Testament, yet, the followers of the movement are completely radical in the fact that their new race is not based on ethnicity, nor on a location, but on a promise. For as Paul argues in Romans 9, the Jews took the promise of Abram to apply only to their own ethnic race, where as Christians take the promise given to Abram and apply it to themselves no matter their ethnic background or location. When one looks around the world, one can not deny the beauty of it, nor can one deny the pain, suffering and death that plagues the otherwise beautiful world. It is easy to understand the attraction of the Gnostic teachings that the pain and suffering of this world are a product of its natural origin, and the only escape is through secret spiritual knowledge and ultimately death. Yet, according to the teachings of the apostles, the solution to suffering and death is redemption and resurrection. Dr. Sittser explains that God understands suffering because God suffered (Sittser 143). And, while many Jews (as well as the followers of Marcionism), did not understand the Old Testament God this way, the God of the Old Testament was all about redemption as well. For God promised to Jonah that God would destroy the city of Nineveh in forty days. Yet, God used that promise to restore and redeem the city of Nineveh rather than to exercise his wrath on the city. If God used a promise of destruction to redeem, how much more will God use his promise of redemption to restore? This is why we can be confident in the teachings of the apostles verses the teachings of the Gnostic leaders: because the apostles teachings are the product of the wisdom and promises of God as revealed by the Old Testament, whereas the Gnostic teachings where a product of the second century Roman culture.

On the New Race Conceived Before Time

by Stephen Bolin
Sources:

1. 1 Peter 2. Galatians 3. The So-Called Letter to Diognetus 4. New Advent.org: Gnostisism. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06592a.htm. 5. Genesis 6. John 7. 1 Timothy 8. Dialogue of Justin, Philosopher and Martyr, with Trypho, A Jew. Taken from The AnteNicene Fathers Vol 1, edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Published 1886 in Buffalo. Page 212. 9. A Grace Disguised Rev. Dr. Gerald Sittser 10. Romans